CCCS Selected Working Papers Volume 2
This collection of classic essays focuses on the theoretical frameworks that informed the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, the methodologies and working practices that the Centre developed for conducting academic research and examples of the ‘grounded studies’ carried out under the auspices of the Centre. This volume is split into seven thematic sections that are introduced by key academics working in the field of cultural studies, and includes a preface by eminent scholar, Stuart Hall. The thematic sections are: • • • • • • •
Literature and society Popular culture and youth subculture Media Women’s studies and feminism Race History Education and work
Essays by: James Avis; Steve Baron; Trevor Blackwell; Charlotte Brunsdon; Rosalind Brunt; Steve Burniston; Helen Butcher; Hazel Carby; Mariette Clare; Gary Clarke; John Clarke; Stanley Cohen; Ian Connell; Ros Coward; Chas. Critcher; Lidia Curti; Richard Dyer; Marcella Evaristi; B. Findlay; Dan Finn; Jenny Garber; Paul Gilroy; Neil Grant; Ann Gray; Andy Green; Michael Green; Christine Griffin; Roger Grimshaw; Stuart Hall; Rachel Harrison; Dick Hebdige; Dorothy Hobson; Graham Holderness; Tony Jefferson; Richard Johnson; Bryn Jones; Simon Jones; Stuart Laing; Errol Lawrence; Alf Louvre; Gregor McLennan; Angela McRobbie; Adrian Mellor; David Morley; Frank Mort; Jean-Claude Passeron; Brian Roberts; Bill Schwartz; John Solomos; Colin Sparks; Pam Taylor; Andrew Tolson; Christine Weedon; Paul Willis; Janice Winship.
CCCS Selected Working Papers Volume 2
Edited by Ann Gray, Jan Campbell, Mark Erickson, Stuart Hanson and Helen Wood
First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group, an informa business Editorial Selection © 2007 Ann Gray Individual Chapters and Introductions © 2007 the chapter and introduction authors 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. 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 0-203-35707-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0–415–32441–6 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–35707–8 (ebk) ISBN10: 0–415–41259–5 (2-volume set) ISBN13: 978–0–415–32441–0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–35707–1 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–41259–9 (2-volume set)
Contents
Editorial team
x
Preface
xi
STUART HALL
Acknowledgements
xiv
Introduction
1
THE EDITORIAL TEAM
SECTION 1
Literature and society Introduction
13 15
STUART LAING
1
Introduction to the French edition of Uses of Literacy
25
JEAN-CLAUDE PASSERON
2
Literature/society: Mapping the field
35
UNAUTHORED
3
Reading literature as culture
56
ANDREW TOLSON
4
Notes on a theory of genre
70
ALF LOUVRE
5
Walter Greenwood: Working-class writer
80
STUART LAING
6
Lawrence, Leavis and culture
92
GRAHAM HOLDERNESS
7
The abuses of literacy COLIN SPARKS
111
vi
Contents
8
The hidden method: Lucien Goldmann and the sociology of literature
123
ADRIAN MELLOR
SECTION 2
Popular culture and youth subculture Introduction
139 141
JOHN CLARKE
9
The Hippies: An American ‘moment’
146
STUART HALL
10
The meaning of Tom Jones
168
RICHARD DYER
11
The politics of popular culture
179
BRYN JONES
12
Breaking out, smashing up and the social context of aspiration
183
STANLEY COHEN
13
Working class youth cultures
200
JOHN CLARKE, TONY JEFFERSON
14
Girls and subcultures
219
ANGELA McROBBIE, JENNY GARBER
15
Defending ski-jumpers: A critique of theories of youth sub-cultures
230
GARY CLARKE
SECTION 3
Media
257 Introduction
259
DAVID MORLEY
16
The spectacular world of Whicker
270
ROSALIND BRUNT
17
Television news and the Social Contract
288
IAN CONNELL
18
Housewives and the mass media
304
DOROTHY HOBSON
19
Newsmaking and crime STUART HALL, JOHN CLARKE, CHAS. CRITCHER, TONY JEFFERSON, BRIAN ROBERTS
313
Contents 20
The ‘unity’ of current affairs television
vii 326
STUART HALL, IAN CONNELL, LIDIA CURTI
21
The ‘structured communication’ of events
365
STUART HALL
22
Encoding and decoding in the television discourse
386
STUART HALL
23
Reconceptualising the media audience: Towards an ethnography of audience
399
DAVID MORLEY
SECTION 4
Women’s studies and feminism Introduction
415 417
JANICE WINSHIP
24
Images of women in the media
434
HELEN BUTCHER, ROS COWARD, MARCELLA EVARISTI, JENNY GARBER, RACHEL HARRISON, JANICE WINSHIP
25
Relations of production: Relations of re-production
464
WOMEN’S STUDIES GROUP
26
‘It is well known that by nature women are inclined to be rather personal’
485
CHARLOTTE BRUNSDON
27
A woman’s world: ‘Woman’ – an ideology of femininity
499
JANICE WINSHIP
28
Housewives: Isolation as oppression
517
DOROTHY HOBSON
29
Psychoanalysis and the cultural acquisition of sexuality and subjectivity
530
STEVE BURNISTON, FRANK MORT, CHRISTINE WEEDON
30
The good, the bad and the ugly: Images of young women in the labour market
549
CHRISTINE GRIFFIN
SECTION 5
Race
561 Introduction: Lost in translation
563
HAZEL CARBY
31
Down these mean streets . . . the meaning of mugging TONY JEFFERSON, JOHN CLARKE
571
viii 32
Contents Reggae, Rastas and Rudies: Style and the subversion of form
585
DICK HEBDIGE
33
On the political economy of black labour and the racial structuring of the working class in England
615
ANDY GREEN
34
Multicultural fictions
649
HAZEL CARBY
35
The organic crisis of British capitalism and race: The experience of the seventies
669
JOHN SOLOMOS, BOB FINDLAY, SIMON JONES, PAUL GILROY
36
Just plain common sense: The ‘roots’ of racism
699
ERROL LAWRENCE
37
White woman listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood
737
HAZEL CARBY
SECTION 6
History Introduction: Entangled histories
759 761
RICHARD JOHNSON
38
Economy, culture and concept: Three approaches to marxist history
774
RICHARD JOHNSON, GREGOR McLENNAN, BILL SCHWARZ
39
Out of the people: The politics of containment 1935–45
818
CULTURAL HISTORY GROUP
40
The history of a working-class Methodist Chapel
838
TREVOR BLACKWELL
Comment
851
ROGER GRIMSHAW
41
‘Ideology’ and ‘consciousness’: Some problems in Marxist historiography
852
GREGOR McLENNAN
42
Women domestic servants 1919–1939: A study of a hidden Army, illustrated by servants’ own recollected experiences
883
PAM TAYLOR
43
What do we mean by popular memory? CCCS POPULAR MEMORY GROUP
894
Contents
ix
SECTION 7
Education and work Introduction: The books at the end of the shelf
909 911
PAUL WILLIS
44
Social democracy, education and the crisis
926
DAN FINN, NEIL GRANT, RICHARD JOHNSON
45
Perspectives on schooling and politics
989
CCCS EDUCATION GROUP
46
The Adult Literacy Campaign: Politics and practices
1010
MARIETTE CLARE
47
The strange fate of progressive education
1050
JAMES AVIS
48
How working class kids get working class jobs
1071
PAUL WILLIS
Index
1088
Editorial team
Jan Campbell is senior lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham and a former member of staff at DCSS. Campbell’s research focuses on the interface between psychoanalysis and cultural theory, psychoanalysis and film and psychoanalysis and therapy practice (she is a clinical analyst). Her most recent book, Psychoanalysis and the Time of Life: Durations of the Unconscious Self is a rereading of Freud in relation to the work of Henri Bergson. Ann Gray is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Lincoln, Editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies and is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of British Cinema and Television and Memory Studies. Her previous publications include Research Practice for Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Methods and Lived Cultures (2003) and Video Playtime: the Gendering of a Leisure Technology (1992). She is director of the AHRC project ‘Televising History: 1995– 2010’. Mark Erickson is currently Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Brighton. He was a member of staff at DCSS from 1996 until its closure in 2001. His most recent book is Science, Culture and Society: Making Sense of Science in the 21st Century (2005) published by Polity. Stuart Hanson is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester. He has previously taught at Wolverhampton University and in the Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology at the University of Birmingham. He is author of a forthcoming book for MUP entitled From Silent Screen to Multi-screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain Since 1896. Helen Wood is Lecturer of Sociology at De Montfort University. She is author of Talking With Television forthcoming, University of Illinois Press, and has published on television, audiences, talk shows, reality television and cultural studies in a number of journals. She is also assistant editor of the journal Ethnography. She was an undergraduate student and member of staff in the Department of Cultural Studies at Birmingham.
Preface Stuart Hall
This is the second volume of papers republished from the archives of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies. They cover the two decades from the Centre’s inception in 1964 to the beginning of the 1980s. The Introduction by the Editorial Team sets this work in the broader context of the Centre’s development over this period. The aim of the Preface is to describe the organizational contexts and working practices through which they were produced. The essays were selected from a variety of sources, including early formulations of the Centre’s project, papers produced in the various seminar groups, early drafts of essays or chapters, some of them first circulated in the form of the mimeographed Stencilled Papers series which subsequently appeared, revised and expanded, in more permanent form – for example, in the Centre journal, Working Papers In Cultural Studies and the Hutchinson book series. CCCS Selected Working Papers Volume 1 was largely concerned with early theoretical developments in Cultural Studies at both the conceptual and the more methodological or ‘grounded’ levels. The final two sections of that Volume ‘Theorising Experience, Exploring Methods’ and ‘Grounded Studies’, drew from work produced in the Centre’s various sub- or working-groups and the essays and papers in this volume are almost entirely drawn from that source. Collective intellectual work at the Centre was organized into three levels: a general theory seminar in which everyone participated and which subsequently evolved into part of the ‘taught’ MA; a series of sub- or working-groups to which all staff and students were attached; and individual theses and projects. A description of the theory seminar was offered in the Preface to Volume 1. It included a wide-ranging critical discussion of a variety of key texts, writers, concepts and intellectual or disciplinary traditions. Its purpose was to help constitute cultural studies as a ‘field’ (not a rival discipline); to generate a common intellectual focus for discussion amongst staff and students who, it should be remembered, were drawn from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds; and to develop through critical engagement and collective debate a distinctive approach to the way culture and its relation to other practices in a social formation was theorised. The second strand began as a ‘work-in-progress’ seminar in which students were invited to report on and collectively discuss their individual research projects. This quickly evolved into a number of different thematically-focused research areas or domains of study. As compared with the ‘theory’ strand, working groups were more focussed on concrete research problems and methodologies of research. The development of working- or sub-groups is reflected on at length in the following Introduction. Initially, they were sited at those points where individual thesis topics loosely overlapped. As Richard Johnson, the Centre’s third director, said in the 1977–8 Report,
xii
Preface
describing the organization of its collective intellectual work, ‘thesis topics are usually linked to sub-group programmes which therefore act as a forum for the presentation of research and the development of shared intellectual insights’. Here students read together and discussed the literatures related to their discrete areas and critically engaged the relevant aspects of traditional disciplines. In effect, those early sections of theses which conventionally ‘review the literature’ were collectivised. Sub-groups therefore began as ‘a method of support to thesis work’. Later, many sub-groups developed collective projects of their own, where their members worked together on a concrete research problem and explored their own theoretical avenues. ‘Where a sub-group has been working together for some time and has developed a common project, the relation between collective and individual work may well be reversed, thesis topics being designed in relation to sub-group work and discussion.’ They consequently became more wide-ranging and intellectually ambitious. In effect, the sub-group system bridged the gap between more high-level theoretical and conceptual work and concrete research. Sub-groups greatly enhanced the Centre’s ‘collective’ style of research practice. As the Introduction notes, each acquired a distinctive character and ethos; they therefore made a significant contribution to, and greatly enriched, the pluri-centered character of cultural studies research at the Centre. They helped to diversify the variety of theoretical and disciplinary fields drawn into the orbit of the cultural studies project and made more organic its ‘inter-disciplinary’ character. Above all, they were a major source of creative energy, variety and productive output in the Centre’s early development. Sub-groups produced major parts, and sometimes whole issues, of the journal, Working Papers in Cultural Studies and were responsible for expanding them into books in the Hutchinson series. Considering only the groups which are represented in this Volume: the article ‘Mapping the field’ of the Literature and Society Group, one of the earliest, is included here. It was responsible, with the subsequently emerging Language Group, for major sections in the volume Culture, Media, Language (itself a selection of papers from the early years of the Centre and a report to its members as a whole on developments in the sub-groups over several years). It contributed to what was subsequently identified as ‘the turn to theory’ in literary studies. The Youth Sub-cultures group produced a double issue of the journal, WPCS 7/8 which subsequently developed into Resistance Through Rituals (recently republished with a new introduction). Some, of its members, with the help of ‘external’ contributors from other groups, went on to develop the independent research project on race and urban crime and to write it up in the text known as Policing The Crisis. The Media Group produced important work on television discourse, generated its own collective projects on news, current affairs and popular television like sport and published significant early research on audiences. Its work overlapped with innovative work by members of the Women’s Studies Group on soap operas. The section here entitled Women’s Studies and Feminism reflects two different strands of work, since ‘women studies’ was a shorthand term for both a feminist grouping in the Centre, formed to contest its many formal and informal patriarchal practices and to develop a feminist critique of cultural studies, as well as clustering together those who were working on gender-related topics. The product of these two strands appeared in the Hutchinson volume Women Take Issue. Despite Policing The Crisis, the group organized around questions of Race and Politics was a relative late-comer but its work provided the basis of an important and path-breaking critical text, The Empire Strikes Back. Historical work was, by contrast, one of the earliest focal points of Centre research and was at that time widely diffused through the Centre as a whole. The Cultural History Group provided a focus for those Centre members wanting to work on cultural studies questions ‘in historical ways’. It addressed the
Preface
xiii
interface between history and theory, initiated critical reviews of recent British historiography including the ‘new’ social history and the work of the Marxist historians, and supported what was in effect a Marx reading group. Some of this work formed the basis of Making Histories. The Education Group generated the volume Unpopular Education and its work, with that of the closely related Work group, is summarised in two, collectively-authored, overview articles reprinted in this Volume. There are no precise models for expressing the relationship between the general theoretical project of cultural studies as pursued at the Centre at this time and the more grounded work of the sub-groups. This relationship evolved in practice rather than being part of an overall plan and never produced anything like a single cultural studies methodology. In retrospect, it is hard to think what this would have looked like, given the very different approaches and thematic areas through which cultural studies was developing. Nor could methodologies simply be borrowed from elsewhere. The literary-critical approach privileged the engagement with and close reading of specific texts – ‘these words in this order’, as the Leavisites put it. But it was deeply suspicious of more general questions, with which the Centre was bound to be concerned, about the conceptualization of culture, except in so far as this could be ‘read out of ’ or speculatively inferred from the texts themselves. Besides, not many sub-groups were working with ‘texts’ in that sense (though, for example, the Media Studies group was, which is why the exploration of semiotic analysis of media texts, language and genres was most advanced there). Typically, the sociological model made a clear distinction between the theoretical and the empirical; in which the former, translated into a set of hypotheses, was then ‘tested’ at the empirical level. The Centre was sensitive to the anti-theoretical and ‘scientistic’ assumptions which seemed to be written into this empiricist approach and their inappropriateness to the domain of meaning and cultural practices. The ‘case study’ model as developed in some approaches in anthropology and interactionist sociology seemed more appropriate; and versions of this were indeed developed in those parts of the Centre’s work – for example, Paul Willis’ influential Learning To Labour project and the studies of youth sub-cultures in Resistance Through Rituals – which deployed a more ethnographic approach or what Clifford Geertz, more loosely, called ‘thick description’. What seemed particularly appropriate here was the critical effect of a methodology which, instead of taking for granted the prevailing definitions, attempted to see structures and processes from the actor’s perspective – taking into account how they were being experienced, the subject’s ‘definition of the situation’. However, this was not relevant to all the working groups. Perhaps the best way of understanding the relationship of theory to research in the Centre was in terms of the perceived requirement simultaneously to work at different ‘levels of abstraction’. Theoretical work was inevitably pitched at a high level of conceptualization. More focused or grounded research was seen, not as a test or an exemplification of the latter but what happened when one moved the analysis to a lower level of abstraction, where theories became more concrete as a result, not of disconnecting theory from the empirical, but of adding more and more determinations. These different kinds of work were, nevertheless, part of a single project, sustained organizationally at different but related sites. Though never formalised as a methodology, this approach developed in this period as a style of collective research practice – which may have been all we were capable of at that moment; and which, though not in the usual scientific way replicable and generalisable, seemed to us a particular way intrinsic to the cultural, of articulating the concrete and the conceptual, which has set its stamp on ‘doing cultural studies’ since.
Acknowledgements
We have made every effort to contact all the authors of the enclosed papers and thank those who agreed so readily to have some of their earliest scholarly work published in this collection. Our thanks are also due to former colleagues at the University of Birmingham, especially to Tilusha Ghelani, Barbara Shaw-Perry and Sue Wright who worked on the initial reading and selection of papers and to Michael Green who supported our efforts throughout. Thanks also to Erin Bell and Lynn Johnson at Lincoln for their help in copy editing and producing readable copies of the papers. Rebecca Barden during her time with Routledge never lost faith in the project in spite of quite major set-backs and delays and Natalie Foster picked up the final stages of its production – our thanks to them both. In memory of Eve Brook Ian Connell Adrian Mellor Robin Rusher Allon White The following articles have been reproduced courtesy of the authors and publishers involved: Avis, James: ‘The strange fate of progressive education’ in Education Group II: Education Limited: Schooling, training and the New Right in England since 1979, London, Unwin Hyman, 1991 Blackwell, Trevor: ‘The history of a working-class Methodist Chapel’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 5, 1974, pp. 65–84 Brunsdon, Charlotte: ‘ “It is well known that by nature women are inclined to be personal” ’ in Women’s Studies Group: Women Take Issue: Aspects of women’s subordination, London, Hutchinson, 1978 Brunt, Rosalind: ‘The spectacular world of Whicker’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 3, 1972, pp. 7–32 Burniston, Steve, Mort, Frank and Weedon, Christine: ‘Psychoanalysis and the cultural acquisition of sexuality and subjectivity’ in Women’s Studies Group: Women Take Issue: Aspects of women’s subordination, London, Hutchinson, 1978 Butcher, Helen, Coward, Ros, Evaristi, Marcella, Garber, Jenny, Harrison, Rachel and Winship, Janice: ‘Images of women in the media’, Stencilled Paper No. 31, 1974 Carby, Hazel: ‘Multicultural fictions’, Stencilled Paper No. 58, 1979
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Carby, Hazel: ‘White woman listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood’ in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and racism in 70s Britain, London, Hutchinson, 1982 CCCS Education Group: ‘Perspectives on schooling and politics’ in Unpopular Education: Schooling and social democracy in England since 1944, London, Hutchinson, 1981 CCCS Popular Memory Group: ‘What do we mean by popular memory?’, Stencilled Paper No. 67, 1982 Clare, Mariette: ‘The adult literacy campaign: Politics and practice’, Stencilled Paper No. 80, 1985 Clarke, Gary: ‘Defending ski jumpers: A critique of theories of youth sub-cultures’, Stencilled Paper No. 71, 1982 Clarke, John and Jefferson, Tony: ‘Working class youth cultures’, Stencilled Paper No. 18, 1973 Cohen, Stanley: ‘Breaking out, smashing up and the social context of aspiration’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 5, 1974, pp. 37–64 Connell, Ian: ‘Television news and the Social Contract’ in Culture, Media, Language: Working papers in cultural studies 1972–79, London, Hutchinson, 1980 Cultural Historical Group: ‘Out of the people: The politics of containment 1935–45’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 9, 1976, pp. 29–50 Dyer, Richard: ‘The meaning of Tom Jones’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 1, 1971, pp. 53–64 Errol, Lawrence: ‘Just plain common sense: The roots of racism’ in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and racism in 70s Britain, London, Hutchinson, 1982 Finn, Dan, Grant, Neil and Johnson, Richard: ‘Social democracy, education and the crisis’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 10, 1977, pp. 147–98 Green, Andy: ‘On the political economy of black Labour and the racial structuring of the working class in England’, Stencilled Paper No. 63, 1979 Griffin, Christine: ‘The good, the bad and the ugly: Images of young women in the labour market’, Stencilled Paper No. 70, 1982 Grimshaw, Roger: ‘Comment’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 5, 1974, pp. 65–84 Hall, Stuart: ‘Encoding and decoding in the television discourse’, Stencilled Paper No. 7, 1973 Hall, Stuart: ‘The “structured communication” of events’, Stencilled Paper No. 5, 1973 Hall, Stuart: ‘The Hippies: An American moment’, Stencilled Paper No. 16, 1968 Hall, Stuart, Clarke, John, Critcher, Chas., Jefferson, Tony and Roberts, Brian: ‘Newsmaking and crime’, Stencilled Paper No. 37, 1975 Hall, Stuart, Connell, Ian and Curti, Lidia: ‘The “unity” of current affairs television’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 9, 1976, pp. 51–94 Hebdige, Dick: ‘Reggae, Rastas and Rudies: Style and the subversion of form’, Stencilled Paper No. 24, 1974 Hobson, Dorothy: ‘Housewives and the mass media’ in Culture, Media, Language: Working papers in cultural studies 1972–79, London, Hutchinson, 1980 Hobson, Dorothy: ‘Housewives: Isolation as oppression’ in Women’s Studies Group: Women Take Issue: Aspects of women’s subordination, London, Hutchinson, 1978 Holderness, Graham: ‘Lawrence, Leavis and culture’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 5, 1974, pp. 85–110 Jefferson, Tony and Clarke, John: ‘Down these mean streets . . . the meaning of mugging’, Stencilled Paper No. 17, 1973
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Johnson, Richard: ‘Economy, culture and concept: Three approaches to Marxist history’, Stencilled Paper No. 50, 1977 Jones, Bryn: ‘The politics of popular culture’, Stencilled Paper No. 12, 1972 Laing, Stuart: ‘Walter Greenwood: Working-class writer’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 4, 1973, pp. 147–62 ‘Literature/society: Mapping the field’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 4, 1973, pp. 21–50 Louvre, Alf: ‘Notes on a theory of genre’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 4, 1973, pp. 121–34 McLennan, Gregor: ‘ “Ideology” and “consciousness”: Some problems in Marxist historiography’, Stencilled Paper No. 45, 1976 McRobbie, Angela and Garber, Jenny: ‘Girls and subcultures’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 7/8, 1975, pp. 209–22 Mellor, Adrian: ‘The hidden method: Lucien Goldmann and the sociology of literature’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 4, 1973, pp. 86–103 Morley, Dave: ‘Reconceptualising the media audience: Towards an ethnography of audience’, Stencilled Paper No. 44, 1976 Passeron, Jean-Claude: ‘Introduction to the French edition of Uses of Literacy’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 1, 1971, pp. 120–31 Solomos, John, Findlay, Bob, Jones, Simon and Gilroy, Paul: ‘The organic crisis of British capitalism and race: The experience of the seventies’ in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and racism in 70s Britain, London, Hutchinson, 1982 Sparks, Colin: ‘The abuses of literacy’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 6, 1974, pp. 7–24 Taylor, Pam: ‘Women domestic servants 1919–1939: A study of a hidden Army, illustrated by servants’ own recollected experiences’, Stencilled Paper No. 40, 1976 Tolson, Andrew: ‘Reading literature as culture’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 4, 1973, pp. 51–68 Whicker, Alan: ‘Response’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 5, 1974, p. 161 Willis, Paul: ‘How working class kids get working class jobs’, Stencilled Paper No. 43, 1975 Winship, Janice: ‘A woman’s world: “Woman” – an ideology of femininity’ in Women’s Studies Group: Women Take Issue: Aspects of women’s subordination, London, Hutchinson, 1978 Women’s Studies Group: ‘Relations of production: Relations of reproduction’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Vol. 9, 1976, pp. 95–118
Introduction The editorial team
This volume of papers represents the work that emerged from the ‘sub-groups’ or working groups, which were formed at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) as it expanded. As one of very few sites where researchers could engage with the distinctiveness of the problems of culture, the CCCS became a magnet for numerous postgraduate researchers from a variety of backgrounds. The ‘voices’ of cultural studies therefore multiplied as a number of relevant cultural political issues, influenced by the social conditions of the day, housed themselves within the broad church of ‘cultural analysis’ at the Centre. That is not to say that the work represented here is reflective of simply ‘anything’, which has often been the point of confusion for those suspicious of cultural studies as a new field. It is clear, looking at accounts of the history of these studies at Birmingham, that a determined search for a deep and unified approach to cultural studies accompanied its considerable growth and expansion. In this introduction we think about that history and the various intellectual, political and, at times, pragmatic events, which bore out this legacy of research from the working groups at the CCCS. It is useful to outline initially some of the precedents upon which this work is founded. As discussed more fully by Ann Gray in the introduction to Volume 1 of this collection (Gray et al. 2007), the early sketches for a ‘cultural studies’ are outlined in Richard Hoggart’s lecture, ‘Schools of English and Contemporary Society’.1 He established an explicit blueprint for an inter-disciplinary framework that provided the characteristic shape of the Centre’s work throughout its subsequent life. Hoggart emphasizes the imperative to engage with historical and philosophical debates about contemporary culture that had for too long been dominated by literary criticism, coupled with the need to combine those interests with a greater understanding of the sociology of literature and the arts. This represented a search for a new critical language aimed at locating the critique of cultural forms within a broader understanding of social life. Questions of cultural value and thus relativism were teased out and in some ways resolved through a reading of Weber which helped clarify the distinction between value judgment and value analysis. Here, exploring the ‘various possibilities of the [cultural] object to values’2 facilitated a move beyond the close reading of cultural artefacts to a consideration of their engagements in socio-political contexts as ‘cultural events’, broadly seeing culture as a ‘whole way of life’. That initial outline optimistically sought a ‘big’ picture of cultural studies, which set in motion the need to collect together and critique the fragments of the study of culture from other spaces. Texts from, for example, literary studies, sociology, anthropology and mass communications, informed members of the CCCS in their attempt to capture the connectedness between culture as form and structure, and culture as social, experiential phenomena. This larger take on culture, rather than simply a focus on mass art or popular culture, to which
2
The editorial team
the Centre has sometimes been reduced by others, initiated the establishment of the ‘Texts’ seminar which was to lay the proper foundations for inter-disciplinary research in cultural studies.3 Not surprisingly then, the Centre felt that many of the best students were to be found at the boundaries between traditional subject areas. Through an eclectic reading list, those previously trained in humanities were educated in the social sciences and (to a lesser extent) vice versa. This suggests an inevitable debate about the methodological implications of both interpretation and empiricism. The Centre’s reports make clear how continually revisiting the tensions between theory and method meant that doing cultural studies involved tackling the fundamental issues at stake in the social sciences. Fighting against the structural-functionalist determinism of the social sciences, the Centre was keen to grasp and make real the relations through which cultural formations are often contradictory, ‘rooted in different conceptions of the world’. For cultural studies this was the certainty with which current legacies in the social sciences could not cope, either theoretically or methodologically. But, the Centre’s inter-disciplinary commitment did have a unified mission: an attempt to clarify the domain of the ‘cultural sciences’ in order to outline a definitive field which had a characteristic method. Thus by the time of the publication of the Centre report of 1969–71 there was a common intellectual goal to address two problems: ‘How collective intellectual work of this kind should be organized, and what relevance this has for social action’. The answer to these questions came through the emergence of the sub-groups in the period 1969–71, breaking down the traditional hierarchies associated with academic work. This is reflected in the number of co-authored and even un-authored papers in these volumes. The move to group work is recalled by the Centre report as a complement to the year’s unified theme in the ‘Texts’ seminar, whereby general theoretical problems were sub-divided into critical areas derived from individual thesis work, which should then always be fed back into the Centre’s work as a whole. Indeed by the time of the 1974–6 report it is suggested that the sub-groups were in some ways a reaction to the elusiveness of a consolidated definition of cultural studies, ‘[t]he range of research areas provide the next best thing – an empirical or working definition of what the field must consist of, for us – within our range of competence’. Therefore, the figure of the lonely scholar working in the remote ‘stacks’ of the University of Birmingham library was recognized as a totally inappropriate model for this type of work.4 But the mode of working is also inexorably bound to subject matter. Attending to the experience of socio-cultural contexts is to recognize that culture has a purchase ‘on the ground’ and such work could be more fruitful when pursued by a collective commitment to relevant contexts, rather than entirely abstract engagements in the pursuit of individual intellectual work. In this second volume then, much of the work from the sub-groups is eager to endorse the Centre’s commitment to the translation of the general and abstracted theoretical paradigms into their relevance to the real business of life. The 1969–71 Centre report reminds members that: ‘The critical and reflective study of modern culture if situated in its determining social structure, must never have become so scholarly that it forgets collectively to assume the questions its progenitors so urgently posed’ (CCCS 1969–71: 6). Interdisciplinarity and group work were no doubt the generators of an eclectic range of projects emerging from the Centre. Time saw the groups change with individual interests and intellectual fashions, but as post-graduate numbers grew, so did the number of research groups. There was also of course fluidity of membership between the different groups, with a number of researchers also migrating into Birmingham for different periods of time from different institutions. By 1982/3, the end of the period covered by these Volumes, the Centre records some ten working sub-groups: Class, Education, English Studies, Food, Media, Popular Memory, Politics and Culture, Race and Politics, Sexuality and Visual Pleasures;
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and eleven if one counts the Women’s Forum which emerged some years earlier as feminism made its mark intellectually and politically at the Centre. This collection cannot and does not seek to represent them all. Neither are these papers selected here intended to represent the organization of cultural studies as a field, either as we may wish to announce it now, or as a programme for the future; the theoretical interests of those terrains have taken on new formulations often for good political and intellectual reasons. Rather these sections here – Literature and Society, Popular Culture and Youth Subculture, Media, Women’s Studies and Feminism, From Race to Racism, History and Education and Work – represent some of the key groupings at the time, described and constructed in the Centre’s own reports. The early work of the Centre took its cues from the work of Hoggart, Williams and Thompson in their concern with the understanding and broadening of the notions of class, along with an attempt to grapple with the relationship between literature and society. These were dual concerns of Hoggart’s ‘founding statement’. One of the first working groups then was the Literature and Society group, picking up the dominant concerns set in motion by Hoggart. Theirs was an attempt to search for a new critical language for literary studies, which was to be more analytically engaged with the ‘unpremeditated textures of experience’ in contemporary society. In that sense the members worked against the dominance of form and structure in Birmingham’s English Department, at that time dominated by the figure of David Lodge. Instead, they followed the work of Raymond Williams and worked towards a Marxist approach to literature, reading the works of Goldmann, Sartre and Lukács. Goldmann’s work, eventually published as Towards a Sociology of the Novel, offered one of the first accounts of the relationship of literary forms to social contexts from a socialist humanist perspective, in keeping with those early British thinkers, but his influence is often overshadowed by the imminent dominance of structuralism. In that tradition the group worked towards accounting for the relationship of literature to society and to social movements, in a sense to demystify the prevailing values of ‘literary elitism’ in order to develop a materialist approach to reading as social practice.5 But also, as Chas. Critcher (Critcher 1979: 17–18) points out, Hoggart in his The Uses of Literacy was concerned with what he saw as the denial of social class divisions within the optimism of ‘affluence’ (Hoggart 1957). This problematic was to take on firmer contours than the early humanist emphasis at the Centre, and can be seen to have influenced and shaped the Centre’s work on the study of youth and youth subcultures. With Stuart Hall’s appointment as director, questions of consciousness were framed within a vigorous and extensive reading and re-reading of Marx and Marxism which engaged centrally with the wider intellectual landscape of the New Left in Britain. The Marxist conception of consciousness, although contested, served as a framework within which different forms of cultural expression could be subsumed, thus allowing ‘superficial’ differences to be reconciled into an overarching theoretical perspective. The use of this concept in many CCCS texts is reflective of the influence of sociology at the time, and the struggle in sociology between normative functionalism and Marxist, conflict-based analyses. The notion of the leisure or affluent society, particularly as it was seen to affect working class youth, caught the attention of researchers at the CCCS. Drawing strongly on the work of the Chicago School and their engagement with youth and ‘deviant’ behaviours, researchers worked with the notion of ‘sub-cultures’ and in particular the ‘spectacular’ expression of sub-cultural identity and belonging through forms of style and music. Far from allowing these expressions to stand as evidence of human agency, researchers were concerned to locate these expressions and forms in relation to broader social and cultural structures. The structure consisted of three cultures: working class, dominant and mass
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culture. Their aim was to examine how these different elements worked ideologically in relation to form and practice. Researchers suggested that youth, far from being alienated or rendered a homogenous mass by commercial culture, resisted the contradictions inherent in the social structure. Further, members of sub-cultures actively engaged with the products and texts of everyday life in the creation of meaning and identity. However, researchers at Birmingham insisted that class definitively shaped that existence and experience. Whilst the emphasis of the CCCS work was clearly on contemporary culture, there was from the mid-1970s an active and productive ‘History’ group which, taking their cue in part from E.P. Thompson, explored hidden and subaltern histories with a strong emphasis, in the early work, on class. The different pathways of the historians of the New Left and the lively relations between CCCS and Ruskin college were sister movements that look back to the pioneering work of that historian and ‘more-than-historian’ Raymond Williams. The dynamic debates about history at the CCCS were also debates about ‘Marxist’ histories which were constantly being remembered differently. The central focus on class and class consciousness was also born out in the establishment of the Media Sub Group and its predominant concern with questions of ideology. Working from the theoretical apparatus of Althusser and then Gramsci, the main focus of their efforts was on textual analyses of ‘serious’ current affairs programming, and in particular the reporting of industrial and political conflict reverberating through 1970s Britain. Morley and Brunsdon (1999) in their introduction to the reprinting of The Nationwide Television Studies, describe how the work of the CCCS media group was produced through the conjuncture of the political crisis in British public life around the 1972 and 1974 miners’ strikes, with an attempt to import ‘continental Marxism’ to explain the media’s role in the maintenance of the dominant status quo. They report that Althusser’s essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ ‘served an almost emblematic function in focusing the work of the Media Group at that time’ (1999: 5). These more theoretically complex accounts of the role of ideology in the circulation of meaning, and their associated questions of subjectivity, ran counter to the media transmission models that dominated other embryonic forms of media studies. In that sense, Hall’s ‘encoding/decoding’ essay provided justification for the need to consider media influence that were not recognized elsewhere, and influenced Morley’s subsequent call for ethnographic work into audience studies, as well as work by Dorothy Hobson into women’s media use in the home. These developments were also influenced by the reconsideration of what counted as ‘serious’ and political in terms of questions of class consciousness. Challenges from Barthes and others, including feminist engagements, resulted in emerging analyses of the construction of common sense in everyday life. These developments were part of broader theoretical and political shifts in thinking which impacted upon the Centre’s work as a whole. The assaults on this conception of consciousness – the fragmentation of consciousness – firstly from feminism and subsequently from the direction of race and politics can be seen to be both a commentary on and a reflection of the fragmentation of the society of that time. In terms of cultural studies practice this shift is very significant. The critique of Marxism as inadequate for all tasks of cultural analysis due to its inadequate conceptual scheme became tied to a critique of ‘traditional’ theory with its heritage of colonial and Eurocentric discourse. This was not just a critique of intellectual practice, but also a critique of the operation of the Centre itself. However, the shift from ‘consciousness’ to ‘identity’ occurred through a deeper understanding of the role and politics of culture and this subsequently had great effect on the discipline of sociology. Indeed, it can be argued that the cultural turn in sociology (and the other social science disciplines) has its roots in the CCCS work of the late
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1970s. Cultural studies, with its roots in sociology, was structured by that discipline and subsequently became the agent for change in sociology itself, as David Morley points out in his introduction to the Media section: ‘perhaps emulation is the sincerest form of flattery’. One direct challenge to the centrality of class then came from the multiple voices of feminism. As Angela McRobbie (1980) points out in her ‘Settling Accounts with Subculture’ essay, the emphasis in cultural studies on processes of production and the public spaces of ‘spectacular subcultures’ concealed attention to the role of women in the economy or in cultural life. Stuart Hall’s own discussion of his entry into cultural studies from the New Left acknowledges that the Eurocentrist and patriarchal assumptions of Marxist theory had to be contested not just at the level of theory but also in the realm of politics. There he acknowledges the interruption of feminism in the formative history of cultural studies, describing it as a ‘thief in the night’ which ‘crapped on the table of cultural studies’ (Hall 1996: 269).6 Feminism at the Centre changed the object of cultural study in both theoretical and practical ways. First was the issue of the personal as political; second was the re-examination and broadening of the concept of power beyond the public domain. Finally, theorizing the workings of sexuality and gender radically changed the way power could be understood. If we look at the very different contestations around feminism marked in the section on ‘Women’s Studies and Feminism’ in Janice Winship’s introduction, and to the various interventions in other sections – on subcultures and on the media for example – made by women at the Centre, we can see how all these themes were expressed. Charlotte Brunsdon describes the Women’s Studies Group established at the Centre in the 1974 as a ‘strange meeting place’ for women involved in very different trajectories of feminism, reflected in their publication, Women Take Issue (1978). It was always ambivalent as to its relationship to the Women’s Liberation Movement, which reflected a wider debate about the status of ‘academic’ feminism and grass roots feminist politics. A central dilemma for the Group was, if feminist research was to challenge and transform existing research within the academy, then how could this happen without it becoming appropriated and de-politicized by the mainstream? Alternatively, was feminism to become a focus for the group as simply their own gender-specific topic, and therefore something separate and marginal to the rest of the Centre? The group, then, raised the difficulty and tension of their work (a problem which extended to all women working in the Centre) of, on the one hand, their need to organize and work as a closed group, and on the other, for ‘the question of women’ to be a mainstream issue for all intellectual and political work. If the Women’s Studies Group at the Centre was divided between wanting to join the mainstream, wanting the Centre to define all of its work in terms of that group, and also wanting to organize autonomously, then this of course mirrored the political work and concerns of the women’s movement at that time.7 Perhaps the essay that summarizes the contradictory tensions of how women in the Centre forged their work in relation to the Liberation movement was Brunsdon’s ‘It is well known that by nature women are inclined to be rather personal’ (reprinted in this volume). This essay maps the emerging tensions of feminist thinking in the group around the ‘nature’ of femininity and the structural subordination of women. The arguments that erupted between the Women’s Group and what Brunsdon calls the ‘boyzone’ of cultural studies were all about identification and differences. But it would be a mistake to see the interruption of feminism into cultural studies as simply an argument between the ‘boyzone’ and the feminists, when in fact the women in the Centre by no means defined themselves at the time, or in retrospect, as belonging to the same collective identification. This, of course, was also a problem inherent to the history of feminism as much as to the Centre. For feminism the difficulty was always how to acknowledge difference, whilst working together to achieve
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agreed political aims. The differences and identities that were characteristic of the evolving women’s movement of the time created a force borne of utopian identification and bitter argument, which nonetheless was distinctive in marking out personal identity as a public arena of struggle and debate and thus opening a doorway to connected political debates and struggles on race and gay sexuality. The difference and identity between the politics of gender and race is perhaps encapsulated most powerfully through the work of some of the black women at the Centre. Hazel Carby’s (1982) essay ‘White Woman Listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood’ (published in this volume) reminds readers that it is only black feminists who can articulate the complex relations of power between gender, race and class and, as the history of feminism is structured through racism and ethnocentrism, so the relation between black feminists and white women is also structured through racism. Carby asks white feminists to stop trying to write herstory for black women, to stop making them an object of study, and to analyse themselves in relation to those very structures of racializing power they would rather avoid. Similarly, Pratibha Parmar’s (1982) ‘Gender, race and class: Asian women in resistance’ in The Empire Strikes Back has to be read in relation to the real dispute in the UK just before the 1978–9 so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’, where the lowest paid public sector workers went on strike in opposition to the Labour Party’s refusal to grant a living wage. Parmar shows clearly how in the late 1970s an analysis of culture and power understood through particular historical instances had to take account of the complex negotiation of forces such as capital, patriarchy and race. Most importantly, she links her analysis to the practice and struggle going on at that time for particular communities of Asian women in Britain. Whilst the intellectual and political trajectories outlined above in relation to feminism and anti-racist politics have made sense at least of the western development of these issues, the arguments above also point to how the Centre’s work began to evolve through particular engagements with British politics. It is important for the reader to encounter this volume not only in relation to the broader intellectual theoretical debates which inform it, but also as responses to the political contours of the UK at the time. For example, the emergence of a politics and thinking through issues and formations of race at CCCS cannot be grasped without an understanding of the history and politics of being black and British in the 1970s and 1980s. The Labour Party returned to power in 1974 after the miners’ strike brought down Edward Heath’s Conservative government. The Labour government came under pressure to resolve rising unemployment and falling living standards. The breakdown of the political consensus and the fear of political violence and opposition to the state led Labour to ignore the workers’ complaints. Instead they gave in to the demands of the big employers, cutting living standards further and bringing in a string of counter-reforms. Social unrest amongst the working class and an increasing sense of society drifting into lawlessness was met by a political discourse of authority securing state power. The role of policing was part of this discourse, seen as responding to an increasing political violence and ‘disorder’ in society. As these popular discourses spread, so racism and violence against black and Asian communities increased. The rise of the National Front and the far right, and the increase of policing, continued to fuel racist violence. Margaret Thatcher, elected in 1979, continued the political rhetoric of Britain being swamped by an alien culture, eventually culminating in 1981 with the Brixton riots. Policing the Crisis (1978), then, was the first CCCS publication to focus on questions of ethnicity and race. Jefferson and Clarke’s ‘Down These Mean Streets’ and Dick Hebdige’s, ‘Reggae, Rastas and Rudies’ in this volume are also evidence of early work influenced by that political conjuncture. Policing the Crisis analysed the breakdown of political consensus in
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1970s Britain and the increasing sense of ‘moral panic’ which demonised black youth, raising fears around black criminality. Using Gramsci’s notion of hegemony this text showed how disparate social groups were brought into alliance through ideologies that stressed a working-class emphasis on respectability and nationhood. The rise of an authoritative rightwing consensus based on racism mobilized the working classes in relation to conservative politics, which ushered Thatcher into power. Policing the Crisis was followed by The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain published in 1982. This was an important milestone in the history of CCCS, not least because it made the politics of race and racism central to all understandings of historical cultural identity in Britain. Hazel Carby’s introduction here highlights how the analysis of the politics and formations of race at the Centre was multi-layered, in relation to the development of theories of ideology, feminism and youth sub-culture. Through The Empire Strikes Back the historical legacy of British imperialism began to be understood in relation to how the question of race helped structure capitalism, the British Labour movement, feminism and youth culture. It confirmed the way in which race, sexuality and class are all indelibly rooted in terms of each other and how racism in society was a fundamental part of defining 1970s British identity. This work helped establish an emergent critical mass that became known as ‘Black cultural studies’ and paved the way for Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack. Gilroy there examined the concept of race as an active and cultural category, analysing how the British left with its idealized construction of the white working man had been an attempt to counter patriotism on the right, but also showed how this socialist version of being British was based on a structural racism that excluded the experience of the ‘black diaspora’. He evaluates how anti-racist campaigns such as Rock again Racism and the Anti-Nazi League were critical spaces where questions of youth, class and race were fused together when the mould of British politics was being broken. Gilroy’s exploration of black cultural aesthetic forms as expressions of diasporic experience, which could counter hegemonic discourses of racism, was thus centrally connected to the political anti-racist movements of the 1970s. As we have indicated, such material arising from the work of the Centre in the late 1970s and early 1980s came at a time of dramatic social and political change in the UK and the emergence of new voices and new work in the CCCS are indicative of wider socio-political shifts taking place at the time. Many of these can be associated with the election in 1979 of a right-wing Conservative government led by Britain’s first woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. The next 17 years of Conservative rule, but particularly the 1980s, saw the fragmentation of the left in UK politics, the decline of trade unionism, and the rise of individualism as a strategy for state policies, summed up succinctly by Margaret Thatcher in 1987: ‘[T]here is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.’8 At a time when we can see (UK) universities as quiescent institutions given over to the training of ready operatives for the new knowledge economy it is perhaps difficult to imagine that universities in the late 1970s and into the 1980s became, particularly in social science and humanities departments, locations for forms of ‘dangerous’ thinking that worried many people in positions of political power and authority.9 ‘Dangerous thinking’ then was a common practice at the Centre, which potentially encapsulated Gramsci’s concept of the ‘organic intellectual’. This involved always marching on two fronts. Not only being at the forefront of the theoretical positions that were emerging at the time, in a sense to be ahead of the academic ‘game’, but also having a responsibility to transmit those ideas outside of the ivory towers of the academy. In an early Centre report they write, ‘We should like to have the opportunity to make some work “operational” in the
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field of education, and to establish firmer links with teachers and educationalists. This is one of the many ways we can see our work relating more specifically to the larger concerns of the society.’ (Centre Report 1965–6: 34) Thus, the work of the Education Group (combined in this volume with the representation of the work of the Work Group) sought to have a direct impact upon policy making. Paul Willis informs us in his introduction of their straightforward hopefulness in wanting to connect their intellectual work to social change and government initiatives, in order to have a direct impact upon the quality of life of the working classes. With this in mind, Centre work often had a direct involvement, for example, organizing practical events with other sectors of education, including teacher training and Adult Education. Some of the critical interventions are visible here, but also see the formative texts, Unpopular Education (CCCS Education Group 1981) and Education Limited (CCCS Education Group 2 1991), for a politics of critical education. We can see in the introductions to the papers in this volume the rich diversity and complexity that made up the various sub-groups. Defining them as discreet entities is impossible and each introduction is mindful not only of the changing strands of interest represented by the groups, but how their focus on, say, history, race or feminism influenced discussions which took place between and across the quite malleable boundaries of group definitions. Moreover this cross weaving of ideas is part of the changing focus of the wider theoretical themes of the Centre. We are grateful to those who agreed to write the introductions to each of these sections. We are conscious of the proximity that these authors have to the work and to the Centre, and how that is perceived by themselves and others in their subsequent trajectories. There is a good deal of sensitivity here to the spaces occupied at the Centre by individuals and particular groups, as well as sensitivity to what this work is to stand for in the contemporary context of its publication. Making selections which we hope strike a balance between representing ‘core’ papers that have since taken on some considerable historical weight, at the same time as rescuing some of those least familiar to the dominant narrative of Birmingham Cultural Studies, was not an easy process. The authors of these introductions have worked with these selections and thoughtfully sought to make sense of their internal logic, as well as the external impact of these papers. They draw our attention to the considerable contribution that Birmingham Cultural Studies made to a range of fields across the Humanities and Social Sciences, and perhaps more importantly, to intellectual (and political) work in general. Stuart Laing returns to the ‘Literature and Society’ section mindful of his original introduction to the WPCS 4 (Laing 1973), where many of these papers were first published. He reminds us of Hoggart’s call to examine the nexus of literature and society as the key starting point for cultural analysis and to the largely forgotten work of Lucien Goldmann, which began to offer insights into the critical fit between social and literary structures. Thus one of the starting points for this group was the taking on of the current intellectual hegemony of Literary Criticism, represented in this collection by Andrew Tolson. But what is also interesting in Laing’s introduction is how, despite the significance of the literature and society debates (and the group) as catalytic to the origins of the Centre, their subsequent influence was rather muted. Yet it seems that in the debt to Raymond Williams and his re-engagement with Marxism, as well as the interjections of contributions like Sparks’s which argues for holding on to the bigger political picture against the danger of a nostalgic celebration of culture, that we have the grounds of the debates that still resonate through cultural studies and through the spaces more usually remembered via other fields like ‘subcultures’ and ‘media’. Perhaps this section will go some way to encouraging some revision and recognition of the ideas worked out here.
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‘Popular Culture and Youth Subcultures’, possibly the area that has become the metonym in some histories for the legacy of the CCCS, is tackled by John Clarke. He describes how that field offered the contemporary focus upon the cultures of Britain of the 1960s and 1970s, which may have assisted its subsequent international visibility, but also suggests how tentative the conjectural process was in terms of finding new forms of analysis to engage with new forms of culture. In that sense Clarke is concerned with the various ‘tactics’ necessary to meet this challenge of culture’s dynamism. In one sense this meant close analysis of popular culture, rendering it intellectually visible and inherently political. But it also involved theorizing popular culture through ‘cross border raids’ into fields such as sociology and structural anthropology, and at the same time rescuing the terms of ‘youth’ from other disciplines and reconfiguring them in terms of class, and subsequently in terms of gender and race. Clarke reminds us of the pace of these directions. Just as the CCCS was becoming known for making class central to subculture/youth debates, so the feminist and anti-racist interventions, as we have been describing above, were rearranging the picture. David Morley gives us an account of the developments of the media group at the Centre, which has been rarely documented and provides an important counter history to how the work on media at the Centre has come to be understood in the many textbook accounts that exist. He reminds us of the central contexts in which the Centre was working, and their relationship and challenges to other work at the Centre for Mass Communications Research, University of Leicester; those working in political economy; and the Glasgow University Media Group. Hall’s canonical essay ‘Encoding/Decoding’ was a challenge to the over linear models of mass communications that were in play. Morley points out a distortion in the histories which place Hall’s essay as the precursor to ‘active audience studies’; in its initial incarnation this essay was as much about the encoding textual processes at work, concerned as the Centre was in the main with textual analysis. These early analyses were often responses to political unrest in the UK, whilst the members went through heated debates via the challenges of feminism to work on popular texts. That is not to deny the seeds which generated the development of audience studies, not least by Morley himself, and feminist work on domestic spaces of reception by Dorothy Hobson, but this introduction does us the great service of setting the record straight. The title of the Women’s Studies section, by Janice Winship, is ‘The difficulty of “between” – a position that almost isn’t there’. She begins with her diary entries from her time at the Centre. Charting her own negotiation between being a woman, intellectual and feminist as a constant movement between and in-between these positions, Winship then shows us how this weaving of identities is integral to all the papers in the section; how such crossings are both creative and problematic components of an emerging feminist cultural studies. Articulation of feminist or feminine, the politics of the Women’s Liberation Movement versus the theory of cultural studies, Marxism versus psychoanalysis, the empowerment of being a feminist researcher against the passivity of being the woman researched, are all part of these encounters. These engagements, as Winship reflects, are still relevant issues for us today in regard to the occupancy of transitional identities; ‘playing between “femininity” and a bigger picture’. Hazel Carby’s introduction also takes us on a personal journey from her experience of working in a multiethnic comprehensive school, to, as she says, ‘being back and black in graduate school’ in the CCCS. Experienced in witnessing the racist violence against her black pupils, Carby’s account of her engagement with the Centre highlights how for her, theoretical work there was a means of questioning the political status quo. Whereas in her family background education was a means of social mobility and a protection from racism,
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in her eyes it was a way of questioning why inequalities in relation to race, class and gender continued to persist, and why these inequalities were further entrenched by the existing educational system. Carby’s concern with the perpetuation of inequalities is then directed to the organization and ‘archiving’ of the papers in these volumes. She is unhappy about the classification of the sections, seeing them as ‘structured in dominance’. Calling the sections ‘Theoretical Frameworks’ or ‘Race’ marks these areas off from each other as mutually exclusive and suggests a structure of importance that necessarily demotes the latter. Although she acknowledges the impossibility of any archive being able to capture the fluidity and continually contested nature of the Centre’s discussions, Carby worries that the complex interweaving of people, issues and ideas gets missed in the current ordering. Race, gender and theory become somehow separate concerns, whilst in reality, as we point out above, most people belonged to several sub-groups and each group was always influencing the ideas of another. So, the complexity of how thinking on race was inflected by, contested with, and related to other topics such as youth culture and gender is effaced. Also, in a similarly reductive move, the recognition of how wider theoretical trajectories of the Centre were also crucially informed by the thinking through of issues of race and gender is bypassed. Carby’s points are important ones, although maybe the problems of structured dominance and mythology are the accompanying dangers of any archive project. We hope that the readers will be able to digest the papers, in the way Carby suggests, as occurring between the spaces of the groups, just as they were also dealing with the complex interrelationships between gender, class and race, or between theory and experience, language and history. In a similar vein of occupying the in-between, Richard Johnson introduces the history section as ‘Entangled Histories’. He begins by mapping the divergent paths of the historians of the New Left into the two academic Centres: the CCCS and Ruskin College in Oxford, which housed the History Workshop Movement. Johnson talks of the ‘mediating’ influence for him and fellow students of figures such as Hall and Raphael Samuel, the history tutor at Ruskin. But he also charts the significance of his education in Marxist social history from Edward and Dorothy Thompson. Approaches to history in the Centre ranged from a focus on the hidden histories of subordinate groups, to literary and historical influences, to a later more theoretical emphasis inaugurated by Hall in relation to hegemonic formations and the theories of Gramsci. Later strands focused on structuralism and historiography, bringing with them fierce debates on the status of ‘theory’; whereas the final strand Johnson tracks is the work of public and popular memory. What becomes abundantly clear in reading Johnson’s introduction is that the question, the definition and the scope of what constitutes an historical approach was a necessary arena of dispute, difference and interconnection within the CCCS. The ‘entangled histories’ of the CCCS crossed between many different concerns of cultural theory, phenomenological experience, epistemology and political history. It is the richness of the divergent interests and the need to continue the debate rather than close down exploration through summary conclusion that, for Johnson, characterises the oftenmisrepresented nature of these papers. And finally, Paul Willis refers to the political optimism embedded in some of the interventions in the Education and Work section, reminding us of the idealist commitment of the group to making significant contributions, which on the one hand would connect education policy to broader socio-cultural shifts and everyday life and, on the other, to policy formation at a central level. Willis revels in the centrality of class in these writings as they addressed the main issues of the day, suggesting what may be lost by the contemporary reticence to address these big questions of agency in relation to economic structures and
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relationships. The Centre’s work then provided a particular blend of critical education analysis, combining sociology, critical analysis of educational policy and party political discourses which focused a class/cultural perspective on the historical conjunctures of the time. Whilst a range of right-wing policies including ‘marketisation’ have demolished the political potential of state educational reform for the benefit of the working class, there need not be collusion on the part of the academy, but rather the essays reproduced in this volume can serve as reminders of the role of education in practices of contestation. The changing face of culture and the economy under pressures of global flows does not make these works redundant, but underlines the need for ethnographically grounded contemporary analysis of the current conjuncture, so as to explore the possible bases for subordinate power and resistance, reconnecting ‘really useful knowledge’ to an educational politics of working class emancipation. Responding to the politics of education in 1992 Hall expresses his dumbfoundedness in the face of the mushrooming institution of American Cultural Studies, suggesting the very real danger he feels when theory and knowledge become just a market in their own right. The kind of cultural studies work which this volume represents keeps the ‘tension’ between the theoretical and political, holding onto the ‘worldliness’ of textual practices, even though the strain between the two is (productively) irresolvable (Hall 1996: 272). Perhaps we also have to see this statement as simply a grim foreboding of what, in essence, has become the depressing future of the overall academic institution itself. The current environment represents a market where research output is quantified and where Cultural Studies, like its neighbours in Sociology or Media Studies, are increasingly defined and aligned with government cultural policy and the decisions of funding for the creative industries. From such a position we might well look back with a certain yearning to those arguments between white and black feminists and the ‘boyzone’; indeed from this perspective, feminist crapping is not just an unseemly noise. It should be seen as an organic voice of vital connection and contradiction between academic and political spheres. As Hall (1996: 275) reminds us, ‘I do think there is all the difference in the world between understanding the politics of intellectual work and substituting intellectual work for politics’.
Notes 1 Available in Use of English (Winter 1963 and Spring, 1964) and re-printed in Gray et al 2007. 2 1965–66 Centre Report p 14. 3 The ‘Theoretical Engagements’ section in Volume 1, introduced by Larry Grossberg, sets out some of the intellectual endeavours that were largely a result of the ‘Texts’ seminar. Organizationally we have separated out a section of theoretical work in Volume 1, but of course this is slightly misleading, since it is clear from the collection of works in this volume that those questions fiercely debated in the ‘Texts’ seminars influenced the outcomes of the work produced in the working groups. 4 Larry Grossberg’s introduction to the theory work of the Centre in Volume 1 also draws our attention to the unusual approach to collective theorizing. 5 We are grateful for a conversation with Andrew Tolson for some insights into the workings of the Literature and Society group. 6 See Charlotte Brunsdon’s discussion of the impact of feminism at the CCCS ‘A thief in the night: stories of feminism in the 1970s at CCCS’ in Morley, D. & Chen K.-H. (eds) (1996) pp. 276–86. 7 The women’s movement in the 1970s emerged from all walks of life, from women who were discontented with their roles in the family as housewife and mother, to women in the labour force demanding equal rights and demanding from their trade union brothers that they do the child-care. Social and political concerns blended with definitions of personal freedom and identity and as the movement progressed throughout the seventies it became inspired by art, literature and film. Feminism spread and divided: there were radical feminists who politicized lesbianism, or fought against pornography; there were socialist feminists who joined the trade unions and fought for equal pay and value in the workplace; women’s groups congregated to combat violence against women and
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the nuclear arms race. Sexuality was both affirmed as women’s erotic key to liberation and it was vilified as a male oppression exemplified through rape and pornography. Class and sexuality were issues fought over by white feminists and black women’s organizations also took root, with AfroCaribbean and Asian women campaigning against immigration laws and the virginity tests women were subjugated to on entry to Britain. All of this created tremors in the struggles over the politics of culture within the Centre. 8 Women’s Own 31st October, 1987. 9 Indeed, one of the Thatcher government’s first acts was to cut £100m from the UK budget for universities. The suggestion that cuts in HE budgets were ideologically driven was rejected, but conservative politicians did point to the incipient Marxism of sociology departments around the country as being problematical, and even changed policy to exclude sociology graduates from undertaking secondary school teacher training courses.
References Brunsdon, C. (1996) ‘A thief in the night: stories of feminism in the 1970s at CCCS’ in Morley, D. and Chen, K.-H. (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies London: Routledge. CCCS Education Group (1981) Unpopular Education: Schooling and Social Democracy in England since 1944 London: Hutchinson. CCCS (1982) The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain London: Hutchinson. CCCS (1982) Making Histories: Studies in History – Writing and Politics London: Hutchinson. CCCS Education Group 2 (1991) Education Limited: Schooling, training and the New Right in England since 1979 London: Unwin Hyman. Carby, H. (1982) ‘White woman listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood’ in CCCS The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain London: Hutchinson. Critcher, C. (1979) ‘Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class’ in Clarke, J., Critcher, C. and Johnson, R. (eds.) Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory London: Hutchinson (see pp. 17–18). Gilroy, P. [1987] (1992) There Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack London: Routledge Gray, A. (2007) ‘Introduction’ to Volume 1 in CCCS Selected Working Papers: Volume 1 London: Routledge. Gray, A., Campbell, J., Erickson, M., Hanson, S. and Wood, H. (eds.) (2007) CCCS Selected Working Papers: Volume 1 London: Routledge. Hall, S. (1996) ‘Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies’ reprinted in Morley, D. and Chen, K.-H. (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies London: Routledge. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, Law and Order London: Macmillan. Hoggart, R. (1957) The Uses of Literacy London: Chatto and Windus. Laing, S. (1973) ‘Textual Analysis; A Selective Bibliography’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 4, Spring 1973 Birmingham: University of Birmingham McRobbie, A. (1980) ‘Settling Accounts With Subcultures: A feminist critique’ Screen Education 34 pp. 37–49. Morley, D. and Brunsdon, C. (1999) ‘Introduction’ in Morley, D. and Brunsdon, C. The Nationwide Television Studies London: Routledge. Parmar, P. (1982) ‘Gender, Race and Class: Asian women in resistance’ in CCCS The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain London: Hutchinson. Women’s Studies Group, CCCS (1978) Women Take Issue London: Hutchinson.
Centre Reports Second Centre report 1965–66 Sixth Centre report 1969–77
Section 1
Literature and society
Introduction Stuart Laing
Preface To begin on a (somewhat Hoggartian) personal note, it is now nearly thirty-five years since I first set pen to paper to draft the overview essay and bibliography on literature and society textual analysis which appeared in Working Papers in Cultural Studies 4 in Spring 1973. While this fact may appear to lend some inherent credibility to what follows in this twenty-first century re-sit, it will soon become apparent to the knowledgeable reader that this Introduction has two considerable limitations. Its author is, often, too close to the material – too inclined to explain (or explain away) the characteristics of the articles being introduced in terms of their micro-origins, rather than placing them in a broader subsequent intellectual and political context. Secondly (and unlike the other introductory essays in these two volumes) the credentials of the author, such as they may be, do not include any current standing or authority in the field; my own professional trajectory, especially in the last two decades, has taken me elsewhere than (certainly with any depth) into the issues of literature/society/theory/cultural studies. The value of this introduction (apart from, hopefully, providing a reasonably accurate guide to the general arguments and types of article contained in this section) then lies in the obverse of its first weakness – in the reconstructions and reflective memories of someone closely involved in the work of the CCCS Literature and Society group between 1970–3 and particularly in the genesis and delivery of Working Papers in Cultural Studies 4, where five of these articles first appeared.
The place of literature at CCCS in the early 1970s The study of literature occupied a very curious and ambiguous place in CCCS during the early 1970s, when all the essays in this section were written, or (in the case of that authored by Passeron) first published in English. There was, first, the need to continue to acknowledge and place the double legacy of Richard Hoggart (whose permanent departure from CCCS was confirmed in 1971). The Uses of Literacy remained much referenced as a key foundational text for CCCS, although there was much less clarity about how to evaluate and make use of its detailed arguments and modes of analysis. More immediately Hoggart (through a number of essays on literature and society/contemporary cultural analysis) seemed from 1964 to have clearly located the core project of CCCS in terms of a dialectical engagement between literary criticism and sociology, with the key question as how to read literary texts in relation to their social context(s), particularly in relation to their embodied ‘values’.
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CCCS, also, had been founded as a subset of the University of Birmingham English Department and especially in the early days defined itself very significantly in relation to its degrees of similarity and difference from mainstream ‘EngLit’ – initially mostly in terms of object of study (popular literary texts, such as that long-lost text from 1968, the ‘Cure for Marriage’ study; or one of the first, perhaps the first, Centre doctoral study to be completed, Roger King’s study of the Hank Janson series of crime novels) and later in terms of method and theories. It was also the case that the other founding father of British Cultural Studies (Raymond Williams) and his key text (The Long Revolution) were seen as outgrowths of English literary studies. In this respect it is indicative of the perceived CCCS project of the early 1970s (arguably of the 1970s as a whole), that the origins of both its key foundational texts in adult education teaching of the 1940s and 1950s were rarely acknowledged or discussed at that time (despite the fact that quite a few of the graduate students were engaged in similar, if more enforced by financial circumstance, attempts at popular education through their own ‘liberal studies’ teaching in local technical colleges). Rather, both Hoggart and Williams were seen as scholarship boys breaking back from the academy (and its canonical approach to ‘EngLit’) into broader social concerns. In one sense, then, the study of literature (or perhaps more precisely the critical engagement with English Studies) was central to the CCCS project in its early days. However, from another perspective, it was, by the early 1970s, no longer entirely clear why (or if) literature was really all that important. As new students arrived and the mantle of leadership fell directly on Stuart Hall, the central areas of interest began to form up in other places: media; subcultures; work and leisure; a range of sociological theories and methods concerned with directly accessing ‘lived’ culture (ethnomethodology; symbolic interactionism; forms of participant observation) and from 1971–2 onwards a deliberately explicit (at times almost intellectually masochistic) encounter with Marxist theory (both Marx himself and the European neo-Marxists). The importance of literature and also (not the same thing) literary criticism for cultural studies was now by no means obvious – and while outside the Centre both the expansion, and the expanding ‘crisis’, in English Studies continued, inside there was no particular commitment to the survival or otherwise of the EngLit enterprise. By coming to the Centre the graduate students (and staff ) had already made their personal break from that domain. If the modes of study necessary to position literature within cultural studies required the rejection of Eng Lit as a whole then the reply might well have been – ‘so what?’. The key drivers of the CCCS ‘literature-and-society’ project in the early 1970s were rather (albeit perhaps at an unconscious level) to discover and justify the place and importance of studying literature for cultural studies and, more explicitly, to specify the place and function of literary texts within a whole social formation: ‘the key question is how this privileged activity, and its product, the literary text is related to other activities in the totality’ (‘Mapping the Field’ p. 40). Work on literature at the Centre in the early 1970s was not driven (at least at a collective level) by any pressing contemporary social question (there was no literary equivalent of ‘the meaning of mugging’ or the political effects of television news and current affairs) nor by any compelling individual empirical research questions. The key issue presented itself rather as a straightforward theoretical and conceptual question – and in the domain of the very discipline where (in the UK at least) there had been, as Perry Anderson had so eloquently demonstrated in his majestic essay ‘Components of the National Culture’, the greatest
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resistance (even among those well disposed to linking literature to society) to abstract theorising.
European theory The issue of ‘theory’ at that time translated itself concretely as engaging with European theorists from the period 1919 to the present – predominantly those within the Marxist tradition, but also in the recently emerging area of structuralism and semiotics. The main internal reason (internal, that is, to the literature/society project – there were of course other over-arching political and cultural reasons in a post-1968 Europe) for the centrality of the Marxist work in this enterprise is set out in the ‘Mapping the Field’ essay: the study of the Literature/Society problem in a Marxist framework, is not a marginal enterprise but absolutely central to the development of historical materialism as a science – because, within that problem, a critical absence in the theory can be, progressively, clarified. (p. 42) In fact if the place of literature (and art) within ‘the neglected theory of superstructures’ could not be specified then not only was there a problem for Marxism in general (as a totalising social theory) but, even more pressingly for many of those within CCCS in the early 1970s, the hoped-for alignment between Marxism and cultural studies as a whole could not occur. It was for this reason that the presence (and increasing availability) of a number of European theorists (and key texts) who claimed to have solved the problem of how to respect the particularity of literary texts, while also situating them as historically determined, commanded the attention of CCCS (or at least its more theoretically-inclined members) at that time. The fact of the recent (or imminent) translation of many of these works into English is noted a number of times in the articles in this section. This issue is referenced with regard to (inter alia) Adorno, Gramsci, Goldmann, Benjamin, Brecht and Barthes as well as in relation to such key texts from Marx himself as the Grundrisse. It is worth noting here that the significance of this point lies not so much in the stereotypical linguistic insularity of the English; in fact, texts by Barthes, Kristeva, Goldmann, Althusser and the Frankfurt School were read by many CCCS members in the original French or German. Rather, the issue was that it was not until such texts were rendered into English and their forms of terminology became available in English, that it was possible to mobilise the new concepts they represented so as seriously to contest established Anglophone sociological, philosophical and literary normative assumptions. Of all the European theorists whose work was interrogated (for once the aggressive connotations of this term are appropriate) by the CCCS group it is perhaps now surprising to recall that it was the work of Lucien Goldmann which first opened up new lines of thought. Goldmann’s work has (as far as I can judge) not, since the mid-1970s, been in any way influential in either the development of Critical Theory within English departments nor in the variety of ways which Cultural Studies has approached literature. Around 1970, however, the year of Goldmann’s death, there were a number of reasons (many treated at length in Adrian Mellor’s essay) why the figure of Goldmann and his work seemed particularly important and worthy of attention.
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Goldmann’s emphasis on reflection and homology between social structures and literary structures fitted well with the core CCCS focus on the question of how literary content was both shaped by and offered a distinctive insight into the contemporary social structures from which it had been created. Goldmann’s notions of world-vision and different types of class consciousness seemed also to offer a way round the twin elephant traps of seeing literature as either a-historical creative vision or a form of ideology or false (through its class limitations) consciousness. Additionally both Goldmann and his work had presence within English intellectual life. The influential essay on the sociology of literature had been published in the International Social Science Journal in 1967 and Jonathan Cape had published the more general monograph, The Human Sciences and Philosophy in 1969; the latter text was one of the core texts selected for the CCCS general seminar in Autumn 1970 – a seminar intended to lay the ground for another of those legendary unfinished projects, the publication of a Centre definitive theoretical and exemplificatory Reader on Cultural Studies. And behind these texts lay Goldmann’s monumental analysis of Racine and seventeenth-century France, The Hidden God – a text which through its sketching of social class, class consciousness and its relation to drama, Jansenism and philosophy appeared to show empirically how to solve the key problem of ‘mediations’. For many, including some of those in CCCS, the plausibility of this analysis was probably aided by their own relative lack of detailed knowledge of any alternative accounts of class consciousness and class fractions in the era of Louis XIV. Goldmann had also recently visited England – a version of his paper to the Dialectics of Liberation conference in 1967 had been published in the Penguin Special of that name – and his lectures at Cambridge in the Spring of 1970 were celebrated in Raymond Williams’s ‘Literature and Sociology; in memory of Lucien Goldmann’, published in New Left Review in the May-June 1971 edition. This was one of the first essays in which Williams signalled his re-engagement with forms of Marxist theory. In particular the possibility of the alignment of the notion of social totality (as developed by Goldmann from Lukacs and other neo-Hegelians) with Williams’s own ‘culture as a whole way of life’ formulations suggested a more painless way of linking the CCCS’s early 1960s position with the Marxist tradition than seemed possible elsewhere (such as in encounters with Althusserian Marxism). As the ‘Mapping the Field’ essay suggests, Goldmann’s work was probably the most influential of those at the reflectionist pole – pushing the work of Lukacs (and even of Marx and Engels themselves) to a new level of specificity. Less well developed and more dispersed was a range of work which took (or could be aligned with) the core Marxist notion of production as the primary social process and situated literature as one form of cultural production alongside many others. This range included a wide range of sharply opposed positions – from Sartre’s Problem of Method, centred on ideas of individual creativity, to Althusser’s anti-humanism, to the Brechtian emphasis on the writing and performance of drama as a collective social process, to the structuralist/semiotic view of the primacy of the linguistic and sign systems. The ‘Mapping the Field’ essay itself was the result of a number of individual contributions from different members of the Literature and Society group being put alongside each other and then heroically, and at times ingeniously, stitched together (predominantly by the efforts of Stuart Hall) into what was still essentially a series of related snapshots rather than a fully coherent argument – as the lack of even a pretence at any Conclusion revealed. In retrospect (after three decades of subsequent development in theoretical and empirical work on literature and cultural studies), despite the exceptionally ambitious aim of encapsulating
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such a breadth of theoretical work in such a small space, it is striking how relatively narrow an area of enquiry concerning literature/society relations the essay opens up. At that time, for example, both the study of actual conditions of literary production (the economics of authorship, the nature of publishing, methods of marketing and distribution) and consumption (contemporary patterns of reading) were generally regarded as the province of the wholly untheoretical sociology of literature or the literary historian and hence of limited interest. Also despite the rather heavy-handed shift to using ‘she’ rather than ‘he’ in the latter sections of the ‘Mapping the Field’ essay, the work on literature within CCCS in the very early 1970s remained relatively innocent of gender issues (let alone of those of race, hybridity, nationalisms etc). Further the shift to concern with European theory had largely displaced earlier concerns with the nature of popular fiction, while the crucial turn within English Studies itself to put in question the nature of ‘English’ as a social and cultural institution did not seem relevant until later in the decade, when more focus began to develop on the notion of cultural institutions and, then in the 1980s (with a more benign connotation than Adorno and others could ever have imagined) on the ‘cultural industries’. Nevertheless, despite these limitations ‘Mapping the Field’ remains a major document of its time in signalling a paradigm shift for literary study into a post-theory world. It is hard now to convey the degree of intellectual effort and, even, imagination necessary at that time to make even (what may now appear as) these relatively timid and limited steps away from the safety of the Anglo-American devotion to close reading of the literary canon.
Dynamics of meaning production One way of acknowledging the value of the ‘Mapping the Field’ essay is to recognise how the essays which follow in this section by both Andy Tolson and Alf Louvre took advantage of the kind of ground-clearing work which the ‘Mapping the Field’ essay reflected and recorded in order to go beyond the dominant reflectionist model of the early 1970s. In particular ‘Reading Literature as Culture’ now appears as perhaps the most forwardlooking of all the essays in this section – even if only by virtue of its recognition that without a detailed conceptualisation of how ‘reading’ happens there would remain a major (and, as perceived by the end of the 1970s in the Centre as elsewhere, unbridgeable) gap in the understanding of how literary texts actually become inserted into contemporary social processes. Tolson’s essay played across the notion of reading as, variously: empirical social activity, psychological capability, Leavisite attentiveness and the pre-requisite for cultural study, although without quite settling firmly on any of these. More than any other essay in this section ‘Reading Literature as Culture’ took its target as existing literary criticism (Leavis, Richards, Empson, Frye) and its construction of an ideal reader/reading – whether presented as a fully sensitised humanism or as a matter of objective quasi-science. The essay proposed to replace this with a concept of reading as historically-specific knowledge production, but one rooted also in a detailed knowledge and tracking of psychological and linguistic processes. The latter part of the essay then conflated, in a way which perhaps pre-figured certain later moves in deconstruction, the study/research of reading with the experience of the student/researcher as active reader to release a dynamic notion of meaning production, although one which (as suggested by the crucial role of the Sartrean regressive/progressive mode of analysis in the argument) was centred on the individual experience of reading (albeit one always historically situated and with the encouragement/instruction to read in a way which took account of that historical specificity).
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By contrast Louvre’s essay, through the concept of genre, developed a more explicitly collective and would-be political perspective, taking at least part of its premise from the ‘meaning as production’ half of the ‘Mapping the Field’ argument. Louvre started from the premise that the key area of attention for textual analysis should not be either manifest content or (as with Goldmann) the underlying philosophical ‘world-vision’, but should be literary form – with particular reference to how that form defined the modes of communication with a readership or (in the case of drama) an audience. Genre was specified as the key mediation here, but not genre in its traditional literary critical sense which assumes ‘the fixed nature of the relations posited between imaginative form and social determination’ (p. 71). Rather genre was to be grasped, through the linking of the concept to the ideas of Brecht, Benjamin and Enzensberger, as a (potentially) dynamic force or instrument through which a dialectical relationship could be established between author and audience. Louvre’s essay, in fact, more than any other in this section, developed an argument that became (in its logic) primarily an exhortation to a certain type of artistic production rather than an analytic approach to existing literary texts or processes. He cited favourably David Caute’s proposal that playwrights: ‘make the first target of their commitment, the structure of our consciousness, the way we think, know, feel, listen and respond . . .’ (p. 74). Glossing this Louvre commented that: ‘it is precisely at that point that the artist can make his radical insertion, can reformulate his genre in ways that deny the satisfaction of expectations deriving from any such structure of consciousness (itself substantially conditioned by the dominance of previous genres)’ (p. 74). This emphasis had the undoubted merit of turning the angle of vision firmly on the present and future and opening up some new questions about the new electronic media and the possible convergence of issues of general commodity production and cultural production. The final call to arms – ‘by developing this view of generic change . . . it may be possible to evolve a consistent revolutionary artistic practice’ (p. 77) – offered then the possibility of a quite different task for the cultural studies approach to literature and the arts by replacing an essentially analytical and historical (albeit focused on contemporary history) project with that of being the theoretical underpinning of radical/political cultural and aesthetic practice. At the same time, as both Tolson and Louvre began to carve out new spaces beyond the core reflectionist theoretical paradigms, their essays, however, also confirmed the dominance of a Centre approach to literature and society that both began from and concluded on theoretical, rather than substantive empirical, questions; even Tolson’s commentary on Wuthering Heights was essentially for exemplificatory purposes rather than because Emily Bronte (even a modern reading of Emily Bronte) was of especial significance for CCCS. It remains striking how far actual engagement with genuinely contemporary literature (even popular literature) was virtually absent at this stage of the Centre’s development.
Class, culture and literature While, then, the majority of the essays in this section took their starting point from the theoretical set of problems already cited, there are two which, instead, did begin from specific literary and historical instances – instances which, in different ways, had continuities with what was already by the early 1970s coming to be seen as an earlier and outmoded phase of British cultural studies – specifically the question of the relations between working-class life and its literary expression. Graham Holderness’s essay illustrates precisely the comments of ‘Mapping the Field’ on F.R. Leavis – that:
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those critics within the Anglo-Saxon tradition, who have tried to think the Literature/ Society problem in a rigorous way, have usually taken their point of departure from Leavis, while at the same time breaking from the way he has formulated the problem. (p. 40) For Holderness (the only English author in this section who was not a Centre member) the break was very much a matter of taking seriously the need for an analysis of the actual empirically verifiable relations between the early novels of D.H. Lawrence and the specific and variable cultural contexts which influenced and enabled them. The essay then was a very direct engagement with the 1950s concerns of Leavis, Hoggart and Williams and is also the most immediate empirical illustration in this section of how the relations between the two meanings of ‘culture’ (as the selective tradition of great literature, and as a whole way of life) can be articulated. The essay turns on the relations between an instance of cultural/artistic production (the novels of Lawrence) and three competing cultural milieux: the working-class home, the aspirational culture of Eastwood, and the artistic world beyond (as crucially mediated through Lawrence’s relationship with Jessie Chambers). The choice of Lawrence here (while, in one sense, occurring quite naturally as typical literary critical homage to an already canonical figure) was also of particular resonance for British cultural studies. After all it had been the appearance of Richard Hoggart at the ‘Trial of Lady Chatterley’ in 1960 (a trial which was actually the trial of Penguin Books and its head Allen Lane) which had helped to create the support of Penguin Books for the foundation of CCCS itself. And Lawrence himself had been an earlier exemplar of that ‘scholarship boy’ social type who, in the figures and writings of Hoggart and Williams (as in many of those of CCCS members), embodied so many of the aspirations and dilemmas of the cultural studies project itself. In accepting this article for the Centre Journal a strong link was re-established with some of the main energies behind the original CCCS project. While my own essay on Walter Greenwood touched on some of the same ground as that of Graham Holderness it also had a rather different orientation and different origins – origins that may explain some of its distinctive emphases as well as indicating another area of potential influence on literary study at CCCS at that time. In the summer of 1971 Dorothy Thompson, then a lecturer in the University of Birmingham History department, needed to organise a short three week post-end of year examination course for the first year History undergraduates. She chose the topic of History and Literature in the 1930s, recruiting first as a tutor her husband E.P. Thompson (who had only recently departed from Warwick University following the ‘Warwick University Ltd’. conflicts over business influence and the keeping of files). Edward Thompson gave sessions (as I recall) on Auden and Spain. To make up the tutorial team Dorothy Thompson asked CCCS/Stuart Hall if any of the graduate students could assist and I was drafted in to give two sessions – one on Walter Greenwood’s novel, Love on the Dole. This may explain the slightly unusual starting point of the subsequent essay, which was essentially to pose some questions of historical method (‘how can literary texts serve as historical evidence?’) rather than of literary criticism – and to make a connection through to some general cultural studies issues by the citing of the issue of ‘subjective meaning’ (a significant concern in those innocent pre-Lacanian days of unproblematically unified subjects). This turn to history as a way of speaking about the ‘relevance’ of literary study both supported the interest in Goldmann (Love on the Dole as a particular instance of class consciousness as world vision) and also could be seen as pre-figuring Colin Sparks’s sharp demand (in ‘The Abuses of Literacy’) for a location of cultural studies as itself only a branch
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of history, although perhaps not quite in the way he had in mind. The essay also took the term ‘experience’ and its mediation through a variety of different forms of writing as a way of establishing a direct connection with the interests of the founding fathers of cultural studies and of the old (post-1956) New Left. For despite the homage to Goldmann the essay in reality drew more on the approaches of The Making of the English Working Class, the second chapter of The Long Revolution and The Uses of Literacy than of the European theorists of ‘Mapping the Field’.
Re-visiting Richard Hoggart While the essays by Graham Holderness and myself did pay some indirect homage to the concerns of the Centre’s founder, more thorough, if diametrically opposed, evaluations of The Uses of Literacy were to be found in the essays of Colin Sparks and Jean-Claude Passeron. Sparks, in a piece originally published in 1974, summarised a significant view within the Centre that both Hoggart’s book and many of the cultural studies perspectives which it had inaugurated now (by the mid-1970s) needed to be superseded by more serious and weighty matters. The sub-text here was that the focus on the traditional subject matter of Cultural Studies (leisure, the entertainment media, the ‘popular arts’ – in the title of the Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel book of 1964) had de-politicised its potential; now an emphasis on the spheres of production, the Trades Unions and political organisation, within the perspective of Marxist theory, should take precedence. In part this argument was a (significantly harsher in tone) re-run of a debate from more than a decade earlier when E.P. Thompson had criticised Raymond Williams’s theory of culture, as set out in The Long Revolution, for a lack of political and historical perspective and, in particular, for underestimating the role and extent of conflict within social and cultural processes. However there were also some major differences, not least in Sparks’s view that cultural studies should not be concerned with the celebration of the culture of a subordinate class. The critical language used by Sparks was also very much that of the post-Thompson new New Left – a rejection of ‘nostalgia’ (p. 112), the ‘sentimental myth of past ages’ (p. 113) and (in the case of Raymond Williams) ‘linguistic evasiveness’ (p. 116), with the use of such adjectives as ‘shabby and contemptuous’ (p. 112) and ‘cancerous’, ‘blind’ and ‘myopic’. The distance from the Hoggartian (and to some degree Thompsonian also – as in the Making of the English Working Class) bottom-up and empathetic approach to describing and judging working-class culture can be especially recognised in the view that: ‘Our starting point for the critical evaluation of working-class culture is not the empirical reality of that culture but the historical role of the class’ (p. 119). The implication that the starting point for cultural studies should be conceptual and theoretical rather than empirical was clear. By contrast the choice made to present a translation (excellently effected by Richard Dyer) of Passeron’s Introduction to the French edition of The Uses of Literacy in the first edition of the Centre Journal signalled an opposing (self-consciously humanist) tendency, wishing to celebrate and preserve Hoggart’s approach not only for sentimental reasons, but as a statement of where the central object of study for cultural studies should lie. Passeron’s essay offered also a surprising, and perhaps over-generous, interpretation of Hoggart’s book as an exemplar of anthropological/sociological method. Citing one of its major achievements as a critique and correction of ‘the image that other classes have of the working-class and their values’, Passeron provided a typology of the book’s combination of a number of genres and styles of writing – autobiography, novel, moral and aesthetic criticism, ethnography. Further he argued that there were systematic methods in Hoggart’s use of
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evidence – from linguistic analysis to hermeneutic readings of everyday life to types of participant observation – which could and should provide a guide to further more extensive sociological research. Both in the 1970s, and even more with hindsight, the links with the works of such key figures in the sociology of culture as Bourdieu were evident. Through (Passeron argued) typologies of social spaces, routines, schemes of popular thought and social character types Hoggart was able to ‘hold together systematically a whole play of determinations and a whole constellation of attitudes . . . that are truly significant in the social life of the group’ (p. 28). Within this perspective – which seemed to offer to many CCCS members an unexpected external and wholly welcome validation of the claim that there was a defensible social scientific basis to the Centre’s approach to the study of culture as ‘a whole way of life’ – there was, however, little obvious connection with the directions which literary study at the Centre was then beginning to take. Passeron, for example, identified a major achievement of Hoggart as: ‘drawing attention to the fact that the reception of a cultural message should not be disassociated from the social conditions in which it occurs . . .’ (p. 32). The legacies of Hoggart’s work for CCCS in the early 1970s were, and were perceived as, much more present in the areas of media studies and the approach to sub-cultures than in the study of literature itself. It was rather in the figure and work of Raymond Williams (as the still critical, but much more respectful, tone of the commentary on Williams by Colin Sparks suggests) that the connections between the general field of cultural studies, the detailed study of literary texts and the engagement with European (especially Marxist) theory were seen to be developing.
Conclusion It may be that many of the essays in this section now bear interest only for essentially archival reasons, or at best for active historical reasons (in the sense of assisting ways of understanding how we got to be where we are today). Certainly most of these authors would see their later work as having superseded (or in some cases sensibly retreated from) positions of too great a simplicity or stridency. However the core of these essays, especially when taken as a group, was and is a nagging away at what, perhaps inevitably, still remains the central dilemma of those concerned with the ‘literature-and-society’ duality or with any kind of text-based cultural studies. Whatever the necessary emphasis on whole social process which a cultural materialist approach has since (quite rightly) commanded, the indispensable element at the centre of studying literature remains textual interpretation, or rather textual interpretations. And the central dialectic here is that between experience and theory. Experience in a double sense – as the experience of reading (actual or implied) and as the ‘lived’ experience to which the text (however extended the degrees of linguistic or formal mediation) alludes: Theory as the wholly unavoidable concepts or frames of reference that any student of literature (or of any other piece of cultural textuality) must possess. For members of the literature and society group at CCCS in the early 1970s the strains of seeking resolutions to what seemed then a quite severe set of oppositions are manifest in these essays. Re-reading them after three decades is a reminder of the very considerable personal and collective effort lying behind their production – and of the many blind alleys and misdirections which we took (some still reflected in these finished articles). It may indeed be that their value now lies more in the work of the following decades (for which they helped to clear the ground and lay some of the foundations) rather than in their own twenty-first
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century currency; but that, dear reader, is now a matter (in an appropriately Tolsonian spirit of regressive/progressive analysis) for you to determine for yourself. Stuart Laing was a postgraduate student at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies between 1970 and 1973. He is currently Pro-Vice Chancellor and Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Brighton. He has published widely on literature, media and cultural change in the post-1945 period, including the book Representations of Working-Class Life 1957–64 (Macmillan 1986).
Bibliography Anderson, P. ‘Components of the National Culture’ in Cockburn, A. and Blackburn, R. (ed.) Student Power, London, Penguin, 1969. Goldmann, L. The Hidden God, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. Goldmann, L. ‘The Sociology of Literature: status and problems of method’ in International Social Science Journal, Vol.XIX, No.4, UNESCO,1967. Goldmann, L. ‘Dogmatism and Criticism in Literature’ in Cooper D. (ed.) The Dialectics of Liberation, London, Penguin, 1968. Goldmann, L. The Human Sciences and Philosophy, London, Cape, 1969. Hall, S. and Whannel, P. The Popular Arts, London, Hutchinson, 1964. Hoggart, R. The Uses of Literacy, London, Chatto and Windus, 1957. Laing, S. ‘Textual Analysis; A Selective Bibliography’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 4, Spring 1973. Thompson, E.P. ‘On The Long Revolution’, New Left Review, May/June and July/August 1961. Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class, London, Gollancz, 1963. Williams, R. The Long Revolution, London, Chatto and Windus, 1961. Williams, R. ‘Literature and Sociology: in Memory of Lucien Goldmann’, New Left Review No. 67, May/June 1971.
1
Introduction to the French edition of Uses of Literacy Jean-Claude Passeron
J.P. is a member of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne in Paris and is co-author of Le Metier de Sociologie. The essay here translated by Richard Dyer appears as the introduction to the French edition of The Users of Literacy. M. Passeron examines Richard Hoggart’s work as contribution to anthropology as well as to the debate about mass culture. He suggests the theoretical foundations and hypotheses in this apparently untheoretical book and goes on to indicate the ways in which it seems to have been misunderstood by bourgeois intellectuals.
Despite its subtitle, ‘Aspects of working-class life’ it would not be paradoxical to treat The Uses of Literacy as a thoughtful contribution to the sociology of intellectuals and more especially of those who are professional sociologists. He analyses the imagery of ‘the man in the street’, so dear to journalists, or the contradictory and complimentary myths of the ‘rustic vigour’ and ‘feminine gentleness’ of working class, which are the delight of novelists, moralists, and artists alike; and all the dreadful contributions imbued with the viciousness or else with lyricism which have been made to the mass culture debate (a counterpoint to the pastoral nostalgia from which few sociologists are exempt) and in each case, Richard Hoggart hints at the extent to which sociologists merely play among themselves when they play with an image of the working-class. He suggests why the situation of this class, characterised negatively as cultural deprivation, constitutes a privileged symbolic object for groups of intellectuals, themselves defined in various ways by a privileged role in the production and popularisation of culture. If it is true that intellectuals never reveal better their propensity to monopolise the social definition of culture than in their incapacity for seeing in other social groups anything other than an excuse to examine their own cultural contradictions (by an ethnocentrism which, even though in apparently proposed forms, bears witness to both aristocratic and populist attitudes), then Richard Hoggart’s strategy of outlining, in order to go beyond them more easily, some of the intellectual illusions inherent in the sociology of the working classes, involves at the very least markings of sociological interpretation which would connect the ideological values of attitudes towards popular culture with the social position of various sorts of intellectual. One might as well point out straight away that the extreme originality of the work is liable to disconcert many of its readers. Richard Hoggart calls into question the artful naivety, the class ethnocentrism or the hidden anachronisms of numerous analyses largely accepted to-day of ‘the cultural homogenisation of consumer societies’, the evil or beneficial power of the mass press, radio and television, on the ‘atomisation’ and ‘massification’ of the urban proletariat or of the destruction of the traditional way of life of the working class. Not
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without vehemence when taking fashionable ideas to pieces, he has put himself in the position of being labelled a vitriolic writer by all those who would find that a convenient way of dismissing tiresome analyses. Moreover the work, which doubtless owes much of its success to the fluidity of its style and descriptions, cannot be fitted into a neatly delineated tradition of anthropological literature. Although the author is aiming at a synthesis of the specialised studies on the life style of the working class1 in urban and industrial England and on the characteristics of the production and diffusion of new cultural messages, The Uses of Literacy, deliberately stripped of the more obvious signs of sociological debate – jargon or statistics, crushing documentation or methodological emphasis – could be taken, in part one, as a study of manners, in which the treatment of the setting, the stories and the characters is sometimes not unlike the novelistic tradition of the depiction of milieu; whilst in its second part it could pass for an exercise in method: transposing the classic technique of literary analysis to the context and audience of the mass press. In addition there is a variety of other concerns which might dismay a reader too exclusively faithful to the religion of clear distinctions between disciplines. At one level a protest in the name of scientific objectivity against aristocratic, populist, apocalyptic or foolishly optimistic pronouncements which come between the life of the working class and its necessarily intellectual or bourgeois observers, The Uses of Literacy also derives in large part – as the author admits several times – from autobiography, if not self-analysis. Moreover, while he methodically sets about grasping the mechanics behind the failures of proportion or the optical illusion to which the majority of moral judgements commonly applied to popular culture may be reduced, Richard Hoggart has no intention of refraining from sticking his neck out and assessing the value of cultural changes associated with the transformation of working class life. Whilst offering elements of autobiography which allow him to situate himself in relation to the working class and thereby, as he suggests to his readers, to relativise his own judgements, the author never hesitates to formulate his likes and dislikes, his hopes and regrets concerning, say, the developments in popular song or furniture, changes of style in women’s magazines or pornographic literature, or other transformations in popular resourcefulness and cynicism; and it is in this way that the work clearly touches on moral and aesthetic criticism. One has to forget for a moment the rather overwhelming richness of the book in order to discern Richard Hoggart’s more scientific contribution to our understanding of the situation and culture of the working class. Richard Hoggart certainly can’t be numbered among those sociologists whom Wright Mills has attacked as ‘bureaucratic empiricists’: statistical information, relegated to the notes, is there only to indicate questions of scale; the author uses only the conclusions of surveys and, doubtless caring little for the artificial delights of attitude ratings, did not consider it worthwhile to undertake a questionnaire survey in order to give his analysis numerical proof. This is a pity to the extent that the majority of his hypotheses concerning the changes in attitudes over a period or from one category to another are formulated in a way which could easily have been substantiated by statistical tests. But social science should not be defined, as a certain methodological imperialism would have it, by the exclusive use of a rigid method for the construction and assessment of facts. The Uses of Literacy can legitimately quote another tradition of research as authority, namely ethnography, whose heuristic fecundity and power of objectification are no less than those of statistical analysis when, employing the direct and continuous observation of conduct in a real situation, it operates according to methodically constructed categories and submits its instruments of investigation to a systematic control. If the description that Richard Hoggart offers of the development of daily life and leisure among the urban working-class in the industrial north-east of England cannot be immediately identified for what it is, this is surely
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only because the author refrains from relying on the terminological apparatus with which the professionals usually surround themselves in carrying out fieldwork; perhaps too because a whole tradition accustoms us to associating the principles of ethnography with a particular type of society – that very type which some call with an expert’s naivete ‘ethnographic’ – making us hesitate when we see them applied to the study of groups or socio-cultural milieux observable in our own society. If, instead of English workers, he had given us Trobri and islanders or the Kwakiutl, would we have had any difficulty in recognising this systematic picture of daily life as an example of an ethnographic report? Is it true that a personal experience does not in itself constitute a correct procedure for methodical observation, and that a body of documentary material – no matter how suggestive it may be – should not be confused with a correlated collection of ethnographic facts. But it is precisely characteristic of Richard Hoggart’s work that, even if the liveliness of the description sometimes hides its underlying organisation, it is ordered according to a plan of observation in which one is bound to recognise the headings and operational concepts of ethnographic inventory in its most classic form: • • • • • • •
Organisation of space and habitation Seasonal and weekly itinerary and movements Rhythms and places of work and leisure Ages of life and relations between the sexes Structure of the family group and the education of children The articulation of economic, cultural and religious practices A repertoire simultaneously of material objects and goods and of models which govern their use.
Meticulously reviewing the various areas of activity in daily life, Richard Hoggart does not give in to the cultural critic’s temptation of going directly to the ‘values behind’ a human group by a sort of divine intuition, probably because he is concerned to relate systematically the objective situation of the group to its habits and routines, these being as objectivations of some fundamental principles which govern the response to these conditions of existence: thus the analysis of values is clearly grounded in a concrete and methodical description of habits and norms as different at first sight as those which underlie food, funerals, clothing, furniture, decoration, contraception, superstition, humour and health, or which by a similar logic order the relations of members of the working class to work, work prospects, wages, handling the budget, expenditure, credit and saving, as well as their contact with bureaucracy the institution of the monarchy, sport, adultery, suicide, bachelorhood, drink, sex, games and morality. In short, by a meticulous attention to the nuances of everyday life, to the details of décor (even the smells are not forgotten) and to the social physiognomy of people – right down to its effects on the silhouette – as well as by its hermeneutic orientation towards revealing the latent meanings of publicity and leisure or the most subtle connotations of key words and turns of speech, Richard Hoggart manages to draw from his autobiographical experience as an intellectual coming from a working class background all that a careful ethnographer can draw from a good ‘informant’. Better still, the liberties in composition and the narration that the author readily takes with the codified rules normal in the presentation of an enquiry’s findings definitely have the effect of correcting any methodological weakness of the genre. One knows how difficult it is to work out the logic of action in a life style, an ideology or a culture from a dry ethnographic study, when it is reduced to a lexicon of models behaviour. These models are cut off
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from the whole set of concrete conditions which occasion them and are abstracted from the series of actions which alone can explain their function. If he must be permanently on guard against the deceptiveness of his material, the misleading evidence of anecdotes or the dubious insights of participation in ceremonies, the ethnologist knows that the observation of real scenes and situations can at least suggest the hypotheses for correspondences, homologies or continuities which can only be made out in vast configurations of attitudes or events, such as biographies or genealogies, time tables or allocations of space learnt over a prolonged period of time, and institutionalised or recurrent scenes. When Richard Hoggart puts together certain social totalities which the inventory of features only gives in a dispersed order, he thus reconstitutes significant wholes – they may be: • • • •
Lives like those of the housewife, the scholarship boy or the self-taught man Family trees like his own family’s Occasions such as the ‘chara trip’ to the seaside, the way an evening or a Sunday is spent at home or in the working men’s club, the audience at a court case or a family scene Places where the regulars establish a rhythm of coming and going, such as the road, the pub, the local library or waste ground the system of social relations embodied for instance in the relationship between a working class couple and salesman at a big furniture store, or between the scholarship boy and his working class family, the woman of the house, the father, and his teachers, his books, exams and social success.
These minutely constructed reconstitutions do not show a literary penchant for the vignette or realistic decoration, but a properly sociological effort on the part of the author to hold together systematically a whole play of determinations and a whole constellation of attitudes which only completely reveal all their relations – be they interdependencies or contradictions – in sufficiently complex configurations of actions and reactions, observed in situations that are truly significant in the social life of the group. This is after all only a practical example of what Bronislaw Malinowski held to be the most irreplaceable contribution of ethnographic method: . . . there is a series of phenomena of great importance which cannot possibly be recorded by questioning or computing documents, but have to be observed in there full actuality. Let us call them the imponderabilia of actual life. Here belongs such things as the routine of a man’s working day, the details of his care of the body, of the manner of taking food and preparing for it; the tone of conversational and social life around the village fires. . . . All the facts can and ought to be scientifically formulated and recovered, but it is necessary that this be done, not by superficial registration of details as is usually done by untrained observers, but with an effort at penetrating the mental attitude expressed in them.2 Equally the use of a semi-indirect style3 through which the sociologist can with complete ease let the object of study speak for itself, is not a whim of the author. Hoggart’s phraseology is designed to treat with complete objectivity the perspective that the working class has determined to adopt on the world, and is constructed according to a grammatical scheme which implies in principle the sociologist’s exteriority to this perspective which are analysed by the imperceptible integration of phrases and semantic categories, themselves equally manifestations and indices of the working class world view. In other words, Richard Hoggart
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gives himself, by this implicit syntax, a means of introducing systematically characteristic schemes of popular thought in a descriptive discourse which can thus be organised continually according to the proper logic of the object described, even if it remains distinctly at the level of interpretation and exposition. Clearly the use of this method expresses in the style of the writing the theoretical project of an author committed to uprooting and exposing intellectual ethnocentrism in all its forms; for in forcing his description to run, according to the structures, if not always in words, or working-class consciousness and speech, Richard Hoggart arms himself against the temptation of eliciting from the working-class answers to questions they do not ask themselves or not at any rate in the terms in which intellectuals for their own purposes like to put them. But in the last analysis it is in its results that the richness of a method can be measured. Without wishing to treat here in detail the influence that The Uses of Literacy may have had on sociological research, one should note that the descriptive tenor of this work, which proposes for future research a whole body of systematically interconnected hypotheses, relates directly to the multiplicity and above all the style of works in the sixties devoted to the situation of the working-class, their values and the concrete organisation of their daily life. The alerted reader of empirical research completed in this area must feel that numerous analyses which seem ‘obvious’ to him – and which in the end may find more ‘literary’ than those he may have read in specialised monographs – have generally become classics only after the appearance of Richard Hoggart’s work (1957). The Uses of Literacy attracts attention to a complex of attitudes and behaviour governed by the confused consciousness of the objective and collective destiny of the group; this complex expresses itself in the strongly felt sense of belonging, for better or worse, and irreversibly, to a community subject to the same limitations and the same constraints, and manifests itself concretely in for instance the sentimental value attached to the family circle and relations proper to the nuclear group, in the changeability of family relations with the neighbourhood, in the use of personal chains of solidarity and self-help, in the local and communal character of entertainments and of daily life, and, above all, in the fundamental separation of the world into ‘them’ and ‘us’. This latter means a double standard in judgements and actions, moral inclinations and handling relationships with others, which is in inverse proportion according to whether one is ‘one one’s own ground’ or must come into contact with the world ‘them’. All these aspects have subsequently been studied or even experimented upon in the work of H.J. Gans, M. Kerr, J.M. Mogey, M. Young and P. Willmott, D.E. Muir and E.A. Weinstein, E. Litwak or A.K. Cohen and H.M. Hodges. Another set of themes describe a popular morality, a mixture of puritanism, ostentatious cynicism and sarcastic refusal of all idealism or the attitude towards ‘them’, a subtle blend of suspicion, retraction, pride, false deference, provocation, resignation and disparagement, or class conformity, which often also involves tolerance towards other member of the group and rest on a whole tradition of disaffection from the authorities and official society, or again the fatalism and resignation of the worst-off sections who entrench themselves in a consciousness deaf to their socio-economic destiny. All these themes underlying Richard Hoggart’s analysis can be found again in the studies of F.L. Strodtbeck, L. Rainwater, R.P. Coleman and G. Handel and R. Endleman. Or look again at the personality of the mother in the working-class family, her relationship with the father and her role in the management and economy of domestic life, or the relations of parents and children at various points in their education, – in addition to the authors already cited, M.L. Kohn, E.E. Carrol and W.B. Miller4 have substantially taken over, not always without some watering down, these features which The Uses of Literacy brought to light with such vigour.
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Richard Hoggart’s analyses are at their most original when he is calling into question the image that other classes have of the working-class and their values. The author’s past, born and brought up in a working-class family, becoming a scholarship boy and then a university teacher and researcher, undoubtedly puts him in a particular advantageous position for grasping the class significance of judgments on the working class which often to the educated classes seem of the order of ‘natural truths’. It may well be true that all intellectual personality is socially conditioned and that no class experience is capable of engendering by itself a properly scientific attitude (no gift of birth in any class, whether privileged, or even [Mannheim notwithstanding] intellectual, ever predestined someone to the attainment of the objectivity of sociological percipience). Even so it is clear that it is only after a period of work by himself, the social situation of which is precisely that of scientific study, that Richard Hoggart has been able to make use of that approach consisting of both distancing and participation, which makes him able to perceive and explain by example even the very nuances of the behaviour of intellectuals with working-class backgrounds, technocrats with too much assurance, university teachers who ‘sell out’, or at any rate look down from their newly acquired class position – ready to draw on their own library, as he himself ironically remarks, to illustrate the incoherence of the self-taught man thirsty for cultural salvation. In every case, and although it is so intimately associated with the social situation of his early years, there can be no doubt that Richard Hoggart’s particular habit of mind is peculiarly effective when bourgeois or petit bourgeois ethnocentrism needs ousting. There is no need to recall the ideological fruits born among the middle class by those sententious speeches emphatically deploring the thoughtlessness and improvidence of the lower classes, their prodigal expenditure and their inability to think for the morrow or to manage their budget sensibly; pity is taken on ‘these people’ who buy – on the instalment plan – a television and not a sewing machine, which would be so much more useful for them ‘with their hundreds of children’, who ‘throw away’ their money playing bingo or betting, and who spoil their children against all the canons of child care, even encouraging the vices of vanity, prodigality, and indifference – not forgetting the supreme failing of not knowing their place – by buying them at Christmas the loveliest toys when they can’t even afford to dress or educate them properly. It is by relating this behaviour to the most restricting aspects of working-class life that Richard Hoggart reconstitutes the logic of attitudes which seem illogical only when one is illogical enough to judge them according to values which are the products of other conditions of existence. If the purchase of a television set is more logical than that of a sewing machine and if the coal is necessary for ‘a good fire’ from which all may benefit takes precedence over worrying about underclothes, this is because for the working-class, preference is always, however slender the budget, for goods whose collective use can serve as a support to the gathering and hedonistic communion of the family community. Since leaning back on the privacy and even the promiscuity of the home is the only resort in a situation which would otherwise be intolerable. The ‘weakness’ of parents who let children ‘have a good time’, especially in adolescence, that the last period of licensed frivolity before the burdens and worries which will come ‘soon enough’ is understandable enough when one sees that it expresses the need to ‘take advantage of it when you can and while you can’, a need which is peculiar to the underprivileged classes, deprived of any objective chance to better their lot. This need provides a key to the understanding of popular entertainments, ‘all pals together’, excursions where no expense is spared, the fantastic roundabouts of the fairground. Similarly one can grasp the transformation in meaning and value that what one might call the paradigm of the bad worker undergoes. In itself, this is the last and basic resort of petit-bourgeois moaning and the legitimation for the housewife’s daily indignation at the
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plumber come to repair the bath (‘One can’t get the service these days’), but the alternative meaning is apparent when the plumber’s attitude towards repairing the tap is seen from the point of the wage earner, and his relation to wages, to the boss, to the work and to the class he serves. In a more general way, by this style of analysis which deliberately breaks with principles in their own way as racist as those of pre-scientific ethnographers limited to detailing the barbarism of the ‘primitives’, Richard Hoggart gives himself the means of escaping from interpretations which are too ‘obvious’ and which are often only the promotion to the level of intellectual investigation of class biases all the better protected for being less explicit. The analysis of the functions of defence and re-assurance served by the spontaneous suspicion the working-class adopt towards grand words or morality or politics (‘you can’t kid me’), of civic pride, patriotism, the ‘imperatives of growth’, and the value of public administration gives one an insight into the apparently neutral language of economists and planners. For when these speak of ‘putting things right in the absence of information about the economic agents’ or throw into the anonymity of ‘irrationality’ and ‘traditional resistances’ anything which departs from a type of behaviour considered sovereign, they are hiding behind the screen of an ideology of experts, the assurance proper to members of the ruling class, certain from birth of the rightness and the universal value of their attitude to culture and of their modes of conduct. Nor is it a coincidence that so many sociological enquiries can be condemned precisely because they do not get at the specificity of popular attitudes except in terms of lack or lacking ‘failures of motivation’, lack of interest or absence of inspiration. More subtle still is the attempt to establish the ‘baroque’ norms of popular art in narrative structure of conversations, in the over-elaborate style of the furnishing and objets trouvés, in the cloying form of sentimental song, in the highly coloured composition of a marriage feast or in the fairground atmosphere and truculent appeal of entertainments. Here, The Uses of Literacy hints at the inadequacy the vocabulary of ‘art’ when applied to a ‘taste’ which, like popular taste, refers to principles indistinguishable from ethical norms, be it in the worth attached to the serious and to the minutiae of a work, or in the value given to sentiments and sentimentality, or else in the primacy given to moral edification and to the sensuous enjoyment of the struggle over form. Here as elsewhere, Richard Hoggart avoids the populist trap, which I find particularly tempting for an intellectual who, even if of working-class background, is always given to endowing popular culture with a delegated or transferred existence, defined by implicit reference to the literary culture. For it is from this last, that (despite all his good intentions) the intellectual draws his definition of aims, when he attempts to rehabilitate certain ‘authentically aesthetic’ productions by reproducing, at the very heart of popular culture, the cleavage whereby literary culture by definition excludes ‘popular taste’. Most valuable of all from the point of view of social science, Richard Hoggart breaks with those images of popular behaviour determined by the observer’s membership of the intelligentsia. Too numerous to mention are the themes of sociology-fiction which have piled up until today; they constitute a vulgate of the ills and dramas of ‘mass civilisation’. These owe what credibility they possess to the social and psychological functions which they perform for intellectuals, themselves, the producers and principle consumers of this literature. The analysis, alternatively or simultaneously pejorative or fascinated, of the ‘conditioning’, ‘brutalisation’ and ‘penetration’ of the masses by the mass media is a well enough known orthodoxy with its sects, schisms, and theological debates. The Uses of Literacy is among those rare works which, whilst not denying the magnitude of the transformations that the new type of leisure and the new means of communication have effected amongst the general public,
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does attempt a balanced assessment. This leads the author without any great theoretical fanfares, to pose some questions as pertinent for theory as for the empirical analysis of the transformations in popular culture and the receptivity of the different class levels to the ideological solicitations contained in the messages of the cultural industry and directed at them. In this way Richard Hoggart can demonstrate the illusoriness of a concept the origins of which lie in the failure to understand the working-class capacity to maintain a separation between the ‘real and serious life’ and the world of entertainment; he can show that numerous areas of ideology and practice, such as the relationships at the heart of the family group or the attitudes to illness, death, to the home and more generally to the emotions, are hardly affected at all by the influence of the national press, radio and publicity. The majority of analyses which have, like those of Denis de Rougemenot, popularised among the intelligentsia the notion of ‘escape literature’ are founded upon the semantic ambiguity of the term ‘mass’, which leads to blaming on popular attitudes the thematics of a literature whose principle consumers are still the petit-bourgeoisie. It is far more in the situation of the middle class than in that of the working class that ‘bovarysme’5 finds its pride of place, and the image of the scullery maid so engrossed in reading the threepenny novel that she loses her sense of reality and lives out imaginary adventures with cardboard heroes is based not so much on observation as on the mental projections of certain sorts of intellectuals fascinated by the fantasm of absolute fascination, the ultimate form – and one in which they have a vested interest – of a belief in the absolute power of literature. Richard Hoggart takes the schema in which so many specialists, by simplistic analysis of press messages, persuade themselves that such a voluminous mass of publications can only have a ‘massive’ effect upon its recipients, and turns it on its head, suggesting that the modern means of communication could well in the end have the effect of neutralising the effects the specialists are looking for by the very way in which they are diffused. The analysis of the ‘pasteurization’ of pin-up pictures which derives from a concentration on technical improvements in photography, shows how the repetition and intellectualisation of press messages tends to prevent them from using the direct or frankly emotive effects which the popular literature and imagery of the last century almost certainly achieved more easily by its melodramatic and brutal style. By drawing attention to the fact that the reception of a cultural message should not be disassociated from the social conditions in which it occurs and thus from the ethos which essentially characterises a social group, The Uses of Literacy proposes for further research a theoretical hypothesis far more to the point than the assumption which leads numerous psycho-sociologists to think they can get at the true relationship between members of the working-class and their reading and entertainments by ‘audience analysis’, in which as a general rule they only succeed in getting their subjects to confess their own ideology of escapism or ‘alienation’. By the direct observation of the real situations and spontaneous behaviour in which the dimensions of popular consumption are indicated, Richard Hoggart is led to a theory of casual consumption or, as he says ‘oblique attention’. This takes on its full meaning when one connects these listening habits to the value system of the working-class, traditionally inclined by the logic of their situation and by the ethos which is its product, to find their best protection against the world of ‘them’ with its authority and seductions, in scepticism, sarcastic cynicism and above all in the capacity for indifference, all the more effective for being hidden beneath an apparent availability. The truth of their profound attitude, made up of an acquiescence without consequence and of disabused tolerance, is expressed by the members of the working-class when, speaking of the din of publicity surrounding the heroic
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captain of the ‘Flying Enterprise’ or of the political propaganda or of the emotions that the popular song and magazine exalt, they reply that one must learn how to ‘take it or leave it’. The logic of the working-class, more especially when they must come into contact with realities which do not belong to their daily environment, is a logic which makes them able to use alternatively and according to the needs of the moment, formally incompatible schemas, and this structure allows them to adopt towards the affirmations of the national press an attitude of elliptical adherence, very similar to that which makes them adhere, without ever being fooled completely, to superstitious beliefs of the traditional type. Here we recognise the techniques of institutionalised reticence, by means of which groups deprived of the cultural instruments of certainty and self-assurance arm themselves against the risk, experienced as omnipresent, of being ‘taken for a ride’: ‘you’ll not put one over on them’. The supreme folly among the working class would be apparently to believe these ‘stories’ other than as ‘stories’, – witness the amused condescension working-class women show towards young mothers naive enough to give their daughters Christian names taken from the heroines of magazine stories. At an even deeper lever, The Uses of Literacy is distinguishable from the semi-intellectual discussion of ‘incredible transformations’ in the life of ‘the masses’ by a theoretical principle which underlies from one end to the other the analysis of cultural change. In effect Richard Hoggart is trying to find in the structure of a set of attitudes the principles which govern the transformation of this structure. He shows for instance how popular taste is capable of reinterpreting the fashion in household furniture or the vogue in imitation fabrics for its own purposes of recreating the traditional atmosphere of home, congested and gaudy. He observes how the performance of pop songs in a Yorkshire melodic idiom ends up making them resemble the ancient local songs, or, the other way about, he demonstrates how traditional tolerance can only have become moral indifference because it was so inclined anyway. In these demonstrations Richard Hoggart seeks to tease out the law which subordinates the efficacy of the factors of change to their relevance to the pre-existing structures. The originality of this theoretical approach allows him to exercise all the retrospective myths which are the illusory principle behind a golden age view of working-class culture and life. To the extent to which the analysis of cultural change is subordinated to the analysis of popular ethos (conceived as a sort of general grammar of attitudes, or, as it is put by Richard Hoggart, as an ‘attitude towards attitudes’), the interplay of reciprocal reinterpretations between a structure of reception and a structure of transmission (which is how ethnologists come to understand the logic of cultural growth) is transposed from the analysis of cultural diffusion in space to the analysis of cultural transformation over time. Finally, all the qualities of this book derive perhaps from an initial daring, doubtless more probable, sociologically speaking, in Britain than in France, where the relationship of intellectuals to the working class, including those of them who come from this class or the lower echelons of the petit-bourgeoisie, is more controlled by the rules of good taste and good tone and thereby more ‘intellectualised’ and it needs to be said, all the more shameful for it. The discussion on the realities of class is certainly to the credit of numerous fractions of the French intellectual milieu, but it is not altogether wrong to suppose that its theoretical and abstract tone serves also to keep at bay a whole set of realities at once simple and scandalous – or worse than scandalous, vulgar. The whole empirical force of these realities is evident when a description at once ethnographic and autobiographical such as Richard Hoggart’s brings them into focus directly, above literary artifice and scholarly exercises. If The Uses of Literacy impresses the reader at once as one of those books in which in all its simplicity and truth there shines out everything which by various means is obscured by university
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sociologist (those specialists in sublimation and displacement) and populist intellectuals, and even by dictionaries, virtuosos of counter-suggestion and projection, this is because the author has succeeded despite all the defence mechanisms which protect the intellectual of working-class origins from his own social origins, in finding through a study of himself at once sociological and auto-analytical, the difficult way by which to effect the return of the unprivileged.
Notes 1 M. Passeron uses the term ‘les classes populaires’ in his analysis, for which the only English equivalents are the rather unpleasant ‘common people’, ‘proletariat’ and ‘lower classes’. Despite the fact that the French do have a term for ‘working class’ (les ouvriers’), I have chosen to use this term more or less throughout the translation, since it is the term favoured by Richard Hoggart himself. Readers are reminded however that Hoggart’s use and definition of the term, as set out in the first chapter of The Uses of Literacy is particular to him, being based not on any occupational criteria but on a phenomenological understanding. (Richard Dyer.) 2 Bronislaw Malinowski: Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London: RKP 1932) pp. 20–21. 3 The term ‘semi-indirect style’ is one common to French literary criticism, presumably because it is a style widely used by French novelists since Flaubert. It refers to the expression of personal feelings and experiences in the third person, or as M. Passeron is implying here, to a narrative presentation in which the participation of the narrator in the events described is clearly suggested. (Richard Dyer.) 4 M. Young & P. Willmott: Family and Kinship in East London (London: RKP 1957). M. Kerr: People of Ship Street (London RKP 1958). W.B. Miller: ‘Lower class culture as a generating delinquency’ Journal of Social Issues XIV 1958. F.L. Stodt Beck: ‘Family interaction, values and achievements’ in D.C. McClelland et al: Talent and Society (New York: Van Nostrand 1958). L. Rainwater et al: Workmans Wife (New York: Oceana 1959). E. Litwak: ‘The use of family groups in the achievement of social goals’ Social Problems VII 1959. M.L. Kohn and E.E. Carroll: ‘Social class and the allocation of parental responsibilities’ Sociometry XXIII 1960. D.E. Muir and E.A. Weinstein: ‘The social debt: an investigation of lower and middle class norms of social obligation’, American Sociological Review XXVII 1962. H.J. Gans: The Urban Villagers New York: Free Press 1962. A.K. Cohen & H.M. Hodges Junior: ‘Characteristics of the lower-blue-collar-class’ Social Problems X 1963. R.S. Endeman: ‘Moral perspectives of blue-collar workers’ in A.B. Shostak & W. Gonberg (eds): Blue Collar World (New Jersey: Englewood Cliffs 1964) F.M. Katz: ‘The meaning of success: some differences in value systems of social classes’ Journal of Social Psychology LXII 1964. At a more general level one can see in a bibliography of sociological literature in the English language devoted to the condition and culture of the working class and the working-class family that the majority appeared after 1956 and that those works which stand out as exceptions to the general trend (for example Portrait of the Underdog by G. Knupfer or The Deprived and the Privileged by B.M. Spinley) are precisely those whose ruling ideas are further away from those of Richard Hoggart. One should note that in the bibliography at the end of the present work Richard Hoggart lists either collections of documents or else historical studies far from systematic according to a sociological perspective. 5 The term refers to the character of Emma Bovary in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. She is the type of mindless inconstant sentimental inadequate petit-bourgeois.
2
Literature/society Mapping the field
This introduction serves two purposes. First, it provides a framework for the following articles on the Literature/Society theme. Second, it tries to ‘rough-in’ the main arguments and positions in the debate for readers who are interested but not specialists in the area. Our focus is the way literature has been understood as a social activity or phenomenon. This article deals with three questions. (1) How is the Literature/Society problem handled in traditional literary-criticism and in English Studies? (2) How has this problem been ‘thought’ in other traditions, especially the European Marxist ones? (3) How ought the Literature/Society problem to be conceptualised? Our central focus is on Questions 1 and 2: some possible lines of approach to Question 3 are implicit in our critique, but no attempt to provide a systematic theory has been made here, nor have we aimed for a comprehensive presentation. We have tried to get succinct formulations of the central positions in this debate in our own words, rather than by extensive quotation and reference. The structure of the Introduction is therefore as follows. First we try briefly to characterise the way the problem is handled in traditional literary criticism (Section I). Next (Section II) we consider various discontinuities in the conceptualisation of relations between literature and society, some clearly constituting a radical break with the tradition, others exhibiting perhaps little more than a certain internal incoherence within that same tradition. One notable example of a distinct ‘break’ which we shall examine in more detail, is the work of Raymond Williams which offers a channel of communication between the Scrutiny tradition and the writing of continental Marxist exponents of the sociology of literature. In Section III the Marxist problematic relating to Literature/Society is more directly but briefly formulated. Finally, Section IV consists of notes identifying and characterising certain key positions in the European Marxist traditions. Before proceeding to those discussions, however, we should examine one term which will recur throughout as a convenient indicator of one of the central areas of the field. The term problematic is associated with the writings of Louis Althusser, who uses it to discuss the characteristics of ideology (or ideologies). For him, the problematic is not the real problems of an historical period, nor the questions objectively posed in the attempt to solve those problems, nor the ‘world-vision’ adopted by the inhabitants of any specific social and historical context. Rather, it is the back side of those concepts, necessarily present, inextricably connected, but decently clothed and only to be deduced, in essence by the necessity of its existence, and in specific character by the contours of its clothing. In deducing its form, one must ‘read’ the absences (as well as the presences) in the expressive artefacts of the period, and one must acquire knowledge of the objective problems inherent in the social configuration. The problematic of a particular ideology is then understood to be the form in which that ideology – by transposition, omission, or
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deformation – casts the objective problems in such a way that answers can, or even must necessarily, be found within the preferred framework. To extend our metaphor, strictly the problematic is neither the ‘backside’ nor the ‘clothing’, though it includes the existence of both – rather it is the constructional principles and practice of tailoring adopted to give a degree of fit between the two. Less picturesquely, and in Althusser’s words, the prevalent ideology: to be understood at this internal level . . . must first be asked the question of its questions. But this problematic is itself an answer, no longer to its own internal questions – problems – but to the objective problems posed for ideology by its time . . . So it is not the interiority of the problematic which constitutes its essence, but its relation to real problems . . .1 (emphasis original) Elsewhere, Althusser distinguishes between this, an ideological problematic, and a scientific problematic – presumably one where the tailoring approximates to a perfect fit with the objective problems of an enquiry – but the formulations are complex and rather beyond the scope of this article. Throughout, we shall use the term to imply variable degrees of fit, and variable degrees of open-endedness or closure in the provision of implicit answers.
I How is the literature/society problem ‘thought’ in traditional literary criticism? No full review of the great diversity of traditional literary criticism in practice can be attempted here.2 Our focus is the way English Studies conceptualises, explicitly or implicitly, literature (in general) and the literary text (in particular) as social phenomena. Three points are of special importance here. (1) Traditional literary criticism has at its core the notion of the literary text as a ‘thingin-itself ’. The degree to which the text is treated as wholly ‘self-sufficient’ differs, of course, but, in most approaches, ‘the text’, as a literary-linguistic construct, or as a linguistic ‘ordering of experience’ has held the foreground, with some further degree of ‘situating’ of this text in its contexts. This emphasis on the literary text as an empirical object of study has been linked with a second point; (2) On the whole, traditional criticism has been suspicious of any sustained theorising or self-reflection about its own premises and activities. This includes a lack of self-reflection about how a text is to be situated in its social contexts. Leavis’ exchange with Wellek provides a locus classicus of this anti-theorising position.3 The critic’s concern is with specific analysis . . . ‘to enter into possession of the given poem in its concrete fullness’. The radical empiricism of Leavis’ approach (its strength and its weakness) is admirably summarised there. Characteristically, it is an empiricism that is reluctant to enquire too closely into questions of method. To Wellek’s demand that he ‘elaborate’ his ‘implicit assumptions’, Leavis ‘can only reply that I think I have gone as far in explicitness as I could profitably attempt to go’ and affirm a rigorously common-sense account of ‘the business of literary criticism’. Literary criticism is thus founded on the unexamined practice of ‘reading’. ‘The ideal critic is the ideal reader’: what that critic offers is a ‘full and sensitive reading’ of a text: English Studies is itself, in essence, an informal training in critical reading . . . The critic must ‘submit himself ’ to the text, which thus has a value in itself and of its own right: though what in it, precisely, is valued, and how a text transmits value to a reader, is differently
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formulated. Whatever particular values the critic gains from a particular text, however, he also subscribes to a notion of the inherent value of literature as literature. The way language and form have been used to ‘recreate’ experience confers, above and beyond the particular experience so organised, a value in itself. This value resides in the text: it also belongs to the activity of creating the text, and thus (by a subtle transfer of values, via ‘reading’) to the critical activity of attending sympathetically to what the text has to say. Related questions (the author’s life, historical moment of the work, its reputation in its own time, reasons for its survival, etc) are sketched in only as they help to illuminate the ‘aesthetic’ achievement of the text (though formal aesthetics is rarely discussed).4 The student/apprentice critic/ideal-reader-in-training – is therefore encouraged to read widely and variously: to become tolerant of, curious about, and then knowledgeable about works from different periods in different modes. Literary study encourages a wide ranging responsiveness, rather than a particular mode of understanding with its own distinctive procedures. Too elaborate an interpretation, and questions of method are mistrusted as interposing abstract presuppositions between readers and their ‘openness to the text’. In traditional literary criticism, there has been a tension between those who considered that practice of ‘reading’ as a discipline in its own right, and those who sought something ‘more scholarly’. For the latter, this extra disciplinary strengthening has been variously achieved, by stressing, say (a) the study of language or imagery; (b) textual and bibliographical studies; (c) informed literary history and ‘history of ideas’; (d) biographical work. The ‘discipline of criticism’ (the former position) has also been variously pursued: among others by (a) the formalist emphasis of early American ‘new Criticism’; (b) Northrop Frye’s efforts to found a ‘critical science’ on the basis of the concept of myth; (c) the use of stylistics or (d) of genre-criticism. A critique of these various approaches in traditional literary criticism is offered at the beginning of Andrew Tolson’s article in this journal. It is certainly not the case that any of the varieties of literary criticism cited above have wholly bracketed out the social dimensions of literature. Literary history and the ‘history of ideas’ have had their own ways of pointing to connections between text and society – though this has largely remained at the level of providing informed ‘background’ to the text (4). For the most part, history and society have provided the raw material with which texts and their authors do their privileged work. The core assumption which gives coherence to traditional literary-criticism as a practice is that literary works are communications of a radically distinctive kind. They are autonomous productions of the activity of literary expression. It is in the name of this claim that studies of the author’s life, his times and society, his stated purposes, his working drafts, etc are subordinated to the reading and interpretation of the text itself. In theory, an English Studies which was sensitive to contexts could have become seriously interdisciplinary: drawing on other disciplines to help situate the text. In practice, ‘other disciplines’ have been kept in their place. Frye, for example, argues that ‘Criticism has a great variety of neighbours; the critic must enter into relations with them in any way that guarantees his own independence’.5 (our emphasis). The field has been closed up around its own premises and assumptions, with the text in a privileged position. This kind of ‘closure’ has been reinforced by the institutional position of literary studies. Competing for position in large universities, beset by the rapid expansion and fragmentation of the map of knowledge, literary studies have tended to see ‘related disciplines’ (history, linguistics, psychology, sociology) as too formalised and specialised. The tendency has been for the critic to regard his neighbours as rather uncivilised simplifiers. He may also have felt his knowledge of these other subject-areas as too amateurish. The
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situation has not been made easier by the fragmentation of the field of English Studies itself, under these complex pressures. But, in general, the response to this intellectual and institutional crisis has been to drive the critic back on the defensive to that small core of premises which can still be said to ‘unify the subject-area’. The core or centre remains the undisputed centrality and status of the literary text. The study of literature has thus become substantially a-historical. It proceeds naturally to the study of literary forms and patterns as they recur within literature as a whole. The context within which books are situated is, characteristically, that of other books of a similar kind. And the ‘literary history’ which tends to connect books with books, is often abstracted from the pressures of particular historical time and place. The connections have somehow become blocked. Raymond Williams has remarked on two ways in which this de-historicising of the literary text has been achieved in traditional critical practice. One is the placing of the text in what he calls the ‘false totality’ of tradition – ‘which is seen, not as it is, an active and continuous selection and reselection, which even at its latest point in time is always a specific choice, but now more conveniently as an object, a projected reality’. The second is the ‘false totality’ of literary ‘kinds’, or genres (though there are, of course, genetic, historical, and structuralist approaches to genre, which are quite different): where the study of ‘kinds’ is based on ‘the prior assumption of the existence, within the ‘body’ of literature, of such ‘permanent forms’ as epic, tragedy, romance, and then all our active study is of variations within them, variations that may be admitted to have proximate causes, even a social history, but that, in their essential features are taken as autonomous, with internal laws.’6
II The revival of interest in the literature/society theme As a glance at the bibliography in this issue will confirm, there has nonetheless been, in recent years, a remarkable growth of interest in the Literature/Society problem. To place this changing visibility properly, in all its complex significance would require a critical review of the whole map of intellectual culture. Some recent work provides a starting point7 but a really substantive critique is lacking, and is beyond the scope of this article. However, any attempt to explicate the current shift in attention must take account of the following: 1 2 3 4
5
6
The continuing force of the Leavis/Scrutiny tradition, both in English Studies and in education generally. The central elements in this position are summarised below. The growth of an interest in ‘culture’ often from a base within English Studies. The work of Hoggart and Williams is paradigmatic here. A disenchantment with the pragmatic, empirical, anti-theoretical nature of Anglo-Saxon literary criticism – a growing interest in literary theory. The availability, in English, of some of the key texts of European writers and theorists, especially the Marxists, whose work had hitherto been known, if at all, only second-hand: Lukacs, Goldmann, Marcuse, Benjamin, Brecht, Adorno. The expansion in the use of linguistics in literary and cultural studies. There are, of course, many kinds of linguistics. What is important here is the apparent promise that a more rigorous and ‘scientific’ approach can be discovered through a linguistics-based study of literary work, than through the intuitive and interpretative procedures of literary criticism. The intellectual impact of French structuralism and semiology. Though the coverage in English is still extremely limited, there are, inter alia, translations of Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser.
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7 The application of semiology, structuralism and ideological criticism to the new media, and a general revival of interest in aesthetic and formal questions. Here the English development lags well behind the French, German and Italian debates. But some discussion has emerged in magazines like Screen, Monogram, etc, and in Wollen’s widely-read Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. There are also three important, though less immediately related, factors: 8 The so-called ‘cultural revolution’ which has manifested itself in western societies since the early 1960s. These extremely heterogenous movements have yielded, among other things, ‘theories’ attempting to deal with ‘the politics of culture’, and to relate art/life, literature/politics avant-garde/politics, culture/ideology. This climate has been exceedingly favourable to a renewed interest in the social and political dimensions of art and literature. 9 A shift in the whole intellectual universe of the social sciences, away from positivistic and quantitative approaches, towards phenomenology, structuralism, marxism, ‘critical theory’, etc. This has promoted, in turn, a much-renewed interest in such hitherto marginal fields as ‘the sociology of literature’, ‘the sociology of art’, ‘the sociology of culture’. 10 A quite remarkable general interest in ‘theory’: marked especially by by the slow, uneven but significant way in which Marxism has penetrated English intellectual life in recent years. This intellectual shift parallels political and historical tendencies which cannot be further developed here. One convenient signpost is the translation into English of some key Marxist theoretical texts: e.g. Marcuse’s early essays, Goldmann’s Human Sciences & Philosophy, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Althusser’s For Marx and Reading Capital, Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy, Sartre’s Problem of Method, Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism, selections from Marx’s Grundrisse. Approaches from within literary criticism The dehistoricising of the text, noted in Section I, has had a specific influence on literarycritical concepts of literature as a social phenomenon; yet, within that tradition equally sophisticated positions can retain enormous differences of emphasis. As instances, we cite Northrop Frye’s essay on ‘The Social Context of Literary Criticism’, and F.R. Leavis’ ‘Literature And Society’.8 Both, it should be noted, define themselves explicitly against the Marxist approach (thereby negatively confirming the argument advanced by Tom and Elizabeth Burns that ‘the genesis of the concern with literature . . . as a social institution, lies in Marxism’.9 Frye acknowledges that this is a serious issue in criticism; and, after reviewing a number of approaches, and finding them unsatisfactory, he remarks ‘I wanted a historical approach to literature, but an approach that would be or include a genuine history of literature, and not the assimilating of literature to some other kind of history.’ Via such concepts as ‘conventions’, ‘genres’, and then ‘archetypes’ and ‘myths’ Frye finds his way to an historical overview, on the basis of what is inside literature rather than outside it. Instead of fitting literature deterministically into a prefabricated scheme of history, the critic should see literature as, like a science, unified, coherent, and autonomous created form, historically conditioned but shaping its own history, not determined by external historical process.
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In this argument, the ‘social context’ of the literary text is both acknowledged, and at the same time reinserted into the framework of ‘literary activity’ which is ‘autonomous’. Leavis has always affirmed that the critical act of reading, interpretation and judgement is, fundamentally, a social act – while limiting the kinds of people, the sorts of mind equipped to engage in this critical dialogue. His famous prescription for this dialogue – ‘this is so, is it not?’ – is one to which only an embattled civilising minority can profitably subscribe. Perry Anderson has pointed out that this interrogative statement demands one crucial precondition: ‘a shared, stable system of beliefs and values’.10 The less evident the existence of this morally and culturally unified set of uncommon ‘common readers’, the more relative this universalised practice of criticism becomes, and the more explicitly elitist his prescriptions, the more one-dimensional his lament for the loss of an ‘organic reading public’. But Leavis, too, acknowledges that ‘if the Marxist approach to literature seems to me unprofitable, that is not because I think of literature as a matter of isolated works of art, belonging to a realm of pure literary values’. He never aims for the degree of ‘closure’, the squaring of the circle, which satisfies Frye: indeed, it is Leavis’ ability to hold, at one and the same moment, to the specific quality of the ‘words on the page’, while using the ‘felt experience’ organised in language as a representative index of the ‘quality of life’ of a whole culture, which makes his work so pivotal to the whole argument. Leavis always tries to ‘go through’ from the close response to the text to the ‘qualities’ which lie behind its specific organisation. ‘Without the sensitising familiarity with the subtleties of language, and the insight into the relations between abstract or generalising thought and the concrete of human experience that the trained frequentation of literature alone can bring, the thinking that attends social and political studies will not have the edge and force it should’. We find here the sources of the paradox that those critics within the Anglo-Saxon tradition, who have tried to think the Literature/Society problem in a rigorous way, have usually taken their point of departure from Leavis, while at the same time breaking from the way he has formulated the problem. The ‘break’ with traditional literary-critical practice The most significant ‘break’ from within traditional literary criticism to a new way of formulating the Literature/Society problem is to be found in the work of Raymond Williams, in whose major theoretical writing,11 literature becomes one, specially privileged level or instance of a ‘cultural totality’, itself composed of many different levels, several ‘particular histories’.12 The art and literature of a society are aspects of its culture: and culture is understood as the crucial meanings and values which distinguish the ‘way of life’ of one particular society from another. Culture, in this sense, is expressed and carried, not simply in literature and the arts, but in every level and activity which goes to make up the social totality. It is there ‘in institutions and ordinary behaviour, in implicit as well as in explicit ways.’ Literature is one of the specially privileged ways in which such key meanings are expressed, clarified, discovered and transmitted. The key question is how this privileged activity, and its product, the literary text, is related to other activities in the totality. Here, Williams dispenses with a formulation which would give prior determination to any one level or activity – for example, the economic ‘base’ which art, in a simplified Marxism, reflects as part of the ‘superstructure’. He argues that, if literature really is a part of the ‘whole’, there is ‘no solid whole, outside it, to which . . . we concede priority’. ‘The art is there, as an activity, with the production, the trading, the politics, the raising of families. To study the relations adequately, we must study them
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actively, seeing all the activities as particular and contemporary forms of human energy’. If ‘culture’ can be said to ‘relate’ in any sense then it is as an expression of the way in which all the activities hang together – ‘the theory of culture is the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life’. The same pattern or structure, then, might be revealed as active in very different, apparently unrelated, levels within this totality. Thus, the study of literary texts, provided it was undertaken in this ‘many-sided’ way, could ‘stay in touch with and illuminate particular art works and forms’, while at the same time being connected to the ‘forms and relations of more general social life’.13 Williams’ work represents a long, sometimes displaced critical engagement with the Marxist tradition on these questions. In his early substantive work (Culture & Society) Marxism is discussed in terms of English Marxist literary theory of the 1930s – an engagement with traditional literary criticism which, Williams argues, Scrutiny won, and deserved to win. In the theoretical sections of The Long Revolution, Marxism provides the hidden ‘sub-text’ of the argument; but the key terms and concepts are re-translated and reshaped. This applies, above all, to the problem of base/superstructures, which, despite the reshaping, emerges from Williams’ work as the key problematic of the whole field. Base/superstructure is the classic framework within which the relationship of ‘being’ and ‘consciousness’, of ‘ideas’ to their ‘social base’ has been formulated in Marxist thinking. In ‘From Leavis to Goldmann’ Williams acknowledges that some way of conceptualising the relations of determination – ‘the economic base determines the social relations which determine consciousness which determines actual ideas and works’ – is not only ‘near the centre of Marxism’ but ‘indicates an appropriate methodology for cultural history and criticism, and then of course for the relation between social and cultural studies.’ But his own way of handling this problem is to substitute for some sophisticated version of the base/superstructure framework, ‘the more active idea of a field of mutually if also unevenly determining forces’.14 The key concept, for Williams, in his attempt to ‘think’ the relationship of ideas or works of art and literature to the social totality, is structure of feeling. This concept locates both the internal order and values of a literary text, and the pattern of experience at a given historical moment. The pattern of experience, however, is not defined in terms of a set of explicit beliefs – e.g. an ideology – but in terms of the implicit structure which social life exhibits at the level of experienced values: thus, ‘structure/of/feeling’, an apparently paradoxical concept. The literary text is one concrete instance of the ‘structure of feeling’ in a particular society at a particular moment. In practice (and often, it seems, somewhat at odds with his theoretical position), Williams does seem to treat literature as qualitatively different from other activities. This is partly because he stresses the active, creative process by which society organizes ‘received meanings’ and discovers ‘possible new meanings’. This, indeed, is change – the ‘long revolution’. This process depends on the ability to communicate these new meanings, to find a language and form as a description for new experiences. Every social individual takes part in this process – ‘culture is ordinary’: but – it follows – the moments of the most intense exploration, those embodied in art, are a very special aspect of a common activity. Williams’ engagement with Marxism only begins with these subtle formulations. His work poses the whole question of whether ‘culture’ can be simply and easily assimilated into the Marxist notion of ideology, or whether it requires new terms, concepts, ways of establishing its relationship to its social base. In his most recent work, Williams seems to have discovered, via the work of Goldmann and Lukacs, a more direct and sympathetic route between his own thinking and the Marxist tradition. Though this has not yet borne fruit in substantive terms, he has gone so far as to pin-point certain key convergences between his own work and
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Lukacs and Goldmann: (a) The concern, in both, with the notion of the ‘social totality’: (b) The search for homologies or correspondences between a work and its social base at the level of structure (rather than of content); (c) similarities between Williams’ ‘structure of feeling’, Lukacs’ ‘potential consciousness’ and Goldmann’s ‘world vision’.
III Re-formulating the ‘break’ Much of what has been said indicates the absolute centrality of Marxism to the Literature/ Society problem. Many who explicitly dissociate themselves from Marxism, implicitly acknowledge its centrality by the very form of their disavowal. Williams’ work progressively reveals the complex tension it maintains with Marxist concepts and problematics. In this section we must now address these questions directly. Whichever variant of the Marxist problematic we take, we are always led back to the central formulation, base/ superstructure. From the early 1844 Manuscripts, through the German Ideology to the Critique of Political Economy and the Grundrisse, whenever Marx wanted to refer to the ways economic structure, social relations and the ‘ideological forms’ cohere to form a distinctive social formation, he tended to employ some variation on the idea of a ‘basis’ and ‘the superstructures’. The nature, degree and mode in which one level determined the other was variously expressed in Marx’s own writings, and was the subject of key reformulations in Engel’s later correspondence. This argument is too complex to trace through in detail here. Marx always insisted, both that ‘the formation of ideas’ should be explained ‘from material practice’ and that art was related to material production by an ‘uneven development’. The ‘transformations’ which connected ‘the economic foundation’ with ‘the whole immense superstructure’ were, clearly, not simple, transparent or unmediated.15 We know that, by ‘economic foundations’ he meant something as complex as ‘the material production of life itself . . . the form of intercourse connected with this and created by the mode of production (i.e. civil society in all its stages)’ – ‘the totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation.’ We know he thought it crucial to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic – in short, ideological forms, in which men become conscious of the conflict and fight it out. But in the absence of the promised volumes on the State, politics and art, it remains an unfinished project for Marxism to ‘think’ rigorously how the ‘correspondences’ between these levels are to be understood. That is the reason why (a) in Marxism, a proper ‘theory of the superstructures’ still awaits elaboration; (b) it is difficult to base a Marxist theory of literature as a social phenomenon squarely on the existing texts and concepts; and yet why, paradoxically, (c) the study of the Literature/Society problem, in a Marxist framework, is not a marginal enterprise but absolutely central to the development of historical materialism as a science – because, within that problem, a critical absence in the theory can be, progressively, clarified. Despite the confused state of Marxism in this whole area, two things at least are clear. (1) The ‘vulgar marxist’ way of conceptualising the base/superstructure relation is not likely to take us very far. It conceives this relation in narrowly reflexive ways, and tends always towards a reductively economistic kind of analysis. However, (2) Marxism does require the
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analyst rigorously to confront the question of determinations – more especially, the ‘determination of the economic level in the last instance.’16 We may usefully break this question down into several, related questions: (a) How to ‘think’ a social totality or social formation – the ‘ensemble of social relations’ – in a different way; (b) How to ‘think’ what is specific about each of the levels, activities or ‘practices’ which compose or ‘produce’ this complex totality; (c) How to think the different modes in which social activity in history (what Marx, in the German Ideology defined as praxis, and Williams translates as ‘human energy’) appears – for example, in economic life and production; social relations; institutional life and the State; consciousness, ideas, ideologies and beliefs; artistic and symbolic productions, including language; (d) How to ‘think’ the relationships of determination and ‘relative autonomy’ between the different levels in this totality. We may identify two variants or problematics in this area within Marxism. The first, follows from Marx’s notion that ‘definite forms of social consciousness’ correspond to the ‘totality of relations of production’. It attempts to elaborate and clarify just what that notion of correspondence entails. The theorists who belong to this variant all reject some simple notion that the superstructures directly reflect the base. They therefore explore the mediations, the transformation, the refractions etc., which establish or reveal the dialectical links between ‘ideas’ and ‘society’. These writers address the base/superstructure problem headon, and deal with literature as a ‘superstructural’ phenomenon. Lukacs and Goldmann, but also, from another position, Adorno and Marcuse, belong within this problematic. There is, however, a second line of theorising. This stems rather from Marx’s equally important injunction that ‘consciousness must be explained from the . . . conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.’ The base/ superstructure problem is seen not so much as a two-tiered model, but in terms of a complex, differentiated totality. Thus literature is regarded, less as a refraction of the base through the superstructures, and more as a specific kind of activity (praxis): a certain kind of practice: even, as a form of production. To this alternative tradition belongs Brecht, with his stress on the ‘mounting’ of the work of art, his concern with ‘effect’; Benjamin, with his attention to the new ‘productive forces’ in artistic work; perhaps in an intermediary position, Sartre, who is concerned with praxis and project, but for whom the work of art is the production not of a text (object) but of certain kinds of signified meanings – artistic production as a form of signification; and the structuralist and semiotic schools, for whom the primary mode of artistic production is the production of signs through language and sign-systems. We should also include here the ‘Althussereans’, who, though they have not produced a ‘theory of literary practice’ as distinct from their discussion of ideology, have given a most rigorous and fruitful definition of the term practice which could be developed into a ‘regional theory’ for art and literature.17 In Althusser, the two sides – base/superstructure and practice-production – come together in a useful way. Althusser accepts the value of the base/superstructure distinction. He also accepts Engels’ notion that in capitalism, the economic level is ‘determining in the last instance’. But, since he sees any complex social formation as a base/superstructure complex, he argues that it is never actually possible to find one level (the economic, say) appearing on its own without the other levels (social relations, political practice, ideology, theory). Thus, instead of a simple
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determination, he speaks of relations of ‘contradiction and over-determination’ defining how any one level relates to another ‘within a structured whole’.18 Althusser therefore does not believe that there are simple correspondences or homologies between the different levels (the Hegelian problematic): each level is produced by its own kind of practice, or ‘production’, and may stand in an ‘uneven relation to other practices’. Thus we are required by him to think what is specific to, ‘relatively autonomous about’, each level; as well as the relations of similarities and difference which govern social formation. The notion of practice is useful here in clarifying what might be meant by speaking of literature as a form of production. Althusser has proposed that, by practice, we should mean ‘any process of transformation of a determinate raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means (of ‘production’)’.19 The overall perspective of this view of art as production of literature as a ‘practice’ is that the determination of art within society appears not (as with Lukacs and Goldmann) at the level of general relations between the structures of being and consciousness (the way Marx formulated the problem in the German Ideology); but rather at the level of the specific character of the moment, materials and activity of artistic production. Such a perspective recognises art as an activity within a determinate social world; but, more significantly, as always in certain specific relations to other ‘practices’ at work within the same historical moment. Art is seen as a practice which employs certain specific ‘means’, to transform some set of objects or concepts or perceptions into something else – the specific structure of the literary text or the work as a symbolic-social object. However, what it is that literary practice transforms: what distinguishes its means, materials and ‘mode’ of production: what and how this practice is ‘determined by’ or ‘relatively autonomous from’ other practices: and so on, are problems in this approach which have not, so far, been rigorously exposed.
IV The Marxist traditions In this final section, we have pin-pointed certain key figures and positions within the two Marxist problematics we have defined (they are, of course, closely related, as we hope to have shown). Here we have had to be highly selective. Gramsci, who on any other grounds deserves a full account, has been omitted because his major work on Italian popular literature and religion is not available in English. We have grouped Lukacs and Goldmann together, as their similarity in approach and mutual influence warrants. We have also linked Adorno and Marcuse, as representing two variants from the formidable Frankfurt School of ‘critical theory’. We have included Brecht, in part because he represents the opposite pole in a confrontation with Lukacs’ aesthetics, in part because he figures equally as theorist and as practitioner. But there are other practising artists and ‘schools’ – Eisenstein, Vertov and the Constructivists, the Dadaists, for example – who also combined a radical or materialist aesthetics with an avant-garde practice. We have linked Brecht with Benjamin, partly because of their close partnership, but also because Benjamin takes Brecht’s ‘materialist aesthetics’ right the way through to an examination of the bases of artistic production. Sartre stands as a major figure, in an intermediary position. He has criticised the abstract and static aesthetics of Lukacs: but his notion of signification differs both from Benjamin’s concept of ‘production’, and from the more formalist approach of the structuralists. Finally, we identify the various strands of structuralism, to which we cannot here do justice, through the figure whose work is most easily available (if still very incompletely) in England: Roland Barthes. The first two positions – those of Lukacs and Goldmann, clearly belong together. Both
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deal with the literary text as the transformation of the ideological and conceptual ‘world’ outlook of a social class into a coherent structure (the text), via the mediation of the writer. Lukacs Lukacs’ theoretical writings represent in many ways the first serious attempt at a Marxist aesthetics. Plekhanov and Mehring were largely unknown, and the observations by Marx and Engels on literature were not available until 1933. The basic category of Lukacs’ literary concepts is that of ‘totality’. ‘Totality’ in this context means the ‘wholeness of man’, untouched by alienation and reification. The Lukacs of History and Class Consciousness was deeply aware of the alienated reality, the reification, characteristic of capitalist social relations. He saw, however, the possibility that in art these contradictions might be moulded and shaped in such a way as to prefigure the essential totality of human existence. The mode of this ‘supersession’ was realism. Lukacs adopted and adapted Hegel’s notion of the progression of aesthetic forms: he thus came to see the classical realist novel as the final and finest expression of the whole humanist literary tradition. In his work, the remarkable achievement of the realists – Balzac, Tolstoi, Goethe and Thomas Mann – was contrasted, first, with the naturalists, like Zola, and then, more sharply, with the ‘modernists’ – Kafka, Joyce. Naturalism committed the error of mistaking the surface representation of life for the recreation of its underlying tendencies and movements towards ‘wholeness.’ In the modernists, this ‘totality’ is lost, broken up, fragmented. In classical realism, and its later inheritors, Lukacs saw a group of writers who reflected in their art the continuous tragedy of the lost totality, and who thereby provided a profound critique of the isolation and fragmentation of modern life under capitalism. Lukacs saw these writers as embodying the historical contradictions of their time in ‘typical characters’, in ‘world-historical individuals’. In these ‘typical characters’ and their dilemmas the double-sidedness and contradictoriness of life under capitalism was ‘represented’: not statically but in terms of their movement, their development, their determination to ‘become’, their tragic ends. By the ‘typical’, Lukacs understood the fusion of all the essential human and social determinants which crystallise both the farthest extremes – the ‘potential consciousness’ – as well as the limitations of man in a period when wholeness, ‘totality’, was denied. In the idea of realism, the mediated ideal of totality is retained; in the form of realism, the totality is restored through the unity of the work of art. Goldmann Goldmann was deeply influenced by Lukacs’ early writing. In particular, it is from Lukacs that Goldmann derives the central concepts of ‘totality’ and ‘world vision’. Within the framework of his approach (which he calls ‘genetic structuralism’, because it examines ‘structures’ but in terms of their historical origin and development – ‘genetically’), Goldmann examines the structure of a literary text for the degree to which it embodies the structure of thought (the ‘world vision’) of the social group to which the writer belongs. This social group, for Goldmann as for Lukacs, is usually a class. The more closely a text approximates to a full and coherent articulation of the social group’s conceptual ‘world vision’, the greater its validity as a work of art. Thus, in The Hidden God (the study for which he is best known in this country) Goldmann relates the structure of the ‘tragic vision’ discerned in the work of Pascal and Racine, firstly to the social situation in seventeenth century France, of the noblesse de robe (a group or
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‘class-fraction’ losing their former power and position in the state); secondly, he relates it to the conceptual expression of that group’s historical situation embodied in the religious movement of Jansenism. Goldmann claims that one important result of his dialectical examination of these elements was the discovery of a hitherto unrecognised ‘extremist’ form of Jansenism. This discovery was first made by a structural analysis of the literary texts, which revealed an ‘extreme’ variant, then subsequently confirmed by research among the less well-known Jansenist theorists. This discovery provides powerful support for the predictive and explanatory power of Goldmann’s method. In Goldmann’s work, the mediating link between a text and society is the ‘world-vision’ of particular groups or classes. Social classes are the ‘infra-structure of world views’. Because of their common historical situation, all the members of a class ‘tend towards creating the same significant structures, universal in scope, that we call world views’. The literary work of any value creates ‘a roughly coherent universe which corresponds to a world view’. This it does by reproducing, in its immanent structures, the structures of thought ‘potential’ in the class. This is no mere ‘reflection’, since the work ‘advances very considerably the degree of structural coherence which the collective consciousness itself has attained in a rough and ready fashion’. Goldmann describes the relation as a ‘homology of structures’. The work is thus a ‘collective achievement’, made possible by the individual creator, who thus ‘reveals to the group what it was moving towards “without knowing it” in its ideas, feelings and behaviour’.20 Adorno and Marcuse For Adorno, too, art (literature, but more especially music) is a phenomenon of the superstructures: and he, too, aims to point the connection with the base. But where Goldmann goes for homologies between ‘parallel’ structures, Adorno tries to show contradictory oppositions at the level of form. A work is (especially, perhaps, in modern times) a sign of the negative, torn from the heart of the social totality: it reproduces, in the tensions, oppositions and antagonisms which make up its immanent form, the antagonistic nature of the ‘social whole’ to which it corresponds (even as the work, in reaching after unity of form, denies or negates that antagonism). Adorno thus places far more weight on the analysis of the formal structures of the literary or musical text than Lukacs; while at the same time denying that the text can ever be a self-sufficient, permanent structure, standing on its own. Adorno suggests that, when the work is most wholly ‘itself ’, it is also most deeply and radically connected with the social totality. His method is thus perpetually to show the fragmentary, incomplete and antagonistic nature of works which present themselves as coherent, finished and complete. The determinate social moment, from which a work arises, can be more surely indicated by its ‘realised form’ than by either its content or its conceptual structure. Both Adorno and Lukacs employ the Hegelian notion of ‘mediation’ but whereas Goldmann and Lukacs see a correspondence in the structures, as one moves through the mediations (social class – world view – coherence of the text) Adorno sees a dialectical progression by the negative side, by sudden analogies and leaps, rather than by ‘genetic’ unfolding of one structure into another. The antagonisms of any particular moment in the infrastructure of a society are reproduced as a set of tensions or ‘moments’ in the work itself. The connections are shown by a series of analogies or equivalents: between Balzac’s massive appetite for data, and the primitive accumulation of capital, for example, or between the total organisation in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone musical system and the over-systematised and totalitarian world in which it comes into being.21
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Adorno is also deeply concerned with the structure of artistic production in different periods, with the changing social functions of art, with the disintegration of the work of art into a commodity, and the growth of what he calls the ‘cultural industry’. He is not, however, concerned with these things as extrinsic sociological variables, which merely change the context for the production and distribution of art: he is concerned to show how these ‘extrinsic’ variables are reproduced as antagonistic moments within the formal structures of the work themselves. Thus the formal complexity, the determination to be difficult, which many ‘modern’ works of art exhibit, Adorno often interprets as one of the few ways in which the work can resist being wholly transformed into a commodity: of course, (the negation of the negation), by resisting commodity status in this way, the work confirms its status as a ‘minority’ thing, to be set off against the much-publicised simplicity of appeal of the commodities of the ‘cultural industry’. In so far as the work of art has the capacity to resist – albeit negatively – total incorporation into the world of commodities, it expresses for Adorno a ‘principle of hope’, a utopian element, though he resists conceptualising this hopeful side in isolation from its other, fragmented, negative side. Perhaps, then, the difference between Adorno and Marcuse (both of whom have their origins in the ‘critical theory’ of the Frankfurt School) is that Marcuse considers the role and function of the work of art to be more positively and affirmatively ‘utopian’ though not simply, fanciful, wish-fulfilling . . . For Marcuse, also, art negates the effort of the existing state of things, the status quo, to assert itself as all there is to know; as given, permanent, unchangeable. Life in modern, technologically-advanced capitalist societies is ‘one-dimensional’: not only is social life in such a period organised, routinised, rationalised, the conflicts contained or pacified: it is also the case, Marcuse argues, that such societies present themselves as ‘knowable’ only in terms of the ideas and theories which are already to hand. One-dimensional thought thus parallels and makes legitimate one-dimensional society; its purpose is to suppress ‘alternatives’. It is, therefore, principally in the work of art that ‘alternatives’ – other dimensions, other possibilities, emergent but not yet fully realised – continue to exist. These alternatives, in so far as they are embodied in ‘fictive worlds’, are, of course, necessarily ‘utopian’: but it is a ‘utopianism’ we desperately need. Thus, whereas Adorno sees the work of art in the modern period as negating, in the same moment as it reproduces, the antagonisms of one-dimensional societies; Marcuse’s view of the role of art is more ‘affirmative’, even if the affirmation sometimes expresses itself (as it does, for Marcuse, in cultural manifestations like street theatre and rock music) as a simple experiential cry of ‘no’ to the one-dimensional ‘yes’ of modern life. Such manifestations, Marcuse considers necessary but necessarily ephemeral ‘negations’ to the proposition that the ‘real is the rational’, the propositions that what already exists is all that should exist. Such cultural phenomena are capable of saying ‘no’ to this proposition: but they would require the more ‘affirmative’ work, which for Marcuse characterises ‘art’ in the proper sense, to get beyond this simple negative: such more profound work would be marked by a proper and necessary attention to ‘aesthetic form’ and ‘aesthetic distance’. If art is properly to incarnate the alternative dimension, it must be ‘worked up’, formed, shaped.22 Sartre Sartre holds an intermediary position between those writers (already dealt with) who see the work of art as the transformation of a specific type of (class) consciousness into a literary form or structure, and those writers (see below) who tend to view the literary object as the product of a specific type of ‘production’.23
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In the Problem of Method, Sartre argues that only within Marxism can we develop a totalising framework within which the relations of a complex social formation can be properly analysed. ‘Vulgar Marxism’, however, (he argues) has ceased to be a fruitful way of discovering things about society. What he wants is a theoretical framework which is capable of making the mediations, between the general economic contradictions and the social-class reality, the specific man, the specific work, the specific ‘moment’, more precise and more intelligible. He wants a method which preserves what is specific and irreducible about any particular historical event (like the writing of Madame Bovary), while at the same time tracing the path or ‘project’ of its development out of a historical context or situation. In theoretical terms, he proposes the combination of Marxism with an existentialist framework – Marxism alerting the analyst to the wider, ‘objective’ structures or determinations, existentialism alerting the analyst to the ‘profundity of the lived’. In terms of method, Sartre outlines a ‘regressive-progressive’ approach. The ‘regressive’ part of the analysis takes the object or event we seek to understand back down into its elementary parts: it ‘decomposes’ it, retrospectively. The ‘progressive’ part reconstitutes the object in its fullness, by relating these elements to the ‘totality’ towards which they are tending. This process of ‘reconstituting’ differs from the method of ‘vulgar marxism’, because it does not simply try to account for the ‘totality’ in terms of the objective structures (the economic contradictions, the class situation, the historical circumstances, etc) which determine it from the outside. Instead it understands the process of ‘reconstitution’ as an active process: what Sartre calls (after Marx) praxis. People are born into specific circumstances: what they can actively make (praxis) of the circumstances they inherit is limited by the objective circumstances in which they live and work (determinations). All praxis is thus subject to the determination of its ‘starting conditions’: it is limited by the ‘field of possibles’ in a historical moment. However, within that set of ‘objective’ determinations, men have the opportunity (in the existential sense, the ‘choice’) to realise what they inherit, objectively, in some active project (subjectively). In thus taking up some of his circumstances, reworking them subjectively, and expressing this reworking in some active manifestation in the world, man in one and the same moment, acknowledges his historical limits, and surpasses them. Human praxis is, thus, neither wholly determined (vulgar marxism) nor wholly free (pure existentialism). It is neither wholly ‘objective’, nor wholly ‘subjective’. It moves from given determinations, towards a new totalisation, which, of course, provides a set of new determinations for those who inherit it. This is the dialectic, as Sartre understands it. Praxis is also a movement, a ‘project’, from the objective moment to the subjective moment to the objective moment. Thus, Flaubert ‘inherits’ the starting conditions of the French bourgeoisie in his period by way of the family into which he is born. This limits him. It also provides the ‘raw material’ of his subjective experience with which he must work, which he must incorporate into his own project. The way he ‘lives’, and tries to ‘surpass’ what he inherits, manifests itself, among other things, in the production, at a certain moment, of the text, Madame Bovary. Madame Bovary is thus neither wholly given in Flaubert’s class and family situation, nor is it free of those circumstances. It constitutes a ‘moment’, in which Flaubert ‘makes sense’ of the sense which his family and class make of him. The task for a method – the ‘problem of method’ – is to trace his project through its different ‘moments’, and thus to reveal the way the different mediations (class, family, personality, situation, text) add up to a ‘complex totality’. Each mediation or ‘moment’ realises itself in some tangible or ‘objective’ form. This is because men not only labour, and thus provide objectifications which mark their unfolding
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‘project’ through history, they also express or signify their project, using language or employing objects as if they were signs. Thus it is possible to ‘read’ Flaubert’s life itself as a kind of signification: Madame Bovary is only one such expression or objectification in Flaubert’s unfolding project. At any such moment, the writer creates, through work or language, an objective structure (the novel) which sets into the world the subjective way in which he ‘makes sense of the sense history makes of him’. One consequence of this method, therefore, is to subsume the literary text back into a sort of ‘existential biography’. However, in his notion of ‘the project’ and of ‘signification’, Sartre comes some of the way towards the position (exemplified in the final group of theorists) who see literature as a form of ‘practice’, and the literary text as the ‘product’ of a specific kind of production. Brecht Lukacs, Goldmann and Brecht all attempt to define their aesthetics in relation to a central problematic which is the negative and positive aspects of the capitalist mode of production. The contradiction between the dehumanising elements accompanying this mode of production (alienation, reification and exploitation) and the positive technical advances which threaten to explode the dehumanising productive relations of capital is taken up by all three, especially Lukacs and Brecht.24 The importance of Brecht’s attitude to the literary text is two-fold. Firstly, as a socialist artist, his drama is a weapon in the class struggle and it functions primarily to awaken the consciousness of the working class, making them aware of the exploitation they suffer and provoking them into action to change the social relationships building them. Secondly, as a revolutionary art form, his plays anticipate new relationships between the individual artist as producer and the audience as passive spectators, consuming art objects. An examination of the techniques involved in Brecht’s epic theatre, shows that the two considerations outlined are united in his drama in a preoccupation with new modes of artistic presentation. His ‘alienation effect’ helps the audience to abstract from the action and thus make judgements on history, so that they are not drawn to identify themselves with the conflicts on stage through the personalities of the actors. The latter are instructed to detach themselves from the roles they are performing; their gestures should be socially significant, rather than individual or imitative, expressing the social relationships prevailing between people of a given period. We can see that the ‘alienation effect’ is tied to the first task of awakening proletarian consciousness. In approaching his second assignment, Brecht is occupied with both (a) opposing the encapsulation of artistic forms, such as drama, opera, film, etc. (a product of the division of labour, heightened under capitalism) and (b) overcoming the producer/consumer distinction posed in the relationship of the author to his audience. (a) is answered by mixing media, using films as a backcloth, etc. (b) by open forms, which view the play as incomplete in itself, with the audience as an integral part of its production, not mere spectators. In contrast to Lukacs, Brecht did not posit the work of art as a totality in itself. Whereas the former argued that good (especially socialist) art opposed the fragmentation of modern man by remoulding the contradictions of reality inside art, Brecht was concerned with exposing these contradictions by open forms and new artistic techniques which exploded the moribund individualistic relationship of the artist to his audience. Thus, Brecht’s aesthetic is closely linked to Benjamin’s notion of the contradiction between productive forces and productive relations within art itself.
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Benjamin Benjamin is a complex figure, whose work is still only fragmentarily available in English. Though deeply influenced by Lukacs’ – History and Class Consciousness, he took Brecht’s side, against Lukacs, in the debates in German Marxist circles in the 1920s and 30s. Like Brecht, he believed any really modern thinking about art would have to begin, as Brecht put it, ‘from the bad side’. Lukacs, they felt, tended to begin ‘from the good side’ – trying to rescue for Marxism the great European humanist and realist tradition, and looking for ‘wholeness’, ‘totalities’, coherence, the moulding of contradictions into a formed or shaped aesthetic whole. Both Brecht and Benjamin preferred the deliberately ‘open’ fragmentary forms.25 Benjamin’s work on literary topics and figures is an attempt to ‘read off ’ the contradictions in aesthetic structures from their base in historical antagonisms of their age.26 But what distinguishes Benjamin’s work is the profound sense he had that the position of the arts, in the modern world, had been transformed by the new means of artistic production. Benjamin inherited from the Surrealists, Dadaists and other modern artistic movements, a deep responsiveness to the new media: photography, the newspaper, the cinema, design. He argued that these were not simple technical developments: the transformation in the means of making art which they pointed to would have profound consequences for what kinds of art would now be possible. They would also deeply alter, retrospectively, our attitudes to the art and literature of the past. The work of art in the era of the individual book or painting, Benjamin argued, was founded on its singularity, its uniqueness, its radical individuality. A sort of traditional or magical ‘aura’ surrounded the work. Thus, the whole effort of art history and of collecting was to find and prove the ‘originality’ of the work, and thus to trace it to the unique vision of its maker. But, when literary language is subject to the medium of the modern newspaper, or the painting can be mechanically reproduced, or when the surface of the painting can be broken up and explored in a new way by photography and the cinema, that singularity of the ‘work of art’ is progressively destroyed: its aura is dispersed. Instead of the ‘work’ presenting a fully formed and complete ‘surface totality’ to the world, it could now be broken up, broken into, invaded and reorganised by the new media. Thus the fixed proportions of European painting could not, in his view, survive the penetration of the camera, which created a ‘new optics’. Painting offered a rounded surface to the world: but the camera cut into its ‘object’ like a surgeon with a scalpel.27 Benjamin, therefore – like the Russian Formalists, the Constructivists, and film directors like Vertov and Eisenstein – thought the artist should be conceived not just as a fashioner of artistic objects, but as a certain kind of producer. The work of art was his product. Marx had argued that a transformation in the ‘forces and means of production’ in economic labour would lead to a transformation in the ‘social relations’ of production, and in the form of its products; so by analogy Benjamin argued that a transformation in the means (media) of artistic production would alter the ‘social relations of artistic production’ (i.e. the function and position of ‘the artist’) and the nature of his product (the ‘work of art’ itself). Benjamin therefore made a fundamental contribution to our understanding of the ‘basis’ of artistic production, by giving as much weight to the means of making art – to its technics – as Lukacs and Goldmann give to its conceptual content or structure (its ‘super-structure’). One of the consequences of this transformation in the ‘means’ which Benjamin developed was the shift in artistic production from what he called ‘magic’ to ‘politics’. The ‘work of art’ which was considered individual, unique and complete within itself was, Benjamin argued, based on a sort of ‘ritual’ conception of artistic practice. This ‘magical base’ was preserved in artistic tradition, which amounted to a collection of unique, individual objects, and
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preserved their ‘aura’. But the new means were distinguished, for Benjamin, by the possibilities they opened up of consciously and actively manipulating the contents and structures of art. The cinema was paradigmatic here, since its ‘aesthetics’ were, precisely the aesthetics of manipulation: cutting, framing, angling, montage. But once the work of art acknowledged that it was a manipulated structure, it could not hold itself separate from a consideration of its purposes, function, effect, tendency. Thus art, ‘in the age of mechanical reproduction’ had shifted its base from ‘ritual’ to the aesthetics of manipulation – what Benjamin called politics. But this, in turn, meant that artistic work need no longer be the preserve of a privileged elite. The means of making art – the camera, the tape recorder, mass publishing, etc – made it possible for all men to be producers – even if the present ‘social relations of artistic production’ tended to inhibit and constrain this process, preserving art for a minority when the means of art were being progressively made more ‘social’ and collective. We can see, here, that Benjamin was applying, to art, Marx’s notion that revolutionary transformations could only occur in societies when there was a developed contradiction between the means or ‘forces of production’ (tending towards social and collective production) and the ‘social relations of production’ (still constrained within the framework of private expropriation). The role of the artist who was also a revolutionary, was to produce an art which acknowledged and developed this tendency towards social production, which demystified art and opened it up to ordinary people: and to resist the enclosed, ‘bourgeois’ role of the artist as the unique and privileged maker. It would not be sufficient for the artist to put a revolutionary content into the old forms, using the old means. It was necessary for the artist to revolutionise the forms, and develop the means. It was still possible for the new medium of photography to be so used that it restored the hegemony of bourgeois ‘art’ and ‘the artist’. A truly revolutionary use of photography would do more than express a revolutionary content. It would actively and consciously break up the old forms, the old structures of perception, and create new ones: ones more in line with the progressive development of the collective means of artistic production. As Benjamin argued, ‘the political tendency of a work of art cannot, by itself, organise a work’. Only if that tendency found expression at the level of new forms – so that content and form reinforced one another – would a real break with the old modes of artistic production have been made. Thus, though Benjamin had a deeply radical conception of art, linked to his ideas about its media, he never collapsed art directly into politics. He always looked at the necessary mediation – at the level of progressive forms – which mirrored and refracted, in the work itself, the contradictions he had isolated in its ‘infrastructure’. The structuralists and Barthes The final point in this conspectus of positions, is a look at the structuralists, and the development of European semiotics – especially those varieties which positively acknowledge some relationship to Marxism. This is an extremely complex area, and we have chosen to deal, mainly, with Barthes: first, because his work is more accessible in English, but second because so many tendencies in this area converge in his work. What distinguishes the structuralists who also accept a Marxist framework is that they conceptualise the creation of literature and art as a form of production: but they devote all their attention to what is specific about artistic production, namely the fact that it employs, as its medium, language or some other systems of signs. The real theoretical basis of this development, therefore, lies in the different uses made of structural linguistics and the theory of the sign. Literary production, like other kinds of communication, produces ‘meanings’ ordered into a structure.
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It does this by using the mode of ‘objectification’ appropriate to literature: that is, sign systems. Structuralist analysis is thus grounded in the theory of the sign, and in the notion of signification (or sign-ification). This approach, as we suggest below, is in turn, grounded in Saussure’s distinction between langue/parole, or, in the more familiar language of communication theory (from which they have also drawn), the distinction between message/code. The langue/parole distinction is the cornerstone of Saussure’s linguistics and the foundation of structuralist and semiotic method.28 Previous theories had seen language either as a spontaneous, natural and ‘transparent’ medium of human expression, or as a set of prescribed, grammatically ‘perfect’ rules. Saussure stressed that language consisted of individual, and in some sense, ‘free’ particular speech acts (parole) which however could only be made by obeying the rules of language (langue). Langue was thus the ‘social part of language’, which made it possible for the speaker to produce, at the level of parole, speech acts which were both innovative, free but also coherent, capable of being decoded by those who shared the linguistic community. Saussure also developed the notion of signification. Signification, he argued, required two ‘planes’: the symbol or index within the signifying system which was the ‘mental representation’ of the concept, object or person – the signifier: and that to which the signifier referred – the thing (concept, or person) signified. The union of the signifier and the signified formed the sign. Signs, then, could only mean something if they were organised within their own system. They had value only in terms of the relations of similarity and difference which organised them. There were different sign-systems, differently arranged – morse code, traffic signals, written language: these configurations constituted codes. An extended piece of articulation within any code is a discourse. We can only decipher what any particular signifier signifies if we have access to the code in which it is arranged. Signification, then, must be conceived as a process. As Barthes says, ‘it is the act which binds the signifier and the signified, an act whose product is the sign.’ ‘Meaning is articulation’. In most signifying systems, the first plane of articulation is a simple, denotative one. But there are also more complex articulations, superimposed on the denotative level, which can signify more complicated associative or connotative meanings. These ‘second-order’ systems the semioticians call meta-languages. In morse code, for example, signifiers are dots and dashes, arranged by simple principles of contrast and combination. The signifieds are the letters of the alphabet. In the code, the sign . . . – signifies V. This is the level of denotation. But, during the war, when Churchill made the V-sign a symbol of victory for the Allies, . . . – also connoted ‘V for Victory over the Germans’. This latter articulation marked a connotative, or second-order code. In Barthes’ phrase, ‘there is no message without a code’. The tendency is therefore always to treat the particular message (or the parole) of an individual work in terms of the code, or in Levi-Strauss’ sense, the structure, or in Chomsky’s terms, the deep structure, which organises the signs into meaningful, signifying relationships. This broad framework can, of course, be applied at different levels. Some work by this school on the cinema, for example, is basically concerned with what are the signs and the codes of the cinema as a discourse. This is work at a relatively ‘low’ level in the signifying chain. Other work is concerned with the way different codes are employed within any one work: Barthes’ S/Z works at this level. Others are concerned with the structuring effect of larger, or more inclusive, codes – the larger units of discourse: the novel, science-fiction, the confessional novel, even history itself, as a specific kind of ‘discourse’. Barthes has also developed a study of ‘modern myths’, as a meta-code based on the connotational power of signs. Whatever the level at which this analysis is conducted, the idea is that these discourses constitute (on an analogy with Saussure) the ‘social part’ of literary production: fundamentally, they are not within the
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keeping of an individual artist, any more than the individual speaker of a language can bring about linguistic change. They constitute an already formed ‘space’, a set of available discourses, which each individual writer situates himself in. He must to some degree ‘obey’ its structuring effect upon him. In this way, the discourses and codes ‘think themselves’ through the writer, as much, if not more, than the writer uses them to ‘think his way’ through his subject. Barthes has applied these notions of message/code, of signification and metalanguages to many modern cultural symbol-systems: the advertising image, the language of fashion, modern myths, Japanese ‘sign’ culture, and so on. From the many possible applications of the method to the study of signs, we choose two which refer more directly to literature. In Writing Degree Zero Barthes suggested that when a novelist sits down to write a novel, she is limited not only by the language she uses, but by the conventions, rules of expression, habits of thought, traditions of feeling – in short, by the discourse of the novel as a form. The novelist must situate herself in this ‘field’ before she can write at all. But since the structure and habits of any particular discourse express, reflect or reproduce to some extent the ideology of the society which lies behind it, every act of ‘writing’ also makes active an embedded ideology preserved within the form. The discourse of naturalism in the novel, for example, is not simply a literary genre: it represents a certain dominant mode of seeing, feeling and thinking the world. This suggests one possible line of development from this way of thinking of the questions about discourse and code: a revived interest in the whole discussion of genres – where genre is defined in terms of the structure of conventions and rules (a sort of deep structure) which produces a range of ‘surface variants’. But if the text is the production of meanings through the use of different codes, then the commentaries, readings, interpretations of the text lay new codes over those already employed. The ‘text’ (like Levi-Strauss’ myths) cannot be said to have one, single, unambiguous and finished meaning. New meanings are constantly produced on the meanings it itself produces. For this reason Barthes says that his commentary on Balzac, S/Z, is not merely an ‘analytical commentary’ but ‘belongs to a textual productivity’. Barthes’ notion that each reading of a text produces its own ‘text’ is close, in some ways, to Sartre’s position in What Is Literature? But where, for Sartre, each ‘reading’ requires the ‘reading subject’ to complete the meaning of the text, Barthes (like Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Levi-Strauss, Althusser and other ‘structuralists’) tersely dispenses with the notion of the phenomenal subject, and considers the text as ‘reading’ or ‘writing’ itself via its ‘authors’ (the bearers of its meanings). This preliminary mapping of the field introduces a range of articles dealing with separate aspects of the general problems raised above. Reading as an activity is considered first, as the most general but least-examined problem. Then follow two articles on major theorists, Lukacs and Goldmann, written by members of the Centre’s working group on Literature and Society. Helga Gallas’ article, translated by another member of the group, deals with a different aspect of Lukacs’ work, and is set in context by the translator’s preface. A discussion of the radical possibilities of genre analysis is included as a preliminary opening up of that field, and is followed by two case studies, one dealing with a recognised major work of literature, All’s Well that Ends Well, the other with a writer whose work is most widely known in the form of a single title, Love on the Dole. For both, however, it is argued that the writings offer significant examples of authors at work on the reformulation of their historical/literary problematic. The symposium ends with Stuart Laing’s bibliography of works in various areas of the field. Given the strongly-marked trend, noted above in the work of Barthes and others, it may be
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partisan to mention authorship of this introduction. Its genesis, however, involved contributions from the members of the Literature and Society group, a major organising of the material by Stuart Hall, and final tinkering by members of the editorial group of W.P.C.S. 4. We remain unsure whether its final form tends to support or deny the Barthesian hypothesis.
Notes 1 Althusser, L. For Marx, Essay ‘On the Young Marx’ footnote p. 67 Trans. B. Brewster Allen Lane, Penguin Press 1969. 2 For a more developed critical review of English Studies from an American point of view see The Politics of Literature, ed. Kamf and Lauter, Pantheon Press. 3 Cf: Wellek’s criticism of Leavis’ Revaluation, Scrutiny, March 1937, and Leavis’ reply to Wellek, ‘Literary Criticism and Philosophy’, in The Common Pursuit. 4 A knowledge of the book trade and of publishing has always formed a subsidiary part of literary history. The well informed critic or scholar has been able to pin-point the historical references to real persons and events in the text, or even to see how the text documents the ‘literature, life and thought’ of a period. One or two books of real theoretical distinction have, of course, emerged from this sort of work (there are some selective references in the bibliography, below: Ian Watt and L.C. Knights are examples.) 5 Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism 1957. 6 Raymond Williams ‘From Leavis to Goldmann’ New Left Review 67 (May/June 1971). 7 The following, very disparate, kinds of work may be taken as significant contributions to such a review, from very differing points of departure: e.g. the work of Raymond Williams and the critical review of The Long Revolution, first published in New Left Review, 9 & 10, by E.P. Thompson; the much-discussed article by Perry Anderson on ‘Components Of The National Culture’, in Student Power, ed. Cockburn and Blackburn; the essays collected by Robin Blackburn in Ideology And The Social Sciences: some of the new Penguin Education ‘Readers’, including Counter-Course and the series on economics. 8 Frye’s ‘The Social Context of Literary Criticism’ is reprinted in The Sociology of Literature & Drama, ed. Tom and Elizabeth Burns, Penguin Education Reader (1973): Leavis’ ‘Literature and Society’ and the related ‘Sociology and Literature’ are both in The Common Pursuit (1952). 9 Introduction to The Sociology Of Literature & Drama, op. cit. 10 Perry Anderson ‘Components of a National Culture’, in Student Power, ed. Cockburn and Blackburn, Penguin. 11 Culture & Society and The Long Revolution, but also Modern Tragedy and The English Novel. 12 Hoggart’s work, which is often, correctly, also identified as originating here, moves in a different direction: by extending the methods of ‘close reading’ of texts in the direction of ‘reading a culture’, and especially popular and working-class culture, where the ‘texts’ are, characteristically, not literary in the traditional sense. 13 All the formulations quoted in this paragraph are from The Long Revolution, Chatto & Windus, (1961). 14 The formulations in this paragraph are all from ‘From Leavis to Goldmann’, op.cit: reprinted as the Introduction to Goldmann’s Racine, Rivers Press, Cambridge (1972). 15 ‘In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out’. Marx, The Preface to the Critique of Political Economy. 16 The problem with the base/superstructure model has always been how far the base actually determines the form of the superstructure. Engels (and now Althusser) insisted that to postulate any too direct a determination by the base would be to oversimplify but that in the end (the last instance) it was the determining element. However, how one can conceive the last instance, or in Althusser’s sense, whether one can ever consider the base in isolation from everything else in a social formation, remains a problem. Adrian Mellor’s paper on Goldmann, in this issue, has a discussion of this question. See also Engel’s letter to J. Bloch in Marx and Engels: Selected Works, Moscow, 1951, p. 443 and Althusser: For Marx, Allen Lane, Penguin Press 1969.
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17 Cf: Althusser’s tantalisingly brief essay on ‘The “Piccolo Teatro” ’, in For Marx, two brief essays in the Appendix to Lenin & Philosophy And Other Essays: also Pierre Macherey, Pour Une Theorie De La Production Litteraire, Maspero, (1970). 18 Especially the essays in For Marx, Allen Lane, Penguin Press (1969). 19 Althusser, ‘On The Materialist Dialectic’ For Marx. 20 The formulations of Goldmann’s position are based, primarily, on The Hidden God, Human Sciences & Philosophy, ‘The Sociology of Literature’ in Intl. Journal of Social Science, vol. XIX No. 4 (1967) and ‘Genetic Structuralism In The Sociology of Literature’ in ed. Burns and Burns op.cit. 21 Very little of Adorno’s work on literature and music is as yet available in English: but see Prisms, Neville Spearman (1967), and ‘The Sociology of Art’ translated by Brian Trench, W.P.C.S.2. For a full and sympathetic account cf F. Jameson, Marxism and Form, Princeton U.P. 1970 Adorno’s essays on radio, television and popular music are also relevant here. 22 Cf: Marcuse’s One – Dimensional Man and Eros & Civilization: but also two essays in An Essay On Liberation, Allen Lane (1969); ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’, Negations (Allen Lane, 1968); and Counter-Revolution and Revolt, Allen Lane (1972). 23 This account of Sartre’s position derives mainly from The Problem Of Method, the Critique De La Raison Dialectique, Saint Genet and Idiot De La Famille, rather than from the more familiar What Is Literature? There is, of course, a strong link between the two phases in Sartre’s writing, but it is too complex to unravel here. 24 On Brecht, see Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic ed. and trans. John Willett, London 1964. 25 Cf: Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, New Left Books (1973), and the introductory essay by Stanley Mitchell. The formulation of Benjamin’s position is based, primarily, on Illuminations, and ‘The Author As Producer’, New Left Review 62 (July/August 1970). 26 Cf: the Benjamin fragment translated as ‘Paris – Capital of the 19th Century’ New Left Review No. 48 (Mar/April 1968). 27 Cf: the seminal essay, ‘The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction’, reprinted in Illuminations. 28 F. de Saussure, Course In General Linguistics, Peter Owen (1960). For an exposition of Saussure’s method as applied to semiotics, Cf: Barthes, Elements of Semiology, Cape (1967).
3
Reading literature as culture Andrew Tolson
Reading literature as culture This article is an attempt to sketch a theory and model of how to read. We all read books, newspapers, advertisements, and, in a more general sense, we may be said to ‘read’ cultural ‘signs’ like fashions, manners of behaviour, and social rules, which, like signposts, orientate our daily lives. A theory of reading is thus, in the first place, a theory of what we already know and take for granted. As students of culture, however, we are interested in how this daily acquaintance with the objects of our study can become ‘knowledge’, that is, how it is possible for us to transcend our personal readings, to put them in some kind of perspective, and to explain their characteristics. So, in the second place, we must understand how a description of what we already know can teach us something new. In this issue, we are specifically concerned with reading books, especially those which have been traditionally selected and preserved as the finest examples of creative literature. This area has particular significance for us, not only because of the intrinsic fascination of the texts, but also because, with the growth and development of literary criticism, we have at our disposal a multitude of ‘readings’. Literary criticism can itself be studied as a fairly well developed ‘field’, and in so far as it purports to produce ‘knowledge’, we can reflect upon the nature of this claim in relation to our second problem.
Ideological reading When we examine literary criticism in some detail, we are immediately struck by the tremendous range and diversity of its aspects. There seems to be an unlimited variety of possible approaches ranging from traditional forms of bibliographical scholarship, to practical criticism, and ‘avant garde’ applications of Existentialism, Marxism or Psychoanalysis. In recent years, literary critics themselves have reflected upon this situation as the ‘crisis in the humanities’, but have as yet been unable to suggest a more satisfactory state of affairs. For, divided into an ever expanding plurality of disciplines, they see any ‘solution’, any attempt to unify their readings into one ‘body of knowledge’, such as that proposed in Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism,1 simply as the expression of yet another individual’s personal interests. Furthermore, if we are interested in the problem of reading, we will also be impressed by the almost total silence of literary critics on this matter, a silence which is surprising in readers of such skill. Theories of literature are remarkably detailed in their accounts of the production of the text (the ‘creative process’), and in their analysis of linguistic structures (the ‘verbal icon’), but apart from occasional asides from psychoanalysts, like Lesser2 and
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Holland, or existentialists like Sartre, and with one notable exception, I.A. Richards,5 literary criticism lacks a theory of reading. We may, therefore, with some justification, raise the question as to whether the ‘crisis in the humanities’ and the absence of a theory reading (and thus, bearing in mind our second introductory question, the absence of a theory of knowledge) are somehow interconnected. A perspective of this state of affairs can be gained by considering, in general outline, the relatively recent historical development of literary criticism.* We can recognise in this development two dominant trends of argument concerned to justify, rather as ‘apologies for poetry’, the reading of literature as a university discipline. The first is the humanist argument. The humanist starts with a general social concern which is not merely specific to literature. Characteristically, this has taken the form of criticism, in ethical terms, of a growing cultural diversity and a corresponding decline of a ‘sense of value’ or ‘discrimination’. The commitment is to communal cultural ‘standards’ and against the ‘standardisation’ of the mass media.6 On this general basis, the further argument is made that reading literature in particular can combat this decline. Thus, Richards, in Practical Criticism and elsewhere, proposes the therapeutic value for communication, of the study of ‘misreadings’. ‘Rhetoric’, he argues, should be the study of misunderstanding and its remedies’, and should ‘measure our losses in communication’.7 The humanist has to demonstrate the distinctive value, for the community, of literature’s special communication. In developing this ‘theory of value’ two factors are emphasised; – the peculiar imaginative quality of artistic creativity and the particular aesthetic quality of poetic language. The first factor becomes a theory of the perception, or ‘sincerity’ of the author, which varies from a notion, developed by the early Richards,8 that experience is directly transmitted through psychological impulses from author to reader (allowing the reader to simply internalise the author’s perception of life), to a much more sophisticated theory, developed by Leavis and others,9 of communication as the shared re-creation of the cultural continuity of the collective wisdom of the past, (on the basis of the interplay between a specific author and the literary ‘tradition’). The second factor, the emphasis on poetic language, becomes a theory of the ‘potentialities’ of meaning offered by the dynamic interaction of elements of the linguistic structure of poetry. For the later Richards, this dynamic structure, located within the text itself, is found in the ‘interinanimation’ of words in metaphors10 Similar notions are developed by Empson as ‘ambiguity’11 and by Brooks as ‘paradox’.12 The language of poetry liberates ‘connotations’; that is, the meaning is not simply directly ‘referential’ (denoting objects or concepts), it creates, through a web of hints and suggestions, a total complex of internal modifications and cross-references. It is a synthetic pattern. The common factor in both these arguments is the lack of consideration given to the reader. The first emphasis on the author leads to simplistic theories of the transmission of experience which the reader passively receives,13 or to complex theories of ‘close reading’, in which, through a ‘technique for sincerity’, minds can meet in a ‘continuous analogical enactment’ by the reader of the author’s values.14 The second emphasis on language is more open, since in so far as the text merely opens up possibilities for the reader, he can be given a creative role. Some of Richards’ later work especially, seems to develop this focus upon the active reader.15 Essentially, however, the source of value located in the structure of the text reduces reading to a process of ‘contemplation’, or at best, ‘following-through’.16
*
4
See references for extended quotation and bibliography.
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Andrew Tolson
In so far as the humanist argument does take up the problem of reading, it is to refer the question to the external factors – the author’s experience, or the language of the text. In neither case is the reader made responsible for his own readings. The humanist ideology, which values the reading of the text as a ‘lived appropriation of the cultural tradition’, commits in its immediate concern a double-sided fallacy. Firstly, it idealises the values of that tradition and gives authoritative weight to the ‘wisdom’ of great authors. Secondly, it reifies the medium through which these values are conveyed; that is, the language of poetry is contemplated as a ‘thing’, containing within itself the dynamic principle which is the source of its value. The reader is subservient to, and encompassed by, a body of literature which assumes mythic status, rather like religious icons which both point beyond themselves to the Absolute and contain within themselves some vestige of magical power. The second established justification for reading literature is the ‘scientist’ argument. Here the emphasis is not so much upon the communication of personal value and experience, as an attempt to establish literary criticism as a ‘body of knowledge’ with principles and methods which lay claim to ‘scientificity’. There are two dominant forms of scientism. The first gives priority to a close and rigorous description of the language of the text; the second to a ‘totalising’ perspective, which ‘stands back’ from the text, establishing its relation to an overall ‘body of knowledge’. To some extent, the growth of precise methods of language description is a development of the humanist reification of poetic language. The focus on the poem as a ‘thing’, (with, in the classic practical criticism experiment, its authorship excised) and the extraordinarily detailed ‘dissection’ of poetry by Empson and Brooks, was developed into the American ‘new criticism’ of the ‘forties’ and ‘fifties’. Recently however, this method has been re-charged by the influence of descriptive linguistics and the development of a hyper-empiricist stylistics,17 which are no longer dependent upon humanist ideology for their justification, but seek a ‘value-free’ closely descriptive rendering of what is ‘there’. On the other hand, the ‘totalising’ perspective, of which the most influential exponent is Fyre, from the outset explicitly defines itself against humanist ‘public taste criticism’. Here, the question of scientificity for literary criticism is posed, not as the elaboration of textual complexity in close reading, but as the development of ‘a co-ordinating principle, a central hypothesis which . . . will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole’.18 In this context, Frye cites as an example the theory of evolution in biology. The test for a science is its ability to unify its data arond a ‘central hypothesis’. Both forms of scientism, also, lack consideration for the reader. From the point of view of stylisticians, such as Riffaterre,19 the reader is postulated as a hypothetical average system of responses to ‘stylistic devices’ located in the text. The notion of close reading ‘followingthrough’, becomes a stimulus-response model, not far removed from Richards’, which constructs a ‘reading competence’ of response categories, and in which creative expectations on the part of the reader are dismissed as distorting irrelevancies. The alternative emphasis on literature as a whole, self sufficient body of knowledge, looks for its co-ordinating principle in the structure of the texts themselves (in Frye’s case, the archetypal structures of myth). The reader, as critic, makes a ‘positive value-judgement’ – a judgement of tolerance, ‘catholicity’ – assuming beforehand the coherence of his data. ‘Reading’ therefore, as the foundation for knowledge, is no longer an individual activity of the ‘whole man’, rather, it strives towards an a-historical, ‘transcendental act of consciousness’. ‘The theorist of literature and the consumer of literature, are not the same at all, even when they co-exist in the same man’.20
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What interests us about scientism, is not that its claim to provide a break with ‘immediate reading’ are true, but on the contrary that the structure of its arguments is the same as that of humanism. The reader is again referred to factors (the ‘linguistic structure’, the ‘body of knowledge’) which are external. Though there is an attempt to ‘stand back’ and view the act of reading from an autonomous perspective, that perspective is only achieved by idealising literary texts as providing in themselves data for the elaboration of ‘reading competence’. Again, the reader is subservient to, and encompassed by, a body of literature which assumes mythic status. We can account for the absence of a theory of reading in literary criticism (and the absence of a central debate unifying its heterogenous approaches), by pointing to the ideological character of its foundation. Conceived, in the twenties and thirties as an educational crusade against declining cultural standards, it developed a programme centred upon the lived internalisation in the present ‘conjuncture’ of the values of the past. The reaction against this notion which has partly grown out of, and partly in contradiction with the humanist debate, preserves its ideological terms. ‘Scientism’ is not ‘science’, but the fallacy of positivism, which denies the constitutive relation of the experimenter to his or her objects, and preserves a method of naive induction, of ‘innocent’ description. Such a method is plainly inadequate for a ‘cultural’ reading of literature, since one of the basic premises of cultural study is that the analyst is part of the culture he or she describes, and thus that a science of culture can only proceed by incorporating this premise in its methodological foundation. To move beyond the simple reproduction of current ideology, we have to break with the literary-critical debate. Our own risk is to return the readers to their readings, and on this basis, understand the production of real knowledge.
The problem of knowledge in cultural studies Ideological heading, which seems to use the reading process in the service of some external, ideological goal, is inherently incapable of the kind of self consciousness necessary to the understanding of its own processes. The ideologist is so immersed in the immediate ‘lived situation’ of culture, his activity is so permeated by desires and dreams (for example, the desire for human community, the dream of the total science) that in his eagerness to build utopia he distorts both his cultural ‘tools’ (in this case, language) and his understanding of his own cultural activity, (in this case, reading). If we are, therefore, to attempt a valid description of the reading process, we must have attained the necessary ‘self-reflexivity’, or ability to place ourselves within the culture we describe, which is the foundation for any study of our own daily lives. Briefly, then, we have to recognise that knowledge of our own daily lives tends to be distorted by ideological motivations which arise from our lived situations themselves. In this tendency, we project our needs or wishes as external necessities, which imperatively direct our activities. Thus, as we have seen, the scientistic search for a value-free ‘objectivity’ becomes for the positivist an absolute determining goal to which all other considerations are subservient. How can we avoid the fallacies of humanism and scientism in the reading of literature; fallacies which we understand as the ideological projections of the immediate concerns of certain skilled readers, and which cause these readers to deny theoretically the validity, even the existence, of their own readings? The answer is that we must effect an ‘epistemological break’ with ideology before a truly critical reading is possible.21
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The production of knowledge is an activity with its roots in people’s daily lives. It is a form of labour, the transformation of a set of ‘raw materials’ (certain facts, ideas, etc.), via certain ‘means of production’ (usually language), into a ‘product’, (a new work). That product enters the cultural life of the society as the ‘objectification’ of a ‘theoretical practice’ and may serve as the raw material for future theoretical practice. Various factors, however, serve to complicate this picture. Firstly, though the work may be the production of one person, because that person is a member of groups, a class, a society, the work may objectify the interests of many individuals. In so far as the work ‘signifies’ human activity, it is subject to human conflicts and concerns. Authors may see their objectification stolen, neutralised or turned against them by others. The sum total of these various ‘projects’ constitutes the ever-expanding ‘totalisation’ of the work’s ideological meaning, as it is read, by many individuals with many existential interests. Secondly, however, the work of the individual author has, simultaneously, another reality, relatively autonomous to immediate ideological signification. This is a reality conferred upon the work by its medium – language – of which there are two main elements. The first element is the resistance to the ‘pure’ freedom of the individual creator necessitated by the formal constraints of language structure, the system of shared conventions, the ‘langue’, which makes communication possible. The second element is a feature of the historical character of language, that the words the author chooses will have semantic references and connotations which go beyond the immediate situation. Some of these meanings may be hidden, or even absent, but if this is the case, they are part of the ‘discourse’ by virtue of their absence. All authors whether or not they choose to be conscious of the historical relations, are thus part of a discursive ‘tradition’. Together, the work’s relations to ‘langue’ and to ‘discourse’ are its ‘problematic’. The problematic is the ‘structural-historical’ meaning of the text which may be ‘placed’ within a cultural framework. This ability to ‘place’ the work calls for a particular kind of reading; the mere existence of the problematic does not in itself produce knowledge. One essential factor in this reading is self-consciousness, involving the ability of readers themselves to ‘place’ their own readings within the cultural ‘totality’ that includes the problematic of the text. This is made possible for individual readers (even those who are part of the groups, classes and societies of particular authors and thus share similar ideologies) because the work, as a problematic, is no longer free imagination but is a cultural objectification. However, not all self-consciousness breaks with ideology. Members of a group, for example, may begin to understand their thoughts as ‘group thoughts’ – an understanding which constitutes some transcendence of individual perspectives – and yet remain within an immediate re-affirmation of the group identification. For a fascist or racist reader the work simply flatters a self-enclosed system of beliefs, and the ‘problematic’ is ‘reified’ as a group object. Thus, there is a second requirement for the ‘epistemological break’ with ideology. The self-conscious reading of the problematic must be historical. In this case the problematic is simultaneously recognised as the objectification of the group, and rejected as having been surpassed. Of course, it is possible, as with scientism, for that rejection to take an ideological form, but it is also possible, if the group firstly has lived out a process of internalisation prior to the break, for the process of historical surpassing itself to be a conscious feature of selfreflexive rejection. For example, philosophers may in their old age reject the theories of their youth, but recognising that they were once their objectifications, simultaneously question
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themselves as to their surpassing. Or, the group, in reforming the institutional objects of the past to meet new situations, may reflect upon the historical processes of change involved. At the end of this essay, I hope to demonstrate this process of cultural self-consciousness with relation to a reading of Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte; a work central to our own culture (in particular concerning the novel and the social aspirations of women), but in which, I would argue, we can now see those aspirations taking a historical form, and thus, in part, in the process of being surpassed. This illustrates the common adage, that without literacy there can be no knowledge of history, because there can be no historical reading. We can understand the production of knowledge, therefore, as a self-reflexive grasp of prior conditions from a perspective which is not only immediate, but also retrospective.22 That is, because the problematic of a theoretical practice is not only an ideological signification lived and read in the present, but also a historical objectification preserving the past for the present, it can serve as a pointer to the relations between the past and the present which constitute the cultural relations of society. These relations are revealed by a double movement, which is both regressive and progressive. The regressive movement reveals the totality of past relations from individual lives, through many mediations, to the most general social, economic and geographical conditions. The progressive movement attempts a synthetic reconstruction of those conditions as an attempt to correctly predict the future, which is the test for any science. Wuthering Heights may be regressively understood through the biography of Emily Bronte herself, a study of her immediate locality, family and social group (her role as a woman in that group, the group’s religious ideology, etc), opening out as an analysis of class, and the economic and social relations between classes. Something may be thus revealed concerning the book’s character as a protest, not only to an immediate situation, but also to more general problems (for example, the conflict, internalised by some middle class women, between the ideological values of domesticity and education), which in many respects pertain today. We do not here deny that history changes. Rather, we affirm that we change history, often blindly, it is true, (making predictions highly uncertain), but self-reflexively, little by little, to the degree that we understand our own past, and thus attain a ‘relatively autonomous perspective’ upon the present. Neither can we deny that at the same time as making this ‘epistemological break’ with ideology, we live out the break ideologically. There is no simple transition to science; knowledge is a long battle with experience. But only thus can we understand the significance of our cultural readings and the foundations of cultural study.
The reading process How, then, can the reading process be described? We are now in a position to understand this description as a systematic retracing of the cultural relations expressed in the immediate encounter of the reader with the text, and a corresponding attempt to synthetically reconstruct this analysis as the future foundation for the study of cultural activities. In the first, regressive analysis we have two major tasks, to describe the individual psychology of readers, their ‘reading competence’, and to describe the social relations of communication starting from the existential encounter with the text. In both cases, our analysis takes the metaphorical form of specifying levels which interact to form wholes; lower levels are progressively synthesised to form higher levels. In the second progressive movement, we can return to our present concern, and suggest how a cultural reading of literature can produce real knowledge.
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(1) The reader The reader brings to the text a number of psychological and linguistic mechanisms which can be described. At the lower levels of analysis, these features can be analysed separately, but as we move to higher levels we begin to deal with ‘psycholinguistic’ structures. Thus, a reader’s ‘reading competence’ is firstly a psycholinguistic competence. Despite the somewhat scanty and diffuse research in this field23 we can begin to sketch the outlines. (a) Perceptual strategy The analysis begins with an account of perceptual strategy, a field of cognitive psychology.24 This is firstly a description of processes of perception which centres on the problem of constructing ‘visual figures’ from discrete elements, and secondly, an attempt to isolate the immediate visual units, such as letters, word shape, established by these processes. There cannot however, be an autonomous description of perceptual strategy, because both the temporal processes and the spatial units occur simultaneously, as an undifferentiated activity. Differentiation can only be made in retrospect from the point of view of a higher level of reading competence. A description of the perceptual processes of reading must take into account the essential factor of the speed of reading.25 The adult may scan at least six hundred words per minute in silent reading, which (given an arbitrary average of, say, five phonemes per word) would require a rate of fifty phonemes per second if each phoneme were processed sequentially. As psychologists are agreed that a formation time of at least 0.3 seconds is required to completely process an input into clear perception, such a rate of one phoneme per 0.02 average seconds is plainly impossible. It follows that individual phonemes are not processed sequentially, but in terms of higher order units. In view of this it is likely that perceptual strategy is not a unitary process, but is differentiated (the sensory movement of the eye is not directly tied to processing systems) and selective (words are not perceived as units of letters, but certain significant letters are selected as cues, and predictions are made on the basis of incomplete data; word shape, word length, contextual patterning, etc.) Reading, thus, exploits the high degree of redundancy and irrelevancy in written language, not all aspects of the text are of equal importance. A model for perceptual strategy is an attempt to systematise this differentiation and process of selection. In particular, three levels can be postulated26 a sensory input (scanning) system, a cue storage system and an internal response system. At all levels essential data is being sifted from non-essential data by ‘organisational’ procedures. Between the scanning and storage systems is an organisational procedure which synthesises diverse visual sensations, and between the storage and response systems a further selection procedure identifies significant long-term response material. One way in which this may be done is the automatic recognition of grammatically significant material, such as the head word of a nominal group or the main verb of a sentence.27 (b) Sound-letter patterns One criterion for selection in making a reading response is the sound pattern of language, and this has been the focus for a great deal of pedagogic discussion regarding the child’s transfer from oral to visual language behaviour on learning to read. The relative regularity of phoneme- (individual sounds) – grapheme (individual letters) correspondences has been demonstrated at the higher morphophonemic level,28 which suggests the importance of ‘phonic blending ability’ (the ability to synthesise separate phonemes). It is suggested that
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units, similar to the traditional syllable, and variously described as the ‘vocalic-centre group’29 or the ‘linguon’,30 form morphophonemic systems, intermediate to short-term perception and long-term response. This is the level of ‘lexical representation’,31 the movement at which visual sensory input is meaningfully perceived as the ‘lexical term’, a part of verbal structure. (c) Cognitive processes The integration of perception with response, and the passing over into long-term memory, requires, however, further selection. Even as abstract ‘lexical items’ the reader would not have time to process individual units. Accordingly, selection must be made on the basis of cognitive expectations, and reading must be seen as an active process of hypothesis testing and decision-making – ‘a psycholinguistic guessing game’.32 At this level, graphic input serves as the data for syntactic and semantic contextual predictions, which utilise the reader’s knowledge of sentence structure and narrative form. If the prediction is wrong, the readers are held up, and must not only question the text, but also their own strategies. Their ‘working systems’ are challenged, and to the degree that they are an expression of a fundamental orientation to the world through language, readers are continually threatened by the act of reading. (d) Affective factors As we move into the region of long-term memory and expectation, we begin to approach a crucial problem, that the psycholinguistic system we have built up is no longer sufficient to describe the activity of reading. The break occurs somewhere between the ‘semantic’ and ‘affective’ levels. A categorisation of word meanings available to readers, after the manner for example, of Katz and Fodor33 only goes so far (and not very far) in accounting for their ‘reading competence’. For insofar as reading is a ‘goal-directed’ activity, which points beyond itself to a meaning in the world, it involves the whole personality of the reader. A great deal of psycholinguistic research has adopted the framework of transformational grammar. This is inadequate for understanding these problems, because the attempt to describe the structures of the mind on the basis of the structures of language cannot comprehend the expectations which the individual brings to language from outside. In so far as transformational grammar makes these claims it is guilty of the positivism which we observed in Riffaterre. We have an idealisation of psycholinguistic structures as ‘innate ideas’, and a reification of the linguistic medium as a system of deep and surface structures.34 An alternative to this is the theory of language developed by the tradition of ‘genetic epistemology’, especially by Piaget35 and Vygotsky.36 Here language is understood as one part of a total process of ‘symbolic differentiation’ (which includes play activity and techniques of experimentation). This genetic development of language is part of the child’s whole socio-historical experience. Language is a tool, which the child learns to use, to tackle the problems he encounters in his daily life, and the foundation of the theory is sociolinguistic, arising from Piaget’s observation of linguistic behaviour in the social environment of the kindergarten. Thus as our analysis moves up the psycholinguistic scale, from the immediate perception of letters and words, to the long term formulation of systems and structures, we approach the moment at which this behaviour becomes meaningful and enters our cultural life. The foundation of reading as a sociolinguistic activity is the existential encounter of the
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subject with the text. We can no longer be satisfied with an external, psycholinguistic description of reading, which treats the reader as the object for experimental tests. On the contrary, because we recognise the reader’s freedom to go beyond mechanical perception, and to structure that perception according to socio-cultural values, we recognise that he is a privileged object – the object which we are. To reduce that privilege to positivistic dimensions is the fallacy of scientism. (2) Communication An existential analysis is made from the inside as our self-conscious description of ourselves. It is primarily an immediate recognition of two factors. Firstly, we can reflect that our activity has become conscious and that it is possible for us to speak of ‘motivation’ and ‘ends and means’. Secondly, we recognise other people, for in so far as the text itself expresses consciousness, it is the signification of the author. Because we perceive ourselves, therefore we also perceive others, and we have the moment of communication.37 (a) Writers In their books writers create words for themselves. Having initially perceived the external as ‘not theirs’ (the differentiated subject/object perspective which is the basis of consciousness of self), they have attempted to internalise these worlds, to make them essentially their own objectifications. Thus they have approached the external as raw material to be transformed. In so far however, as these projects are successful, the world, (as it was, external to the subject) is surpassed in the act of producing new worlds, and together with this surpassing arises a natural tendency for writers to subjectively idealise their creative activity (or ‘praxis’) as an end in itself. Accordingly the objective criterion is lost in the act of transcendence. So writers need new objectivity; they need readers who will re-establish their private worlds as their objectifications. (b) Readers Readers complete the projects of writers. Conversely however, these projects, objectified in books, do not confront readers simply as random objects, but as objects which signify human consciousness, and thus direct them. This is not to say that readers do not also create, according to their own expectations and ends, but rather that their creation is a peculiar kind of ‘directed creation’ – which, at the same time as it goes beyond the object, also preserves it as an irreducible human signification.38 (c) Communication Thus the act of communication, described from within, is an act of human commitment. It is not what one reads that is important, it is the fact that as one reads, one realises a value, a ‘perceptually renewed choice to believe’. Reading is an ‘exercise in generosity’; an activity which is a giving and taking of freedom, and may be subjectively seen as valuable in itself as an expression of community. Aesthetic joy might be understood in this way as the identity of reciprocal freedom, a feeling which arises in the subjective reader of feeling essential to an essential object. The pleasure of reading may be seen as a utopian vision of communal harmony.
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However, though inter-personal communion is undoubtedly an important feature of reading and indeed, the very centre of our social existence, it is not as idealists would have it, an end in itself. It has, of course, long been fashionable to hold this view, by which the act of reading becomes a kind of ‘pure praxis’, like lovemaking, a harmonious release of form and content, body and soul without repression or constraint. Thus Romantics argue for the ‘communion of souls’, and Freudians for ‘substitute gratification’. Such arguments, however, not only deny the reality of reading, they also deny the reality of literature. For literature, even when it seems to focus upon the means for their own sake, provides an historical and formal perspective upon the immediate situation – a kind of ‘problematic’. And it is through the ‘problematic’, which refers to external values and traditional norms, that the reader is able to ‘place’ the work from a ‘relatively autonomous perspective’. To reduce that perspective to an immediate communion with the past is the fallacy of humanism. (3) Reading culture Reading literature as culture therefore, is not reading only to exercise psycholinguistic structures, nor even to participate in the affirmation of human community. It is both these and more; being a total activity which goes beyond these conditions and thus reveals them in retrospect. It is simultaneously a progressive activity with a regressive self reflexivity. For example, a reading of Wuthering Heights will be more than a series of syntactic predictions, as a psycholinguistic ‘guessing game’. It will be, in addition, a recognition of the importance of certain formal features of the text. We will compare this novel to other novels, (for example, as to the use of the retrospective narrator, Nelly Dean, which is an unusual feature of the genre), we will become conscious of the novel’s own dialectical structure, (the antithesis of the two houses, the conflict between Heathcliff and Linton, and the problematical search for a resolution in the marriage of Hareton Earnshaw to the younger Cathy), and we will focus upon aspects of the novel’s style (the use of symbolic motifs – windows, coffins, fires, storms – and the general tight, clinical quality of the language). These mediations in our reading of the genre, structure and style are resistances presented by the text to the immediate interiorisation of its ‘meaning’. We are encouraged, through them, to question the unique aspects of this novel which have modified our reading expectations, and thus construct, for the novel, a formal ‘problematic’, in which we explore their interrelations. Furthermore, our reading will be more than a cathartic release of tension, important though this may be. It will be, in addition, a recognition of the particular ‘structure of feeling’ and thus the historical importance of certain features of discourse, or interrelation of cultural values and characteristic responses in the text. We will be impressed by the parochial vision of the work, (in which the action seldom moves from the local situation) and the extraordinarily detailed description of immediate environment (the moors, the interiors of houses), we will encounter the strangeness of the characters, (particularly the men, Heathcliff, Linton, Hindley, Hareton, even Joseph – all are extremes of one sort or another), and we will be impressed by the importance of certain themes (the supernatural, death, sexuality) which give the novel its Romantic, even Gothic atmosphere. These aspects of the ‘structure of feeling’ point of view, character, portrayal, themes, are historical mediations on our reading. We confront the novel as a historical text – (the parochial point of view is impossible in an age of mass communication, the strange portrayal of male sexuality is impossible in a co-educational, ‘permissive’ society etc.). On this basis we are
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encouraged to construct for the novel its ‘discourse’ in which we explore the interrelation of its historical ‘mediations’. In these respects, our reading of Wuthering Heights is a regressive analysis of its totality, both as a linguistic system and as a historical signification. In both cases we are referred outside the text itself, in determining the originality of the novel’s form in relation to alternative means of expression, uses of language etc., and in determining the uniqueness of its discourse in relation to alternative forms of discourse. It is therefore necessary to locate the novelist precisely to her family situation, locality, group and class as both form and discourse are specified historically. Our analysis of Wuthering Heights refers to the life of Emily Bronte herself, understands that particular lower-middle class family in relation to other similar families, analyses the lower-middle-class family as a social structure (its economic ‘level’; its, in this case, conservative politics; its, in this case, low-church Anglicanism; its cultural and education milieu; etc). Only in this detail can we account for the total, dramatic and aesthetic, tragic vision of Wuthering Heights – the extremes of conflict in both its form and discourse – and avoid simply caricaturing the novel as an expression of the parochial Romanticism of lower middle class women. Emily Bronte was able to ambiguously transcend her situation, and only by understanding what was unique about her can we do justice to her novel. Thus we are not simply interested in Wuthering Heights as a ‘document’ of the period, and we do not seek simply to reduce the novel’s special qualities. Wuthering Heights identifies, in the choice made by Cathy between Heathcliffe and Linton, (between, we might say, elemental passion and social affection) a pivotal existential dilemma. The novel’s strength is that this dilemma is elaborated as a total myth or ‘world vision’; the parochial atmosphere of the work portrays the world of the novel as the only possible world, and Cathy’s dilemma as universal. It is apparent that the mediations of the novel are rooted in Cathy’s choice. The structural antithesis of the two houses (the natural chaos of the Heights, the social order of the Grange), the various formal motifs (the window as mediation between the inner domestic world and the outer ‘beyond’, the juxtaposition of the bed and the coffin suggesting dream-fantasy as mediation between the ‘here’ life (sexual conflict) and the ‘there’ (death/sexual consummation), and the ideological themes of the novel (the choice confronts the woman as a choice between types of men, and as an absolute choice between the social and natural which cannot be satisfactorily resolved) – all these aspects totalise Cathy’s dilemma and give the novel its problematic unity as a utopian critique of social experience. In Emily Bronte’s world romantic love and social marriage are irreconcilable. The ghost of Heathcliffe haunts even the attempt at a final resolution in Hareton’s marriage to the younger Cathy, and there is no way of passing beyond the conflict between social alienation (the desire for escape) and emotional fulfilment. However, our reading is not only regressively analytical, it is also a progressive reconstitution of the present, and thus refers, not simply to the novel and its history, but also to ourselves. In so far as our reading has as its centre the reciprocal process of ‘directed creation’, we are interested in the critique of our own reading which our analysis can give, for in so far as we clarify from a ‘relatively autonomous perspective’, the structure and history of the text itself, we also clarify our own historical situation as contemporary readers. The novel itself, somewhat fortuitously, explicitly encourages us to make this critique, for its world vision is narrated by Nelly Dean in retrospect, with an in-built historical perspective. This is not to say that the narrator can be trusted, but that the connections between past and present which mediate Nelly Dean’s story make us aware of our mistrust, and thus of our relations to her and to the world of the novel. Raymond Williams suggests that
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39
Wuthering Heights can ‘teach a new feeling’. The point is not that the book itself teaches us anything, but that it encourages us to make an analysis which teaches us about ourselves. Wuthering Heights has been selected for us as one of the supreme examples of nineteenth century fiction, even by socialist critics like Williams. Undoubtedly different contemporary readers find different values in the novel, from its ‘intrinsic excellence’ to the fascination of its setting and the romance of its plot. Again, we cannot simply reduce the novel to one contemporary meaning. On the contrary, as we begin to understand the particular history of the novel, we can begin to understand the history of particular responses to it, as ‘escape’, ‘criticism of life’, or whatever. We then begin to comprehend the wider patterns of our culture to which our reading of the novel refers, we see ourselves as historical readers, and we ‘totalise’ our readings. This immediate reading of this particular novel is thus ‘placed’ as the existential foundation for an act of knowledge which goes beyond the present and constitutes the future. For as we begin to break with the individual, ideological situation, we begin to create a history for ourselves, based on knowledge of ourselves.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, 1957. Simon O. Lesser, Fiction and the Unconscious, New York, 1957. Norman Holland, Dynamics of Literary Response (New York, 1968). J-P Sartre, What is Literature? London, 1950. I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, New York, 1936. I.A. Richards, Speculative Instruments, London, 1955. ‘Radio, T.V. and the screen propagate most successfully the most superficial the most facile, and the least educating elements of a culture . . . in every culture it has been the things which received the most lasting and recurrent attention – the books re-read again and again, the stories and sayings known and familiar from infancy to old age, the rites repeated throughout a lifetime, the perennial monuments, the enduring ideas the constant aesthetic institutions – which have done the most part of the work of the humanities. Mass media at present replace such continuous shaping forces by an incessantly shifting play of light and confusing impacts. It is not surprising that they are of little help in seeing life steadily and seeing it whole.’ (p. 62) I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric pp. 3–4. I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, London, 1924 ch. 7. F.R. Leavis, Education and the University, London, 1948. I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric. W. Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, London, 1961 (paperback edn.). Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, London, 1968, (paperback edn.). I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, ch. 21. F.R. Leavis, English Literature in Our Time and the University, London 1969 p. 15 I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, pp. 124–5. cf. Brooks, ‘The poem communicates so much and communicates it so richly and with such delicate qualifications that the thing communicated is mauled and distorted if we attempt to convey it by any vehicle less subtle than the poem itself.’ op. cit. p. 58. cf. J.H. Sinclair, ‘Taking a poem to pieces’, in R. Fowler, ed. Essays in Style and Language: Linguistic and Critical Approaches to Literary Style (London, 1966). Northrop Frye, ‘Polemical Introduction’, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 15–16. Michael Riffaterre, ‘Criteria for Style Analysis’, in S. Chatman and S.R. Levin, eds. Essays on the Language of Literature, Boston 1967, pp. 412–30. ‘Our problem is to transform a fundamentally subjective reaction to style into an objective analytic tool to find the constant (encoded potentialities) beneath the variety of judgements, in short to transform value judgements into judgements of existence’. (p. 149) Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 20. See Louis Althusser, For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, London 1969. ‘In fact Marx established
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23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32
33 34
35 36
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Andrew Tolson a new problematic, a new systematic way of asking questions of the world, new principles and a new method. This discovery is immediately contained in the theory of historical materialism, in which Marx did not only propose a new theory of the history of societies, but at the same time implicitly, but necessarily, a new ‘philosophy’, infinite in its implications . . . In a word, Marx substituted for the ‘ideological’ and universal concept of Feuerbachian ‘practice’ a concrete conception of the specific differences that enables us to situate each particular practice in the specific differences of the social structure.’ (p. 229) See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Problem of Method, translated by Hazel E. Barnes, London, 1963. ‘Knowing is simply the dialectical movement which explains the act by its terminal signification in terms of its starting conditions . . . The movement of comprehension is simultaneously progressive (toward the objective result) and regressive (I go back toward the original condition). (pp. 153–4). See Goodman, Kenneth, ed. The Psycholinguistic Nature of the Reading Process, Detroit, 1968; Levin, Harry & Williams, Joanna P., eds. Basic Studies in Reading, New York, 1970; Singer, Harry & Ruddell, Robert, eds., Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, Newark, Del, 1969. See Neisser, Ulric, Cognitive Psychology, New York, 1967, especially chapters 5 and 10. Paul A. Kolers, ‘Reading a temporally and spatially transformed text’ in Goodman, op. cit. pp. 27–48. John J. Geyer, ‘Models of perceptual processes in reading’ in Singer, Ruddell, op.cit., pp. 47–94. Julian Hochberg, ‘Components of literacy: Speculations and exploratory research’ in Levin, Williams, op.cit. Hochberg calls such automatic recognition of visual cues ‘peripheral search guidance’ or ‘PSG’. See C.C. Fries, Linguistics and Reading, New York, 1963. Robert B. Ruddell, ‘Psycholinguistic implications for a systems of communication model’ in Singer, Ruddell, op.cit. pp. 239–58. David W. Reed, ‘Linguistic forms and the process of reading’ in Levin, Williams, op.cit. and ‘A theory of language, speech and writing’, in Singer, Ruddell, op.cit. pp. 219–38. Noam Chomsky, ‘Phonology and reading’, in Levin, Williams, op.cit. Kenneth S. Goodman, ‘Reading: a psycholinguistic guessing game’, in Singer, Ruddell, op.cit. pp. 259–71. ‘Reading is a selective process. It involves partial use of available language cues selected from perceptual input on the basis of the reader’s expectation. As this partial information is processed, tentative decisions are made to be confirmed rejected or refined as reading progresses’. (p. 260) J. Katz & J. Fodor, ‘The structure of a semantic theory’ in Katz and Fodor, eds. The Structure of Language: Readings in the Philosophy of Language, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1964. Noam Chomsky: Language and Mind, New York, 1968. Chomsky’s tentative hypothesis that syntactic structure is psycholinguistically reflected in mental structure is methodologically unsound, since it involves reducing those psycholinguistic mechanics concerned with the perception of language (e.g. in the process of acquiring language) to the structure of language itself. That is to say, Chomsky works from the ‘answer’ to the ‘questions’, from the ‘given facts’ of syntactic structure to a description of how that structure is perceived. This procedure is reflected in the nature of ‘the facts’ themselves – highly formal examples of ambiguity and anomaly – which support rather than test his theory of deep and surface psycholinguistic structures. Chomsky thus falls into the ideological trap of the ‘behaviourists’ he criticises. He fails to treat his data (syntactic structures) critically (in relation to its problematic); rather, he generalises from one set of problems to another. Piaget, Jean, The Language and Thoughts of the Child, London, 1959 (3rd edn), and Six Psychological Studies, London, 1968. Vygotsky, L.S., Thought and Language, Cambridge, Mass, 1962. Genetic epistemology avoids the fallacies of transformational psycholinguistics because it studies the perception of language in the context of the perception of other experience. The linguistic text is not given privileged status, and so it cannot be argued that the structures of the text are the structures of the mind. The confrontation of the two (language and mind) is a social encounter which the child makes in acquiring language. See Sartre, Jean-Paul, What is Literature? London, 1967 (paperback edn), especially chapter 2: ‘Reading seems, in fact, to be the synthesis of perception and creation. It supposes the essentiality of both the subject and the object. The object is essential because it is strictly transcendent, because it imposes its own structures, and because one must wait for it and observe it; but the subject is also
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essential because it is required not only to disclose the object (that is, to make it possible for there to be an object) but also so that this object might exist absolutely (that is, to produce it) . . . The reader must invent . . . in a continual exceeding of the written thing. To be sure, the author guides him, but all he does is guide him. The landmarks he sets up are separated by the void. The reader must unite them; he must go beyond them. In short, reading is directed creation’. (pp. 30–1). 38 Williams, Raymond: The Long Revolution, London, Penguin, 1965, chapter 2. ‘. . . here most distinctly, the changing organisation is enacted in the organism; the new generation responds in its own ways to the unique world it is inheriting, taking up many continuities, that can be traced, and reproducing many aspects of the organisation, which can be separately described, yet feeling its whole life in certain ways differently, and shaping its creative response into a new structure of feeling’ (p. 65). 39 Ibid., pp. 75–6, 85–6.
4
Notes on a theory of genre Alf Louvre
The problem From messianic theatrical liberators through to sober reflexive Marxists, the aestheticians of the left, with a few prominent exceptions, have consistently failed to develop a theory that adequately and consistently describes the relations between imaginative form and its social determinants. (1) Marxist critics (Goldmann is a particularly able exponent) are interested primarily in the world-view implicit in the art-work, rather than in how its form affects the communication and reception of that view. There is no realisation that what the artist says – and how it is received – must always be influenced by the cultural context. To take the example of ‘realism’ – there are barriers between the perception and the communication of ‘reality’, and the mode the artist chooses for his communication is potentially the biggest barrier of all (the most concrete expression of his cultural context). The ‘realist’ cannot simply escape this, cannot be a special exception, and so far as that is the explanation offered for his position, it points to a failure in the theory’s description of the norm. Lukacs, to put this another way, is aware of the constrictions of the naturalistic or the modernistic forms of the novel, but not at all of the constrictions of the novel-form as such: the theory of realism, failing to confront these, is a plea not an explanation. (2) Theatrical liberators like Baxandall, Poirier and Sontag1 attempt to destroy the distinctions maintained by the traditional culture – that between art as a special activity and other social activity; between the theatre (or the novel) as a special place and other places in the community; between the artist as a gifted performer and the audience as passive spectators; between consciousness and action, politics and play. But their argument – art defined as a special displaced, professional discipline is reactionary; art understood as the negation of these qualities must be revolutionary – describes necessary rather than sufficient conditions. Between ‘revolutionary’ and ‘revolution’, indeed between all the categories they seek to unite, come all sorts of mediations that cannot be rhetorically asserted away. To put this another way, one does not solve the problem of the relations between imaginative form and social determinations by simply collapsing the terms together, by saying the imagination and the forms it invents, once free from its by now traditional alienation, is implicitly social, and indeed determines society (which in turn is understood as our collective imagination). What is involved in that ‘once free’, just how much freedom the imaginative form has in relation to its social context, how far formal innovations can influence social innovation are precisely the questions at issue, and once again these theorists plead a case rather than explain the problems whose solution their case presupposes. (3) To a large, and fatal, extent these radical aesthetics reflect the traditional attitudes to
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form and genre (terms we temporarily group together here for convenience). On one hand the established criticism understands genre as a means of making technical distinctions between objects in a set field on the basis of formal constitution – so ‘drama’, ‘poetry’, ‘the novel’ etc. (an approach that is prominent, even in negation, in the liberators’ position). On the other hand, in cultural criticism, and in relation to the popular arts, there is an approach that stresses genre as a product determined by extra-technical, extra-formal considerations – so, ‘thriller’, ‘musical’, ‘romance’ and ‘pop’ are seen as market commodities (just as in Lukacs and Gorky, certain artistic forms are seen as directly determined by the social milieu). Common to both versions of the traditional and both versions of the radical approach is the fixed nature of the relations posited between imaginative form and social determination. Formalists and liberators share a belief in the autonomy of the imaginative form; reflexive Marxists and conventional cultural sociologists a belief in the determining force of socio-economic structures and their supportive philosophies (except in a few rare cases where the Great Realist resists the flood). (4) There is a space between theories of the autonomy of form and theories of its absolute determination, between theories that make the artist central and her or his work normal, and those that make him marginal and his work special – a space where the problematic nature of the relation between the imagination and social determination is asserted. I shall claim that the relation between these is a version of that described by the Marxist model of base (means of production) and superstructure (culture, law, morality etc.), but that it is a distortion to relate forms back directly to social production as a whole, just as it is to suggest that artistic forms can themselves direct those forces. Developing the clue contained in all the radical and the traditional critiques – that there is a direct relation between how one sees the relation between imagination and social determination and how one defines genre – I aim to sketch a theory of genre that will define the relative autonomy of the art-work and its special determinations, a theory, in other words, that will allow the problematic nature of that relation. As such I confront three closely-connected tasks: (1) a definition of the term that reorients it, allowing it to cross barriers between arbitrary formal classifications, and that shows no inherent necessity for genre to be reducible to commodity or ‘inevitable expression’; (2) to describe the historical sequence of the formation of particular genres, what their genesis is and how they relate to the culture as a whole; (3) to understand the possibilities and the limitations of radical generic innovation.
The model (5) First, we can describe the role we assign to genre by reference to the planes of traditional criticism, which are: at one extreme (horizontal, sociological): art as production in a conventional sense, the sociological study of the totality of output from theatre, publisher and film-producer, the means of distribution, who owns the outlets, who selects the goods, the composition of the consumers, who and what they are, and what value they attribute to the product. Relations between institutions at all these stages, and between them and other social factors (like technology, class, patterns of work and leisure), the other (vertical, formalistic): the speciality of artistic production, what influences the particular creation and reception of a single artifact or experience, what are the internal determinants of a production, the immanent possibilities of form. In this context genre can be inserted as the essential mediating term between those two planes: as a means of measurement, a guide to what the popular, and I would say, socially significant art is; as the effective ‘raw material’ received by the artist, the
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socially-agreed definition of his product, the way he experiences most directly the social determination, and thus the basis of any radical response; because (lastly) changes in the genre, redefinitions of form, imply the relocation of the audience and thus lead back to external sociological changes. Contemporary Black dramatists, for example, understand that the internal innovations in the plays’ forms will make it impossible to perform them in conventional theatre and will necessitate getting an audience on the street, which in its turn will mean alterations in the leisure habits of the community, and so on.2 Reciprocally, changes in exterior sociological formations will have their influence on form (see Ian Watt on the novel, Benjamin and Brecht on the cinema, and Helga Gallas’ article in this journal). (6) In this description there is embedded a more theoretical account of the function of the genre, and in attempting to articulate this we are led beyond the conventional approaches and indeed beyond the majority of the approaches from the left to a radical-Marxist formulation whose ideas it is now relevant to take up. I have in mind in particular the work of those ‘prominent exceptions’, Brecht, Benjamin and more lately, Enzensberger.3 These writers do recognise how far generic responses to the form of the work (or production) condition and contain responses to its content (or its ‘realism’), but they do so without moving from that recognition to a pure formalism. The central element in the theories of these men, in emphasising which they avoid both the fixed positions we have criticised, is on the lived relation between the producer and consumer of the art-work. Studying that, they develop psychologies of aesthetic involvement (built on such distinctions as empathy/alienation, absorption/distraction, emotion/intellect and worship/use). And eventually, genres come to be defined in terms of the relations they imply between the audience and the artist. These relations in turn are taken as paradigms for the social function of art. Concentrating less on the psychological state of mind involved in certain genres than on their social and political implications (as the above writers often do), and emphasising the historical rather than the methodological meaning of ‘essential mediation’, we can arrive at the following formulation: that genre is the result of the interraction between the particular author (or producing group) and the productive means in her or his society, that genre embodies the social relations of production. Applied to the cultural sphere as in some ways distinct from general economic production (how distinct itself being a crucial question), we get the following:
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Notes to the model
(1) Form here refers to the internal conceptions of the artist, as distinct from their objectification in any particular mode. This use is to be distinguished from that of the formalists, who, by collapsing these two aspects of the creative process, exaggerate the autonomy of the individual artist, and minimise the extent to which the objectification in any established genre can be felt as a loss. (2) As a whole this diagram is meant to suggest the relative autonomy of the cultural sphere, the resemblance between internal relations there and internal relations within the general economic sphere (rather than any complete disjunction, or complete identity). At which of the three levels in the diagram the cultural sphere is determined (to whatever extent) by the economic sphere is, of course, the crucial question. At this stage we can dissociate ourselves from the position of conventional historians (which emphasises the overriding influence of philosophical, cultural currents on the art-works in a society, without worrying about what influences those currents) and from the – equally static – obverse of this that sees the cultural sphere (directly connected with Philosophy, Law etc) as a direct ideological expression of the economic base. Our focus is mostly on the intermediary level, on the connections between relations of production in the various spheres.
Application (7) At first sight this diagram seems to reinforce the more deterministic readings of generic production – and the conservative possibilities of genre do need to be recognised. For example: there is an oppressive element in the establishment of a particular generic tradition. The moment of public recognition of an art-work as belonging to a ‘genre’ is in fact the moment of consolidation of a particular set of productive relations within the culture, and that consolidation in its turn ‘fixes’ the genre, makes it more mechanical, increases the likelihood of it becoming a commodity only marginally different from those in the general economic sphere. It is this consolidating – and therefore conservative – response to established relations of production, in fact, that underlies the predominantly commercial manufacture of thrillers, romances and pop: a manufacture so predominant that it becomes, precisely, a business. And so predominant, too, that it leads to critics responding to the idea of genre only as a particular, fixed, rather than problematic category – quite simply as co-extensive with commodity. Even without this extreme form of generic manufacture, there will always be a direct connective between productive relations within the cultural sphere and productive relations in the general economic sphere. We can express this relation in several ways. Firstly that the form particular genres take is not determined (in style, plot and characterisation) simply by internal considerations, but that all those aspects of its design will cohere in a structure that indicates either directly or by omission the structure of the society as a whole (and, in particular, that reflects the artist’s assigned or agreed function within the author’s creation of the work, we can discern the same infiltration of the aesthetic by the social and the economic. The point being that in their phenonemological reactions (to the physical characteristics of the book as a book, or the film as a film) and in their ideological reactions (issuing from a particular ‘set’ of mind), the audiences’ responses (responses that contain and often negate more disciplined, aesthetic reactions to ‘style’ or ‘content’) will form a pattern closely resembling their responses to manufactured objects in the general sphere. The audience is not after all entering a new world when it encounters the work of art in its prescribed leisure-time, and the ‘relations of consumption’ prevalent
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elsewhere (the need for a certain product, appropriated in a certain way, with a certain regularity) can be expected to assert themselves here. (8) To develop the positive aspect of genre theory, to describe the extent to which there are at certain stages areas of negotiation between the author and the social forces surrounding him (however heavily weighted toward a certain outcome), we need some account of the possibilities of less conservative, more progressive responses to the received genre. Wild, cryptic and emotional as he is, Caute takes us to the centre of the problem in this passage from The Illusion: I do not propose that playwrights should avoid such subjects as colonial Africa or Vietnam, but I do propose that they remember that what emerges is not the subject but the content, that is to say the subject mediating and mediated by the artistic form: and I propose also that they make the first target of their commitment, the structure of our consciousness, the way we think, know, feel, listen and respond. For the committed writer, reinforcing the conventional left-liberal righteousness about this or that contemporary issue is both a waste of time and a lost opportunity. As writer and as artist he will do better to commit his language and his art to the erection of new playgrounds in the cities of the mind, the imagination and the emotions.4 We notice here the same concern for the effects of the artistic form that we see in Brecht and Benjamin, the same refusal to consider the subject of a work in a pure isolation impossible to achieve. We need however to relocate Caute’s idea about making the ‘first target of (artistic) commitment the structure of our consciousness, the way we feel, listen and respond etc.’ for in this passage (though this is not true for other parts of the book) he presents this idea very much in a vacuum. ‘What sort of thinking, knowing and feeling?’ we are inclined to ask, or, ‘how will the new playgrounds in the cities of the mind function so as to avoid perpetuating what Meszaros denounces as the “egoistical consumption” of the art-work?’ The vagueness and the idealism are eliminated if we assert (as Caute sometimes does) that what should be the subjects of our new feeling, thinking and knowing are precisely the relations between ourselves as an audience and the author as producer, the relations of cultural production. If we recognise that those relations exert a profound influence on the structures of our consciousness (aesthetic, intellectual and creative) and say that the function of the new playgrounds in the cities of the mind will be to rethink those relations, then we can indeed avoid simply sophisticating individual consumption. Tackling the structure of our consciousness is for us indistinguishable from throwing those relations into question. The value of a term-like structure of consciousness is that it brings to mind half-conscious or habitual or subliminal responses to the phenomenology of the object (or action). While the duplication of those responses in the cultural or aesthetic sphere is at once the most conservative and the most deterministic element in our theory of genre, it is precisely at that point that the artist can make his radical insertion, can reformulate his genre in ways that deny the satisfaction of expectations deriving from any such structure of consciousness (itself substantially conditioned by the dominance of previous genres). Placing Caute’s statement in this sort of context, we can use it to dismiss as inadequate those radical artistic responses that do not address themselves to the structure of consciousness (and beyond that to the relations of production) predominant in their own – cultural – sphere, but instead seek only to present a new content within the old relations. The implication of such a position being that only political changes in the general economic sphere are important, and that art should rightfully subordinate itself as propaganda to
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those goals. We shall see shortly in relation to Enzensberger’s article that far from minimising the importance of the relations of cultural production, some theorists suggest that stresses and contradictions within the cultural sphere may in fact be more developed than in the economic sphere as a whole, and therefore should be developed, revealed and exploited in their own right. While recognising the cultural sphere as special this approach suggests that it may in fact be in the political vanguard (given certain historical conjunctions), thus greatly emphasising the importance of generic changes, which become the guide and precursor of changes elsewhere. (9) Between the attitude of socialist realists and that of a critic like Enzensberger comes the most substantial body of critical and creative work related to generic innovation, work that gives rise to those ‘self-conscious’, ‘dialectic’ and – most frequent label – ‘alienated’ art-forms, the most developed of which was Brecht’s epic theatre. The Brechtian epic attempted to dissolve the compulsions that defined the previous role of artist and audience – via the relegation of perfections of form (in the well-made play) and performance (in the realistic, engaging drama). The art-work was to be a functional (if entertaining) exercise for the audience as social group – participating by completing its thesis – rather than an icon for an individual under its spell. This reformulation of the relations between producer and consumer is to be seen, partly at least, as Brecht’s response to the new means of cultural production in the media then coming into prominence, means that would anyway have altered those relations. (‘The old forms of communication are not unaffected by the development of new ones, nor do they survive alongside them’.5 ) On this basis we can compare Brecht’s ideas about how they be changed with those of Benjamin and Enzensberger (critics whose central interest is in the potentiality of new productive means). All of them emphasise the necessary destruction of what Benjamin calls the ‘aura’ of the work of art (in Brecht this aura involves mimesis and catharsis, in Benjamin uniqueness, in Enzensberger expertise); they also stress the necessary supersession of the restricted, specialised nature of artistic production, and encourage the mutual participation of artist and audience. But they do so in different ways and to different extents, and the differences between them are as important as the similarities, for they provide us with an effective gradation of the radical response to genre. To compare Brecht and Benjamin, for instance, is to notice how far the older relations of cultural production still influence the former, as indeed do the socialist realist responses to them. For Brecht still acknowledges the need for an independent author (even if he is only doing the social work he is most suited for), and – the implication of his open-ended epic submitted to the critical intelligence of the audience – his art still presents itself as secondary, posing problems for solution elsewhere. In questioning the relations of production within certain limits (but not questioning the need of artist and audience as such), and in giving the theatre essentially a critical, negating, question-raising function (rather than making it, like Benjamin’s cinema, a medium where completely new relations were enacted) Brecht exemplifies the fact that there is always a tendency even when making progressive responses to the genre to duplicate outworn relations. Indeed there have been cases (e.g. the auteur theories of the cinema) where the potential of the new means of production has been resisted, where the deliberate attempt has been to contain them within previously established (in that case literary) relations. (10) In moving from Brecht to Benjamin and Enzensberger we seem to move into a qualitatively more radical position, even though these critics stress precisely the same elements as he did – the emergence of new media and the necessary reformulation of relations as a result.
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There is a common determination in these writers not to respond to the new means of production with the categories provided by the old, but to make as positive an interpretation as possible of the electronic media. Benjamin therefore questions the function of absorbed contemplation rather than taking it as a necessary a priori for aesthetic response, and Enzensberger fights against the romantic and the ‘conspiratorial’ reactions of the left to the new media, asserting that the media’s importance (even in their current deprived form) corresponds to real human, rather than manufactured, needs; together they argue for the superiority of verbal over written expression, for the existence of public demands which only the progressive use of the media can satisfy, and for the historical advantages to be derived from the new mode of appropriating the artwork. A sustained attempt is made to clear the ground, to explode the preconceptions of former, more literary, relations (involving the artist as individual genius, the art-work as magical entity and the audience as dutifully disciplined and passive receivers). Equally prominent, however, is their realisation that the right receptive attitude to the new means of production is not itself sufficient, that the media’s progressive use is not guaranteed simply by changes in the creator’s and the audience’s predispositions. Benjamin, for example, carefully describes how the Fascists are abusing the potential of the new media (by offering spectacle rather than real participation), and Enzensberger, going one step further, formulates the reasons why any established political force tends to thwart the potential of new productive means. Together, then, ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, and ‘Constituents of a Theory of the Media’ sketch out the essential role and the necessary restrictions of generic innovation: ‘One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which will only be fully satisfied later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with changed technical standards, that is to say, a new art form.’6 In asserting that each art strives toward its own future, Benjamin implicitly provides a standard by which to measure aesthetic innovation, namely, does it hasten the arrival of that future – but simultaneously, he makes it clear that the task is not simply one of aesthetic innovation. There must be a technology developed enough to sustain the new art, and the new productive relations underlying it, and there must be a political climate receptive to rather than repressive of the innovations. Another common element in their work is a certain vision of the achieved future (the product of these formal, technological and political changes). When Benjamin says, ‘For the tasks which confront the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means . . . by contemplation alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation’7; when Enzensberger says ‘For the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialised productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves’,8 when both argue that the electronic media answer certain needs – to be recorded and to give voice – that are as substantial as material ones, they are in effect describing not only the penetration of the cultural sphere by technological means, but the eventual inseparability of the cultural from the general sphere of production. And, crucially, the spheres will eventually be indistinguishable not because of the conformity of the relations and objects within the cultural sphere to the patterns prevalent in the general economic sphere, but the reverse. Thus the way in which the masses make use of the new artistic genres will provide a model for appropriation elsewhere, and the relations of cultural production necessary for the realisation of the new media’s potential, will provide a model for the relations of production elsewhere. It would be simplistic, of course, to suggest that the cultural sphere (and thus generic changes)
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has a straightforwardly determining role in these men’s work: we need essentially to keep in mind their realisation that these cultural changes are themselves finally dependent upon the availability of technology and on changes in the political sphere that will permit its full exploitation. Superimposing their sense of the potential and the limitations of generic change within the culture on their vision of an achieved future, what emerges is a dialectical model of the interraction of cultural and economic spheres: should the potential of productive means within the culture be allowed full scope (which would involve massive political and economic changes) they would in their turn be the precursors of further political and economic reorganisation . . . and the eventual collapse of distinctions. Which makes that famous passage in Marx’s German Ideology a little less abstract: Whereas in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he pleases, production as a whole is regulated by society, thus making it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, in accordance with my inclination, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.9 This future collapse of distinctions reminds us, too, of Meszaros’ argument in Marx’s Theory of Alienation – which is exactly that a communist society would go beyond the simple satisfaction of material needs beyond the forced and artificial division of labour, to ‘the emancipation of the human senses’, to a mode of production that would be ‘free activity, an adequate fulfilment of the rich human being’, to production that would be essentially (as we now use the words) ‘cultural’ and ‘aesthetic’. Marx’s conception of art aims at adding a new dimension to human life, in order to transform it in its totality through the fusion of this new dimension with all the other human life-activities. In this conception artistic production and consumption become inseparable elements of the same life-activity which can be described as the practical aesthetic self-education of man.10 (11) The value of this theory of genres – so far as it is comprehensible! – is that it indicates the direction of the work to be done here and now, in the time between our era and this visionary future. Hopefully, the range of responses we’ve tried to ‘place’ – from the socialist realist, through Caute’s emphasis on the ‘structure of consciousness’ and dialectical writing, Brecht’s theory of alienation and Benjamin’s interpretation of mechanical reproduction to Enzenberger’s reading of the new electronic media . . . will have made clear the extent to which artistic innovation can prepare for the correct utilisation of new means of production. By developing this view of generic change – as neither irrelevant nor absolutely determining, but as crucial in anticipating or delaying essential changes in the relations of cultural production (a production which itself can influence the direction of production in the society as a whole), it may be possible to evolve a consistent revolutionary artistic practice. At the least, these notes should cancel out the impression of the total separation of present and future, and the lack of any activist function for art (that one is left with after reading the reflexive Marxists), and the impression of the future as achieved and of the boundless importance of the aesthetic (that one gets from the liberators’ proclamations).
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Appendix For the old-fasioned ‘artist’ – let us call him the author – it follows from these reflections that he must see it as his goal to make himself redundant as a specialist in much the same way as a teacher of literacy only fulfills his task when he is no longer necessary. Like every learning process, this process too is reciprocal. The specialist will learn as much from the non-specialist as the other way round. Only then can he contrive to make himself dispensable. Meanwhile his social usefulness can best be measured by the degree to which he is capable of using the liberating factors in the media and bringing them to fruition. The tactical contradiction in which he must become involved in the process can neither be denied nor covered up in any way. But strategically his role is clear. The author has to work as the agent of the masses. He can lose himself in them only when they become authors themselves, the authors of history.11 While this imperative does follow from Enzensberger’s – and our – reflections, one key question remains, namely, what are the forces that make the author’s response to generic change less or more radical, less or more conservative? The effect of phrasing the imperative in the way Enzensberger does, is to balance the technological determination and the inevitable victory of the masses against the personality of the particular author (obeying or not obeying the imperative): one wishes the relations between the determinations and the personality had been made more explicit, for the danger is that either one or the other will be seen as the wholly predominant cause, and that we will thereby arrive back at the fixed versions of the relations between imaginative form and the social determination that we set out to transcend. We can only take note of this aspect of the problem here and, tentatively, suggest the beginning of a solution. Namely: if the problematic relation between imaginative form and the social determination is itself only a reflection of the problematic relation between the whole sphere of cultural production and the whole sphere of production in general, then it may be that in different historical epochs in which the overall social importance of the cultural sphere varies, the likelihood of radical or conservative responses to generic change will accordingly grow or be reduced. How far this is true might be established by an investigation of the generic changes (and the implicit accompanying changes in the function of the culture) that occurred within a particular economic era. The following schema of generic changes in a less than epochal economic span (the last 150 years or so) is offered simply as speculative and heuristic. As for using its categories to define any individual writer’s ‘conservatism’ or ‘radicalism’, or for developing conclusions about the respective responsibility of the author and the socio-economic determinants for initiating generic developments . . . these are projects in which this author respectfully invites his reader’s productive participation. ROMANCE (as a response to the growth of industrial production; see Abrams). Art as the lamp rather than the mirror, but after its losing battle with the ethics of industrialism, as the lamp whose light goes out . . . eventually, art as the antique lamp, a special object deified in what Benjamin calls the ‘cult of beauty’. The artist, once an alternative, is now the exception. The audience looks on, wonders at, is dominated by the object and its maker. GOTHIC (and the cycle of overproduction, see Ruskin’s speeches to the businessmen of Bradford). The debunking, exaggerating form attacking both the myths of society and those of a glorified art. Its changeability, while preventing the glorification of the object and the stability of an audience that knows what to expect, yet prevents, too, any systematic critique.
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This, plus the attention to myth, means a further drift from the social world into exotica, erotica and primitivism, while the predilection of the audience for a ‘finished product’ and the artist as straight saviour mean a continual misrepresentation of its politics, the inflation rather than the deflation of the artist, the reading of sensational means as ends . . . the confirmation of Wordsworth’s insight, that Gothic sensationalism as a response to the decay of sensibility, only further compounds the ill. EPIC (and economic depression; see Brecht’s theatre between the wars in Germany). The attempted dissolution of the compulsions that defined the artist and audience, via the relegation of the perfections of form (in the ‘well-made play’), and performance (in the engaging, realistic drama). The art-work as a functional (if entertaining) intellectual exercise, for the audience as a social group, participating in completing its thesis, rather than an icon mystifying the individual under its spell, but still an art that acknowledges the need for an independent author, even if he is merely doing the social work he is most suited for, and, an art that still presents itself as secondary, posing problems for answer elsewhere. CLASSIC (and a socialist economy?). Film and the electronic media. The potential union of specialised and normal productive forces (the cultural and the economic sphere) brought on by the technological saturation of these media. Even more so than with the theatre, the end of the special individual artist. While presently the most exclusive and specialised – not to say privileged – art form, it is potentially (the common production of everyone’s film commune) the form that will demolish the producer/consumer, artist/audience distinction and allow the integration of art and society (technique rather than genius being its requirement), though integration as a rational problem-solving group, rather than as a primitive magical tribe.
Notes 1 Baxandall’s Dramaturgy of Radical Activity, Poirier’s The Performing Self, and Sontag’s Against Interpretation. 2 See, for a full discussion of these developments, Ed Bullin’s edition of the Tulane Drama Review on Black Drama. 3 Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Arendt’s collection of his essays, Illuminations, New York, Schoken, 1969; his ‘Artist as Producer’ in N.L.R. no. 62; Enzensberger’s ‘Constituents of a Theory of the Media’ in N.L.R., no. 64; Brecht’s theoretical writings are collected by Peter Willett in Brecht on Theatre, New York, Hill & Wang, 1964. 4 David Caute, The Illusion, London, Panther, 1972, p. 227. 5 Brecht/Willett, op.cit. p. 47. 6 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art . . .’, op.cit. p. 237. 7 Ibid, p. 240. 8 Enzensberger, op.cit. p. 15. 9 Marx, Sociology and Social Philosophy, edited by Bottomore & Rubel, Penguin, 1956, pp. 110–11. 10 Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation, London, Merlin, 1970, p. 214. 11 Enzensberger, op.cit. p. 36.
5
Walter Greenwood Working-class writer Stuart Laing
The purpose of this article is to present some reflections on two books by Walter Greenwood – Love on the Dole, his first novel published in 1933 and There was a Time, his autobiography, published in 1967.1 These reflections will have two aims. They will first try to pinpoint and clarify certain theoretical questions concerning the relationship between cultural studies and literary criticism. Also they will offer some observations on the nature of Greenwood’s work itself and its place in an understanding of the 1920s and 1930s. This study is then, initially, comparative. Faced with two texts which present substantially similar events and experiences (growing up in Salford in the early twentieth century), the preliminary task is to specify their similarities and differences. However I want to consider first the differing forms through which these events and experiences are mediated rather than comparing directly the parallels of content. Before examining these parallels, the problem of how to ‘read’ an autobiography as opposed to a novel must be faced.
Autobiography Subjective meaning A fundamental problem in cultural studies as a whole is the recovery of subjective meaning – how to gather and evaluate accounts of subjective experience. Such experience is important – not however because through it we are able to reconstruct an ‘objective reality’ (as a historian might use newspaper reports or diaries critically in order to discover what ‘really’ happened) – nor because of any inherent need to contact human beings directly rather than to work with public artefacts or collective institutions. Both of these are legitimate aims, but such experience is valuable primarily because it is itself part of any total account of human activity (whether studied under the name of history, society or culture). That is to say that we must take seriously not merely how any event can be reconstructed in its entirety, but also the way in which people experienced that event and, using this experience, tried to act upon it. Our ability now to demonstrate the inadequacy of this experience to the complexity of the event in no way destroys the importance of that experience as part of human history. Once again it must be stressed that such experience can never be collected unmediated. Even in the case of contemporary studies, using the methods of depth interview or participant observation the very process of collection and presentation of the experience will necessarily influence the resulting formal testimony. Historical studies more obviously use structured documents and, whether these are diaries, letters or autobiographies, in each case the relative degree of public presentation of the material will have to be taken into account. Greenwood’s autobiography initially enters the field of cultural studies in relation to this
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problem. It represents not an attempt to describe the whole situation of a working-class community (although it clearly contributes to such a description), but rather an account of how that situation was experienced and of how that experience is remembered thirty years later. The real 1930s Greenwood’s autobiography has then a certain status as a specific kind of text – its medium standing in a particular formal relation to its content. Consider a group of books all attempting to reflect similar content: The Classic Slum, Britain in the 1930s, Uses of Literacy, The Road to Wigan Pier,2 all of these try in various ways to present accounts of working-class life in the inter-war years. The first two are frankly academic works – deliberate attempts, using a variety of materials and sources to present the whole situation, although at different levels (The Classic Slum is a close study of Greenwood’s own Salford from 1900–25). For these writers, chronological distance from the subject has distinct advantages – both technically (time for the accumulation and sifting of available evidence) and also in terms of the greater ease with which the period can be labelled as such, with a definitive beginning and end. Hoggart’s book, on the other hand, uses and acknowledges directly a foundation of personal experience (I am talking about Part One). However, it is not autobiography but rather a distinctive kind of analytical work which depends for its evidence predominantly on a blend of direct observation and personal experience. Orwell’s work has a different perspective again; it is conscious participant observation both when Orwell is posing as a poor lodger and when he is explicitly the reporter observing the miners at work. All of these are ‘true’ accounts of the situation (as against the fictional novel), but clearly they all contain different perspectives and purposes; their accounts, that is, are not so much rival versions of a non-problematic ‘real’ life of the 1920s and 30s, as different ways of bringing that reality into articulate being. Greenwood’s autobiography is yet another, but even here there can be no simple labelling of it as one person’s experience which has much the same value as that of any other. It is a very different kind of book from a contemporary autobiography such as B.L. Coombes’ These Poor Hands,3 an account of mining in South Wales, published by the Left Book Club in 1939. Greenwood’s autobiography traces his life up to the publication of his first novel in 1933, but the writing of the book took place in the 1960s and this influences it throughout. It is not just the concluding chapter (written as though re-visiting Salford in the mid 1960s), nor the retrospective glosses (as in a joke about the discovery of D.D.T.), but rather the whole conception of the book itself which makes the time of its composition important. The title There Was a Time invokes Wordsworth’s praise of the glorious days of childhood, but does so in a full awareness of itself. The lines cited are: There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, The earth and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in a celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream.4 The key-word is ‘seem’. Greenwood guards against nostalgia not by attempting to eradicate it, but by acknowledging it as a genuine emotion. He gives it its proper place, by stressing that it refers not to the 1920s in Salford, but to his own experience and memory of childhood.
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The deliberate recognition of the nostalgic element has a purpose similar to Hoggart’s discussion of the autobiographical element in The Uses of Literacy. Hoggart notes: ‘The reader sees what is intended to be said and also from the tone, from the unconscious emphases and the rest, he comes to know the man saying it.’5 It is not this alone. The reader is also able to re-apply his knowledge of ‘the man saying it’ in terms of a critical examination of the book’s content. In both the cases of Hoggart and Greenwood, there is a self-presentation which invites this critical reading and which draws attention to the problems of autobiographical writing. There Was a Time is then no pure reflection either of the ‘real life’ of the Salford working-class community, or even of Greenwood’s own experience; it is a complex document of which all the contributing elements must be recognised.
The novel: Theoretical questions Truth and fiction Greenwood’s autobiography discusses his life up to the time of the acceptance of his first novel, Love on the Dole, in 1933 – a life which also provided the material for that novel. The novel itself was initially and is still regarded as a semi-documentary work. The back cover of the recent paperback edition, for example, compares it to Cathy Come Home. Ronald Blythe, in his idiosyncratic and anecdotal book The Age of Illusion claims that: people who went to see plays like Love on the Dole did so from the same sense of social duty as might have made them undertake district visiting, not because they thought for one moment that such material . . . had anything to do with going to the theatre.6 Orwell, writing in the 1930s in The Road to Wigan Pier tends to confirm Blythe’s assessment, if not his valuation of the nature of the response to Greenwood’s book and subsequent play. Everyone who saw Greenwood’s play Love on the Dole must remember that dreadful moment when the poor, good stupid working man beats the table and cries out, ‘O God, send me some work!’ This was not dramatic exaggeration, it was a touch from life.7 Orwell’s emphasis in this last sentence is necessary; he must paradoxically stress the truth of this fiction in order to make his point which is a polemical, not a literary-critical one. From the latter standpoint, of course, his remarks derive from a naive approach which sees the value of literature as residing in its accurate portrayal of this or that detail or individual situation drawn from contemporary social life. Sophisticated literary critics attack this view of literature (sometimes pilloried as the ‘sociological’ approach) because of its denial of the creative role of the writer; they stress instead the degree of literature’s freedom from influence by material and social conditions. Above all they argue that it is in the work’s organization, its transmitted values and formal or thematic unity, that its importance is to be located. All of these are understood as universal values which transcend the specific social situation in which it was written and come to exist in ‘an ideal realm of being’. The survival and popularity of works beyond their immediate period and their contribution to a national cultural heritage or tradition add weight to this theoretical position which is at the basis of the autonomous study of literary works. The result has been that in English critical writing,
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until very recently, there has been an unspoken assumption of the existence of a clear division between a sociological approach to literature and literary-critical analysis. Elsewhere in this journal, the major trends in a more recent approach are examined. This approach, under the general title of the sociology of literature, has attempted to resolve the earlier opposition made between the study of a literary work as social phenomenon, and analysis of its ‘timeless’ creative quality. As Istvan Meszaros defines it, the required resolution depends on ‘the idea of a historically-developing social consciousness’, since that concept supersedes the older, felt opposition between the historical and the universal. From that starting-point, universality could be conceived as inherent in, and not opposed to, dynamically evolving particularity. Thus the specific historical identity of, for instance, a particular work of art could be recognised to be not the negation of ‘universality’, but, on the contrary, its realisation.8 This line of theoretical development, beginning (say, in the work of Williams and Goldmann9 the task of understanding literature as a social phenomenon without disregarding its status as art, has been noted here since, although Love on the Dole clearly offers a wealth of specific detail concerning working-class life in the 1930s, it may well be that, if the full significance of the novel is to be recognised, analysis must take place at the level of its narrative, fictional organisation. There may, after all, be no need to apologise for ‘dramatic exaggeration’. The dole and the means test Before proceeding to detailed analysis of the two works, it may be helpful to outline the sequence of historical events which forms the background to both the latter parts of the novel and the autobiography and also the moment of the novel’s appearance. In 1929 the second Labour government (like the first a minority government) had been elected under the leadership of Ramsay Macdonald. However this government proved unable to take action to cope with the economic slump and a situation of impending wage cuts and growing unemployment prevailed. By 1931, the Cabinet was split on whether to take firm measures to curb government expenditure, particularly with regard to unemployment benefit. On 24 August 1931, Macdonald allied himself and some of his colleagues with Conservatives and Liberals to form a National Government which was to implement cuts in wages and unemployment benefit. At a subsequent general election on 27 October 1931, the National Government won 556 seats to Labour’s 46. The Labour party, however, although losing 200 seats retained 30% of the votes. This National Government survived until 1935 and then again was in office from 1935–9, although in these latter stages under Baldwin and Chamberlain it was a more openly Conservative administration. In relation to Love on the Dole, of particular interest are the measures relating to the unemployed. In August 1931, unemployment ran at a level of 2.7 million – about 20% of all insured men. Harry Hardcastle, the semi-autobiographical anti-hero of the novel is described as one of these – ‘a unit of the spectral army of three million lost men’.10 At this time the benefit for a single man was seventeen shillings. One of the measures over which the Labour Cabinet was split was the proposal to reduce unemployment benefit and on the day after the formation of the National Government, Macdonald said in a broadcast, ‘Unemployment benefit is not a living wage; it was never meant to be that.’ This attitude was
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the prelude to two measures which affected unemployment benefits. First, benefit was reduced in October 1931, Harry’s reaction was ‘this here National Government had gone back and the bloody swines had already cut the dole from seventeen bob to fifteen’.11 The actual cut was to fifteen and threepence – to be in line with an attempt to implement 10% wage cuts. The second measure was the introduction of the Means Test. This came into force in 1931. Under this, benefit could be drawn automatically for only twenty-six weeks; after this a means test was applied which took into account the whole family income. Both Harry (whose sister was working and father drawing benefit) and Greenwood himself (mother and sister working) had their dole money cut off completely. In the autobiography Greenwood also cites the case of a friend who left home and stayed with another family in the same street in order to be assessed separately and, thereby, receive benefit. Together the reduction of benefit and the introduction of the Means Test produced a significant impact on the daily lives of working-class communities in the depressed areas.
The novel-analysis Historical perspective These events form the background both of Part Three of Love on the Dole and the latter sections of the autobiography. Their different presentation in each case, however, corresponds to a notable difference in overall historical perspective between the two books. The autobiography clearly starts in 1900 with Greenwood’s father celebrating the Relief of Mafeking and is played out explicitly against the backcloth of twentieth-century British history – the Boer War, the Great War, the General Strike, the Depression and, with the retrospective last chapter, the Second World War and the rise of the welfare state. In the foreground are the details of revolutionary social changes – notably the superseding of Greenwood’s beloved horses by the motor-car (an engineer working at Rolls-Royce is a recurring figure). As against this, in the novel national historical events only enter during Part Three (apart from a few cursory reminiscences of the Great War). Here the changes in unemployment benefit and the introduction of the Means Test come to affect directly the lives of the characters. Parts One and Two deal predominantly with the life of one character, Harry, and his reactions to his environment. His progress is experienced by him not primarily in terms of historical development, but rather in terms of personal progress within a static situation; he leaves school at fourteen, becomes apprenticed for seven years and at twenty-one becomes unemployed. Parallel with this is his relationship with Helen, his win on the horses and their subsequent holiday, her pregnancy and their marriage and their renting a house of their own. Harry, unlike Larry Meath, the politically-conscious, music-loving hero, has no overall grasp of his situation; he sees it only from the inside. Through Harry, Greenwood seems to be attempting to present the experience of an unexceptional member of the three million unemployed. For Harry the situation is not composed of historical events and social conditions to be analysed and acted upon. but is an inescapable environment to which only reactions are possible. It is perhaps for this reason that the novel contains no mention of the General Strike although by inference, it would have taken place during Harry’s apprenticeship. It is not this kind of experience which the novel directs itself towards. Rather Parts One and Two are constructed so as to lead directly into Part Three where Harry’s apprenticeship
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ends and his own unemployment coincides with the cutting of benefit and the introduction of the Means Test. The differences between the novel and the autobiography in terms of historical perspective do not however stem only from Greenwood’s choice of a relatively inarticulate central figure. They also relate to the formal requirements of the different texts. The autobiography has a sixty-year span and in it there is a sense of the unity of historical development and Greenwood’s life; from the 1960s he can look back both on the Depression and on his own beginnings as a writer. The novel, on the other hand, seeks to develop one central situation by means of a number of characters. If the autobiography tends towards the structure of a chronicle, with a sense of linear historical progress, the novel presents a cross-section of one situation. Also as I shall show in the latter case this perspective is further re-inforced by a central thesis of the novel – that the situation itself is static and unchanging. From author to character I have already implied that this difference in perspective may also be considered in terms of the relationship between the figures of Harry Hardcastle and Greenwood himself. The former is clearly partially modelled on the latter in that they share a number of key experiences from those of choir boy and pawnbroker’s assistant to that of the dole queue with its sense of wasted manhood. However there is one essential difference. Harry could never have written a novel. Therefore, Greenwood in conceiving his central character could not merely record his own memories and experience in a direct way. He had also to try and discount the exceptional nature of his own situation as a working-class writer. In Greenwood’s autobiography the influence of his mother is seen repeatedly in preventing his becoming only another Harry. She searches for a piano for him, gives him a love of music, quotes Homer at him and buys him Shakespeare. From her father she also derives a strong political sense and is a keen supporter of the Independent Labour Party. By 1931 Greenwood’s own story is that of one who, while being on the ‘dole’ like Harry or Larry Meath, is striving consciously for an individual remedy for his situation through writing. In conceiving Larry and Harry, both of whom have affinities with Greenwood himself, he was clearly aiming at greater typicality; for them there was no such alternative (particularly as they are both on the verge of marriage). Indeed looking at Greenwood’s account of his own career through a wide variety of jobs as office-clerk, groom, packing-case maker and salesman it might seem reasonable to suggest that the extremely claustrophobic atmosphere of Hanky Park in the novel is indeed ‘a dramatic exaggeration’. Before discussing this point it is, however, necessary to define more closely the elements which build up this atmosphere and which contribute to the very constricted sense of life which seems to me to be the central experience which the novel is communicating. Apart from Harry’s holiday (in a chapter entitled ‘Magic Casements’), the novel restricts itself to two environments – the street in Hanky Park where all the characters live and the factories where they work. The meaning of the Depression is then sharply focussed through the factory redundancies as Harry, Larry and Ned Narkey (Larry’s antitype) are all sacked. Unlike Greenwood himself, who was something of an itinerant drifter from job to job, these three are all qualified engineers whose commitment to a set job is disturbed. Harry eventually becomes a busman and Ned a policeman. The constricted perspective of the novel is, however, also a result of the adoption by Greenwood of specific literary and narrative devices. The most obvious of these is the close parallel between the early morning scenes which open the narrative (at Chapter Two) and
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close it. In these almost identical descriptions, the cold and drizzle, the fact that it is 5.30 a.m. on a Monday morning and the general unfriendliness of the environment frame and almost dissolve the narrative progression of the story. With Larry dead and Sally (Harry’s sister and Larry’s intended) gone away, and with Ned as the policeman patrolling the streets, Harry and Helen merely repeat the roles of their parents. In the closing scene it is Harry’s wife and not his mother (as in the opening scene) who stumbles down the stairs to light the fire. Any illusion of positive change in Harry’s progress to marriage is now dispelled as the situation is revealed as static and without possibility of transformation. The novel has then a different perspective on the working-class situation in Salford from that of the autobiography. Greenwood’s own story is that of unceasing personal attempts to escape from it (although never by betraying his origins) and through the chronicle form of the autobiography his career seems even more that of a minor-key picaresque hero. The novel however attempts rather to present the perspective of men caught directly inside an apparently static situation. The claustrophobic atmosphere corresponds not so much to the situation itself as to how that situation is immediately experienced. Narrative organisation Clearly, however, the novel should not be treated as a rival sociological analysis to The Classic Slum. Attention should rather be paid to its fictional and literary elements for it is in these that the unique significance of the novel can be discovered. Greenwood’s novel could in some sense be described as ‘a novel about being on the dole’. Such a description would contain two propositions – one about form, the other about content. These two propositions are reflected in the title of the novel itself; a definition of the fictional elements of the novel could begin with the parallel love-affairs of Harry and Helen and Sally and Larry. This is not at all to present Greenwood as a writer of romantic fiction; he himself records how his own short stories were rejected: a kindly disposed editor would add a note to his rejection slip saying that, while he thought the story good of itself, its subject matter was not the sort of thing to interest his readers who paid their money for romance, entertainment and excitement.12 It is certainly not the case that Greenwood imposed a novelistic form on a wealth of sociological detail in order to produce a marketable commodity. It is doubtful in any case whether such a hypothesis can be usefully applied to any fiction. Greenwood’s novel clearly contains much more complex organisation than that, and it would be a mistake to write off the main threads of narrative as mere window-dressing or sentimentality. For what makes the novel so powerful a condemnation of working-class conditions are neither the detailed descriptions of the effects of poverty (although these are important) nor the adequacy of Larry’s exposition of Marx’s theories of the nature of capital and commodities. The condemnation is rather the way in which the characters’ hopes for a secure and worthwhile future are defeated. I am talking specifically about the use of marriage as a structural device. Greenwood, like so many of the major nineteenth-century novelists, when faced with the problem of what kind of narrative structure is adequate to convey social judgements, almost instinctively (I would say) chose that of the careers of a young man and girl up to the point at which they have been launched on a new family life. Austen, Dickens and Charlotte Bronte were inclined to go even further (as was Eliot in Middlemarch) in sketching out their heroes’ or
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heroines’ future lives, which usually included a liberal sprinkling of children. Equally the great critical novels of the mid-Victorian era – Great Expectations, Villette and Wuthering Heights – use the failure or refusal of marriage in their various ways as the natural mode for a less affirmative social vision. The close of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century produced a great wave of novels dedicated to the destruction of this structural ploy. The ponderousness of Hardy’s Jude and the cynicism of Gissing’s New Grub Street were followed by Lawrence’s novels which are a continual exploration for the basis of a re-definition of marriage. Above all what was in question was the belief in a necessary connection between stable personal relationships and a healthy society. These novelists either ironically inverted the narrative conventions or set out to destroy them completely. By the time Greenwood was writing a second wave of innovation had taken place in the writings of Conrad, Woolf and Joyce (Ulysses was already becoming infamous); these writers called into question the basic assumptions of the traditional novel about the nature of time and reality and the status of the novel-form itself. I do not invoke this partially random catalogue in order to suggest that Greenwood was writing either in or against any tradition. It would be wrong to dismiss his work as naive or ‘proletarian’ merely because he was not in the vanguard of technical innovations. The point is rather that for a fairly isolated young writer with only his own environment for material, there would be no problem about how to write a serious novel. In broad outline it would consist of tracing the fate of two or more young people in the period between adolescence and marriage. This was, as it were, the ‘problematic’13 of the social novel; that is, not the answers, but the questions are dictated by the form. The novel’s individual vision will arise from the nature of the answers. In the case of Love on the Dole the answers are reflected predominantly in the fate of the main characters. Characters It is Harry’s growth through adolescence which constitutes the greater part of the novel and it is, above all, in the disparity between his dreams for the future and the reality of having to adjust to a severely limited income that the novel reflects on the inadequacy of his situation. Even if he were to retain a job he knows that he can only afford cheap furniture on weekly payments and a rented house in the same street. The pregnancy and hasty marriage (‘Come on ’Elen. Let’s get it over with’), the unemployed man spreading bread and margarine and laying newspaper on the table of one rented room – all these demonstrate the impossibility of that happy comfortable marriage which in conventional ‘social’ fiction would symbolise a stable and well-appointed society. Harry meditates on their situation: What a travesty of romantic love this their present courtship. If his present circumstances were to be a subject of a movie play this would be the opportunity for him to rescue, from some sort of danger, the only child of a wealthy man who rewarded his heroism with money and a good job.14 Here is Greenwood ‘guaranteeing’ the reality of his novel through the opposition – novel= real/movie=fiction. This, of course, is itself only a fictional technique, but it serves to demonstrate how Greenwood undercuts the possibility of an easy use of novelistic conventions to bring about a ‘magical’ solution.15
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The other couple with whom the novel is concerned are Larry and Sally. They represent a very different set of qualities from those of Harry and Helen. Harry is the novel’s chief character and is, in many ways, a kind of anti-hero. He is generally beaten down by his environment. Although retaining a certain resilience and ability for temporary enjoyment, he experiences his environment only as it acts directly on him; he sees no way of acting back upon it. With difficulty he struggles through to manhood and marriage. He is, however, also the novel’s most developed character and gives to it its most powerful image – that of the unemployed man ‘staring fixedly and unseeingly at the ground’, ‘hands in pockets, shoulders hunched’, looking for cigarette ends and just killing time. It is through him that the experience of ‘being on the dole’ is presented. Larry Meath is a sharply contrasting figure and in him many of Greenwood’s personal interests (music and politics for example) which can find no place in Harry’s character are revealed. There are however also a number of other figures in the autobiography who can be seen as forming a basis for Larry’s character. Greenwood’s grandfather with his books and political allegiance, Tom Besant with his negative attitude to marriage and, above all, James Moleyns all contribute towards Larry’s personality. Moleyns is most like him with his diligent Labour Club activities and personal ‘Marxist slant’. There is, however, an important difference between Moleyns and Larry which offers an insight into the novel’s structure of opposed characters. Moleyns is a much more robust figure; he is married, supports a family and a largely unsympathetic father-in-law and is altogether a more worldly figure than Larry. Larry is much more someone set apart from the rest of the street. He is a sensitive, reasonable and, as it transpires, a physically rather frail man. He also refuses to be deeply involved in the working-class situation as a whole. A man without family, he has no commitments and seeks none; he even tries to persuade himself not to marry Sally. It is as though Greenwood is showing two possible attitudes to the workingclass situation – either ‘making the best of it’, trying to get what comfort there is from an oppressive, confined situation or direct refusal to compromise. Larry’s attitude is the latter; he even refuses to pay the accepted insurance money for his funeral (he is cremated). He seeks only political transformation, not through any fanaticism but because he sees no possibility of a decent life in his present situation. Sally cannot understand his reluctance to be married, but after his death she also refuses to compromise. Larry is set in antithesis to Ned Narkey as well as to Harry. Narkey epitomises the brutalised, amoral, indestructible aspect of the working-man. This opposition is of some historical significance particularly if it is recalled how many nineteenth-century novels attempted to portray working-men. In Hard Times for example, it is the political agitator who is responsible for the injuries to Stephen Blackpool while in Mary Barton Trade Unionism is more directly associated with violence. Larry however is a descendant of Jude Fawley rather than Slackbridge or John Barton; his education (self-taught it is implied) goes hand in hand with his political interests. He is similar to Orwell’s conception of the positive elements of the ‘working-class intelligentsia’. There is the type who remains working-class – who goes on working as a mechanic or a dock-labourer or whatever it may be and does not bother to change his working-class accent and habits, but who ‘improves his mind’ in his spare time and works for the I.L.P. or the Communist Party.16 In addition Larry is something of a pacifist, and violence is instead associated not primarily with political acts but with Ned Narkey who, unprincipled as he is, becomes a policeman and
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joins the attack on the marching unemployed – thus effectively having a hand in Larry’s death (he dies from a combination of tuberculosis and police truncheons). Larry has easily discernible roots in the characters of Greenwood’s autobiography but Sally has none. She appears as a more obviously fictional character than the others – devised for a specific structural purpose: Eighteen, a gorgeous creature whose native beauty her shabbiness could not hide. Eyes dark, lustrous, haunting; abundant black hair tumbling in waves; a full, ripe, pouting mouth and a low, round bosom. A face and form such as any society dame would have given three-quarters of her fortune to possess. Sally wore it carelessly as though youth’s brief hour were eternal . . .17 Unlike Harry, Sally has qualities which surpass the immediate environment and are not shaped by it. Adjectives of fullness and superfluity characterise here – ‘gorgeous’, ‘lustrous’, ‘abundant’, ‘full ripe’. Throughout the novel she scores repeated personal triumphs, resisting with ease and scorn the advances of Narkey and Sam Grundy, the successful bookmaker. She remains beautiful and proud to the end. If Larry is the politically sound analyst of the situation, Sally is a figure who embodies all those human qualities to which the environment denies fulfilment. She has nothing at all in common with the group of four old women who provide comic interludes with their reminiscences and threepenny tots of gin. There could be nothing more positive than the union of Larry and Sally and therefore nothing more unlikely to succeed in terms of the negative vision Greenwood is presenting. Like Larry, Sally can have no permanent place in the environment of Hanky Park. But while Larry’s death represents his final refusal, Sally’s decision to go away with Sam Grundy marks the change in her attitude which Larry’s death brings. At this moment she, above all other characters, sees clearly the hopelessness which is life in Hanky Park. She has not even Larry’s political faith to sustain her. Her action becomes the most logical response to her situation; in its refusal to acknowledge any moral imperatives it parallels the only meaning which could be given to Larry’s death. She is not so much sacrificing herself for her family (Grundy gets her father and brother jobs on the buses) as expressing the rejection of a fulfilled life which is implicit in Hanky Park. Resolution The concluding chapter of the novel combines a number of different resolving elements. Harry’s new job restores his situation to some kind of equilibrium; he is no better and no worse off than his father was at the beginning of the novel. Sally and Larry have now both effectively departed and the novel closes, as I have noted, with a repetition of one of its opening scenes. However, before this, as Harry comes home from his new jobs, he sees one of his former companions who has no one to get a job for him. The marginal improvement in Harry’s situation which enables him to set up the semblance of a home and family situation is presented as a personal rather than a general remedy. He was standing there as motionless as a statue, cap neb pulled over his eyes, gaze fixed on pavements, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, the bitter wind blowing his thin trousers tightly against his legs. Waste paper and dust blew about him in spirals, the papers making harsh sounds as they slid on the pavement.
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The close of the novel holds in balance the defeat of Larry and Sally, the relative security of the marriage of Helen and Harry and the continuing presence of the unemployed. For Greenwood, writing in 1932, the situation seemed deadlocked and static and indeed it was not until the end of the decade and the coming of war that any fundamental transformations occurred. In retrospect Looking back on that situation from the mid-1960s Greenwood sees a qualitative change as having taken place. Yesterday the Depression and lo by a hop, skip and jump the Space Age and a Welfare State. A five-day, forty-hour week, holidays with pay, superannuation pension schemes, lunch vouchers and works’ canteens; an inrush of immigrants to fill the rising tide of jobs going begging, and organized Labour in conference with employers on equal terms.19 This sense of an almost miraculous transformation in immediate living conditions is, if not a widely held belief, at least prevalent in our public myths of recent history. The Depression, the war and rationing are followed by the affluent 1950s and the Swinging Sixties in a way which is not immediately explicable. It is no accident that the 1940s have never achieved a fixed public identity as a unified decade. The Second World War has not only obscured the precise moments and causes of the transition from 1930s to 1950s and 1960s; it has also established a distance, an easily definable gap between the 1930s and the 1960s. The 1930s are already a memory to invoke and the possibility of the return of their conditions caused by this or that economic measure is a standard rhetorical weapon of politics. Greenwood’s novel is a part of that memory. Most social histories of the period refer to it as a matter of course and its title, perhaps as much as anything else, has contributed to the retention of the term ‘dole’ in public usage. Paradoxically, however, a search for a mention of Greenwood in most literary histories of the period would be in vain. He fails even to achieve the Index in the 578 page Penguin Guide (although he has written many novels and plays since 1933). Certainly, as I indicated, his work could hardly be seen as in the forefront of a new wave of writing. Equally, however, it would be totally inadequate to relegate Love on the Dole to the level of a detailed documentary account of life in Salford. In this article I have deliberately underplayed its value in this respect and concentrated rather on how an understanding of its structure (as a conventional ‘social’ novel) can more adequately enable a situating of it as a historical phenomenon. The ‘literary’ and ‘social’ elements of the novel are in no way separable. Once this is recognised the novel can take its place alongside Greenwood’s own autobiography, Orwell’s reporting, Hoggart’s analysis and the social history of Roberts and Branson and Heinemann. All these will be understood as specific kinds of texts arising out of similar patterns of events and experiences. This is not to reduce the novel to the status of a mere reflection of a social condition, but rather to understand it as a creative act by one man attempting to write within and make sense of a specific situation. Such writing is a creative act, but it is also a historical activity.
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Notes 1 Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole, London, Jonathan Cape. 1933. Penguin 1969. idem: There Was a Time, London. Jonathan Cape 1967. Penguin 1969. Page references are to the Penguin editions. 2 Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum, London 1971. Branson & Heinemann, Britain in the 1930s, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London 1971. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, Chatto & Windus, 1957. Penguin 1957. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, London, Gollancz, 1937. Penguin 1962. 3 B.L. Coombes, These Poor Hands, London, Gollancz 1939. 4 Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality. 5 Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, p. 18 (Penguin edition). 6 Ronald Blythe, The Age of Illusion, London. Hamish Hamilton, 1963, p. 118. 7 Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 77 (Penguin edition). 8 Istvan Meszaros ed., Aspects of History & Class Consciousness, London, 1971 p. 1. 9 Williams has attempted to discuss the differences and shared perspectives between himself and Goldmann in New Left Review, No. 67. 10 Greenwood, Love on the Dole, p. 14. 11 Ibid p. 178. 12 Greenwood, There Was a Time, p. 176. 13 The term is borrowed from Althusser, it is defined in For Marx, London, Allen Lane, 1939. p. 253. See also the introduction to this symposium, p. 22. 14 Greenwood, Love on the Dole, p. 176. 15 For the origin and meaning of ‘magical solutions’ see Williams 1840s analysis in The Long Revolution, p. 82–3. 16 Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 143. 17 Greenwood, Love on the Dole, p. 15. 18 Ibid, p. 255. 19 Greenwood, There Was a Time, p. 206.
6
Lawrence, Leavis and culture Graham Holderness
F.R. Leavis’ D.H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955), a book which profoundly influenced the direction of subsequent Lawrence criticism, also incorporated an important statement about the ‘culture’ of the Midlands mining communities, and about the more general question of the relationship between literature and society. In the essay called ‘Mr. Eliot and Lawrence’, Leavis established a problematic for the discussion of this relationship which has also proved influential. His terms of reference, language and general theoretical framework were accepted by a number of critics who took up the same subject.1 However, although Leavis’ essay offers an extremely generous defence of Lawrence and of the working class community against the snobbery and prejudice of a formidable opponent, it seems to me that his methods are not adequate to answer the kind of cultural questions he raises. In this paper I propose to examine his arguments and offer suggestions towards an alternative method of analysis. Leavis’ argument takes the form of a refutation of Eliot’s attack on Lawrence in After Strange Gods (1933). Although Leavis adopts a stance of total opposition, his method remains much the same as Eliot’s. Both critics begin with the literary text, using the techniques of formal criticism to make a literary value-judgement. The value-judgement is then extended beyond the literary work and towards the underlying culture which produces it, informing and to some extent determining its character. Eliot finds moral and literary flaws in a Lawrence short story The Shadow in the Rose Garden: a certain cruelty or lack of compassion, an aestheticism which is indifferent to human suffering, a lack of any moral sense. These deficiencies are related to Lawrence’s cultural environment: its provincialism and poverty of education, its lack of any strong moral tradition, the degenerate character of its particular brand of Protestant nonconformity. Lawrence’s cultural background, because it was not a ‘living and central tradition’, encouraged in him ignorance, immorality, ‘individualism’ (bigotry) and the kind of deformation of character that Eliot calls ‘heresy of sensibility’. Leavis simply turns this argument upside down. He accepts Eliot’s problematic, but begins instead with a positive critical assessment of Lawrence’s novels, and deduces from that literary valuejudgement that Lawrence therefore was brought up in the environment of a ‘living and central tradition’, among conditions which fostered and developed his ‘individual talent’. To turn it upside down however is not necessarily to offer a thorough-going critique of the argument; a man standing on his head is still the same man. Leavis’ failure to question Eliot’s method, his lack of any alternative theoretical framework, constitutes the major deficiency in his argument. The ‘compelling evidence’ Leavis uses to prove that Eastwood was a living culture, is literary evidence; specifically, The Rainbow.2 That Lawrence was brought up in the environment of a living tradition The Rainbow
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offers the most compelling kind of evidence. The book might have been written to show what, in the concrete, a living tradition is, and what it is to be brought up in the environment of one. (As to whether the tradition qualifies as ‘central’ I will not argue; I am content with recording it to be the environment in which George Eliot, too, was brought up). We are made to see how, amid the pieties and continuities of life at the Marsh, the spiritual achievements of a mature civilisation – the integrative sanctions, with the value-creating forms and associations that make possible the individual’s attainment, above the level of mere response to basic instinct, of something rich and significant – are transmitted. This statement is unsatisfactory in a number of ways. There is first the characteristic vagueness of language; what are ‘integrative sanctions’ and ‘value-creating forms’? It is wellknown that Leavis makes a virtue of verbal obscurantism; that which can be analysed is not living, and that which is living defies analysis.3 But these phrases must leave the common reader wondering precisely what aspects of society are in fact responsible for its ‘spiritual achievements’. Secondly, Leavis identifies perhaps too readily the cases of George Eliot and Lawrence, whose lives in terms of dates, geography, education and social class were really rather different. The premise is that their novels are similar, and occupy the same literary tradition (the Great One). But if it is legitimate to regard ‘provincial’ novelists as a selfdefining group, and to assess the nature of their society by literary evidence, why appeal only to these two writers? Our conclusions about this kind of social culture would be very different if we admitted the testimony of other novelists, such as ‘Mark Rutherford’, Hardy, Arnold Bennett. They are excluded from Leavis’ thinking not on social or cultural grounds, but on grounds of literary value. The biggest problem of all is the assumption that literature can be used as sociological evidence in this way, without the support of other kinds of evidence. For example, Leavis identifies the ‘pieties and continuities’ of farming life at the Marsh with the (supposed) cultural traditions of the Eastwood mining community. Leavis’ point is that an author could only write about life in such an ‘organic’ community from experience of it. But he ignores the fact that Lawrence quite specifically locates the Brangwens in history (the novel begins ‘about 1840’) and that in Chapter XII of this same novel, we have a description of a mining community in the 1890s (contemporary with Lawrence’s youth) where there are no pieties and continuities, no living culture and tradition. In fact, Wiggiston might equally be taken as evidence of what Eastwood was like in the 1890s. It would be absurd to relate Wiggiston directly and mechanically to Eastwood. But the way Lawrence presents it does indeed provide a kind of evidence about Eastwood culture and society, and about Lawrence’s relationship with them. Wiggiston is the complete negation of the ‘organic community’.4 The place had the strange desolation of a ruin. Colliers hanging about in gangs or groups, and passing along the asphalt pavements heavily to work, seemed not like living people, but like spectres. The rigidity of the blank streets, the homogeneous amorphous sterility of the whole suggested death rather than life. There was no meeting place, no centre, no artery, no organic formation. Lawrence describes the town in the colourless black and white of a photographic negative: adjectives have no colour, no sensuous definition, no concrete life; abstract, mechanical, sterile, amorphous, inchoate. Worst of all, in Wiggiston the human dimension has been
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absorbed into the machine and completely negated: there are no people there, only ‘spectres’. Wiggiston can be seen as the negative reflection of the Bestwood of Sons and Lovers, set against and alienated from the reality of that community which Lawrence presents in all its complexity and humanity. However, though the negative community as Lawrence presents it has its own consistency, its own rigorous internal logic and structure, the relationship between this idealist conception and the real Eastwood is not easy to see. And it is precisely the nature of this relationship that the ‘cultural question’ interrogates. We must ask why it was necessary to divide the actual Eastwood into positive and negative (Bestwood/Wiggiston), into ‘reality’ and ‘idea’. Does this contradiction perhaps suggest that we may find in the historical Eastwood, not the homogenous and organic culture described by Leavis, but a society deeply divided against itself ? And that we may find in Lawrence himself, not the natural product of an organic community, but a man divided against himself as deeply as his society was? Critical analysis can raise these questions, but it can’t possibly hope to answer them. The questions are literary, psychological, cultural, social and economic ones. It is not within the scope of this paper to examine the important critical questions, to explore the literary implications of the argument. I hope to do this in a future publication. Here I want simply to compare the conclusions drawn by Leavis on the basis of literary evidence, with the evidence provided by history and biography. I shall not take either the Marsh Farm, Bestwood or Wiggiston as conclusive evidence about Eastwood culture.
Was Eastwood an organic community? The main question raised by the Eliot/Leavis controversy seems to be this. We presuppose two cultures: the national and central culture of the dominant social class; and a local, provincial, basically working-class culture which is more or less distinct from the ruling-class form. The first of these would include, to use Eliot’s method:5 the Church of England, bishops, the Stock Exchange, Ash Wednesday, Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, Hampstead, Conservatives, cocktail parties and Ascot. The Eastwood form of culture embraces nonconformist churches, coal-mines and factories, the Salvation Army, the Board School and the Ilkeston teacher-training centre, Wesley’s hymns, trades unions and cooperative societies, the Labour Party, the Congregational Chapel Literary society, and the Sun Inn. Eliot would describe the latter as a sub-sub-culture, but we can see that it is in fact independent enough to be called a legitimate culture in its own right. The question I want to examine is this: was Lawrence’s culture (his cultural consciousness, his art, the kind of intellectual and artistic culture he sought after) orthodox according to the light of his own tradition, as both Eliot and Leavis have suggested? Was it (to use a phrase more acceptable to Dr Leavis) a ‘further development of that culture in organic complexity’? To answer that question it is necessary to examine the cultural conditions of Eastwood, and to look at Lawrence’s own relationship with them between 1885 and 1912. Eastwood was, according to Leavis, in the environment of a ‘living and central tradition’. It was the kind of stable and organic community which provides for its members a reliable system of values, a respect for tradition, the means for forming satisfactory relationships, the opportunity for ‘spiritual achievement’, and so on. Not only was Eastwood not culturally deprived, it actually provided Lawrence with the best social and cultural environment he could have had:6 To be born, with that genius, a miner’s son at Eastwood in the 1880s – it is as if Destiny,
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having given him the genius, had arranged also that he should be enabled to develop it to the utmost and qualified to use it for the purpose for which it was meant. Lawrence himself describes such an organic community in the Woodhouse of his novel The Lost Girl:7 Alvina never went to school. She had her lessons from her beloved governess, she worked at the piano, she took her walks, and for social life she went to the Congregational Chapel, and to functions connected with the Chapel. While she was little, she went to Sunday School twice and to Chapel once on Sundays. Then occasionally there was a magic lantern or a penny reading, to which Miss Frost accompanied her. As she grew older, she entered the choir at Chapel, she attended Christian Endeavour and the P.S.A., and the Literary Society on Monday evenings. Chapel provided her with a whole social activity, in the course of which she met certain groups of people, made certain friends, found opportunity for strolls into the country and jaunts to the local entertainments. Over and above this, every Thursday evening, she went to the subscription library to change the week’s supply of books, and there again she met friends and acquaintances. It is hard to overestimate the value of Church or Chapel – but particularly Chapel – as a social institution, in places like Woodhouse. The Congregational Chapel provided Alvina with a whole outer life, lacking which she would have been poor indeed. Despite the shift in social class, this is a fairly accurate description of the social life of Lawrence’s boyhood and adolescence. All the institutions and functions referred to are mentioned in the biographical evidence. It is presented as an ‘organic’ society: it is fully independent and self-sufficient, providing social activities, both duteous and amusing, educational and religious experience, and the opportunity to form personal relationships. Lawrence’s narrative tone is partly objective, partly sympathetic: ‘It is hard to overestimate’. And yet the point of view is not that of a participant, but of an observer. Lawrence emphasises that Woodhouse provides an ‘outer life’ for Alvina, but it doesn’t provide for the deeper inner needs she experiences, and it certainly doesn’t offer the possibility of a ‘rich and significant’ life. The value of that social life as seen within the specific context of Woodhouse, is quite different from the value given to it by the novel as a whole. Without that social life, Alvina’s existence would be ‘poor indeed’; but Lawrence gives us plenty of evidence that even with it, her life is nothing if not poor. The movement of the novel is inexorably away from Woodhouse, out from the limiting centre of the provincial community towards a much wider world of experience in which Woodhouse has to be revalued. The internal values of Woodhouse (or Eastwood) are perhaps less important than the fact that Woodhouse (and Eastwood) are always places to be escaped from. However, though Lawrence’s own evaluation of this particular organic community is more significant for us than either Eliot’s or Leavis’, again we must recognise that literary evidence only takes us so far. We must ask why Lawrence abstracted all the religious and cultural activities from his own life, and presented them in isolation from the specific social situation in which they took place. Where is the Woodhouse working class for example? Wasn’t Eastwood itself a society deeply divided by class conflict, the clash of values that forms the basis of conflict in Sons and Lovers? From the literary evidence, Leavis argues that this was not so, particularly in his chapter ‘Lawrence and class’. Answering Eliot’s charge of ‘snobbery’, Leavis uses the Daughters of the
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Vicar to show that Lawrence didn’t suffer from any kind of snobbery or class-consciousness, because his attitude to life was one of ‘reverence’ – a quasi-religious respect for the holiness of human life which transcends divisions of class. And this was, apparently one of the things Lawrence learned from his Eastwood culture:8 ‘Reverence’ must not be allowed to suggest any idealising bent; and if we say that the reverence expresses itself in a certain essential tenderness we don’t mean Lawrence is ‘tender-minded’ or in the least sentimentally given. The attitude is one of strength, and it is clairvoyant and incorruptible in its preoccupation with realities. It expresses, of course, the rare personal adequacy of an individual of genius, but it is also the product of a fine and mature civilisation, the sanctions, the valuations and the pieties of which speak through the individual. So far from tenable is the view of Lawrence as an uncouth and arrogant genius brought up in cultural barbarism. Here Leavis accepts (at last for the purposes of his argument) the social theory of culture outlined by Eliot: that culture and tradition involve ‘all those habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most significant religious rite to the conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represents the blood kinship of the same people living in the same place’.9 Primarily it is a question of making the right kinds of literary critical judgement. But if a social theory of culture is to have any meaning, it is surely necessary to know how Lawrence derived such qualities of character, and such a sense of values, and such moral feelings from the actual, specific material circumstances of his environment. If Leavis is saying that Eastwood in the 1880s and 1890s was pervaded by a sense of ‘reverence’ which transcended all divisions of class, then he is simply wrong. He can, in fact, afford to ignore the very real and very familiar personal, social and artistic conflicts underlying Lawrence’s Eastwood life, by projecting a structure of moral ideals (reverence, piety) which has its own internal consistency, but which is detached and isolated from a specific social context, abstracted and encapsulated within the idealist concept of ‘Tradition’. As Raymond Williams has noted, in discussing this idealising tendency of Leavis’ thinking:10 Societies and literatures have active histories, which are always inseparable from active values. But in literary as in some social, historical and anthropological studies, these facts of change can be projected into an apparent totality which has the advantage of containing them and of making them at last, like the rocks, stand still. In literature the most common of these false totalities is tradition, which is seen not as it is, an active and continuous selection and reselection, which even at its latest point in time is always a specific choice, but now more conveniently as an object, a projected reality, with which we have to come to terms on its terms. And so the real cultural question again seems to me to be: what was Lawrence’s experience of class in the period 1885–1912, as far as we can deduce from biographical and autobiographical sources and historical evidence? The treatment of class in the literature may or may not have a relationship with this experience, though it won’t necessarily be a simple one. That problem is too big for me to attempt here, though I will be touching on it: but the materials with which to answer it are readily available.
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‘A collier’s son a poet!’ One common interpretation of this problem was provided by Christopher Caudwell:11 Lawrence, for all his gifts, suffered from the old petit-bourgeois error. Like Wells, he strove to climb upwards into the world of bourgeois culture . . . it was not the security and power that appealed to him, but the cultural values. On this view, Lawrence was faced with a simple choice, like the choice of loyalties between father and mother. On the one hand, working-class consciousness, and the solidarity and cameraderie of the male part of the mining community; on the other hand, the ‘superior’ ideals of Mrs Lawrence, determined that ‘her children would be different’, determined to push them into the middle class at any price, even the betrayal of the working class in the person of her own husband. To expand Caudwell’s (oversimplified) account, let us add that it was also a choice between the clearly-defined and inflexible economic and cultural traditions of the mining community, such as Mr. Lawrence’s assumption that his boys would automatically go down the pit and his girls become domestic servants; and the escape-route from the industrial machine opened up by the middle-class consciousness and respectability of the mother, and the new educational opportunities (especially the 1870 Education Act). This is the familiar clash of values dramatised in Sons and Lovers: for example, in the incident where the father crops the child William’s long curly hair.12 The miner is insisting that the child conform, that he be obviously masculine in the traditional way, that his mother should not be permitted to make him something different, such as an effeminate cissy, or a gentleman, or an artist. But Caudwell’s account is contradicted by evidence that Lawrence began from an early age to reject his mother’s ideals as well as the traditional demands of working-class culture. Caudwell notes that Lawrence was attracted by bourgeois cultural values rather than material ones: but he fails to notice what this implies about the Lawrence family conflict. Lawrence (at least from the age at which we hear him thinking and talking about his future) had very little desire to become a respectable bourgeois or a gentleman, though he certainly did want to be ‘something different’. That ‘difference’ very early crystallised into the concrete ambition of becoming a writer; possibly a poet; and after that, an ‘artist’.13 Jessie Chambers recalls: By the time of the Centre days [1902–1905] Lawrence was beginning to wonder about himself and to realise that he possessed outstanding intellectual gifts. I remember very well a conversation when he and I happened to be on our way home together. It was perhaps the first of many times when we talked about his uniqueness, though of course we never called it that. ‘When an individual has more of any quality than other people I think it ought to be shared, don’t you?’ he asked tentatively. I agreed, and he continued: ‘When one has bigger mental gifts, for example, I think they ought to be used to help other people. That must be what they’re given us for, don’t you think so?’ After a pause he said slowly: ‘Perhaps I shall be something some day. I mean a bit more than ordinary. If ever I am, I should like to have a big house – you know there are some lovely old houses in the park with gardens and terraces. Wouldn’t it be fine if we could live in one of those houses, mother and all the people we like together? Wouldn’t it be fine!’
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We see clearly in that passage the contradiction between two completely different social ambitions: on the one hand the wish to share one’s gifts with others, to help, to participate in a common life; on the other hand, the vague desire to be ‘different’ which finds its natural equivalent in the big house in the park, and the dream of a more ‘exclusive’ kind of family life, with disagreeable elements quite shut out. This conflict is vitally important. But the point I would like to emphasise is that the way Lawrence chose, and this is often not recognised, was not the way prepared for him by his mother, the petit-bourgeois respectability of a clerical or teaching job. As soon as Lawrence begins to think of himself as a possible writer he comes into conflict with both sides of Eastwood culture. Jessie Chambers:14 It was during the year when he was an uncertificated teacher in the British School at Eastwood [1905–6] that Lawrence first spoke to me about writing. We were in the field that ran alongside the Warren when he said quietly: ‘Have you ever thought of writing?’ ‘Oh yes’ I replied at once, ‘I’ve thought of it all my life. Have you?’ ‘Yes, I have . . . it will be poetry! I took fire at that. ‘Well, isn’t that the very greatest thing?’ ‘Ah, you say that’ he replied. ‘But what will the others say? That I’m a fool. A collier’s son a poet!’ This development is crucial. Up to the age of about 20, Lawrence was exposed to the normal, typical influences of Eastwood. But as well as being a ‘normal, typical’ man, he was also a writer; and we are surely interested in the process by which he made art out of his cultural experience. At the age of 20 we see him beginning to talk about becoming a writer (other evidence suggests that he may have had the idea even earlier) and immediately this ambition introduces into his life a sense of difference and of conflict (What will the others say? A collier’s son a poet!). The ambition probably opened up a division that had been there for a long time; we recall the Eastwood tradition of Lawrence as a ‘mardyarse’ who did nothing but ‘play at ring o’ roses wi’ young lasses’. Certainly, the realisation of that ambition involved for Lawrence a readjustment of his relationship with Eastwood. By the age of 20, Lawrence had conceived the idea of becoming a writer, poet, ‘artist’. What exactly did this mean to a young Eastwood teacher in 1905? What kind of artist would Lawrence wish to become? How far did his cultural environment encourage this, how far did it discourage it? Two passages throw some light on this. From Jessie Chambers:15 I had not a high opinion of the first version of The White Peacock . . . he must have shown it to his mother, because when we were on holiday at Robin Hood’s Bay I asked her what she thought of it, and she replied, in a pained voice: ‘To think that my son should have written such a story’. And from Lawrence himself:16 After the funeral my father struggled through half a page, and it might as well have been Hottentot. ‘And what dun they gi’e thee for that, lad?’ ‘Fifty pounds, father’.
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‘Fifty pounds!’ He was dumbfounded, and looked at me with shrewd eyes as if I were a swindler. ‘Fifty pounds! And tha’s niver done a day’s hard work in thy life’.
The family And yet according to Leavis the Lawrence family was an important cultural influence. The highly civilised ‘social training’ that Eastwood provided was based in the family: ‘A family life beset by poverty and the day-to-day exigencies of breadwinning, yet quite finely civilised’. That family was an admirable character-forming background for a young writer. I think we need to look again at the Lawrence family background with Leavis’ claims in mind, and in particular at the question of how far the family helped to cultivate Lawrence’s writing. It is often assumed that both Lawrence’s mother and the ‘Pagans’ group were directly or indirectly involved in his early writing. William Hopkin was clear about how much Mrs Lawrence contributed to the writing of The White Peacock:17 I have mentioned the profound influence his mother had on his whole life. She dominated every side of it, and her one desire was to see him become a great writer . . . When he was writing The White Peacock he and his mother criticised it together, and he re-wrote parts of it until it satisfied them. This seems clear and definitive evidence. In trying to write, Lawrence embarked on a cultural activity which would have been incomprehensible to his father (who was practically illiterate) and, presumably, to most of the miners. It was a kind of culture alien to the traditional working-class culture of Eastwood. Mrs Lawrence, on the other hand, was ‘different’: she was educated, had been a school-teacher and had written poetry; she was determined that her son would ‘rise’ in the world, educationally, socially and financially. What more natural than that she should wish him to be a great writer, and assist him, as critic and collaborater, in writing his first novel? But, unfortunately, Lawrence’s own account of his mother’s attitude to his writing is also explicit on this point, and conflicts directly with Hopkin’s Lawrence’s version was not written until 1928, but long before Hopkin recorded his reminiscence, in 1949. In any case, where we have such a direct conflict of evidence, we must prefer Lawrence’s own account as being more reliable. Here is the relevant passage from the Autobiographical Sketch (1928), written in the third person:18 His own family, strictly ‘natural’, looked on such a performance as writing as ‘affectation’. Therefore wrote in secret at home. Mother came upon a chapter of The White Peacock read it quizzically, & was amused. ‘But my boy, how do you know it was like that? You don’t know’ – she thought one ought to know – and she hoped her son, who was ‘clever’, might one day be a professor or a clergyman or perhaps even a little Mr. Gladstone. That would have been rising in the world – on the ladder. Flights of genius were nonsense – you had to be clever and rise in the world, step by step . . . Miriam read all his writings – she alone, His mother, whom he loved best on earth, he never spoke to, about his writing. It would have been a kind of ‘showing off,’ an affectation. This is a very revealing passage, which should be compared carefully with some of Leavis’ claims. ‘Pieties and continuities’? A vigorous culture and a ‘strong intellectual tradition’? The
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ideal background for a young and developing writer? What we see here is the puritan’s antiartistic philistinism. Art is not strictly ‘natural’ and is therefore ‘affectation’ or ‘showing-off ’; a writer is apparently one who seeks to rise above the station to which Providence has assigned him, without taking the recognised steps up the official ladder. We see here the characteristic snobbery of Mrs Lawrence’s attitudes: nothing higher, nothing lower than the ‘blessed middle state’ is permissible or even tolerable. But ‘getting on’ is in order, provided that intelligence or genius are reduced to the merely utilitarian ‘cleverness’. Mrs Lawrence’s ambitions for her son are bourgeois ambitions: she wanted him to be an accredited ‘professional’ like a professor or clergyman, nothing so un-natural or un-respectable as a writer. Her criticism of the chapter from The White Peacock is hard-headed, unimaginative, philistine: how do you know? why isn’t it ‘natural’, normal? The young Lawrence shied away from such criticism: and was to later to react against a similar criticism of The White Peacock from Alice Dax, with the accusation of ‘utilitarianism’, against which he measured his own ‘aesthetic culture’. Even allowing for some exaggeration in Lawrence’s later account, and acknowledging that Mrs Lawrence (not surprisingly) was no literary critic, I think we would still see this as a very unsympathetic and discouraging environment for a budding writer, rather than fertile soil for the development of his talent. What about the ‘Pagans’? Did they provide, as well as intelligent conversation and an animated social life, the kind of cultural environment in which a young writer might flourish? Some members of the group, along with Willie Hopkin, seem to have thought of Lawrence as a possible writer very early in the day. But, despite the evidence of Pagan interest in music, art and poetry, we have no record of them discussing their own writing, or Lawrence’s. He began to write poetry in 1904, but he never mentions reading his poems or discussing them within the group. The truth seems to be that whatever may have been the cultural surroundings of the young Lawrence’s everyday life, when he began to write the entire cultural milieu boiled down to the personal help and encouragement of one person: Jessie Chambers:19 I would usually find Lawrence and the ‘Princess’ with their heads close together and the crumpled papers spread out in front of them; but the papers soon disappeared with my arrival. The explanation of that is to be found in the fact that the ‘Princess’ was the only one of the Pagans who did anything at all to encourage Lawrence in his writings.
Jessie Chambers It was in the relationship with Jessie, and only there, that Lawrence could discover the possibility of serious writing. He frequently remarked that without her he would hardly have begun writing at all. Jessie seems to have been involved in nearly all of Lawrence’s early work, right up to the early drafts of Sons and Lovers, which were sent to her after their tacit engagement had been broken off. What implications does this have for our general theme, what was the nature of their relationship, and what sort of influence did it have on Lawrence’s work in these early years? Is it significant that it was in the intimacy of his friendship with Jessie (not in the Lawrence family setting, or in the public environment of Chapel and literary society) that Lawrence found a suitable ‘cultural’ background? We have a vivid and probably accurate description of Jessie in Part Two of Sons and Lovers; and Lawrence’s view of her is amply borne out by her own writings:20
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The girl was romantic in her soul. Everywhere was a Walter Scott heroine being loved by men with helmets or with plumes in their caps. She herself was something of a princess turned into a swine girl in her imagination . . . Her great companion was her mother. They were both brown-eyed, and inclined to be mystical, such women as treasure religion inside them and see the whole of life in a mist thereof. So to Miriam, Christ and God made one great figure, which she loved tremblingly and passionately, when a tremendous sunset burned out the western skies, and Ediths, and Lucys, and Rowenas, Brian de Bois Guilberts, Rob Roys, and Guy Mannerings, rustled the sunny leaves in the morning . . . That was life to her. For the rest, she drudged in the house, which work she would not have minded had not her clean red floor been mucked up immediately by the trampling farm-boots of her brothers . . . She went to Church reverently, with bowed head, and quivered in anguish from the vulgarity of the other choir girls and from the common-sounding voice of the curate; she fought with her brothers, whom she considered brutal louts . . . she hated her position as a swine-girl. She wanted to be considered. She wanted to learn . . . For she was different from other folk, and must not be scooped up among the common fry. Jessie was certainly ‘the romantic sort who hated commonness’. Her romanticism and idealism make her see everyday life as brutal, common, vulgar. There is hardly any social content in these words, so far as one can tell, but it is easy to see how they could be assimilated into a kind of romantic snobbery: we see something of this later in Lawrence himself. But Jessie was not at all impressed by her betters. Her view of education was equally romantic and idealistic: My lack of education was a constant humiliation. The desire for knowledge and a longing for beauty tortured me. The cultural values she aspired towards were essentially ideal, far above the circumstances of her everyday life. In fact in a very important sense, she felt that the culture she wanted was incompatible with reality:21 Right from infancy I had been aware of a world that glimmered beyond the surrounding world of fact, and I dreaded lest the circumstances of my life should shut me out, compel me to live in the dark, and prevent me from ever becoming a sharer in the feast of the human spirit. It was this kind of romantic idealism that appealed to Lawrence, and provided an environment in which he could write. Presumably it was the sense of incompatability between Eastwood and ‘art’ that drove Lawrence into the ‘artistic’ relationship with Jessie, and forced him to produce art out of that. We have a nice anecdote about Jessie and Ada, Lawrence’s sister, reading The Tempest together. The romantic Jessie was profoundly impressed by Miranda’s speeches. Ada Lawrence thought they were ‘rubbish’. Lawrence could probably have seen both points of view. But in order to become a writer, he needed Jessie’s idealism to cultivate a growth that would have withered under his mother’s or sister’s cynical common-sense. Lawrence’s need for that romantic, intimate, exclusive relationship as the only basis for his creative writing, cannot be explained simply in terms of his character or hers, or in terms of Lawrence’s psychological peculiarities: it was a problem with a social dimension. It was the
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nature of that (fairly typical) Lawrence family background, and especially its piety, moral conventionality and hostility to ‘art’, that forced Lawrence into this isolated romantic relationship. And from within that relationship he wrote. In Jessie Chambers’ Personal Record we find a description of the rarified and fragile atmosphere necessary for Lawrence’s writing:22 Soon after 8 o’clock we closed our books. Lawrence made up the fire and we put on our outdoor things. He turned the gas low, locked the door, and put the key on the scullery window ledge. I dreaded to hear a footstep approaching to break the magical quality of our association. When we were alone together we were in a world apart, where feeling and thought were intense, and we seemed to touch a reality that was beyond the ordinary workaday world. But if his mother or sister returned, bringing with them the atmosphere of the market-place, our separate world was temporarily shattered, and only recaptured with difficulty. We see how the ordinary workaday world and the atmosphere of the market-place, the normal day-to-day culture of the Lawrence family, have to be quite shut out. Raymond Williams in Culture and Society has spoken of ‘the rich experience of childhood in a workingclass family’ which gave Lawrence a vital sense of ‘quick, close relationship’; relationship that became in his thinking the basis of human existence. This was possible because of the enforced openness of that family life, the togetherness and lack of individual privacy:23 This was the positive result of the life of the family in a small house, where there were no such devices of separation of children and parents, as the sending away to school, or the handing over to the servants, or the relegation to nursery or playroom . . . In such a life, the suffering and the giving of comfort, the common want and the common remedy, the open row and the open making-up, are all part of a continuous life which, in good and bad, makes for a whole attachment. Lawrence learned from this experience the sense of the continuous flow and recoil of sympathy which was always in his writing, the essential process of living. This is admirably put, and I think quite true. Dr. Williams is here, to some extent, defending working-class life against its detractors: but I think if we look closely at Lawrence’s specific position in that family context (rather than speaking of the general characteristics of working-class life) we are more impressed by the way that the communal character of family life placed on the young writer an irresistible pressure to keep certain kinds of experience completely private. These included his relationship with Jessie and his literary and creative interests. The traditional account of the Lawrence family hostility to Jessie Chambers emphasises Mrs. Lawrence’s possessive love and her struggle to keep Lawrence for herself. Reading Jessie’s Record, it doesn’t seem quite like that:24 ‘They were talking last night, Mother and E. (Emily). E. asked mother if we were courting’. He spoke with difficulty. ‘They say we either ought to be engaged or else not go about together. It’s the penalty of being nineteen or twenty instead of fifteen or sixteen’ he concluded bitterly. I began to understand. ‘I always thought your mother didn’t like me’ I said quietly. ‘It isn’t that – you musn’t
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think that; mother has nothing against you’ he urged. ‘It’s for your sake she spoke. She says it isn’t fair to you: I may be keeping you from getting to like someone else. She says I ought to know how I feel’, he went on painfully. ‘I’ve looked into my heart and I cannot find that I love you as a husband does a wife. Perhaps I shall, in time. If I ever find I do, I’ll let you know’. The most interesting thing in that passage is the part played by Lawrence’s sister Emily. It was she who asked the question. And it was they who said Lawrence ought to declare his intentions. That makes the pressure being brought to bear on Lawrence more of a public, communal, family pressure than his mother’s insatiable, predatory possessiveness. The demand is not merely a personal demand for love, but a social pressure to conform to certain Eastwood values. The relationship between Lawrence and Jessie is not ‘normal’, not understandable in terms of Eastwood experience and Eastwood conventions of social behaviour. Are they ‘courting’ or not? Do they intend to get ‘engaged’? Are they prepared to put their relationship on a proper footing? The pressure to conform to traditional norms of behaviour doesn’t preclude, we notice, Mrs Lawrence’s genuine concern for Jessie’s marriage prospects. That relationship, based as it was on an aesthetic and intellectual affinity and a delicate emotional sympathy, had to be brought into line with the rigid norms of convention set by the female side of the Lawrence family. Lawrence called their interference in the relationship the ‘slaughter of the foetus in the womb’. The development of this tension between the intellectual, emotional and artistic interests of the young Lawrence, and the family, with the consequent pressure to restrict his most important experiences to his relationship with Jessie (or to keep them to himself ), can be traced in the development of their reading. The staple diet of Eastwood culture (that is, the books available in Lawrence’s home, and within the Chambers family, and those accessible in the library of the Eastwood Mechanics’ Institute) seem to have been mainly nineteenth century ‘classic’ novels, romances, and popular moralistic Victorian fiction. Mrs Lawrence was fond of Scott, J.M. Barrie and East Lynne. Lawrence and Jessie seem to have started (about 1901–2) by reading romances: Scott, Rider Haggard, The Prisoner of Zenda.25 They read poetry too, mostly from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury: Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Fitzgerald, Rossetti. Later they graduated to Dickens, Charles Reade, R.L. Stevenson, Thackeray, George Eliot, Swift and many other writers. The extent of their reading experience is astonishing, and the availability of literature presented tremendous opportunities. Leavis’ formulation of the happy coincidence of cultural conditions and individual talent is undoubtedly true in this respect. But it is also an over-simplification. Clearly if the books hadn’t been there Lawrence wouldn’t have been able to read them. But still his reading of them, because of the nature of Eastwood literacy and Eastwood reading habits, became an intensely personal experience: and his interests conflicted at so many points with native patterns of culture, that we can hardly regard his reading as a development of that culture in organic complexity:26 Once when we had just left his home, Lawrence said to me, ‘I don’t believe they were like us when they were young, do you? Our parents, I mean. I don’t imagine mother ever read Carlyle. It was Annie Swan, I think’. And another time he said: ‘I’m sure they don’t feel things as we do, I don’t care what they say. They talk about them too much. If you really feel a thing deeply, you can’t talk about it, can you?’
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Eastwood culture, the reading habits of Mrs Lawrence, the Chambers family and other literate members of the community Lawrence may have known, seems to have offered the very important but limited experience of reading for pleasure or enjoyment; having the imagination stimulated in a not very profound and rather innocuous way. This is not at all surprising. But in considering how far Eastwood literacy can be identified with Lawrence’s, we have to note that Eastwood provided no possibility for literature to act in a radical, disturbing, transforming way. What Lawrence wanted was the more profound engagement with literature which allows it to modify or even transform the reader’s consciousness; to affect his life. When Lawrence read Wuthering Heights it affected him very deeply. He recognised its deep emotional power and its searching analysis of conventional values, its questioning of the whole structure of received morality. But he advised Jessie Chambers not to read it. And Jessie recalls that Mrs Lawrence, after reading it, had strong feelings about what she would like to do to ‘that Heathcliff ’. She may have responded to the novel as a romance, but it didn’t shake her moral convictions at all.27 Lawrence got much more out of the novel, and he found that what he did get was incommunicable in Eastwood terms. When Jessie was nineteen Lawrence asked her to read Maupassant, which had ‘thrilled him to the marrow’ . . . ‘telling me to take care my mother didn’t see it’ (my italics). This was about 1907. Lawrence’s reading then of French writers (Flaubert, Maupassant) and English writers of the 1890s (Wilde, Synge, and Beardsley’s drawings) brought the developing conflict between his own preoccupations and the values of his society to a direct and total opposition. It was these writers who helped Lawrence to solve his immediate artistic problems; Eastwood couldn’t help, and therefore Lawrence accepted values and standards from elsewhere. The specific evidence that we have about the institutional side of Eastwood literary culture conflicts directly with Leavis’ assertions about the community’s cultural life. There is the example of the literary society attached to the Congregational Chapel:28 The Chapel at Eastwood became the centre of our social life. There was a Literary Society, and we all paid a shilling for our membership card. I was wildly disappointed once when some lecture to which I had looked forward with extravagant anticipation came and my brother ‘didn’t feel like turning out’ . . . I was only appeased, when Lawrence, who went to the lecture, told me ‘it wasn’t up to much’. Another time there was a social, and I called for A. (Ada). Lawrence thought he wouldn’t go, he had his homework to do. A sudden impulse made me look at him and say, ‘I wish you would come’. He did not reply but I saw his face change. Ada and I set off together, and the first thing I saw on arriving was a group of some four or five youths solemnly fishing in a box with a magnet. I was dismayed and fervently hoped Lawrence wouldn’t come. A few minutes later, he walked into the room in that alert, expectant way of his, and I felt too ashamed to speak to him. I had expected the social to be an affair of spontaneous fun and gaeity, and was depressed by the commonplace reality. A ruddy young man with a florid tenor voice sang ‘The Boys of the Old Brigade’ and ‘The Old Shake’ and I could have cried when everybody applauded with gusto. This is what we would expect a church youth club to be like, and (given the alternative descriptions) it surely sounds more like the ‘drab, earnest institution of the observer’s cliche’, (Raymond Williams) than the ‘strong intellectual tradition’ ascribed by Leavis. Jessie is ashamed, embarrassed, afraid of Lawrence’s reaction to the Literary Society, because in terms of intellectual development and social maturity he was already far in advance of
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whatever it had to offer him. And of course the values and standards against which he measured it were not those of Eastwood.
Pagans and socialists This brings us directly to Lawrence’s education. He was of course publicly educated at elementary school, high school and college. But Leavis stresses rather the native Eastwood culture, the ‘extraordinarily active intellectual life’ enjoyed by the ‘group of young people among whom Lawrence moved’; presumably the Pagans, and perhaps the gatherings of the Eastwood intelligensia at the house of William Hopkin. There is no disputing that an active intellectual life went on in these groups. In stressing the supposed ‘organic’ nature of the community Leavis forgets that the Pagans group were very dependent on public education. Their meetings certainly took place in Eastwood kitchens, but the group was really based on the Ilkeston teaching centre. But Leavis doesn’t even begin to speculate about the actual relationship between the Pagans and the mining community. Why did they call themselves Pagans? Caudwell described the conflict of values experienced by Lawrence as a straightforward clash between working-class and bourgeois values. To put it as simply as that ignores the cultural activities of the Pagans.29 Their Paganism was that of Swinburne and Meredith; the free pursuit of art, politics and learning with the objective of a free and open life. Their ideal was that of a kind of artistic bohemianism, transcending class-divisions; the ideal of a life free from moral and social restrictions, where the individual could develop and cultivate himself intellectually, emotionally and aesthetically. This led on naturally to political radicalism; Fabianism, feminism socialism. Just how unconventional the Pagans themselves were is arguable. Certainly the kind of cultural experience they had (of literature, music, the theatre) implied potential conflict with Eastwood culture. And it helped Lawrence to define more easily his own ‘paganism’, which involved the rejection of orthodox religion, moral independence (particularly sexual freedom) and intellectual and artistic interests beyond what Eastwood had to offer from its own ‘organic’ culture. The Pagans were certainly native Eastwood intellectuals. But they were Pagans because they felt in many ways that they were in conflict with traditional Eastwood values. It is probably in their socialism that they were closest to the experience of the community, though their ideas were probably far in advance of the average miner or trade unionist. At this point Lawrence found himself faced with a choice: between the socialism that retained some relationship with the working-class community; and a kind of artistic bohemianism and aestheticism that implies a rejection of politics, classes, society, and a great deal of human experience. To prove this would involve a fairly thorough analysis of Lawrence’s early letters, poems, short stories, and above all the first two novels. I hope to undertake this in a sequal to the present article. If there was a truly ‘organic’ outgrowth of culture from Eastwood society, it was surely centred on the house of William Hopkin. Hopkin himself was a far more ‘natural’ part of the Eastwood landscape than Lawrence himself. He was a socialist, and became a local councillor. His widow described him as ‘an independent social reformer, writer, broadcaster, wit, poet and naturalist. His social and intellectual gifts provided him with a wide circle of friends and among peers, tramps, reknowned literary figures, and above all, the colliers and farmers among whom he lived at Eastwood. By his personal charm and sympathy he inspired the many down-trodden and weary to whom he rendered practical help’.30 The socialist culture of the Hopkin home united the Eastwood working-class and the front rank of contemporary intellectuals and politicians. The intellectual atmosphere has been described as:31
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There is a considerable difference between such a view of the political, economic and moral emancipation of a class, and the artistic bohemianism of a ‘Pagan’ like Lawrence. How did he fit into this obviously organic development of Eastwood culture? He felt isolated within it, and more and more divided from it. His correspondence with Blanche Jennings32 shows very clearly the conflict between Lawrence’s concept of his art, and the cultural patterns of the organic community. Perhaps the best piece of evidence is a lecture called Art and the Individual,33 which Jessie Chambers remembers Lawrence delivering to ‘a little gathering of the Eastwood intelligensia at the house of a friend’. Hopkin’s house.34 The lecture opposes the objective, scientific and ‘general’ character of socialism, to the subjective, aesthetic and ‘individual’ concept of artistic culture Lawrence held. The tone of the introduction suggests something of Lawrence’s feeling within that group: it is brittle, sarcastic, conveying a sense of difference and of isolation: These Thursday night meetings are for discussing social problems with a view to advancing a more perfect social state and to our fitting ourselves to be perfect citizenscommunists – what not. Is that it? I guess in time we shall become expert sociologists. If we would live a life above the common rock we must be experts at something – must we not? Besides, we have peculiar qualities which adapt us for particular parts of the social machine. Some of us make good cranks, doubtless each of us would make a good hub of the universe . . . Under socialism every man with the spirit of a flea will become a specialist – with such advantages it were disgraceful not to cultivate that proverbial one talent, and thus become a shining light on one tiny spot. It will take some four hundred specialists to make a normal family of four. However! Here then, is the organic culture of Eastwood. And here we find Lawrence becoming isolated and detached from it; we find a further accentuation of his sense of difference and division.
The Chapel ‘The Chapel, in the Lawrence circle, was the centre of a strong social life, and the focus of a still persistent cultural tradition that had as its main drive the religious tradition of which Mr. Eliot is so contemptuous.’ The Chapel also according to Leavis provided intellectual culture: the Lawrence nonconformity was no ‘debased tin-chapel salvationism’ but could boast a ‘strong intellectual tradition’. Leavis seems to mean that the Chapel preaching would have been of a high order; that the Chapel fostered cultural activities; and that Mrs Lawrence transmitted her Chapel education to her son. We have touched upon Lawrence’s version of the Chapel-based social life in The Lost Girl and on the Chapel’s Literary Society. The question Leavis raises here is very much a historical one, as he himself recognises by sending Mr. Eliot to read Halevy. But I think we can throw more light on the question by using biographical sources, and examining Lawrence’s own relations with the Chapel and with Christianity between 1885 and 1912.
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The extent to which Lawrence absorbed the intellectual culture offered by the Chapel was obviously affected by his relationship with the Chapel. He began to think seriously about religious dogma and problems of belief before the age of sixteen:35 Lawrence would be about 16 when we first talked about religion, and he was clearly perplexed by what passed for religious life amongst us. ‘What does it mean to them?’ he asked slowly, thinking hard. ‘Does it mean anything at all? I don’t think it means much to me.’ We each regarded our mothers as deeply religious women and in many talks we had together we tried to find out what significance the religion they professed had for them. It was the beginning of Lawrence’s groping into experience to find a value that might serve as a guide. There was little analysis of the elements of religion at this stage – that came later. But there was serious attempt to find a practical value. That was 1901–2. The questioning of orthodox religion came to a crisis when Lawrence went to Nottingham University College (September 1906) where he read most of the philosophical, religious and scientific books which provided the staple diet of nineteenth century intellectuals: Darwin, Renan, Carlyle, Huxley, Mill, Herbert Spencer, Schopenhauer, William James. Jessie Chambers emphasised the impact on Lawrence of rationalism and scepticism, the materialist and scientific view of life:36 He had come up against the materialist attitude to life, and religion, and it seared his youthful freshness . . . Far more than any dogma, Lawrence was interested in the question as to how the old religious ideas stood in relation to the scientific discoveries that were sweeping away the familiar landmarks. On one of our walks home he gave my brother and me a vivid description of the nebular theory of the Universe, and he was troubled by the discrepancy between such a hypothesis of the origin of things and the God postulated by the Congregational Chapel. Lawrence objected to the Chapel not just on ideological grounds, but for its tone of selfrighteousness (the ‘tone of authority’ adopted by many religious people, including his mother) and for its essentially negative attitude to morality: ‘The Chapel system of morality is all based on “Thou shalt not”. We want one based on “thou shalt”. Presumably the rebellion against Christianity and the authority of the Chapel was general among the educated young of Eastwood, and they naturally turned towards the familiar alternatives: rationalism, humanism, social responsibility, political belief. It doesn’t surprise us that Lawrence’s acceptance of the materialist position was very much a temporary thing. But there was another alternative to the crisis of belief, and he took one much more seriously. It was ‘art’. He wrote in a letter:37 College gave me nothing, even nothing to do – I had a damnable time there, bitter so deep with disappointment that I have lost forever my sincere boyish reverence for men in position . . . I lost my reverence, and my reverence was a big part of me – and having lost my reverence, my religion rapidly vanished. Now I respect some men, but I revere none. . . . Three parts of my time I was bored till college boredom became a disease. Moreover I was suffering acutely from Carlyliophobia, which you will understand if ever that rabid philosopher has bitten you. And lastly I was sore, frightfully raw and sore because I couldn’t get the religious conversion, the Holy Ghost business, that I longed for. It was imperative that I should do something, so I began to write a novel.
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The novel in question was The White Peacock. Lawrence’s turning to art represents a direct split with the Chapel its teaching and whatever ‘strong intellectual tradition’ it may have had.38
The divided self From about 1906 onwards we begin to hear about Lawrence’s very strong sense of a division within himself: of his life splitting into separate existences under the pressures that operated on him. He articulated this dualism to Jessie as being between the spiritual and artistic self which Jessie encouraged and loved; and the physical, sexual side which she could not tolerate.39 ‘The trouble is, you see, I’m not one man, but two’. I refused to accept the idea, but he persisted gravely: ‘It’s true, it is so, I am two men inside one skin’. ‘I am not a complete whole. I tell you, I am two men. One man in me loves you, but the other never can love you’. ‘One part of my nature needs you deeply’ he would explain with moving earnestness. ‘For some things, I cannot do without you. But the other side of me wants someone else, someone different’. Lawrence’s thinking about the problem is complex and it does change and develop. In relation to Jessie, the division seems to be a simple dualism of physical and spiritual; Jessie satisfied the one, but not the other. Which is why Lawrence had to go to Louie Burrows. In a letter to Jessie:40 When I look at you, what I see is not the kissable and embraceable part of you . . . what I see is the deep spirit within. That I love and can go on loving all my life . . . Look, you are a nun, I give you what I would give a holy nun. So you must let me marry a woman I can kiss and embrace and made the mother of my children. But the simple physical/spiritual interpretation misses out Lawrence’s sense of his ‘artistic self ’ and where exactly that fitted into the pattern. We have seen that as a writer Lawrence felt set apart from Eastwood society, and needed Jessie to develop artistically. This is what he means by ‘for some things I cannot do without you’. And he offers Jessie a purely spiritual love, while he takes his sexual passion to Louie. At this point, the artist is identified with the spirit, and Jessie loved them both. Later Lawrence expressed it quite differently.41 Miriam encouraged my demon. But alas, it was me, not he, whom she loved. So for her too it was a catastrophe. My demon is not easily loved: Whereas the ordinary me is. So poor Miriam was let down. Here the ‘demon’ is Lawrence’s artistic self: inhuman, timeless, amoral, perhaps even diabolical. And Jessie can’t love it. So what has happened is a qualitative change in the nature of Lawrence’s conception of his artistic self. It has now become alienated both from Eastwood society and from Jessie herself. And it now includes (whereas before it excluded) Lawrence’s emotional and sexual life. The decision he makes here is profoundly important: it is a decision to live according to the demon rather than according to the ‘ordinary meal-time me’; that is, the ordinarv conventional self which was the object of his mother’s ambitions. It was of course the amoral, artistic demon who eloped with Frieda Weekley.
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Leavis and others have suggested that Eastwood encouraged and developed the young writer, and that he depended on its culture for the growth of his own. But here we see that Lawrence, thinking of himself as an artist, has to alienate that ‘artistic’ self from his ‘real’ or ‘normal’ self, and regard it as something separate, timeless, inhuman and immoral. Lawrence experienced within himself the deep-rooted contradictions of his society. May Chambers described him in 1912, still experiencing the same division between man and poet, ‘common man’ and artist. At this point he is preparing, of course, to destroy the normal, Eastwood self, and live according to the values of his ‘demon’. May Chambers pronounces with solemn finality the judgement of Eastwood on the erring Lawrence:42 My sister told me that in those days Lawrence impressed her with a sense of his divine belief in himself. She said he seemed to feel he was important to the world, and he resented any claim that would curtail his experience and therefore his usefulness. He felt himself a medium charged with some power for the good of mankind. Yet he wished he could escape it and grow stout, and attractive to women. He longed to be loved as a man instead of as a poet. He told her also that he was a common man with an intellect . . . He would say one day that he must accept every experience that came his way for the sake of his ‘mission’, and the next that he was nothing but a simple, ordinary man, with a little more than the ordinary man’s mental equipment. Her final verdict on him was: ‘He sees the light and chooses the dark’.
Notes 1 Raymond Williams: Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958) p. 206. V. de Sola Pinto: D.H. Lawrence: Prophet of the Midlands (1951). In 1972 the Nottingham Festival Committee assembled an exhibition of Lawrence material to show that ‘Lawrence’s extraordinary genius was permanently rooted in the region’. See James T. Boulton: Young Bert (Heanor, 1972). 2 F.R. Leavis: D.H. Lawrence, Novelist (Chatto 1955), ch. 3. 3 See for example his reply to Rene Welleck: ‘Literature and Philosophy’ in The Common Pursuit (1952). I am sure Dr. Leavis uses these words precisely and consciously: my point is that the language he uses to describe common, shared social experience, is (paradoxically) an isolated and private language. It’s the language of ritual, for the initiated, rather than the language of communication. 4 The Rainbow (Penguin ed.) p. 345. 5 T.S. Eliot: Notes towards the Definition of Culture (Faber 1948), p. 37. 6 Leavis, op. cit., p. 320. 7 D.H. Lawrence: The Lost Girl, ch. 2. 8 Leavis, op. cit., pp. 77–8. 9 T.S. Eliot: After Strange Gods (Faber 1933) p. 18. 10 Raymond Williams: ‘Literature and Sociology; in memory of Lucien Goldmann’ New Left Review no. 67, May–June 1971. 11 Christopher Caudwell: ‘D.H. Lawrence: a Study of the Bourgeois Artist’, Studies in a Dying Culture (London 1938), p. 44. 12 D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers, ch. 1. 13 E.T. ( Jessie Chambers): D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (Cape 1935) p. 49. (All quotations from the second edition, ed. J.D. Chambers). 14 E.T., op. cit., p. 57. 15 ibid., p. 117. 16 Introduction to A Bibliography of D.H. Lawrence by Edward McDonald, Pheonix, p. 232. 17 William Hopkin, in Edward Nehls: D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography (Madison 1957), vol. I, p. 72. 18 D.H. Lawrence: ‘Autobiographical Sketch’, Assorted Articles (1930).
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19 George Henry Neville, in Nehls, op. cit., p. 46. In the preceding remarks I am indebted to my colleague John Worthen for access to an unpublished Ph.D. thesis: D.H. Lawrence: Readers and Audience. 20 Sons and Lovers, p. 177. 21 E.T., op. cit., p. 46. 22 ibid., p. 58. 23 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, p. 205. 24 Jessie Chambers, op. cit., p. 66. 25 ibid., p. 94 ff. 26 ibid., p. 102. 27 ibid., p. 102. 28 ibid., pp. 53–4. 29 See James T. Boulton, op. cit. 30 Oliver Hopkin, in W.E. Hopkin, Glades and Lovers; quoted Nehls, op. cit., p. 543. 31 Emile Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter: A study in Edwardian Transition. See also Enid C. Hilton in Nehls, op, cit., pp. 134–5. 32 Letters to Blanche Jennings: see Harry T. Moore (ed.), Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, 1962, vol. 1. 33 ‘Art and the Individual’, Pheonix 11. A more complete text is that in Ada Lawrence and G. Stuart Gelder, Young Lorenzo, Early Life of D.H. Lawrence (New York 1966). 34 Jessie Chambers, op. cit., p. 120. 35 ibid, p. 48. 36 ibid., pp. 83–4. 37 Collected Letters, vol. 1. 38 There is evidence (such as the essay ‘Hymns in a Man’s Life’) that the Chapel upbringing affected Lawrence as a creative writer in deeper and less conscious ways. But I presume Dr. Leavis means by a ‘strong intellectual tradition’ more than those ‘rather banal Nonconformist hymns’. 39 Jessie Chambers, op. cit., pp. 136–7. 40 Collected Letters, vol. 1. 41 ‘Introduction to the Collected Poems of D.H. Lawrence’, Pheonix, p. 251. 42 Jessie Chambers, op. cit., p. 214.
7
The abuses of literacy Colin Sparks
The Working Class has no golden age in the past; our golden age is the future. Harry Wicks
Most of the current discussion in Cultural Studies concerns the question of methodology. It seems to be generally agreed as to what we are looking at, and all that remains is to settle the way in which we should look at it. The central concern of this paper is to argue that this accepted definition of the object of study takes its fundamental characteristics quite uncritically from much earlier conceptions of the nature of Cultural Studies, and that consequently the bulk of contemporary practise is radically misconceived. In order to argue this case, it will be necessary to return to some of the seminal texts of cultural studies and to look at the ways in which they have been subsequently used. The problem of the relation and mutual determination of methodology and problematic has not, as far as I know, been subject to much investigation, and I cannot here attempt to deal with it in any detail; rather I have tried to illustrate the consequent arbitrary dislocation in the course of the argument about the nature of the problematic itself. Cultural Studies has had, from its inception, a certain flavour of radical brimstone about it. The writers who may be considered, without too much argument, as the founders of discipline, had and have, by the standards of British academic life, highly developed and eccentric concerns and ideas. In particular, the two leading figures (Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams) display in the genuinely seminal works of Cultural Studies quite definite and unconcealed political intentions. The case of Williams is self-evident but The Uses of Literacy itself has its definite plea for political actions: If the active minority continue to allow themselves too exclusively to think of immediate political and economic objectives, the past will be sold, culturally, behind their backs.1 The two perspectives are different, but they share important common ground: both writers attempted to re-integrate a huge submerged area of human experience into the study of culture. It is possible to overstress the importance of biographical factors in the initial impetus towards Cultural Studies. It is possible to locate a number of the central concerns within the more general intellectual climate of the time. I cannot here detail the evolution of the period, but some of its salient features can at least be remarked upon. If one recalls on the one hand the complex of ideas which a combination of Cold War and Long Boom generated; the notion of a problem-free post-Keynesian capitalism; the alleged disappearance of
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the working class; the agonised convulsions of the Labour Party; the bankruptcy of the pretenders to alternative leadership and in particular the sterility of the Stalinist version of Marxism; the changing modes of working-class activity and experience, one can see a good part of the forces at work. If we set alongside that the strengths and weaknesses of the powerfully established literary analysis of ‘Culture’ and the contrary and equally ambivalent sociological studies of ‘mass society’, then much more is visible. If we examine The Uses of Literacy we can see clearly how a number of central definitions emerged. The dominant impressions which a reading of The Uses of Literacy leaves one with are curiously unintellectual: they are nostalgia and self-recognition. These may be to a large part intentional, and they certainly go a long way towards explaining the impact and popularity of the book, but they are also problematic. Nostalgia is built into the whole structure. The warm glow of Hunslet is balanced against the neon and plastic of the 1950s. The world of the 1920s is used as a critical standard against which to judge later developments. It is alleged, quite uncritically, that ‘the old forms of class culture are in danger of being replaced by a poorer kind of classless culture, and this is to be regretted’.2 Regret and nostalgia may be useful and entertaining feelings, but they lead to some very curious conclusions. Speaking of ‘Milk Bars’, Hoggart says, along with much else of an uncomplimentary nature: Compared even with the pub around the corner, this is all a peculiarly thin and pallid form of dissipation, a sort of spiritual dry-rot amid the odour of boiled milk. Many of the customers – their clothes, their hair-styles, their facial expressions all indicate – are living to a large extent in a myth-world compounded of a few simple elements which they take to be those of American life.3 It is only too easy to mock this kind of thinking, but to do so might obscure the substantial point. After a major effort to come to terms with how one generation of working people saw and defined their world, and displaying considerable sensitivity to their modes of selfexpression, we are treated to this shabby and contemptuous dismissal of the efforts of a new generation. Whether intended or not, the intellectual counterpart of this emotion has entered deeply and cancerously into the concerns of Cultural Studies. Central to so much of the work which has been produced is the idea that there was, in the 1920s and 1930s, a clear and definite working-class culture which was more valuable, more authentic, more homogenous, more independent . . . more working-class, than any subsequent development. This vanished culture becomes the standard of judgement for later formations, and they are all found wanting. I do not wish to quarrel with the idea that there was such a culture. Much more to the point is how we evaluate it. The culture was the product of a specific historical experience and it represented a response to a particular historical conjuncture. The culture of later decades was a response to a different historical experience, which included the accretions of the preceeding experience as well as new elements. It was and is different, and if we are to judge either it is not by some nostalgic, inverted teleology of culture. If we accept the authenticity of one cultural formation, then we must accept the authenticity of another. How we analyse and compare different periods is something I wish to deal with later, but we certainly cannot do so by elevating an arbitrary and particular period to the status of a proletarian Paradise.
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The feeling of recognition adds a further dimension. The figure of the Scholarship Bay informs the second evaluative crux of the book. The assumed critical independence which this poor lonely adolescent has been granted is the vantage point from which the strengths and limits of two cultures can be assessed. The limitations of ‘high cultural’ analysis, and the inappropriateness of the characteristic standards, are forever present. In the middle of a discussion of very soft pornography we find a passage like this: Sanctuary is admittedly an early pot-boiler; yet one can see in it the marks of a serious and disinterested creative writer. A gifted, varied, and complex perception is at work, picking up sights, smells, noises, and weaving them together in a scene of some complexity . . .4 The problem presented by passages like this is: if our critical conceptions and values are those forged by academic English Literature, then we can make judgements on a particular kind of human activity; on the other hand, these methods and values are clearly inadequate to come to terms with the real meanings of the experience and culture of the overwhelming mass of society. Hoggart himself seems never to have solved the problem which his work makes clear. In essays like Mass Communications in Britain and Schools of English in Contemporary Society he juggles uneasily and agnostically with the difficulties.5 The difficulty, however, resolutely refused to go away. What occurred in practice was what Stuart Hall later called a ‘shift . . . from the “aesthetic” to the historical and anthropological conceptions of “a culture”’. This movement was undoubtedly one of the fundamental impetuses in Cultural Studies, and it posed very sharply the need to develop a new theory and a new methodology for the study of human experience. However, like the first impulse, the way in which this second insight was to operate contained, within the impulse itself, profound dangers. The internal evolution of Cultural Studies was marked by this impetus. Defining itself in opposition to an avowedly evaluative discipline, it had to create its own values more appropriate to its own material and concerns. If the standards of ‘High Culture’ were inappropriate to Cultural Studies, so too its own standards were and are inappropriate to ‘High Culture’. The values of Cultural Studies have from their origin been rooted in a sentimental myth of past ages, and they do not provide any total vantage point from which to analyse the historical experience of culture. The difficulty with the value system generated is two-fold. If we erect a critical apparatus which is tailored specifically to the culture of one class, then we are simply in an inverse repetition of the tradition from which we are trying to break. Now, unless independent cultural systems are mutually sealed against each other, then there is only one other alternative: simply to ignore the alternative cultural formation. The problem of the assessment of the ‘high cultural’ tradition was not subsumed under a new conception, it was consigned, by an approximation to administrative action, to the status of non-existence. The ‘high cultural’ system of evaluation was the product of a selective reading of a total historical process which was blind to the existence of possible alternatives. What Cultural Studies has done is to erect a different, but equally selective and myopic alternative. This first objection might be met by arguing along more or less quantitative lines that the new system encompassed the experiences of a far greater number of people than the old, but to answer in that manner is to demonstrate glaringly the second objection to this value system. It is, quite simply, based on a rejection of history. To hypostasise a single, unique development as the calibration-table against which all other developments are to be measured is to reject any notion of the
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complex historical evolution of social classes in relation to each other. The consequences are quite suprising: much against the conscious intentions of many of the students of Cultural Studies, the argument leads with irresistable logic to a celebration of capitalism in one of its many unpleasant forms. The culture which is chosen as a yard-stick is, it should be remembered, the culture of a subordinate class. If this is the source of our evaluations, then from what point can we criticise the fact of domination? Cultural Studies thus operated from its inception with a rigid, and thus flawed, notion of social totality. However much it might proclaim its allegience to higher and better things, its failure to give any critical account of itself or what it rejected made it inevitable that it would fail to realise its own potential. This failure leads logically to the third, and in my opinion the most important, legacy of The Uses of Literacy. Once again, the Scholarship Boy provides a key to understanding what is going on. A crucial point in the book is the discussion of the antimony of ‘Them’ and ‘Us’, and in this chapter, Hoggart has a revealing passage: After the age of eleven, when the scholarship boys and girls go off to the grammarschool, the rest look increasingly outward to the real life which will begin at fifteen, to the life with the group of older men and women which, for the first few years after school forms the most powerfully educative force they know.6 This is undoubtedly true, but its most telling point is that the scholarship boy has once and for all been put off from that most crucial element in the real life of the working-class work. This is not simply a limitation of biography: it is also a central theoretical absence from the way in which Hoggart approaches his material. A large part of the definition of workingclass in this book is geographical, and it is supplemented by a vision through the lenses of consumption, leisure, and home. One possible definition, which is specifically ruled out through the inclusion of small shop-keepers, is the one which springs most readily to mind: production. Once again, this perspective had contradictory effects. It opened up a whole new range of topics for analysis and provided a healthy antidote to some dangerous illusions. On the other hand, it seems to me that it produced, in the long run, the most pernicious misanalysis that Cultural Studies has suffered from. Consider, for example, Hoggart’s discussion of working-class activists: . . . I have not referred much to the influence of the ‘earnest minority’ among workingclass people, since my chief concern has been with attitudes among the majority. Yet I do not mean to underestimate the effect the ‘earnest minority’ has, or to imply that this minority has had and may continue to have (though this is by no means certain) an influence on their group out of all proportion to their number, it is important that, something should be said more directly about them.7 I do not seek to deny that this minority has been very much of a minority, but the difficulties inherent in the above formulation are so many that it is hard to know how to come to terms with them. If we look at the list of institutions these people supported (and Hoggart grants them only the ability to support we are at once struck by the fact that one of the most massive and enduring of them, the Trade Unions, were formed as a direct response to the central issue of work. The two other most massive ones, the Cooperative Movement and the Labour Party, have at least strong links with work. A notable exception from the list is the Communist Party. Certainly this has always been very small, and perhaps Gallacher or Hannington
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were really Russians or at least middle-class romantics, but it is difficult to see how any discussion of the working-class activist could possibly ignore that tragic trajectory. It seems that Hoggart was determined to ignore that stubborn millenarian ghost clanking its chains through Conference and Rule Book in so many of those organisations which spring up from the collective efforts of working people. Secondly, although it is true that these organisations have very often depended for their existence and continuation on very small minorities, it is certainly not true that they were, and are, the concern solely of those minorities. Take the example of the Trade Unions these do indeed depend a great deal on a relatively small number of activists, although that active support is certainly very much larger than is commonly supposed, but the organisations are not the expression of those minorities. They are mass organisations and they are the expressions of the masses. It is only in so far as the ‘majority’ are prepared to organise and to give their loyalty to their organisations, only in so far as they are willing to acceed to collective discipline and to suffer collective hardship, that any Trade Union can even begin to function. Thirdly, the concerns of this minority are not the marginal ephemera of the life of the majority of working people. They are the crucial determinants of the material and cultural life of the class as a whole. The culture of the British working class is not ‘affected’ by the strengths and weaknesses of its political and industrial organisations. The relation is one of mutual determination. The horizons and definitions of the class, the ‘cultural space’ within which it operates, are not pregiven and arbitrary. They are the boundaries set by the successes and failures of these organisations. Fourthly, these organisations are not separated off from the cultural life of the working class in a watertight compartment. They penetrate and are penetrated through and through the cultural attitudes which are appropriate even on Hoggart’s narrow definition. Take for example the ‘Labour Aristocracy’. This formation entailed far more than membership of a particular exclusive craft union monopolising the sale of labour power in a particular skilled trade. It also entailed, and was entailed by, a set of self-definitions, and definitions of other groups and classes, which involved dress, housing, leisure, ambition, family . . . a list of cultural factors which we could prolong indefinitely. A whole matrix of cultural patterns of extreme complexity produced and was reproduced by the structure of occupation and trade union. Fifthly, the idea that work and the organisations appropriate to it, form a domain which is radically distinct from that of culture cannot seriously be maintained if we have any commitment to understanding the character and meaning of life as a whole. It may be possible, indeed essential, for conceptual purposes to divide working-class life into work, home leisure, youth, etc., but to ignore the working week simply does not make sense. Even if we exclude it as an area of study in its own right, how can we grasp the meaning of external activities without grasping their relation to work? Sixthly, there is the complex problem of durability and significance. With regard to significance, the discussion of this, which relates to earlier arguments, will have to be postponed to the more positive parts of this paper, but the question of durability can be dealt with more simply. It is obvious, even on a brief examination of the history of the British working class, that formal organisations are immensely durable. This point applies to a wide range of organisations, including many which I would evaluate very negatively, but it is true above all of the type of organisation which Hoggart wishes to ignore. To continue on the issue of trade unions: these have been continually created and recreated at great cost and with great effort, and working people have sacrificed time, money, health, and on occasions liberty, to maintain them. Clearly, all that blood and sweat was about something
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important in working-class life, something about the way in which they saw the world. To ignore them seems at best wrong, at worst dishonest. The above considerations are part and parcel of the initial impetus given to Cultural Studies, and they still remain deeply embedded in it as current practice. It is not that nothing has changed, but that the transformations of vocabulary and methodology, and even some of the attempts to negate the Hoggartian framework, remain trapped within a conception of Cultural Studies which is that criticised above. As I have stressed, the impetus had enormous liberative influence, and the negative aspects did not emerge sharply until later. By mapping out new fields, and discovering new methods, a great deal of useful work could be done, but the seeds of sterility were always there, and new concerns sooner or later gave a bitter withered fruit. The appropriation of Raymond Williams’s work should have opened up new perspectives, but this too seems to have proved inadequate. The problem is one of a different order, for the intellectual superiority of William is self-evident. An indication of the difference may be seen in the contrasting attitudes to Marxism displayed by the two writers. There is a movement in Williams’s work from a highly critical engagement with Marxism in Culture and Society towards an attempt to reformulate the theory of Cultural Studies in explicitly Marxist terms.8 This engagement had very important consequences in so far as it opened up new ways of considering problems which Hoggart had explicitly denied, but in the areas with which I am here concerned it suffered from crucial weaknesses. The negativity of the following aimed not so much at Williams’s work as the ways in which it has been appropriated. Many of Williams’s major contributions to the theory of Cultural Studies originate in the period when his thought was highly critical of Marxism or rather, of the Stalinised bastardisation which passed for Marxism in the bad old days. His famous definition of culture ‘. . . a culture is not only a body of intellectual and imaginative work; it is also and essentially a whole way of life’,9 is given in the course of a critique of Marxist notions of class-culture, but even when the confrontation is at its sharpest there is a shared sense of matters of importance. ‘A whole way of life’: certainly in theory at least Williams should be free of the Grand Remonstrance which can be directed against Hoggart’s ideas. Indeed, in The Long Revolution Williams returns to and spells out exactly the implications of that statement: I remember that I surprised many people, in Culture and Society, by claiming that the institutions of the labour movement – the trade unions, the co-operatives, the Labour Party – were a great creative achievement of the working people and also the right basis for the whole organisation of any good society of the future.10 However, it is one thing to correctly identify these organisations as central to any notion of working-class culture, and to acknowledge their theoretical importance. It is another to provide a theoretical framework for adequately studying them. What is empirically the case, that the appropriation of Williams’s work did not lead to any serious study of these organisations, requires an explanation, for the theoretical definition is so clear and so evidently central to the whole of his project. Running through a great deal of Williams’s work is a certain linguistic evasiveness, a tendency to circumlocution, which is the counterpart of crucial theoretical obscurities. These are most evident on the narrowly political level with respect to the nature of revolutionary social change, and are clearly related to the ambiguities of certain social and
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political movements, but a discussion of these issues would at present be diversionary. In the less precise field of cultural theory the problems are less clear, but they can in principle be traced. Williams counterposed the ideas of the culture of the ‘atomic’ individual to that if collective development, and located the second of these in the tendency of the institutions of the working class. This is undoubtedly correct, but it is not evident from his discussion whether he is referring, in practice, to the structures themselves or the potential of those structures. Many of those structures have a legacy which is, to say the least, profoundly ambiguous from the point of view of notions of collectivity. Williams does not specify in what ways these structures are the bearers of a new society, nor does he specify their relation to Hoggart’s ‘ordinary people’. The difficulty is compounded by the powerful moralism of the language and thought. This tendency comes over forcefully when Williams discusses developments in the labour movement: he speaks specifically of a ‘moral decline’.11 Now I have no objection to morality as such, but it seems to me an inadequate base for a social philosophy, and it provides no point of vantage for a critique of Hoggart. We have once again a picture which relates contemporary developments to a myth of the past, and this clearly confirms the crucial Hoggartian thesis of the fall of working-class man. Without a much more precise and definite analysis of these institutions, their history and their potential, it is difficult to see how they can be re-integrated into Cultural Studies. The difficulty in analysing social change comes over most strongly in the central concept of ‘the organisation of society’. At first glance, this is a conception of social totality which could provide powerful insights, but examined more closely it reveals an evasion of the central problems: It is then not a question of relating the art to the society, but of studying all the activities and their interrelations, without any concessions of priority to any one of them we may choose to abstract. If we find, as often, that a particular activity came radically to change the whole organisation, we can still not say that it is to this activity that all the others must be related; we can only study the varying ways in which, within the changing organisation, the particular activities and their interrelations were affected.12 The conception of social totality which is operating here is one in which the notions of structure and determination are explicity rejected. What the above amounts to in simple language is this: everything acts on everything else. With such a theoretical model, it is inevitable that there can be no coherent conception of history or social change. Nor can there be a precise analysis of culture: the discrete levels of ethics, politics, aesthetics, etc., cannot be located and specified. The mention of ‘art’ in the above introduces my final point about Williams. We have already seen how the problem of the relation of ‘Culture’ to ‘culture’ was evaded in earlier studies, and once again Williams dodges the issue. His definition of culture is wide enough to include ‘a body of intellectual and imaginative work’, but the precise ways in which that relates to ‘a whole way of life’ is never explored. Indeed, Williams’s published work, perhaps as a consequence of institutional factors, contains far more analysis of ‘Culture’ in its concrete form than of ‘culture’. This clearly relates to the failure to specify levels of historical development: without such specificity it is impossible to locate an aesthetic level in a social totality. It is for the above reason that I wish to argue that Williams’s work, however much it may have opened up new ground, did not provide the basis for resolving problems set by the
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initial definitions of Cultural Studies. The plain fact is that the theoretical recognition of the importance of formal organisations was not integrated into the practise of Cultural Studies. I cannot trace that development in any detail, but perhaps the record can be allowed to speak for itself. In the October 1972 list of Stencilled Papers, Studies and Collections, representing a good chunk of the work done by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies I can find no reference to a study whose prime concern is those massive organisations which Hoggart consigned to the fringes of working-class culture. The same is true of the Journal published by the Centre. The same is true of current research interests. The only way in which this experience has ever been approached is through historical debates, notably the Anderson/Thompson debate.13 Hoggart had good reason for his position, but the proclaimed Marxism, or at least Socialism, of so many of the writers who have contributed to the above collections makes their lapse indefensible. Marxism, of course, was the shiny new toy which was to solve the problems set by Williams. The failure of this solution, I wish to argue, was the result of isolating the methodology of Marxism from its proper object and attempting to graft it directly onto the unreconstructed problematic bequeathed by Hoggart. What happened in the case of Cultural Studies is that a number of thinkers, of varying degrees of ability, were lifted out of the Marxist tradition and gutted quite unhistorically for the light they could shed on other concerns. With staggering arrogance, the collective experience of millions of working people was tossed away with the label: ‘profoundly residual’. The occurence was not an accident. The institutions which have historically been the bearers of this tradition were and are extremely attenuated and most unattractive to the student of Cultural Studies. The available avenues to Marxist tradition were, with the exception of the old boy himself, via thinkers whose historical importance has been secondary and whose formulations have often been eccentric. The list of reasons could be protracted, but the essential mistakes remain the same. There was not, and never has been, any attempt to come to terms with Marxism as a revolutionary practise, any attempt to critically assimilate the history of that practise, any effort to understand or relate to the organisational expressions of revolutionary practise, any recognition of the historical dynamic of that practise. Above all the above destruction, I feel obliged to put forward a constructive alternative. It is impossible to elaborate a complete theoretical framework in one half of a short paper, and all that I will attempt is to indicate the major reformulations which follow from my above argument. In a famous review of The Long Revolution,14 E.P. Thompson raised the difficult question of the relation of ‘culture’ to ‘non-culture’ which is inherent in the idea of culture as ‘a whole way of life’. As we have seen, the basic thrust of Cultural Studies has been to define culture in terms of a whole way of life other than the production and reproduction of material life. This definition is at once too broad and too narrow. From the point of view of the study of a class culture, no definition which excludes the productive relations which constitute the objective definitions of class can really be adequate. On the other hand, if we broaden the definition to include productive relations, it is difficult to differentiate Cultural Studies from History. In the end, we are forced to adopt the latter of the two definitions and recognise Cultural Studies as an aspect of the science of history. While recognising the inherent totality implied in the concept of history, it is true that, both materially and conceptually, the totality of history is complex, structured and multilevelled. Cultural Studies is the analysis of one of those levels of articulation with respect to the historical totality itself. Cultural Studies is distinct from, but not divided from, other
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levels such as economics, politics etc.: it is one of the possible ways of looking at history. If we accept specific levels of articulation, then culture is distinguished from the techniques and organisation of production and from directly productive skills and attributes in so far as they are materially productive. Culture becomes the multitude of beliefs, attitudes, organisations etc., by means of which economically defined classes attempt to define themselves and their relationship to society, and through which they seek to establish a position with respect to other classes. It is obvious that this view of culture stresses very heavily the primacy of the category of consciousness. The notion of class consciousness is normally used by Marxists in a narrow and specific political context with regard to those activities, ideas and organisations by means of which a particular class establishes its historical identity. This sense it is important to retain within our conception of the domain of culture, although the temptation to reduce culture to the studies of those activities alone should be resisted. What is true is that consciousness, in the sense of identification of historic role, is the crucial determinant of culture in a class society. The values and meanings with which areas of working class life are imbued do not spring out of nowhere: they are part and parcel of the historic self-definitions of that class and are the consequence of its global self-identification. The practical consequences of this position involve a major redirection of the efforts of Cultural Studies. First of all, we have to be realistic about the specific trajectory of the culture of the class which we spend most of our time studying, the British working class. (I will come to the question of other countries shortly). If we ask the question what is that history?, we too often find the view of the rosy past which was implicit in the Hoggartian model. The truth is very different. The history of the British working class is a history of defeat. It is not a history without great struggles, it is not a history without great gains, but it is a history of failure. The British working class, despite tremendous efforts, remains a subordinate class. It is nonsense to idealise the cultural responses of such a history as working-class culture at its apogee. If we look at the period which figures so prominently in current myth as the finest hour of working-class culture, we find that period is one of tremendous failures. Those failures extended to the great core-values like solidarity, the General Strike was defeated, and victimisation was both normal and successful. In the period when the great myth was being formed, the British working class was forced back from a powerful and aggressive offensive into a long, stubborn and bitter retreat. What are today idealised as the characteristic features of the best of working-class culture were formed in a period of retreat and defeat and they must be understood as attempts to come to terms with that experience. In that black period some of the most massive organisations, most obviously the Labour Party, suffered gigantic fissures, and perhaps our attention should be directed at the remarkable fact of survival rather than accepting such institutions as a minor part of an eternal landscape. What is required is a recognition of the cultural life of the British working class as that of a class ‘preparing for power’; the fact that it has been a long time doing so may be regrettable, but there is nothing to be gained by pretending that it is not so. Our starting point for the critical evaluation of working-class culture is not the empirical reality of that culture but the historical role of the class: The question is not what goal is envisaged for the time being by this or that member of the proletariat, or even by the proletariat as a whole. The question is what is the proletariat and what course of action will it be forced historically to take in conformity with its own nature.15
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Proceeding from that as starting point, we can then go on to analyse the concrete historical experience of culture. The empirical reality of a culture is a complex of determined factors made up of profoundly contradictory elements originating in both the historical and immediate definitions of the class. Viewed with this perspective, many of the characteristics of the culture under review take on a different aspect. It is obvious that the massive organisations of the class take on a central role. It is not that they should be fallen down before and worshipped, but that they are revealed as the crucial agents and expressions of a contradictory experience. The trade unions provide, once again, an obvious example: these organisations are at one and the same time organs of working-class self-expression haggling over control of areas of life, defensive institutions designed to regulate the sale of labour power, and powerful mediating agencies for the maintenance of a particular form of class rule. Secondly, the historical development of a class from a position of subordination towards a position of hegemony implies not only an open struggle at the political and cultural level between classes but also a political and cultural struggle within the subordinate class, and hence between political and cultural organisations within that class. In periods when the definitions adopted by a class limit its horizon to the position of subordination, enormous amounts of energy and time are poured into a whole range of activities and organisations: sport, horticulture, drinking, interior decoration etc. A change in the horizon of that class implies the diversion of time, energy, money, thought and ingenuity into other channels and organisations: a struggle takes place over the cultural definitions of working-class life. If Cultural Studies had ever looked across the English Channel, it would have seen just that sort of struggle fought out in the open. Political definitions and cultural life are not mutually contradictory and exclusive areas. Particular political conceptions and definite organisations of culture are necessary complements. Take the example of Germany: the links between political party, trade union, sports club, media, drinking establishment, chess club, choir, even armed defence force, were all clearly drawn. In the history of the S.P.D. and the K.P.D. we can see how those cultural and political organisations openly and clearly interacted, and how they produced the tragic destiny of that class. In Britain, the links are much weaker, and may even be submerged beyond recall, but they can in principle be traced. In certain very favourable instances, it is quite a feasible project, and it is high time that tracing these links became a central pre-occupation of our work. It is significant that the only real attempts so far have been made by labour historians.16 The failure to carry out this task is at the root of many of the current problems. In the first place, the idealisation of a particular subordinate culture leads to mis-evaluation of particular aspects of the field. The writers are full of the best of intentions, but at best they overstress the local, the passive, the quietistic aspects of working-class culture. At its worst, it can lead to the involuntary adulation of genuinely reactionary aspects, racialism, male chauvinism, etc., which are all part of that culture as it stands. What we are faced with is an inverted and perverse form of the ghost of Proletkult. That theory argued that only those cultural manifestations which came directly from the working class (and poor peasantry) were to be encouraged and adulated, and precisely because of their origins. When it was evolved, the theory could at least claim in its defence that the working class was ruling classthe contemporary proponents can make no such claim. They ‘fetishize corporateness’ in all its ambiguity, and to adulate corporate consciousness is to adulate capitalism. Even the attempts to break out of this trap by appropriating the vocabulary of Gramsci are prone to pitfalls, which result from the second consequence of the failure to analyse relations within a culture. In accepting the notion of a subordinate class within a hegemonic
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order laid down by the dominant class; isolated responses to that order are taken as the archetype for potentially hegemonic consciousness. Bits and pieces around the edges of the social totality are held up as potential threats to the hegemonic order without any real analysis of the processes and organisations by which hegemony is maintained. Hegemony is not some mysterious nerve gas which paralyses the subordinate class and prevents it playing its historic role. It is, much more importantly, a question of organisation and action. Recent developments in Media Studies point quite clearly to this; for example, Stuart Hall’s paper Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse analyses the process of the maintenance of hegemonic definitions both as the construction of hegemonic interpretations and as the communication of such an interpretation in such a form that it is able to resonate with subordinate groups: In speaking of dominant meaning . . . we are not simply talking about a one-sided process, which governs how any event will be signified . . . it also consists of the ‘work’ required to enforce, win plausibility for and command as legitimate a de-coding of the event within the dominant definition in which it has been connotatively signified.17 The question of hegemony is thus a two-sided one. The first, relatively well-explored, is the study of the institutions and systems which generate and transmit the hegemonic definitions for the ruling class. The other side leads to the study of those organisations and systems within the subordinate class which permit a ‘legitimate decoding’. At the ideological level, the process of the maintence of hegemony implies the convergence at crucial points of the ideology of the ruling class with that of the subordinate class or classes. At the sociological level, the hegemonic domination of one class over another requires the existence within the subordinate class of organisations and collective practices which themselves both command wide support and correspond more or less exactly to the practices defined as legitimate by the hegemonic order. Common sense is common because it is commonly practically efficacious. The focus on those practices and organisations within the dominated class which allow the maintence of hegemony raises a further issue of great importance. What is usually forgotten is that discussion of the concept does not refer to some isolated group of intellectuals taken at random, but to the intellectuals of a definite class, acting as part of a definite organisation. The category of ‘hegemony’ implies the category of ‘The Modern Prince’. The concept of hegemony implies definite social organisations as the bearers of hegemonic consciousness. In the case of the working class, this organisation is specified in considerable detail by Gramsci, and the crucial relation between its practical and theoretical role elaborated at length. There remains one final point regarding the relation of elite and popular culture. The tendency to dismiss the problem of elite culture has deep roots in Cultural Studies, but there seems little basis for continuing in it. The nature of the culture as a sphere distinct from the narrowly productive allows the consideration of those activities associated with leisure and the practices of social groups not narrowly tied to production. There is absolutely no basis for excluding from the study of culture the initially rejected aesthetic domain. What has to be recognised is that the sphere of formal art is one of the aspects of culture. During the Bourgois Epoch, this activity has been largely restricted to priveleged members of the fuling class, and it may be the case that this culture has sunk into decadence as the rule of the bourgeoisie has become more and more outmoded. But in the sphere of production the bourgeoisie played an enormously progressive and liberative role; so too in the realm of
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culture this class opened up a whole new series of human insights. We need in our conception of Cultural Studies to recognise these achievements, to analyse its limits and its onesidedness. No Marxist has ever argued that we should reject the socialisation of labour and the possibility of a society free from want, on the contrary, we have always argued that these provide the basis for Socialism. Why then should we say that the concomitant cultures is not worthy of consideration? We must be prepared to take that which is beautiful and valuable just as we are prepared to take that which is productive and useful. We can discard the dross of both. Cultural Studies is nearing its legal majority, and assessments of its childhood and adolescence vary. Perhaps my view is analogous to that of the Stipendary making ready to turn a deviant into a recidivist, but it seems to me that a sentence of three years hard labour in history and concurrent retraining in the traditions of Marxism might just do the trick. Unless drastic measures are taken, Cultural Studies will remain a sideshow in the study of society and prove incapable of solving even those problems it currently sets itself.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Penguin, 1958), p. 323. Ibid, p. 345. Ibid, p. 248. Ibid, p. 268. Both are reprinted in the two volumes of Speaking to Each Other (Penguin, 1973). The Uses of Literacy, p. 82. Ibid, p. 318. The most explicit Marxist essay is ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’ printed in New Left Review, no. 82 (November–December 1973). R. Williams, Culture and Society (Penguin, 1963), p. 312. R. Williams, The Long Revolution (Penguin, 1965), p. 328. The Long Revolution, p. 328. Ibid, p. 62. When I first drafted this paper, I was able to include the proposed M.A. course in this list. The revised draft focusses heavily on historical questions of this order. This was first published in New Left Review of May–June and July–August 1961. I do not have a copy of The Holy Family, and my reference is to page 46 of History and Class Consciousness. E.P. Thompson is the obvious example. Unpublished paper presented to the Council of Europe Colloquy on ‘Training in the Critical Reading of Television Language’ Sept. 1972.
8
The hidden method Lucien Goldmann and the sociology of literature Adrian Mellor
Lucien Goldmann, who died in 1970, is chiefly remembered for his contribution to the development of the sociology of literature. The scope of his researches was, however, much broader than that. His published works include a study of Kant, essays on the epistemology and psychology of Piaget, and others on Marxism and the social sciences. His method of inquiry, which he called ‘genetic structuralism’ was never intended by him to be restricted in its scope merely to the relationships between literature and society. It is, however, precisely with this narrower aspect of Goldmann’s work – his contribution to the sociology of literature – that we are here concerned. Even within this more restricted frame of reference, however, we shall not attempt an entirely exhaustive exposition. Thus Goldmann’s work on the ‘microstructures’ of Genet’s theatre, for example, finds no place in this article. Rather, our prime focus of interest will be on the tensions and contradictions which we find between Goldmann’s earlier researches in the philosophy and ‘tragic literature’ of the seventeenth century, and his later work on the contemporary novel. Because our analysis necessarily dwells in a critical manner on the later formulations, we should make it clear at this point that we evaluate the earlier work, exemplified in The Hidden God, much more positively. Although, therefore, this article is primarily concerned with Goldmann’s failure to extend to the novel form the positive achievements of his researches in seventeenthcentury literature, this should not be taken to imply that those achievements are nonexistent. On the contrary, the criticisms which we offer here should be regarded as the necessary preliminary to a more positive critique of Goldmann’s later work, aimed towards the restoration of the utility of those concepts which Goldmann had earlier used with such notable success. Before embarking upon a detailed examination of this tension between Goldmann’s earlier and later researches, however, we should like to establish a broader perspective upon his work as a whole. The main body of this work is a development, as Goldmann frequently acknowledges, of concepts which first made their appearance in the work of the young Lukacs. Of these concepts, perhaps those of ‘totality’ and ‘world-vision’ are amongst the major points around which Goldmann’s earlier work revolves – both in his concrete researches, and in his more general formulations of the genetic structuralist method.
The world vision and the transindividual subject We shall later pay close attention to certain aspects of the notion of ‘totality’. For the moment, however, let us concentrate on Goldmann’s use of the concept of ‘world-vision’. In The Hidden God, Goldmann defines his notion of a world-vision as being:
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Adrian Mellor . . . a convenient term for the whole complex of aspirations and feelings which link together the members of a social group (a group which, in most cases, assumes the existence of a social class) and which opposes them to members of other groups.1
Other notions necessarily related to the concept of the world-vision include that of ‘the transindividual subject of creation’, and those of ‘real’ and ‘possible’ consciousness. Although Goldmann’s formulations with respect to the transindividual subject are occasionally both confused and confusing, the term is generally used to refer to the social groups or classes of which we have spoken as being the bearers (and collective creators) of the world-vision. Goldmann’s notion of the transindividual subject of creation is one of his most distinctive (and controversial) contributions to the sociology of literature. It provides an approach to the process of literary creativity which radically devalues the importance normally attached to the creative individual in favour of the social group with which he may be identified. The methodological outcome of such an approach is to relegate the study of individual biography and psychology to the status of mere ancillary tools, and to divert attention instead to the ideational structures peculiar to the social group involved: . . . the important literary work is, not exclusively but necessarily, a coherent and structured universe, and . . . this structure is not an individual creation but the collective creation of a privileged transindividual subject.2 Conversely, however, Goldmann maintains that the awareness of a group’s world-vision, or the capacity to articulate it coherently is generally limited to a few individuals within the group: It happens . . . that in certain exceptional individuals, the structure of certain private areas of activity (writing, painting, conceptual thought, faith &c.) coincide entirely or almost entirely with the mental structures corresponding to one of the transindividual subjects to which it is linked.3 This gives us the basis for Goldmann’s criteria of ‘excellence’ in literary production. A writer is significant insofar as he manages to articulate the structure (not necessarily, if at all, the content) of thought of his social group – insofar, that is, that he is able to articulate the maximum degree of the ‘possible consciousness’ of that group. But the writer does not create the structure of that world-vision; he only articulates it on the literary or philosophical plane. As Goldmann puts it elsewhere: there are certain exceptional individuals who either actually achieve or who come very near to achieving a completely integrated and coherent view of what they and the social class to which they belong are trying to do. The men who express this vision on an imaginative or conceptual plane are writers and philosophers, and the more closely their work expresses this vision in its complete and integrated form, the more important does it become. They then achieve the maximum possible awareness of the social group whose nature they are expressing.4 Goldmann’s criteria of valid literary creation go further than this, however, for they bear not only upon the writer’s relationship to his social-group’s world-vision, but also upon the nature of the world-vision itself:
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any valid literary work or philosophical system takes in the whole of human life. It thus follows that the only groups whose world-view is likely to find expression in such works or systems are those whose ideas or activities tend towards the creation of a complete vision of man’s social life; and that, in the modern world – from the seventeenth century onwards – artistic, literary and philosophical works have been associated with social classes and closely linked with the consciousness which each class has of itself.5 (emphasis added)
World visions and ideologies It is by the ‘completeness’ of this vision that Goldmann defends himself against the potential charge that his ‘world-vision’ is merely an ‘ideology’ in fancy-dress. As Laurenson and Swingewood point out: Goldmann argues that an ideology is a partial, a one-sided and distorting perspective, rather than a total view of the world. Ideology falsifies, whilst the world-view strives for the truth, but a truth at a particular historical period and for certain men.6 If Goldmann’s view of ‘ideology’ is somewhat reminiscent of that of Werner Stark,7 then his notion of a ‘world-vision’ is clearly intended to be thought of as approximating more closely to that of Mannheim’s concept of a ‘total’ (as opposed to a ‘particular’) ideology.8
Coherence and dialectics This stress on the ‘integrated’ and ‘coherent’ nature of world-visions might, however, be thought paradoxical in a writer who claims to expound a ‘dialectical’ method, and to adopt a Marxist view of historical formations. The world-visions which Goldmann chiefly studies are those of bourgeois groups and classes and should surely display, therefore – according to the classical Marxist notions of ideology – a ‘false consciousness’ – a partial rather than a total view of social life. Rather than being ‘coherent’ and ‘integrated’ ideational structures, should not these world-visions display the very contrary features – those of internal antagonism and contradiction? Although we cannot pretend here to rescue Goldmann for Marxist orthodoxy, at least some confusion may be avoided by pointing out that Goldmann specifically asserts that, with the possible exception of works of rationalist philosophy, his notion of coherence is not to be regarded as a logical coherence.9 More importantly, perhaps, it should be remembered that for Goldmann the pantheon of dialectical thinkers includes not only Hegel, Marx, and Lukacs, but also Kant and Pascal. We suggest, therefore, that Goldmann’s insistence that the real meaning of a text or passage ‘is the one that gives us a complete and coherent picture of the overall work’, should be viewed, along with the many passages in which Goldmann insists upon the coherent nature of the world-vision, through the fragment of Pascal which he quotes in The Hidden God: In order to understand an author’s meaning, we must resolve all the contradictions in his work. Thus, if we are to understand the Scriptures, we must find a meaning which reconciles all the contradictory passages. It is not enough to have one meaning which fits a number of passages which already agree with one another, we must have one which
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Adrian Mellor reconciles even those that are contradictory. Every author has a meaning which fits all the contradictory passages in his work, or he has no meaning at all.10
And Goldmann elsewhere makes clear that the pursuit of coherence in literary and philosophical researches should not be conducted entirely at the expense of an awareness of antagonism and contradiction. All great literary work carries a unitary world vision which organises its universe . . . For the work of art to be truly great, one must however be able to find in it also an awareness of values rejected and even repressed by the vision which makes up the unity of the work, and an awareness of the sacrifices which men have to suffer because of the refusal and repression of these values.11
The world-vision as a working model In his concrete researches, Goldmann’s working method is to oscillate in his focus of analysis between a hypothetical construction of the social group world-vision of a given writer, and that writer’s published corpus (adjusting the working model of the world-vision insofar as any element in a text defies explanation in terms of the model as it then stands). Concurrently, he relates both the hypothetical world-vision and the text to the ideational structures to be found in the social groups and classes to which the writer belongs. Goldmann claims that we are thereby led to a closer understanding both of the literary object and the ‘psychic structures’ of the social groups under study. Change and inconsistency in one set of relationships sensitises us to look for them in others.12 During the course of an exposition of the meaning, for genetic structuralism, of the notions of ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding’, he illustrates the interleaving complexities of the method, with reference to his own studies of Pascal and Racine: To understand Les Pensees of Pascal or the tragedies of Racine is to bring to light the tragic vision which constitutes the significant structure governing the whole of each of these works; but to understand the structure of extremist Jansenism is to explain the genesis of Les Pensees and of the tragedies of Racine. Similarly to understand Jansenism is to explain the genesis of extremist Jansenism; to understand the history of the noblesse de robe in the seventeenth century is to explain the genesis of Jansenism; to understand class relationships in French society of the seventeenth century is to explain the evolution of the noblesse de robe, etc.13
Goldmann and the novel Controversial though some of Goldmann’s earlier formulations may be, they are by no means as controversial as the argument which he expounds in his later work, Pour une sociologie du roman. In the introductory chapter to this work he sets out an argument whereby he claims to have established a rigorous homology between the structure of the nineteenth-century novel and the structure of economic life in a society characterised by a free-market economy. Furthermore, Goldmann claims that this homology, or at least a significant relationship between the structures, holds good for subsequent historical developments both of the novel form and of economic life. It should be noted at this point, of course, that the notion of a homology of structures is by no means absent from Goldmann’s earlier work. The
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relationship between the literary text and the world-vision in The Hidden God is one of structural homology. What is new here is not the relationship, but its terms. In view of the fact that Pour une sociologie du roman remains as yet untranslated, and because in it Goldmann makes particularly clear the nature of his debt to the young Lukacs, we shall recapitulate in some detail the argument by which Goldmann comes to demonstrate his postulated homology. Let us consider first of all, Goldmann’s characterisation of the novel form. His analysis is derived, as we have said, from that of the early Lukacs,14 confirmation for Lukacs’ main themes being sought in the work of Rene Girard.15
The early Lukacs In The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs tells us that the novel, when contrasted with ‘the normative childlikeness of the epic’, is ‘the art-form of virile maturity: this means that the completeness of the novel’s world, if seen objectively is an imperfection, and if subjectively experienced it amounts to resignation’.16 Shorn, (as far as humanly possible) of the jargon derived from the veritable salmagundi of intellectual influences operating on Lukacs at this time, we might suggest that what Lukacs means by this is that the novel (by contrast with the epic) emerges from a historical situation in which values have become problematic: The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem yet which still thinks in terms of totality.17 Or quite simply: The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.18 The true epic, on the other hand, is the art-form of a world in which values are given, and the hero engages, not upon a problematic search for those values and for himself, but to meet his destiny. The elements of the true epic are an organic whole, integrated and lacking in internal antagonisms, because the concept of destiny does not admit of a separation between the hero and his world. A world in which God is absent (or hidden), however, produces just such a separation and is accompanied by the art-forms of either tragedy or lyric poetry, or the novel. What distinguishes the novel form from the other two, is the insistence of its creators on accepting, at one and the same time, both the problematic nature of the relationship between the hero and the world, (born of the newly problematic nature of values), and a contrary affirmation of the ultimate unity of the hero and the world (born, in part, of the aesthetic demands of the traditional epic form, and in part of the ethical considerations of the author himself: a belief that authentic values, though hidden, still exist): The epic gives form to a totality of life that is rounded from within; the novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life.19 Since the novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God, and since fallen Gods become demons,20 Lukacs characterises the psychology of the novel hero (whose relationship to the world is no longer guided by God) as ‘demonic’.
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Lukacs goes on from here to develop a typology of the novel form which chiefly depends upon the notion of whether the novel hero’s ‘soul’21 is ‘too broad’ or ‘too narrow’ with respect to the real world. The component types are: (a) The novel of ‘abstract idealism’, characterised by an active hero whose soul is too narrow with regard to the complexity of the real world. (e.g. Don Quixote). (b) The ‘romanticism of disillusionment’ (which Goldmann classifies as ‘the psychological novel’), characterised by a passive hero whose soul is too broad to be satisfied by what the world of convention has to offer him. (Lukacs gives Oblomov and A Sentimental Education as examples). (c) The ‘novel of education’, in which the hero renounces the problematic search for ideal values without accepting the world of convention and conformity in their place. (Lukacs here specifies Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister).22 In summary, Lukacs gives us a picture of the novel as being a literary form in which a ‘demonic’ hero engages upon a ‘demonic’ quest for ‘authentic’ values in an ‘inauthentic’ world.
Rene Girard: ‘Triangular desire’ and ‘mediation’ Although Rene Girard’s work was written some forty years after Lukacs’ essay, and apparently without knowledge of it, Goldmann claims that Girard’s conclusions give support to those of Lukacs.23 Girard’s analysis is devoted to the literary phenomenon which he calls ‘triangular desire’. According to Girard, desire manifests itself in the work of the great novelists as imitation. The relationship between the desiring subject and the desired object is directed and determined by a third party: the Other. The Other, from whom the novel hero derives his desire, is designated the ‘mediator’. Two types of mediation are specified: ‘external’, and ‘internal’ mediation. In the case of external mediation, the spiritual distance between the mediator and subject is sufficiently great to eliminate the possibility of actual rivalry between the two for the desired object. Thus Amadis of Gaul provides, as a model of all chivalry, the objects of Don Quixote’s desire, without, of course, ever becoming an active rival for those objects. In the case of internal mediation, however, the Other is not inaccessibly enshrined beyond the world of the subject, but is part of the novel-hero’s own universe. For Girard, the classic example of this form of mediation is illustrated by the relationship, in Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband, between Pavel Pavlovitch and his dead wife’s lover, Veltchaninov. When Pavel Pavlovitch decides to remarry, he seeks out Veltchaninov to approve his future wife. Pavlovitch is able to desire only through the mediation of Veltchaninov’s desire – but, once again, Veltchaninov acts not only as mediator but also as rival, and Pavlovitch suffers the loss of his desire through the agency of its creation. Goldmann claims that Girard’s extension of this structural analysis of the novel form closely parallels that of Lukacs. According to Goldmann, for Girard too, the novel is the history of a ‘problematic search’ (for ‘vertical transcendence’), in which the hero is diverted, by the process of mediation, from his authentic goal. Although Goldmann’s interpretation of Girard’s work is problematic, we shall not examine its merits in any detail here. Suffice to say that Girard’s Catholicism and Heideggerian frame of reference might imply substantially different notions of some of his key concepts
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than Goldmann’s exegesis seems to suggest. Readers who wish to pursue the matter further might consult the English translation of Girard’s essay.24 For our present purposes, the point is that Goldmann finds in the analyses of both Lukacs and Girard a structural similarity. For both writers the novel concerns a problematic (‘demonic’, ‘degraded’) search by a problematic hero for authentic values which are not given in the world of the novel, but which are hidden, implicit, or mediated.
The structural homology Taking the work of Lukacs and Girard to define the literary term of the relationship between the novel and society, Goldmann goes on to seek the area of social life in which the other term is to be located. His search is guided by the observation that it would be quite inconceivable that a literary form of such dialectical complexity would have been found throughout the centuries, with the most different writers, in the most different countries, that it should become the form par excellence through which is expressed, on the literary plane, the content of the whole epoch, without there having been either a homology or a significant relationship between that form and the most important aspects of social life.25 For any Marxist, of course, ‘the most important aspects of social life’ are the economic relationship within society. Following the Lukacsian analysis of ‘alienation’ (‘reification’ – ‘Verdinglichung’, rather than the more common notion of alienation – ‘Entfremdung’),26 Goldmann makes the following propositions: (a) That the ‘natural, healthy relationship of men to property’ is that where production is ‘consciously ruled by the consumption to come, by the concrete qualities of objects, by their utility-value’. (b) That ‘production for the market’, on the other hand, is characterised by ‘the elimination from men’s consciousness of this relationship’ and by the substituted domination of ‘exchange-value’. From which Goldmann concludes that: In economic life, which constitutes the most important part of modern life, any authentic relationship with the qualitative aspect of objects and beings tends to disappear – as much the relationships between men and things, as interhuman relationships – to be replaced by a depreciated and mediatised relationship: the relationship with purely quantitative exchange-value. Naturally, utility-value continues to exist, and even, in the last instance, to govern the whole of economic life; but its influence takes on an implicit character exactly like that of authentic values in the world of the novel.27 (Goldmann’s emphasis) It is this relationship which Goldmann claims to reveal the novel form as being the transposition on the literary plane of daily life in individualist society born of production for the market. There exists a rigorous homology between the literary form of the novel, such as we have come to define it after the fashion of
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Historical periodisation Having demonstrated the existence of a ‘rigorous homology’ between the structures of the novel and economic life, Goldmann extends his analysis to provide us with a periodisation of the novel form, in which the position of the hero in the novel, and the changing nature of his relationship to authentic values, is related to what Goldmann sees as relatively distinct stages in the development of capitalist society. Unfortunately, Goldmann’s identification of the qualitative turning points in the history of capitalism varies somewhat from account to account. Thus, in his essay on Malraux29 Goldmann categorises the period of ‘liberal capitalism’ as extending throughout the secondhalf of the nineteenth century, and into the early years of the twentieth. This is followed by a period of ‘crisis capitalism’ which extends from 1912 (precisely) to 1945 (approximately); which is in turn followed by a period of ‘organised capitalism’, marked by the mechanisms of State economic intervention, and which begins after the Second World War. Elsewhere,30 Goldmann is able to state more precisely that the period of ‘crisis capitalism’ extends from 1912 to 1950. In his earlier elaboration, however, he tells us that the first qualitative turning point is to be found towards the end of the nineteenth century, when ‘the replacement of the free competitive economy by an economy of cartels and monopolies’ first began. This suppression in economic life of the liberal capitalist value of individualism, corresponds to ‘a parallel transformation of the novel form which began with the progressive dissolution and disappearance of the individual character of the hero’.31 This disappearance of the hero takes place over two vaguely identified periods in the history of the novel: a transitory period before Kafka, during which counter-ideologies (i.e. Socialist ideologies) attempted to replace the ‘problematic’ hero with a ‘positive’ hero; and a second period ‘which began approximately with Kafka’, continuing up to the contemporary nouveau roman, and which is not yet finished. This period is characterised by the abandonment of all attempt to replace the problematic hero and individual biography, and to write instead ‘the novel of the absence of subject’, the abandonment of all progressive quest.32 Now this is obviously unsatisfactory on a number of counts. The distinction between a ‘problematic’ and a ‘positive’ hero is clearly suggestive; but if Goldmann is to insist upon speaking of a rigorous homology between the structures of the novel and the economy, then we have a right to a more precise account of the ways in which the changes in the structure of the economy have, since the time of Kafka, been reflected in changes in the novel. Simple observation, of course, suggests that the equation cannot be made. Even in nonSoviet literature, the novel of the ‘positive’ hero thrives on well beyond the time of Kafka. And Kafka is, in any case, a difficult figure to locate in any literary history, and not one that should be used to mark an immediate turning-point. Kafka’s importance lies not so much in his representativeness of the writing of his time as in the fact that he foreshadows a tendency that was to emerge much later. The problem which Goldmann is facing here is one that he himself recognises: that of a form of ‘cultural lag’: If it is evident that the absurd world of Kafka, of Camus’ The Outsider, or Robbe-Grillet’s
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world, composed of relatively autonomous objects, correspond to the analysis of reification just as it has been developed by Marx and subsequent Marxists, the problem which poses itself is how, when this analysis was elaborated in the second half of the nineteenth century, and which concerns a phenomenon of which the appearance was well established beforehand, that same phenomenon only manifested itself in the novel from the end of the First World War.33 How indeed? And how therefore to speak, without some qualification, of the novel form as being ‘the transposition on the literary plane of daily life in individualist society, born of production for the market’?
Goldmann and the dialectic We shall now examine some aspects of the ‘tension’ of which we wrote earlier, between what we called Goldmann’s ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ work. (We should make it clear, incidentally, that when we speak in terms of the ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ work, we are using a term of convenience which refers to representative works, specifically The Hidden God on the one hand, and Pour une sociologie du roman on the other. There is no ‘epistemological break’ in Goldmann’s work which lends itself to chronological periodisation. Many of the methodological essays which Goldmann published subsequently to Pour une sociologie du roman are perfectly compatible with the notions expressed in The Hidden God). We believe that this tension operates in two areas of Goldmann’s work. In both instances we are faced with a relative discontinuity between the two representative works which we have mentioned. The first problem-area concerns a shift in the focus of Goldmann’s level of analysis, and the second concerns the problematic relevance – to an analysis of the modern world – of the notion of the world-vision. Both problems, however, are inextricably bound up with Goldmann’s concept of the dialectic. We have seen already that Goldmann’s stress on ‘coherence’ rather than ‘contradiction’, might be considered by some to proceed from an idiosyncratic notion of the dialectic. The question at stake here, however, is whether Goldmann uses one single notion of the dialectic throughout the whole of his work. Miriam Glucksmann comments: Goldmann defines Marxism as dialectical yet he does not distinguish between two uses made of the ‘dialectical method’: as a basic framework for the analysis of social reality which recognises its complex and dynamic nature, the existence of internal contradictions and the masking of the true level of reality by ideology; and on the other hand, as a preconstituted view of the structure of the social totality, assuming the existence of a central contradiction, the determination of all the other parts of the social whole by this, the mevitability of the revolution as ‘negation of the negation’ and so on. It is in the former sense that Marx’s analysis is dialectical.34 Glucksmann’s argument here, of course, is designed to show not only that Goldmann fails to recognise that there exist two different uses of the dialectic, but also that he consistently uses what from her standpoint, is the ‘wrong’ one. Although we accept Glucksmann’s contention that two uses of the dialectic may be distinguished from each other, our argument is quite different. Firstly, we would maintain that the distinction between the two notions of the dialectic is a matter of emphasis rather
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than of radical breach. Secondly, we contend that at different points in his work, Goldmann uses both these models of the dialectic. Briefly, we would argue that the notion of the dialectic may be heuristically conceived as embracing two models of social reality: that which we shall call the ‘totality’ model, and that which we shall call the ‘base superstructure’ model. Now clearly, an absolute distinction cannot be drawn between these two notions of the dialectic. In each case, the one implies the other; and indeed, it could well be argued that this tension or contradiction at the heart of the dialectical method is the fundamental illustration of the method itself. None the less, differences of emphasis and approach are clearly possible; and these differences have been, and still are (as the quotation from Glucksmann clearly demonstrates), the focus of deep controversy amongst Marxist theoreticians. Broadly speaking, we might say that the ‘totality’ approach arises from a stress upon the Hegelian dimensions of Marx’s work. Its upholders emphasise the importance of Marx’s early writings, particularly the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; and perhaps the work of the early Lukacs – although written before the rediscovery of those early writings of Marx – provides the paradigm for this type of analysis. As Lukacs says in History and Class Consciousness: It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundations of a wholly new science.35 To avoid confusion here, we should note that Lukacs is not denying the importance, for Marxist thought, of ‘economic motives’. His argument is simply that, in contrast to bourgeois thought, which studies phenomena in isolation from each other, ‘the dialectical method aims at understanding society as a whole’: This is not to deny that the process of abstraction and hence the isolation of the elements and concepts in the special disciplines and whole areas of study is of the very essence of science. But what is decisive is whether this process of isolation is a means towards understanding the whole and whether it is integrated within the context it presupposes and requires, or whether the abstract knowledge of an isolated fragment retains its ‘autonomy’ and becomes an end in itself.36 The ‘base/superstructure’ model, on the other hand, takes as its primary focus of analysis the relationships between the constituent parts of the whole, with particular reference to the degree of determination enjoyed by the economic ‘base’ with respect to the component parts of the whole, with particular reference to the degree of determination enjoyed by the economic ‘base’ with respect to the component parts of the ‘superstructure’. Supporters of this view of the dialectic tend to stress the importance of Marx’s ‘mature’ work, to speak of the ‘scientific’ nature of Marxism, and to dismiss the philosophical anthropology which they see as being the basis of ‘Neo-Hegelian Marxism’. Both notions have had their vulgar practitioners, but it is the latter model which has been most prone to produce a ‘mechanistic’ or ‘economistic’ use of the dialectic – a procedure which ceases, in fact, to be dialectical at all – positing a simple determining relationship between the economic infrastructure and the rest of social life.
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Now clearly, this is a precise description of the model of dialectic which Goldmann uses in his formulation of the ‘structural homology’ of Pour une sociologie du roman. Although the connection between the base and superstructure is made at the level of ‘structure’ and in the form of ‘values’, the direction is a unilinear one from base to superstructure – hence the form of Goldmann’s attempted periodisation of the novel in terms of the structural changes in the capitalist economy. Here then, we have two related problems. Our first question must be why Goldmann finds it necessary, in changing his field of study from that of seventeenth century literature to that of the novel, to abandon his previously-held ‘totality’ model of the dialectic; and secondly we must ask why he is forced to adopt in its place such a vulgar model of the ‘base/superstructure’ formulation. We shall be helped in our illustration of this second point by borrowing a notion currently revived by Glucksmann’s intellectual mentor, Louis Althusser. The notion is that of ‘relative autonomy’. In his attempt to formulate the distinction to be made between the conceptions of the dialectic held respectively by Hegel and Marx, Althusser contends that the Marxist dialectic is not simply to be conceived of as a materialist inversion of Hegelian idealism. With Marx, both the terms of the dialectic and the relations between them are different from those of Hegel. Thus Althusser argues that for Marxist theory, the superstructures are not the mere epiphenomena of the economic base. The base determines, but only (following, albeit critically, Engel’s formulation37) ‘in the last instance’ – a phenomenon which is never observed in its pure state: in History, these instances, the superstructures, etc. – are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes.38 Lacking the space to develop the full critique which Althusser’s analysis demands, we may simply observe for our present purposes, that in this more sophisticated exposition of the relationship between base and superstructure, the notion of ‘determination in the last instance’ carries the corollary notion of the ‘relative autonomy’ of the superstructures from the economic base. In relation to Goldmann’s work, therefore, we may see that the failure of his periodisation of the novel form lies precisely in the fact that he displays no developed notion of the ‘relative autonomy’ of superstructura forms. He is puzzled by the failure of ‘the novel of reification’ to step forward at the correct historical moment, but he is unable to account for this phenomenon simply because he lacks a concept which would turn his attention away from the economic base to – for example – some examination of the determinant role of literary tradition. Goldmann’s base/superstructure analysis of the relationship of the novel to the economic foundation is similarly vitiated by the lack of a notion of ‘mediation’. To distinguish this term from the similar one used earlier in relation to the work of Girard, we should specify that we think here not of phenomena which ‘come between’ the terms of a relationship, effectively severing them. Rather we speak of those things that ‘make connections’ between phenomena – in this instance, that make the connections between base and superstructure. In this sense, the relationship in Goldmann’s structural homology is unmediated:
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the structure of values in the novel is the direct transposition of the structure of values in economic life. Paradoxically enough, throughout the whole of his previous ‘totality-oriented’ research, Goldmann possesses a clear, if abstract, mediating agent in the notion of the world-vision. It is the world-vision which forms the link between the social group (defined in terms of economic relationships, and therefore closely tied to the base) and the cultural product. In the more generalised specifications of Pour une sociologie du roman, however, the cultural product is not a text but a literary form, and its relationship is not to the structure of a social-group’s world-vision, but directly to the structure of values in economic life itself. Goldmann himself is perfectly well aware of this lack of a mediating agent – and of the fact that the notion of the world-vision has previously filled that lack: if we find a rigorous homology between the structures of economic life and a certain particularly important literary manifestation, (what strikes us in this case is that) one is unable to disclose any structute analogous to the level of the collective consciousness which seems thus far to be the intermediate chain, indispensible for realising either the homology, or an intelligible and significant relationship between the different aspects of social existence.39 Goldmann does not conclude from this that his homology is inadequate, however. On the contrary, he maintains that this mechanical and direct relationship between the economy and the forms of the superstructure accurately reflects the development of capitalist society. His basis for this argument is two-fold. Firstly, he observes that the proletariat has failed to fulfil the role allotted to it by classical Marxist theory. In modern western societies, he argues, the proletariat no longer embodies an alternative world-vision. Goldmann also claims that this development is explained and even anticipated by the Marxist theory of reification. He argues that this theory precisely suggests that the development of the dominance of economic activity in society is accompanied by a progressive diminution of the ability of the collective consciousness to act back upon the base – a development which in turn allows for a further increase in the dominance of economic activity and its associated values – and so on, until ‘the collective consciousness progressively loses all active reality and tends to become a simple reflection of economic life, and finally, to disappear.’40 Somewhat in contradiction to this, he also claims that the process of reification ‘has a character so contrary to reality and to the biology and psychology of the human individual, that it must engender in all individuals, to a greater or lesser degree, reactions of opposition . . . resistance which would cultivate the background for the creation of a novel form’.41 Thus the progress of reified society produces two contrary reactions: a diminution in the active nature of the collective consciousness (and presumably, therefore, in the capacity of social groups to construct universalised world-visions), and a resistance (which Goldmann stresses is emotional rather than conceptual) to the degraded values of the process of reification, and which affects, not a class, but everyone in the society. That cultural creation continues to have a place in such a society is made possible, firstly, by the universal resistance just mentioned, and secondly, by the existence on the margins of that society of ‘problematic individuals’ – writers, artists, philosophers – who although ‘unable to escape entirely from the action of the market and the embrace of reified society’ are people ‘whose thought and behaviour are ruled above all by the quality of their work’.42 Because the proletariat has failed to provide the conscious resistance to bourgeois society
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which is necessary for the development of an authentic ‘novel of the positive hero’, however, the modern novel is not the expression of any particular social group’s world-vision, ‘but appears on the contrary to express (and perhaps it is the same way with a large part of modern art in general) a search for values which no social group upholds’.43 Furthermore, since the novel of the ‘problematic hero’ is created by individuals on the margin of bourgeois society, and expresses values which are critical and oppositional:44 The novel of the problematic hero . . . establishes itself, contrary to the traditional opinion, as a literary form, bound, without doubt, to the history and development of the bourgeoisie, but which is not the expression of the real or possible consciousness of that class.45 Thus it is that Goldmann comes implicitly to deny the relevance of his earlier framework in its extension to the analysis of the novel form. The focal point for the totality model of dialectic which Goldmann had borrowed from Lukacs had been the notion of the proletariat as embodying in their conscious praxis, the concrete unity of theory and practice. The consciousness of a class raised to self-awareness does not merely embody a passive reflection of the historical process, but becomes a force of active intervention and transformation: The category of totality . . . determines not only the object of knowledge but also the subject . . . The totality of an object can only be posited if the positing subject is itself a totality; and if the subject wishes to understand itself, it must conceive of the object as a totality. In modern societies only the classes can represent this point of view.46 With the collapse, in Goldman’s later analysis, of the notion of a specific social class with the capacity to develop a unified and coherent world-vision, Goldmann is forced to abandon the specifics of his previous framework for the analysis of the relationship between society and the cultural object. And the loss is two-fold: the absence of the notion of the ‘world-vision’ not only subverts Goldmann’s totality model of the dialectic, but also robs him of the mediating agent with which he is most familiar, thereby vitiating his attempt to establish a viable base/superstructure analysis, and forcing him into a crude and mechanistic homology.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10
Lucien Goldmann: The Hidden God (1955). Trans. P. Thody, London R.K.P. 1964 p. 17. Lucien Goldmann: ‘Ideology and Writing’ Times Literary Supplement 28th September, 1967 p. 904. ibid, loc. cit. The Hidden God, op. cit., loc. cit. ibid p. 99. Laurenson & Swingewood: ‘Lucien Goldmann and the Study of Literature’, in New Society, 362, 4th September, 1969 p. 354. Werner Stark: The Sociology of Knowledge, R.K.P., 1958. ‘. . . thought determined by social fact is like a pure stream, crystal-clear, transparent; ideological ideas like a dirty river, muddied and polluted by the impurities that have flooded into it. From the one it is healthy to drink; the other is poison to be avoided.’ (p. 91). It is doubtful whether Stark and Goldmann could have agreed upon which ideas were ‘ideological’. Karl Mannheim: Ideology and Utopia, R.K.P. 1936 Ch. 11. The Hidden God, op. cit., p. 12.f/n 2. Pascal: Pensees (fragment 684 in the Brunschvicg edition; fr. 257, p. 106, in the Penguin edition) quoted in The Hidden God, p. 13.
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11 Lucien Goldmann: ‘Criticism and Dogmatism in Literature’ in David Cooper (ed) The Dialectics of Liberation, Pelican, 1968, p. 145. 12 Indeed, Goldmann suggests at one point that the findings of the sociology of literature are likely to prove most important, not in the field of literary research but in the light that they throw on the ‘psychic structures’ of (especially) the middle classes. Lucien Goldmann: Pour une sociologie du roman Gallimard, 1964, p. 37. 13 Lucien Goldmann: ‘The sociology of literature: status and problems of method’ in International Social Science Journal Vol. XIX, No. 4, 1967, p. 500. 14 Georg Lukacs: The Theory of the Novel (P. Cassirer, Berlin, 1920) Trans. Anna Bostock, Merlin, 1971. 15 Rene Girard: Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque, Paris, Grasset, 1961. Desire, Deceit and the Novel, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1965. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. 16 Lukacs, op. cit., p. 71. Goldmann provides a sketch of Lukacs’ formulations in Pour une sociologie . . . pp. 16–18. Whilst this sketch is by no means incorrect it is far too brief to allow the reader who is unfamiliar with Lukacs’ earliest works to follow the stages in his argument. Since Goldmann makes no fundamental changes in Lukacs’ analysis of the structure of the novel, but bodily places it into relation with his Marxist structural analysis of the free-market economy, using it as a major component of his postulated ‘homology’, we have felt it best to deal here with Lukacs’ analysis as it is directly set out in The Theory of the Novel; although we have, of course, chosen to concentrate on explicating those elements which Goldmann uses most directly in his own analysis. It could be argued, for instance, that the most seminal piece of work in the book is Lukacs’ analysis of the problem of time in the novel – a fascinating study which finds no place in this essay. 17 ibid. p. 56. As Lukacs himself points out in his 1962 Introduction, his analysis is here directly at odds with Hegel, for whom art becomes problematic precisely insofar as reality ceases to be so (through the self-realisation of the Spirit ‘in thought and in social and state praxis’). v. p. 17. 18 ibid. p. 88. 19 ibid. p. 60. 20 ibid. p. 86. 21 Goldmann translates this term, not by the French ‘âme’, but by the term ‘conscience’. 22 Goldmann suggests that the characterisation of the novel as ‘the form of virile maturity’ most aptly applies to only the third of Lukacs’ categories of the novel: that of the ‘novel of education’. (Cf. Goldmann: Pour une sociologie . . . p. 22, and Lukacs: Theory of the Novel Part II, Chapter 3). 23 Pour une sociologie . . . op. cit. pp. 18ff. 24 Rene Girard, op. cit. 25 Pour une sociologie . . . op. cit. p. 24. 26 vide, Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, Merlin, 1971, Trans. Rodney Livingstone. 27 Pour une sociologie . . . op. cit., pp. 24/25. 28 ibid. p. 24. 29 ibid. p. 178. 30 Lucien Goldmann: ‘Reflections on History and Class Consciousness’ in Istvan Meszaros (ed.) Aspects of History and Class Consciousness, R.K.P. 1971, p. 78. 31 Pour une sociologie . . . op. cit., pp. 32/33. 32 ibid. p. 33. 33 ibid, p. 23. 34 Miriam Glucksmann ‘Lucien Goldmann: Humanist or Marxist?’ in New Left Review 56, July/Aug 1969 p. 61. 35 Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, op. cit., p. 27. Put this way, and without further qualification, Lukacs’ formulation is extremely reminiscent of those of Raymond Williams cf. especially The Long Revolution, Chatto & Windus, 1961. (Pelican 1965). For Williams’ own reflections on the similarities see his article ‘In memory of Lucien Goldmann’ in New Left Review, 67, May/June, 1971, pp. 1–18. 36 History and Class Consciousness, p. 28. 37 Engels’ letter to J. Bloch, September 21, 1890. 38 Louis Althusser, For Marx. London, Allen Lane, 1969. 39 Pour une sociologie . . . op. cit., p. 28. It should be noted, however, that although Goldmann takes this view in the theoretical introduction to Pour une sociologie . . . he continues to use an attenuated notion of ‘world visions’ in his substantive analyses of, for, example, the work of Malraux. 40 ibid. p. 30. 41 ibid. f/n pp. 31/32.
The hidden method 42 43 44 45 46
ibid. p. 31. ibid. pp. 28/29. Goldmann expressly exempts from this analysis the work of Balzac. Pour une sociologie op. cit. p. 34. History and Class Consciousness, op. cit, p. 28.
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Section 2
Popular culture and youth subculture
Introduction John Clarke
The papers in this section trace the emergence and development of two characteristic fields of Birmingham cultural studies. They may be read in at least two related ways. On the one hand they embody characteristic approaches, arguments and modes of analysis that can be seen as shaping or prefiguring much subsequent work around these issues – by the authors and many others. On the other hand, they exemplify analytical tactics, manoeuvres and modes of engagement characteristic of the development of cultural studies. In this introduction I want to draw attention to both, but concentrate rather more attention on the second cluster – the tactics of doing cultural studies that these pieces reveal. First, then, these pieces are early attempts to construct the objects and approaches of cultural studies in the Birmingham mode. They capture moments of innovation in which fields of study are being imagined and invented. Bryn Jones’ paper on ‘The Politics of Popular Culture’ announces the necessary politicisation of popular culture as an object of study – for the CCCS of this period, engagement with studying culture was never solely an academic or analytic question. Rather they foregrounded the relations of domination and subordination articulated and contested through cultural forms and practices. This orientation is shared in some sense by all the papers collected here. Rather like Marx’s analysis of the commodity at the beginning of Capital, the analysts of popular and youth cultures try to discern and make legible the relations inscribed within specific cultural objects (whether subcultural styles or the Tom Jones Show). This orientation might best be described as the ‘politicisation of everything’. It was motivated by a double critique – a challenge to the formalised objectivism of academic work (especially in the social sciences) which sought to de-politicise the study of the social; and a rejection of the narrowing of politics to refer to the parliamentary/party political forms of representation. Second, they indicate some of the mixed repertoire of approaches that cultural studies came to mobilise and of which they made use. In this section, it is possible to see the range between (class and other) relational analyses of cultural practices and products and work that deals in questions of sexuality, pleasure and identification as necessary conditions for understanding the popular. Even in these particular fields of study, there is no one ‘Birmingham school’ united in theoretical or methodological convention. Rather we can identify ways of ‘doing cultural studies’ being made up – a point to which I will return later. Popular culture and youth subcultures emerged as focal points of work at the CCCS in part because they were distinctive fields of cultural practice and innovation in the Britain of the 1960s and 1970s. There is a specific conjunctural quality to the arguments here about the particular visibility and significance of the cultural forms and practices being discussed – whether this is the spectacular style of youth subcultures or the spectacular structuring of popular stardom in the Tom Jones Show. The papers embody the orientation to study
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contemporary culture that featured in the Centre’s title. This creates the risk of a rather anachronistic feel about the obsession with these forms and practices but I think it makes more sense to look at these pieces as emergent analyses working to make sense of emergent cultural formations. The interest in the ‘contemporary’ revealed in these pieces is not just a question of immediacy or topicality. Rather it reflects a concern to identify the shifting forms of contemporary culture; to understand their dynamics and to assess their potential social and political implications. Of course, such an orientation to the contemporary carried a number of risks – mistaking the dominant trends, misjudging their consequences and bracketing history as a set of ‘traditions’ from which the contemporary could be distinguished. Cultural studies thus created the conditions of its own revisionism – a dynamic of argument, reworking and re-evaluation that is also visible in these pieces (particularly those on youth subcultures). Cultural studies writing of this period (the 1970s) seems to have a strange double quality – it is simultaneously intensely assertive and tentatively exploratory. To its critics, the work of the CCCS often looked and sounded irritatingly arrogant, assertive and intrusive. The opening sentence of the ‘Perspective’ (editorial statement) for the second issue of Working Papers in Cultural Studies announces that ‘Mainstream sociology is dominated by official or authoritarian perspectives at the service of the present organisation of interest and privilege’ (Jones, 1972: 3). This sort of announcement was not a preface to a friendly dialogue between different positions. Instead, it staked out a particular sort of speaking position for cultural studies (from ‘outside’); and a particular mode of address (politicised, disruptive, transgressive and assertively self-confident). But behind this style, the analyses themselves were often more exploratory and provisional. The papers also reveal the processes and sensibility of being engaged in ‘making it up’ – the excitement and the fragility involved in the enterprise of ‘doing cultural studies’ with few established guidelines. The title of the Centre’s journal – Working Papers in Cultural Studies – accurately captured that sense of innovation and its provisional quality in the emphasis on working papers. The papers collected here – whether they appeared as working papers or stencilled papers – were generated in those processes of writing as the basis for further discussion and argument. They were both statements and starting points. This double character created the possibility – though it did not prescribe the direction for – internal argument, debate and criticism. For many people who passed through the Centre, the invention of something called the ‘Birmingham School’ has been disconcerting. The construction of an apparent unity of purpose, orientation and approach fails to match the experience of argument, dispute and entrenched engagement that marked much of the process of collective work at Birmingham. But it may reflect something of the consistency of speaking position and mode of address that can be seen in CCCS publications and interventions addressed to the diverse ‘mainstreams’ beyond cultural studies. This brings me to some of the ‘tactics’ that I mentioned earlier. Cultural studies was constructed in and across already well-populated academic fields. These had their own hierarchies, structures of established ownership, intellectual traditions and boundary markers. The practice of cultural studies involved rather complicated relations with such neighbours. In some moments, other fields produced desirable intellectual resources that were seen a potentially helpful, productive or illuminating. The non-disciplinary formation of cultural studies in this period enabled a fertile (or undisciplined, depending on your point of view) bringing together of theories, approaches, perspectives and concepts from widely divergent sources. The subcultures work, for example, is marked by traces of the new sociology of deviance, literary theory, elements of marxism and feminism, and anthropology.
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The concept of ‘bricolage’ was appropriated from the work of Claude Levi-Strauss without any intention to import with it the whole of his structuralist approach to anthropology. Such forms of appropriation were mirrored in particular sites of more or less provisional alliance building – ‘radicalised’ bits of sociology (not its ‘official and authoritarian mainstream’); social historians; parts of media studies; and so on. From a small institutional base, cultural studies needed people to talk to and found many in the differentially radicalised parts of the social sciences and humanities. Just as inside the Centre, such alliances were not simple – they too were the sites of dispute, negotiation and re-positioning. Traces of such alliances can be seen in Gary Clarke’s paper where some of the intersections and disjunctures between CCCS subcultures work and a radicalised ‘sociology of youth’ can be discerned. More importantly, most of the focal concerns of an emergent cultural studies were owned and marked by specific disciplinary structures of knowledge. Such structures required a work of ‘unlocking’ – cross-border raids that attempted to liberate objects and concepts from their conventional disciplinary location. Both the fields of cultural studies work collected in this section – popular culture and youth subcultures – required such work. Popular culture occupied an ambivalent position. The concern with the ‘popular’ made it marginal to established literary modes of cultural analysis, but three other approaches made partial claim to it. One was the ‘curatorial’ model of popular culture – discovering, recording and depositing its artefacts in a catalogue of popular culture practices and forms. This lacked any sense of popular culture as a site of struggle – the organising principle of the CCCS engagement with popular culture. An early version of this position can be seen being worked out in Bryn Jones’ paper here with its characteristic organising of popular culture through the framing device of ‘The politics of . . .’. Jones also takes on and displaces the second claimant to the field of popular culture – the ‘mass culture/mass society’ model emanating from conservative US sociologists and cultural critics. In such encounters, cultural studies writing was trying to simultaneously claim the object, radicalise the approach and dislocate existing claims and positions. The third contending position is more visible in Richard Dyer’s piece on ‘The meaning of Tom Jones’ – an objectivist, ‘effects’ oriented model of mass communications. This encounter is dealt with more extensively in the following section on media, but Dyer makes clear that the study of popular culture had to work on media forms and practices but escape the dominant mass communications models of doing so. This work of ‘ground clearing’ is also visible in the pieces on youth subcultures. Youth was already the conceptual property of a number of disciplines (and their sub-disciplines), most notably sociology and psychology. Both of these were dominated by universalist and universalising conceptions of the formative effects of age, either as developmental phase or a form of generational consciousness. Both of these dominant framings of youth worked with what, in post-Foucauldian times, we might call normalising discourses of youth and adolescence that delivered a binary conceptions of normal and deviant youth. The work of the Birmingham subcultures group drew heavily on an article by Phil Cohen published in Working Papers in Cultural Studies 2 (1972) to rework the concept of youth in relation to class (rather than age) and culture (rather than psychology or consciousness). In the process, the generic conception of youth culture was disintegrated into a concern with youth subcultures – the ‘sub’ denoting their status in relation to both dominant and subordinate cultures (themselves structured by class relations). The subcultures work is often identified as one of the exemplary contributions of the ‘Birmingham school’, being treated as dominating the field of youth studies. Gary Clarke’s paper here (written in 1982) starts from the observation that ‘Since its publication, the new sub-cultural theory contained in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ collection
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Resistance Through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson, 1976) has more or less become a new orthodoxy on youth.’ My own sense is that such a view over-estimates the impact of CCCS subcultures work (though it was influential and remains much referenced). In particular, it underestimates the insulation of dominant models from such difficult and contentious incursions. Generational and life cycle conceptions of youth persist (albeit with occasional co-opting nods to the diversity of youth cultures/subcultures). Dominant academic and practice discourses of youth remain committed to treating it as a ‘phase that they’re going through’. I make this point not to disparage the work of the subcultures group (of which I was a member), but as a reminder about the difficulties of accomplishing profoundly transformative interventions in fields of knowledge. Dominant positions do not surrender their dominance (and the associated institutional embeddedness) lightly. Nevertheless it is possible to see in the pieces by Hall, Jefferson and Clarke, and Stan Cohen collected here some of the characteristic tactics of engaging and transforming concepts and objects desired for the practice of cultural studies. The reworking of youth towards its relations with class (and therefore the forms, concerns and practices of classes) appropriates and rearticulates core concepts. It is, as I suggested above, a double movement – towards class and towards culture. This double movement feels like a CCCS archetype – a recurrent practice in which the turn to class is always rendered problematic by the insistence on culture as a privileged site of contestation, where domination and subordination are at stake. In this double movement, class is never just a material reality set against the illusion of youth as generation – it is always a field of relations and practices that include cultural practices. Just as Dyer and Jones lay claim to popular culture, so do these pieces try to wrench youth and youth culture from established disciplinary locations – and make them excitable subjects of cultural analysis. Seeing this collection being assembled, I was struck by how brief the life of the subcultures/class connection was within the CCCS. Clearly, this was one of the sites of dispute around gendered forms and practices of culture, as the piece by Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber makes clear: The absence of girls from this whole literature is quite striking and demands explanation. Very little seems to have been written about the role of girls in youth cultural groupings in general . . . When they do appear, it is either in ways that uncritically reinforce the stereotypical image of women with which we are now so familiar – for example, Fyvel’s reference, in his study of Teddy Boys, to ‘dumb, passive teenage girls, crudely painted’ (1963), or they are fleetingly and marginally presented . . . (1975: 209) This critique was also directed at the Centre’s own subcultural work. It was an internal argument both within the life of the subcultures group and within its emblematic publication ‘Resistance through Rituals’ (WPCS 7/8; Hall and Jefferson, 1976). Resistance through Rituals is perhaps too often read through its dominant tendencies. These do indeed privilege both spectacular youth subcultures and the articulation of (masculinised) class and subculture. But it is hardly a coherent and univocal text. It contained two pieces around gender and youth subcultural formations; one by Paul Corrigan on the unspectacular practices of ‘Doing Nothing’; a sceptical view of ‘reading’ subcultural style by Graham Murdock and Robin McCron; and several pieces that begin to open up the problematic relations between ‘race’ and Anglo-American cultural forms and practices (including the piece by Dick Hebdige reproduced in the ‘Race’ section of this volume). Within three years (1972–75) the class/subculture model had both risen to dominance
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and was being dismantled. In part, that dismantling was driven by feminism and the problematising of the male-centred model of both class and youth subcultures. But it was also driven by a growing concern with Britain as a racialised social formation articulated in youth subcultures and popular culture more generally. Writing this and looking back on these pieces, I am surprised at how many traces of ‘race’ there are, even if they are only traces. The subcultures work overlapped (in time and people) with the ‘mugging group’ which became engaged with questions of the role played by ‘race’ in the crisis of hegemony in Britain during the 1970s and produced Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1978 and see the piece by Jefferson and Clarke in the ‘Race’ section later). Retrospectively, the class/subcultures model looks like a temporary ‘phase we were going through’, rather than a definitive analysis (even if it became reified as such as it spread). Each of the pieces here illuminates a ‘phase’ in this sense: each provides a statement that is also a starting point for much subsequent work within and beyond the Birmingham Centre. Some of the trails are highly visible. For example, some of the subsequent work of Richard Dyer and Angela McRobbie clearly uses these starting points for much more elaborated work on the pleasures and politics of entertainment, and feminism, youth cultures and the lives of young women respectively. Other lines of development may be less obvious, in part because cultural studies burrowed its way into other disciplinary terrains. For example, the subcultures group contained people who went on to work in sociology, criminology and social policy rather than in departments of cultural or media studies. Assessing the impact or the legacy of these formative encounters with popular culture and youth subcultures might involve looking well beyond the institutionalised settings of cultural studies. Some crossborder raids also constructed new patterns of settlement. John Clarke is Professor of Social Policy at the Open University, UK, where he has worked for more than twenty-five years. A product of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, he thinks of himself as trying to introduce social policy to the cultural turn. His work has centred on the social, cultural and political struggles around the remaking of welfare states, ranging from the impact of managerialism and consumerism on state policy and practice, through to wider questions of globalisation, neo-liberalism and the reworking of alignments of nation, state and welfare. These are examined in Changing Welfare, Changing States: new directions in social policy, published by Sage in 2004. A co-authored book, Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Publics, Changing Public Services (Sage, 2007), explores the place of consumerism in New Labour’s public service reforms.
References Cohen, P. (1972) ‘Subcultural conflict and working class community.’ Working Papers in Cultural Studies, vol. 2. Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds) Resistance through Rituals. London, Hutchinson in association with CCCS (originally Working Papers in Cultural Studies, vol. 7/8, 1975). Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London and Basingstoke, Macmillan. Jones, B. (1972) ‘Perspective’. Working Papers in Cultural Studies, vol. 2. Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. McRobbie, A. and Garber, J. (1976) ‘Girls and Subcultures: an exploration’. In S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds) Resistance through Rituals. London, Hutchinson in association with CCCS (originally Working Papers in Cultural Studies, vol. 7/8, 1975).
9
The Hippies: an American ‘moment’ Stuart Hall
This is an expanded and revised version of a paper on the American Hippies written shortly after the Summer of 1967. The Hippie ‘scene’ has undergone significant change and development since that point in time. In the recent emergence of the Yippies – especially during the events surrounding the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, we can see the Hippie style being brought more directly into play in the radical and political arena. In another sphere, we can see the rapid penetration of Hippie styles of dress, music, attitudes and ways of life into the wider youth culture. The Hippie ambience has come to constitute, vis-a-vis youth culture, something of the force of a conscious avant-garde. These are important developments, and I make reference to them in the latter half of the paper. But, essentially, I have tried to hold quite closely to that ‘moment’ around the Summer of 1967 when the Hippies constituted a distinct and emergent ‘grouping’ or ‘formation’ in the society. The method I have adopted is to attempt, first, a phenomenological and thematic ‘reading’ of the central aspects and facets of Hippie ‘society’. I attempt to catch, describe and interpret the symbolic modes of life of the Hippies, as far as I can, from ‘within’ – from the point of view of the subjective meaning this way of life seems to have for its participants. I try to view the Hippie style as a project for a certain section of American youth (rather than as a symptom). I stress that this is both a description and an interpretation because, as will be apparent, I am trying to make manifest what are, by definition, the latent meanings of a way of life: a way of life which rejects and despises, precisely, the language and act of interpretation. I believe this is necessary to get close to the underlying value-structure and weltanschauung of this highly significant phenomenon. But, as a method, it also has profound risks. Thus I am obliged to tidy up and make explicit and coherent what is, essentially, untidy, incoherent, unorganized. In order to get at meanings, I have in a certain sense to ‘falsify’ deliberately the existential experience I am interpreting. In the latter half of the paper, I have attempted to situate this phenomenological account within its proper structures and mediations: that is, I try to give a brief genetic-historical account of its evolution and I attempt to place it, structurally, within its relevant contexts. Many such contexts are ‘available’: in this paper I deal primarily with the political mediations. I place the phenomenon within the structure of the growing political emergence of radical groups and movements within the younger generation. In the treatment given to this analysis here, I take the Hippies as my central focus, and attempt to relate other political groupings to them. In a parallel paper, in the Slant Conference on papers, From Culture to Revolution, I have reversed the analysis, taking the political groupings as my central focus, and relating the Hippies to them. There is, inevitably, some overlap between that paper (‘The New Revolutionaries: Notes on the Politics of Culture’) and the second half of this paper.
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My intention is to suggest that the Hippies and their way of life are not the patternless, amorphous muddle and confusion which at first they appear to be. The way of life, and the values and attitudes embodied and projected in it, have a consistency and pattern. It is this pattern, and its future meaning, which I am trying to bring out. At the very least, the Hippie way of life represents ‘definitions of the situation’ different from, counter to, those which are maintained as valid and legitimate in the taken-for-granted routines of American middle class society: ‘an island of deviant meanings within the sea of its society’. American society is powerfully integrated around a web of values and attitudes – recognitions and confirmations – which bind men to ‘the system’. That matrix of values, the society’s dominant normative order, is not – as many social scientists would have us believe – fixed, immutable and static: indeed, it is part of my argument that it has generated in time its own inner stresses, contradictions and conflicts which are now being openly and vigorously expressed. It remains, nevertheless, an embracing value-structure. ‘Non-recognition and counter-definitions of social norms are always,’ Peter Berger reminds us, ‘potentially revolutionary’. But revolutionary in what way? They can lead to forms of personal protest and rebellion, withdrawal, which, though counter-posed to the established system of values, are primarily adaptive to that system: every society has its tolerated areas of deviance, its sanctioned rebels and eccentrics, its licensed fools. I would say that, for such a formation to become potentially revolutionary in societal terms, four criterion must be met. (a) The counter-definitions must be socially located and rooted. As Berger, again, remarks, All socially meaningful definitions of reality must be objectivated by social processes. Consequently, sub-universes require sub-societies as their objectivating base, and counter-definitions of reality require counter societies. (b) The counter-definitions being offered must be centrally situated: ie they must challenge the system of values at the focal points of stress and tension, they must project a confrontation with the core organizing meanings and values, the critical life-experiences, of the society. (c) They must offer forms of social disaffiliation and opposition which lead to social, rather than simply personal or individual, rebellion. This is a complicated point, since (as I argue later) the distinctions between the ‘personal’ and the ‘public’, the ‘individual’ and the ‘societal’ may not be where we normally tend to place them. (d) Finally, they must offer forms of action, life-projects, which embody alternative structures. The question which is frequently asked – do the Hippies represent a challenge to, or merely a withdrawal from society? – has to be related to these four criteria. A satisfactory answer to that question cannot be given by so-called objective or value-free analysis. The symbols, expressive values, beliefs and attitudes, projects and aspirations of a grouping like the Hippies constitute, taken together, a significant, meaningful way of beingin-the-world for them. It is by learning to ‘read’ the meanings of these ‘signs’ that we come to understand the global vision of the world, the weltanschauung, the project which organizes and makes coherent the many disparate strands. As Sartre observed, Man is, for himself and others, a signifying being, since one can never understand the slightest of his gestures without transcending the pure present and explaining the gesture by reference to the future. Furthermore, he is the creator of signs to the extent that – always ahead of himself – he uses certain objects to designate other absent or future objects . . . Man constructs signs because in his very reality he is signifying; and he is signifying because he is a dialectical transcending of all that is simply given. What we
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I Slogans and phrase-making Most sub-cultures dramatise the gap between their own ‘worlds’ and the worlds of ‘others’ in language – the most expressive mediation or objectivation of all. Hippie phrases constitute a complex argot, drawn eclectically from Negro culture, jazz, from homosexual or addict subcultures, from the idiomatic language of streets and Bohemia. The slogans are striking, linguistically, for two particular aspects: Their emphasis on the continuous present tense – ‘grooving’, ‘balling’, ‘mind-blowing’, ‘where it’s at’ – and their prepositional flavour – ‘turn on’, ‘drop out’, ‘freak out’, ‘be-in’, ‘love-in’, ‘Cop-out’, ‘put on’, ‘trip out’, ‘uptight’. The style of phrase-making is existential (the present tense) and connective (prepositional). One can explore the question of language a stage further by looking at the Hippie slogan coined by Dr Leary: TUNE IN, TURN ON AND DROP OUT. Each phrase in that slogan is both a literal injunction and a submerged metaphor. To ‘tune in’ means, literally, to ‘attune’ onself to another way of life; but it is also a submerged metaphor from the mass media. There is, the phrase suggests, more than one channel of perception through which we experience the world. The trouble with ‘straight society’ is that it is tuned in to the wrong ‘station’ and thus getting the wrong message or signal. If we were to switch wavelengths we might begin to receive messages from the ‘underground’, intimations from unexplored inner space. The idea is repeated in the second phrase – ‘turn on’. Literally, this invites the Hippie to switch to the use of mind-expanding drugs, and to turn on as many members of straight society as he can reach. But, again, metaphorically, it also means to switch to a more authentic mode of experience, to leave the routes of middle class society for more private, apocalyptic channels. ‘Drop out’ is perhaps the most complex message of all in its associative meaning. Again, it means, literally, that the Hippie should reject the structures of middle class experience, the way of life oriented towards work, power, status, consumption – goals which have been discredited within the counter-value system of Hippie sub-culture. The Hippie is a ‘drop out’ from the system for which family, education and socialisation have been grooming him: he actively ‘opts in’ to the ‘deviant’ round of life. But the phrase ‘drop out’ has a more precise social and political reference. Drop-outs are also early school and college-leavers, rejects of the school system or self-absentees from college, who find the whole system of education and training intolerable. In the first instance, ‘drop-outs’ were early-leavers, Goodman’s ‘absurds’, who felt alienated from school or couldn’t meet the grades or didn’t choose to keep up the pace. Leary’s phrase therefore tries to establish an identification between the Hippies and this rejected social group. The identification is largely symbolic, of course, since by and large the Hippies are recruited, not from educational rejects but from the brighter, academically more promising, middle class students. If they have given up on formal education, it is not because they were alienated by the school’s tasks or because their home environment was poor or their learning situation unsupported, but because, in some more symbolic sense, they find the whole ‘education bit’ irrelevant. To
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‘drop out’ is therefore to make the symbolic gesture of withdrawal from the commonplace routines of their generation. These more sophisticated ‘drop-outs’ often stay within hailing distance of the university campuses, though out of reach of professors and the administration. They constitute part of the informal community of scholars of most large universities. They continue to ‘shadow’ the student role they have so recently abandoned. Their counterparts are those students who refuse to do military service in Vietnam, and who have disappeared from the view of the draft boards – dropped out as an act of political withdrawal. The ‘drop-out’ theme can, therefore be seen to have wide associative meanings, all of which are loosely organised in Leary’s metaphor. Poverty The association with educational rejects is only one of a complex series of identifications with groups of the deprived or disadvantaged celebrated in Hippie sub-culture. If we were to compare American Hippies with their British counterparts, the most striking fact would be the degree of, and emphasis upon, assumed poverty among the Americans, the identification with ‘the poor’. On the whole, American Hippies are the very reverse of smart and stylish: their costumes may be bizarre but they are often rough, dirty or in bad repair. This may be explained by the fact that, whereas British youth culture is still, primarily, the preserve of working class kids for whom the access to stylish clothes and fashion represents, in Simmel’s terms, the aspirations, the ‘soul-movements’ of a previously deprived group, American Hippie culture represents the return of an otherwise affluent, middle class and potentially ‘arrived’ group to the disguise of poverty. (It must also be added that American youth culture is, on the whole, more informal and less styled – though not perhaps less costumed – that the British variant. Where stylish fashions prevail, British modes appear to set the pace. This point – which I don’t wish to pursue further here – could be generalised for the society as a whole, in the sense that fashionable middle-class America is, in general, fashionable in, at best, the style of the 1950s; adult styles are relatively untouched by the ‘mod’). Simmel also reminds us that in the world of fashion the real themes of the world are rehearsed in a kind of elaborate ‘play’. If behind the symbolic drop-outs of Hippies life there stand the real drop outs of ghetto schools, so the disguise of poverty shadows that most eloquent of recent American themes: the rediscovery of the true poor – the inhabitants of Michael Harrington’s ‘Other America’. Another form of poverty is to be seen in the persistent begging (or ‘phanhandling’) which is common on the Hippie scene. Indeed, open begging on the streets is a more striking and dramatic enactment of symbolic poverty than rough clothes, bed-rolls and sandals: there is a long tradition of travelling rough ‘on the road’; but, for affluent America, begging is a major ‘bring down’, particularly when committed by the children of the well-to-do. The poor are only the most obvious group in a wider circle of so-called ‘deviants’ with whom the Hippies emotionally identify. In part, this is a matter of shared or overlapping lifeexperiences. In their escape from middle-class suburbia, in their search for cheaper places to live and areas of the city where social controls are less rigidly exercised, Hippies are driven to share – often for the same reasons – those areas where other deviant groups and sections of the ‘disorganized’ have already clustered. More important, however, is the identity which Hippies feel with all those whom ‘straight society’ has labelled deviant, outside the norms and expectations of respectability. To be labelled deviant is to accept a social identity and the possibilities of a social career which passes beyond the rules and conventions of ‘the system’. Those situations, identities and careers which the society has labelled ‘deviant’ are precisely
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those which the Hippies value most highly. This is one of the many symbolic ways in which Hippies attempt to subvert and reverse the conventional legitimations of society. The congregation of different deviant strata in the same urban area does not take place without internal strains and tensions, for the respective groups have often reached the same geographical location by very different paths. But no doubt the clustering and congregation creates its own solidarities. As Becker observes, ‘Members of organized deviant groups have one thing in common: their deviance. It gives them a sense of common fate, of being in the same boat. From a sense of common fate, from having to face the same problems, grows a deviant subculture: a set of perspectives and understandings about what the world is like and how to deal with it, and a set of routine activities based on those perspectives. Membership in such a group solidifies a deviant identity’. It should be added that this enhanced status of ‘deviancy’ is all the more ironic since the study of deviant sub-cultures is one of the most developed areas in American social science. It was always a highly equivocal concept, implying as it did the inevitability, persistence and stability of the legitimate social order. And recent developments, particularly the growth of Hippies’ modes of life, has left it (and, with it, may of the fundamental pre-suppositions of ‘value-free’ social science practice) highly contested conceptual territory. Indian themes Even the poor are not far down or far out enough. The poor are disadvantaged socially, but they are often respectable: they are rarely exotic. An even more powerful identification, therefore, is with the culture, costume and spirit of the American Indian. Serapes, bells, beads, headbans, mocassins – these are central features of Hippie costume. The lines of connection between Indian culture and Hippie sub-culture are really very complex. American Indians stand, of course, as an emblem of the simple, a primitive survival on the continent of affluence, and technological sophistication. They also represent the way white outsiders exploited the native peoples of the American continent. American Indians are therefore one among the several deprived and exploited social groups with whom young people in general, and Hippies in particular, tend to identify. (Even before the rise of the Hippies, Mexico stood to the itinerant student generation in a strong symbolic relation). The disadvantaged groups include, as we have suggested, social deviants of all sorts – addicts, educational rejects and the poor. There is one striking ommission to that list: the blacks. This is all the more striking if, for a moment, we look back to that group of premature Hippies of an earlier period, the Original Beat Generation. Mailer was, I believe, quite correct to see (in ‘The White Negro’, Advertisements for Myself, reprinted from Dissent) that the underground life of the Negro, the music, rhythms and argot of the hustlers and ‘night cats’ of the black ghettoes exerted a powerful appeal to the beatnik generation. In the white beatnik’s exploration of the submerged side of the ‘American Dream’, the man he was most likely to encounter in that forbidden psychic journey was his black counterpart, committed by the very conditions of his existence to the ‘hip’ round of life. Mailer called the hip generation ‘white negroes’. My case is that the American Negro is no longer ‘available’ in these terms to the Hippie. He is no longer living out his life in some submerged nighttime suburb of the inagination of white America. The ghettoes still stand, of course: but through civil rights, the black Muslim movement, Afro-American nationalism, the ghetto rebellions, the rhetoric of Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammed, Stokeley Carmichael and Rap Brown, and finally, Black Power, the Negro has reached for and achieved, if not a real, then certainly a potential imaginative liberation from the cultural imperialism of white racist and white fellow-traveller
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alike. The Newark convention was the black American’s cultural declaration of independence’. Since then, the remaining lines of contact between black and white society have been severely ruptured. The Hippies cannot, then, find a sympathetic counter-culture in the orbit of black ghetto life: and any attempt to do so would be regarded by most black militants as another of the multiple forms of cultural patronage which white society still pays to black. Hippie society is, therefore, strikingly, a part of white America. In the summer of 1967, the word was being passed around Haight Ashbury that it was time the white Hippies pulled out of the Haight for a day and let the blacks in to ‘do their own thing’ – whatever it might be. There are black faces on the Haight Ashbury sidewalks, and organized Black militant groups, like the Panthers, in other parts of California, but by and large the Hippie scene in San Francisco is separated from the largely black slums which surround it by high, though invisible, walls. The Indian – as critics like Leslie Fiedler have often pointed out – has always played an important symbiotic role in the imaginative universe of American literature and culture, but the Hippies have given this theme an elevated status. The use of hallucinogenic drugs such as mescalin, cannabis and peyote by the American Indians is another immediate point of contact. But in a more general sense there has been a long love-affair in American culture – from the novels of James Fennimore Cooper to Edmund Wilson’s Irriquois on the high wires – between the sons of white men and the sons of the brave. This love-match is now sealed in the adoption, by a section of white youth, of the dress, trappings and ritual emblems of those first Americans who were driven off the plains into the reservations. The identification is all the easier because the identified – the Indians – are a relatively remote actual presence in American social life. Mysticism and withdrawal The ‘purchase’ of Indian culture on Hippie society undoubtedly owes something to the strand of passivity in Indian culture – a reversal of the more popular image of Indian war-dances and staged battles coming down through the Hollywood western. It is often said that, as the West was pacified, so the practice of withdrawal, with the assistance of drugs, increased among reservation Indians. This theme of withdrawal from the active to the passive mode (with or without the use of drugs) is to be traced, not only in the Hippie feel for Indian culture, but also in their interest in the more mystical philosophies and art of the ‘other’ Indians and peoples of the orient. The sacred books of Eastern religion and mysticism, the erotic code-books, the figures of the Buddha and of Karma, fragments of eastern philosophy, the adoption of the kashdan, the simulated orientalism of Leary’s ritual LSD ‘performances’, the music of Ravi Shankar, the zitar, the looping and winding dances, the Buddhist chants of Allen Ginsberg – all these are elements in the eclectic orientalism of Hippie life, representing a return to contemplation and mystical experience. The identification with ‘East’ as opposed to ‘West’ is often taken literally: the numbers of Hippies – American, British, Swedish and German – who pass between the West and Nepal, along routes through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, has been calculated in recent years as nearing the 10,000 mark. Pastoral/arcadian The themes of mysticism and contemplation overlap with the implicit pastoral/arcadian spirit of Hippie culture. The move to the West Coast and San Francisco – the land of the
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never-ending surfride – is itself an aspect of this pastoralism, though one should not forget the Hippie enclaves of Toronto, the East Village in New York and elsewhere. So is the attempt to set up utopian communities which has attracted so many Hippies, and led to the founding of truly separatist, functioning agricultural communities or California kibbutzim. So too is the fondness for Tolkien’s Hobbits and the fairyland of Cockayne. But despite the retreat to pastoral settings, I would suggest that this motif is better understood as a revival of pastoral/arcadian values at the centre of urban life, ie a symbolic pastoralism, for the majority of active Hippies. The urban enclaves seem more characteristic of the main thrust of Hippie culture than the really remote rural retreats. Hippie society is better understood as an attempt to build up an arcadian enclave within the heart of city life, thereby combining two powerful cultural impulses: rural simplicity and modernity. Hippie pastoralism is the dream of an urban arcadia. There is, of course, another aspect to arcadianism and that is communal sharing. The Hippie group which has taken this arcadian communism to its most extreme lengths is the group known as the Diggers, who operate a Free Store where clothes, food and furniture is freely available, who run a number of free ‘pads’ for itinerant Hippies and distribute free food in the afternoon in San Francisco’s Panhandle district. The Diggers, however, are not pastorals in my terms: they show a distinctively urban know-how – the lore and skill of survival in street and city; and they combine this with ‘ideological brio, articulateness, good works and a flair for the dramatic event’ (‘Focus on the Flower Children’, Fred David. Transaction December 1967). They are the most self-conscious and the most organized of the subgroups within Hippie culture. Their arcadianism runs to the creation of a counter-society, counter-networks within the existing networks of urban bourgeois society, and it is with them that the latent theme of tribal community is raised to the status of something like an active philosophy of life. But on the whole, the pastoral/arcadianism of the Hippies marks a return to the self-sufficient simplicity of the separate community which has made its appearance so strongly from time to time in American culture: a view that life in its simpler forms and settings can be pared back to the bare essentials, and thus is counter-posed to the frenzy, the stimulated wants and consumer anxieties of a modern technological civilization; the desire to recreate within industrial and urban America the peace and gentle cohesiveness of the tribal community. No wonder the issue, last summer, of a stamp bearing the head of David Thoreau was an occasion for celebration in Hippie circles. Togetherness It is difficult to use the phrase ‘tribal community’ without thinking of that other phrase, ‘the global village’. And although most Hippies are in revolt against the pseudo-psychictogetherness of the mass media, there is no doubt that deep in the value structure of Hippie life is the desire to counterpose to the individualism and competitiveness of American life a new kind of togetherness. Hippie scenes openly express this loosely-organized, fraternal communalism. So does the interest in Eastern philosophies, which has at its centre the notion of the all-embracing unity which underlies the varied multiplicity of living the resolution of the Many in the One. This newly discovered ‘tribalism’ seems to be sustained by influences from both the oldest philosophies known to man – the religions of the East – and the newest philosophies spawned in the West – the preachings and teachings of the greatest of them all: Marshall McLuhan (whose work is beginning to have within youth culture the status of a self-fulfilling prophecy). McLuhan’s ‘global village’ is, of course, a metaphor. What it suggests is that the segmental
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relations and individualism of first-stage capitalist civilization is transcended, in later stages, by trans-cultural media and communications channels which link groups of men across the barriers of time, history, distance, class and culture. Hippies, who are the heirs of the mass media revolution, have an intrinsic feel for the existence of these channels, and are highly communications-conscious. They have created a quite complex sub-structure of communications networks, in radio stations which have been colonised, as well as in the host and variety of local newspapers and little magazines: and news appears to travel by means of this modern ‘bush-telegraph’ from one Hippie community to another, both across the country and between continents. There is a sense, then, in which the Hippie attempt to transcend the social controls exerted through official control of the mass media is also an attempt to transcend, by incorporation, the technology and infra-structure of a media-oriented society. The Hippie ‘revolution’ – if it is one – is the most cybernetically-conscious movement we have seen: their ‘togetherness’ is technologically-based tribalism (which parallels my previous point that their pastoralism is an urban arcadia). So that the Gospel according to McLuhan, with its emphasis on the simultaneity of experience, the creation of electronic environments, and the end of linear logic, makes a strong appeal to the Hippies. But it is also true that in the impetus to cluster, to move in loose groups, to gather in open spaces and to sit-in for a talk or just for unspoken empathy, is underlined the urge to ‘togetherness’ which is prominent in their mode of life. Love It is in this context that I raise the question of Love – in some ways the central motif of Hippie imminent philosophy. The Love being spoken of implies more than the lowering of sexual constraints, the so-called sexual permissiveness of Hippie life. It goes without saying that love, where it exists, is not only not repressed – it is freely and openly celebrated. But in the Hippie alphabet, Love stands for something wider and more inclusive than sex. It is a complex affirmation. It has a widening circle of resonances. First, it is a liberation from the repressive taboos of middle class life, which surround sexual experience. Second, love stands for the physical and spiritual community between men and men. Third, love stands for an inclusive and receptive tenderness to others, a sacred respect for personal relationships (in a world where personal relationships are fragile and contingent). Fourth, there is the allembracing love for mankind, naive and vulnerable in its apparent simplicity, but transformed, in Hippie philosophy, into a sort of silent power. It is hard to define the resonance of this word accurately, since it both include sexual relations between and within the sexes, and, at the same time, transcends – even, critics would say, evades – the fully developed genital sexuality common to post-Freudian generations. It is a commonplace that young Hippie couples, holding hands in that open and disarming way, remind one most of children guiding one another through the woods – though, admittedly, they are children who are sleeping with one another. It has long been a standing joke that young men and women are steadily coming to look more and more like one another, an observation interpreted by those attached to more virile and aggressive models of sexual identity as a trend, among men, towards effeminacy. What seems closer to the truth is that there is a change in the definitions of, and a greater fluidity between, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, a fluidity which comes to rest, temporarily, in a curiously pre-pubertal or pre-genital stasis. Certainly the aggressive, activist, dominant, instrumental virtues attached to the established cultural definitions of the male identity are undermined in this world. But certain aspects of the commonly accepted definitions of ‘adulthood’ seem also to be sloughed off along with certain definitions of
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‘masculinity’. The strongest clue to something imminent but recognizable in the Hippie celebration of love is to be found in the writings of yet another contemporary guru – Normal O Brown, (Love’s Body) and what Fiedler calls his ‘post-Freudian program for pan-sexual, non-orgasmic love’, rejecting ‘full genitality’ in favour of a species of indiscriminate bundling, a dream of unlimited sub-coital intimacy, which Brown calls . . . ‘polymorphous perverse’ (‘The New Mutants’, PR, Fall 65). The word Love, then, connects with the other themes – with simplicity and innocence, with togetherness and tribalism. But it also has a different inflection, a wider reach. Only the Hippies and their generational counterparts could have coined the phrase ‘Zap Them With Love’. The phrase stands opposed to one of the most brutally flip phrases to emerge from the Vietnam war – the game of picking off VC guerillas from the air, known familiarly as ‘Zapping the Cong’.
The existential now In strong contrast to the purposive, instrumental, goal-driven and emotionally-controlled way of managing the self and social relations in a modern technological society, the Hippies celebrate open expressiveness and the gratification of wishes and desires in the here and now. Their emphasis on expressiveness is a counter-thrust to the bottling up of emotions and the role-doubling which they feel to be so central a part of the dominant personality types of modern American society. The immediate gratification of desires – the injunction to ‘do your own thing – now’ – is a latent attempt to deny the historicity and the casuality of human society. Just as the past can be sloughed off – we can learn to free ourselves from anxious routines and controls – so very little can be postponed to the future, since the future, too, is open-ended and undefined. Hippies are ‘drop-outs from history’ (as Fiedler comments) – but, also, drop-outs from the long future. What is left, what is real, is total self-expression in the hore and now. Life is a loosely-organised series of unplanned ‘happenings’, with the stress on the immediacy, the spontaneous participation and the free-form expressiveness of the response. Freud described sublimation and the postponement of gratifications on a pleasure/pain calculus. The Protestant Ethic calculates the same way of organizing the personality on a play/work continuum. The Hippies reach for the expressiveness and intensity of the existential now by accenting the pleasure/play aspects of daily life. Many typical Hippie scenes are scenes of informal enactment, like a play or a happening in broad daylight: the group of people who seem, without forethought, to congregate on the street-corner; the beginning of a song or chant, taken up on a harmonica or guitar or flute, accompanied by a bongo-based beat on a box or the pavement; the free-form dancing and weaving which accompanies this; the gradual imperceptible dying away of the sound, the fading out of the group. Even the mode of street begging, of the discussion with the day-tripper to Haight Ashbury, has the spirit of play-acting behind it, of role-play or acting-out of an existential confrontation. Like street-players in costume, they have transformed the pavement into a sort of ‘living theatre of the present’. There is the same quality in the more organised ‘happenings’, such as the distribution of ‘free’ dollar bills by the Diggers from the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange. A sort of unanxious, perpetual search for pleasure, a diffused hedonism, coupled with a militant resistance to the tyranny of work, is characteristic of Hippie life in general. In dress, behaviour, gesture, dance, the controls have been loosened or or abandoned, and neither the force of circumstance from the past nor the pull of the future are strong enough to counter-balance the impetus to play and pleasure in the immediate present. Of course,
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immediacy, expressiveness, living for the present are bought at a price in a society organised around work, emotional control and instrumental calculation. Not to plan ahead may mean that you are without money or much food for long periods, that you haven’t a pad for the night or a blanket against the California smog. It also means that straight society regards you as a sort of freak in drag, a costumed street walker. But it has its compensations. Flower power Love, I suggested, is a certain kind of power. Its emblem in the world is the flower. Love is ‘flower power’. The flower carries with it the multiple associations which we have seen to be common to other Hippie symbols. It stands for the natural, the wild, the primitive. It stands for the pastoral, the utopian, the Arcadian. It stands for the beautiful. It stands for the rich colour spectrum of psychedelic art. It stands for the flowering cannabis, the sacred plants and roots from which the hallucinogens are distilled. ‘God’, the Hippies remind us, ‘grows his own’. But it also stands for the tenderness, the openness, the gentleness and receptivity with which Hippies hope to confront and unmask the power and authority structures of civil society. When the police – the Hippie’s inveterate foe – turn nasty, find, they say, a little love in your heart for them. Love is the symbol of a new kind of passive resistance. It may be too much even in the Hippie code of ethics to ask anyone to love the cops: but it helps to give them a bunch of daffodils. The state, the police, the military-industrial complex, war, brutality, authority, civil order – all these structures, Hippies argue are sanctioned by violence. And those who try to challenge ‘the System’ directly and overthrow it, counterpose one type of violence to another: they get caught in a collective trap. The Hippies mean, not to conquer but to transcend the confrontation, by smothering all that sort of power in a riot of blooms. With the evolution of the Civil Rights movement towards ‘Black power’, of the student movement towards ‘confrontation’, and the spread of guerilla-ism in the ranks of the more politically militant, the Hippies were left, for a brief moment, as the only group favouring passive resistance, a position to which many of the other groupings and tendencies, especially in the peace movement, had formerly been attached. This too, along with many other of the purer manifestations of the Hippie spirit, has been overtaken by events. The doors of perception Civil society and its structures place their emphasis on material factors – environment, the productive system, political and social institutions – as the parameters of ‘consciousness’. Hippies have tended, in their non-ideological way, to ‘stand Marx on his head’ (or, rather, orthodox versions of Marxism, since much that they express could be found in Marx’s own writing, especially the earlier work): they give primacy in praxis to the place and role of ‘consciousness’ in restructuring the environment. As this point emerges from the Hippie lifestyle, it takes the form, not so much as a theoretical argument about the relations of ‘base’ to ‘superstructure’ (such as has dogged marxist-oriented political discussion for generations) but rather as an enactment based on certain empirical deductions from the realities of the American experience as they see it. In post-industrial societies of this type, the technicalproductive system has been enormously expanded and revolutionised – raised to such mature forms as to have transformed social consciousness itself. Such societies come to depend, for their sustained levels of productive growth, more and more on mental labour and the ‘production of consciousness’. This can be seen in the massive expansion of higher education and research, in the cybernetic and computer revolution, in the role the mass
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media play in ‘creating demand’ and channelling feelings, in the growth of information and the system’s hunger for technically trained élites: in all these ways the forces of mental production have been transformed. The social and cultural factors of production come increasingly to dominate the struggle, in earlier phases of industrial-captialist growth, to pacify the natural and technical environment. Thus in post-industrial societies, what has in traditional marxist analysis been labelled ‘the superstructure’ plays a more central, autonomous and self-producing role in the expansion and development of the productive system as a whole. It follows that new modes of consciousness appropriate to this ‘higher stage’ of civilisation in the system are being ‘produced’ – modes of consciousness which are as yet, immanent, imperfectly ‘formed’: modes which, by opening new possibilities for the superior reign of ‘culture’ over ‘nature’ in the productive dialectic, may come to constitute both a completion of and a negation and transcending of existing forms, whether mental or societal. At any rate, modes of consciousness which de-structure and undermine existing social categories appropriate to previous stages of development. Just as Marx saw revolutionary transformations occurring when, and only when, there was a mature contradiction between the relations of production and the forces of production, so Hippies (giving an implicit societal theory their typical psychic/personal twist or accent) now see a growing contradiction between the ‘dominant systems of values and thought’ shaped in a previous era, and the emergent values and forms of consciousness which that very society has produced. Considered as an incipient theory, this line of thought is not original to the Hippies: many different writers and groups have been trying to build such a ‘house of theory’ and find appropriate forms of action. Indeed, most ‘new politics’ groups have some such notion working for them in the background. Hippies share, implicitly, this way of looking at American society, but they embody it differently and bring to it their own existential stress. Straight society, then, they would see as the willing prisoner of a certain mode of perceiving reality and the self. Thus to disaffiliate from that way of life is also to attempt to pass from one mode of consciousness to another. The way through is via the ‘doors of perception’, and the key to these doors is the hallucinogenic drug. The Jefferson Airplane, one of the bestknown West Coast acid-rock groups, has encapsulated the whole idea in a song, which is about ‘Alice’s mushroom’. There are many observers of the Hippie scene who believe that all the talk about ‘blowing the mind’ is an elaborate rationalisation for a depraved and dangerous social habit. No doubt there is some element of rationalisation. For many Hippies, drug-taking probably carries no deep philosophic implication: it is simply the insignia of entry into the group, a sort of required conformity. There is also an element of contrived confrontation, since not only does widespread drug-taking bring in its wake the police and the narcotics squad – thereby ritualising the gulf between the Hippies and the rest and confirming their position ‘outside’ society, but it has a way of bringing middle class taboos into the open. Middle class society has its own tolerated drugs – alcohol and tobacco – but denies even cannabis, which has never been proved to be more harmful than smoking, to the Hippies. Thus drug-taking as an element in the Hippie way of life has the added attraction of demonstrating how artificial are the established boundaries to that moral code which society takes to be ‘right’ and ‘natural’. But essentially, the case for the use of mind-expanding drugs in Hippie culture has to be understood in different terms. The greatest damage perpetrated by the middle class way of life upon American people, in their view, is that it has constrained and confined them to a narrow, inauthentic spectrum of feeling and perception. We cut off and repress all those modes of experiencing the world – dream, fantasy, hallucination, trance, exaltation, vision,
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madness – which we cannot incorporate into the strict (in Blakean terms) ‘single vision’ of our work-driven, task-oriented, problem-solving, goal-oriented world. But beyond these strict and patrolled confines of the modern versions of the Protestant Ethic, lie ways of experiencing the self and others ‘in depth’, ways of achieving rapport with nature, colour, sound, of communicating with ‘inner space’. There is only one way to recover this rich, hidden utopia within the self: through the medium of mind-expanding drugs. Others by long discipline and the practice of asceticism have managed to enter these forbidden realms of feeling: hence the interest in meditation and the mystical religions of the East. But Hippies are in too much of a hurry, and disciplined asceticism too alien, for more than a very dedicated minority to take the long route to inner space through contemplation, when there is available the short trip via LSD or the other hallucinogens. Here too, Hippies attempt to reconcile the impossible: to achieve the primitive states of contemplation via the medium of the most modern chemical aids: to complement the bare asceticism of their chosen daily life with the rich, pleasurable, multi-coloured ‘garden of the mind’. There seems no doubt that this rich inner life represents a compensation for the drab, colourless, tense routines which are, in the Hippie’s view, the waking experience of most middle class Americans. Drugs give no permanent relief from that desolation: the frontiers of consciousness, once crossed, must be crossed and crossed again. Steven Marcus, writing of the dark hinterland of Victorian pornography, speaks of the dream of the perpetual orgasm, a kind of pornographic utopia which he calls ‘pornotopia’. The Hippie counterpart may be called ‘psychodopia’ – the utopia of the never-ending ‘high’. Becker, in his classic study, ‘Becoming a Marijuana User’, reminds us that the drug-taking experience is also a ‘career’ – that it depends on the user learning to recognise, in the company of others, or through interaction with them, what the experience is which he is having, for it to become a sustained and pleasurable one. ‘Marijuana-produced sensations are not automatically or necessarily pleasurable. The taste for such an experience is a socially acquired one’. The point is that mind-expanding drugs in and of themselves do not make accessible that hidden landscape of consciousness unless Hippies can so structure the experience, in company with others, as to see the experience as pleasurable, intense, liberating, etc. Thus the Hippie ‘ideology’ of the doors of perception serves to define and reinforce the immediate but ambivalent pleasures of drug-use. It is also striking, from the many attempts to describe these experiences by those who use drugs, that the inner landscape, once reached, is not so much a totally different universe, and thus a release from the world’s burden in absolute terms, as a pleasurable intensification of everyday experience. For young people, tensed-up, or, as the phrase goes, ‘uptight’ (one word) about waking life, the hallucinogens – in Time’s graphic phrase – also ‘saturate the senses with colour and music until, like an overloaded circuit, the mind blows into the never-never land of self-lessness’. So called psychedelic art – the posters, light-shows, costumes, acid-rock, projected films and moving objects, the action of the stroboscopes which project flickering lights which are supposed to synchronise with the alpha rhythms of the brain – is best understood as a way of reproducing or re-creating through music and the new art forms the multi-media, multi-dimensional experience of the successful ‘high’. Drugs are one way of experimenting with the self, but also with the limits of the traditional time scale. The hallucinated experience is valued, not only for itself – for its intensity, novelty, its contrast with waking life and the everyday world – but as setting the terms of a new way of experiencing the world. Inside such experiences, relationships between the elements and images are metaphorical, analogical, symbolic, associative, fluid, as contrasted with the literal, linear, rationalistic and uni-dimensional terms of everyday life. In short, they
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are post-Gutenberg. Hippies seem to believe that though power in civil society now rests with the Gutenberg modes of consciousness, these are actually passing away, losing their relevance in the post-industrial world. They have become the vacant shells, the husks and forms of a previous era. It is those people who, by one means or another, seek to liberate their minds from the tyranny of these obsolete structures who are actually moving with the tide of history. In a strange way, even LBJ and the men of the Pentagon are prisoners of obsolescing modes of perception, technological dinosaurs in the cooler gardens of the cybernetic. Thus, much as McLuhan prophesies that through the new electronic media we shall ‘return’ (or go forward?) to the more primitive/more advanced consciousness of the ‘global village’, so Hippies in their own way seek, through drugs and other ‘media’ to go backwards and forwards in consciousness, recovering there worlds of perception lost to technological civilisation since industrial capitalism banished the so-called ‘primitive mind’ to the reservations. Individualism: Cultivating the self/doing your own thing Having spoken of the elements of tribalism within Hippie culture, it may seem paradoxical to speak of its extreme individualism. Yet behind the collective withdrawal, the fraternal arcadianism, the spontaneous community of Hippie culture lies buried an extreme variant of American individualism. This individualism has many roots. In part it springs from the idealization of the spontaneous, the fluid, unstructured, unsequential quality to experience – the approximation of life to the ‘happening’ – which is so characteristic of Hippie styles of action. In part, it is a protest against the over-managed, over-directed, over-routinised character of middle class life – a revolt against the model of the ‘organization man’ and the ‘organized life’ which is the archetype of paradigm of success in the square world. In part, it springs from an assertion of the primacy of the imperatives of self as against the claims of society. But in part Hippie individualism is also rooted in the same soil as the American Constitution and the manifold myths of the free-enterprise, every-man-his-own-President society. From these roots many wild and contradictory variants have flowered – populism, agrarian utopianism, frontierism, free enterprise capitalism, resistance to the gun law, and the cowboy, to name but a few. The Hippies are yet another, even wilder, blossoming of the same secret ideal: the essentially American dream of innocence: free and single men in the open air. That is why even Time magazine and the mass media, when they write of the Hippies, though objecting to almost every detail of their way of life and philosophy, cannot help recognising under the long hair, the beads, the kaftans and the necklaces a mutant variety of a pure American species. But the injunction to ‘Do Your Own Thing’ – which is the purest, most anarchic, injunction in the Hippie alphabet – means more than loosen up, let your hair down and throw over the old taboos. It contains a more urgent and uncompromising message. It is the invocation to the inner voyage: undertaken, where possible, in the company of others who have been on that ‘trip’ before, but ultimately, a voyage by the self into the self. ‘You must follow the river inside you to its source’. This image of the trip inwards is central to Hippie language and culture. The voyage is, of course, a trip from that realm which the world takes to be unreal but you know to be more real because more intensely, more irrevocably your own, through the ‘doors of perception’, into that other space. Through this image is validated all those illicit experiences which the waking world has foreclosed. As R. D. Laing says at the end of one of the chapters in The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (now one of the sacred books in the underground curriculum), ‘Such an experience breaks down the entanglement in the thicket of false consciousness and pseudo-events that our society holds sacred. The
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need to invalidate such experience is because it is subversive. And it is subversive because it is real. Everything, as Peguy said, begins in mysticism and ends in politics . . .’.
II Next, I want to set these motifs in context. The point, as Sartre remarks in The Problem of Method, is to find the proper mediations. Of the relevant surrounding structures, the most relevant is the realm of the political. In this section I try, briefly, to set the Hippies within the historical/genesic evolution of their generational counterparts: I refer the Hippie experience to the growth of a ‘generational underground’. I have dealt with this part of the story at greater length elsewhere (see, forthcoming, ‘The New Revolutionaries’, From Culture to Revolution) so that what follows is a summary recapitulation. It is difficult now, in the aftermath of Watts, Chicago, Berkeley and Columbia to recall that even liberal commentators in the early and mid-fifties were seriously concerned about the political quietism and over-conformity of American youth. They were the quiet Generation. It was against this background that the Beat Generation first made its mark, and it is the Beats who signalled the first breakaway movement in the long and unfinished trajectory of generational revolt in our period. Briefly, and schematically, the trajectory has passed through several phases: (a) There was the Beat Generation, primarily the poets, writers and shadow-artists who made up that loose Bohemian fraternity. (b) This was followed by successive waves of growing political radicalisation and militancy. The main thrust was Civil Rights, especially the phase including the sit-ins, boycotts and lunch-counter protests, and later, school de-segregation and voter-registration in the South, for which students, black and white, provided most of the shock troops. (c) This was followed by the campus rebellions – Berkeley (which included, in the compressed form in which most student rebellions since that time have emerged, free speech university and political issues); and then the growth of SDS and the other campus-based radical groupings and tendencies of the New Left or the ‘new politics’. The involvement here was, increasingly, of white youth, and the issue of poverty was added to that of race. (d) The next phase belongs to the ghetto rebellions – SNCC and the other black youth and student activist groups, but even more centrally, the spontaneous ghetto uprisings, and the mélange of forces and influences, from Afro-Americanism, is Stokely Carmichael, Rep Brown, the Panthers, Muslims, and other groups flowing together in the current of ‘black power’. (e) This phase is marked by a separation of the ‘movement’ into roughly two broad halves along racial lines: black militants following an increasingly separatist path on the issue of race and poverty, white activists increasingly involved with the opposition to the War in Vietnam and resistance to the draft. On both sides, however, a growing escalation in militancy and an impelling urgency to confront and contest what both sides come to identify as ‘the system’. From the Beats, through civil rights and the race issue, poverty, to war and American imperialism, the line is one of growing involvement, political activism and engagement. The movements appear to ‘peak’. Sporadic campus occupations, ghetto and street rebellions, etc. begin to look like the coherent thrusts of a more sustained political type – but both sides have also to count the costs. Washington and the Pentagon do not fall. This is the ‘moment’ of the Hippies.
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The Beat Generation was the direct progenitor of the Hippies. These two groupings shared the same sense of compulsive dis-affiliation from both the mores and modes of middle class life, and from any direct political commitment. Both movements flowered especially on the West Coast – that sun-lit, orange-blossom El Dorado on the far side, the exotic, oriental side of the great heartland of middle American. Both were drawn to the more mystical variants of oriental religion and mysticism, both revered contemplation over action, both gave great weight to the role of the expressive arts, both were heavily involved with drug use. Both adopted the habit and style of those great American archetypes, the hobo, the bum, the hitch-hiker on the ‘open road’ of American life. The Beats, however, were thorough-going Bohemians, self-appointed members of a new avant-garde and their habitual haunts were selfcreated Bohemian enclaves. They developed in writing and poetry a nightmare, apocalyptic vision of the inner disintegration of American society: but though this body of writing, and the structures of feeling it embodied, have gone a long way to providing something of the elementary rhetoric of the new American radicalism – a sort of emotional scenario to political happenings, they were committed to no social programme. They knew, in the words of one of the most distinguished of Beat gurus, Kenneth Rexroth, that ‘the social order, the state and the capitalist system’ was a ‘social lie’: and a poem like Howl was powered by a corrosive subpolitical charge. But temporarily, in the Beats (as Richard Hofstadter once remarked of an earlier period) ‘Bohemianism triumphed over radicalism’. We can deal more summarily with the evolving politicisation of the underground, from the integrated civil rights struggle, through the campus revolts to the separatist militancy of black power and the white ‘new left’. Here was minted, first, a critique of ‘the system’: poverty in the midst of affluence, the power of the ‘military-industrial’ complex (President Eisenhower’s only contribution to radical politics in a long and distinguished career), the obscenity of the war and American neo-imperialism on a global scale, the ‘big lie’ of mass media manipulation, the ‘growing up absurd’ of large sections of America’s youth, the compulsory miseducation of students in the large, impersonal, corporate structures of the multi-versities. Behind each phrase in that brief catalogue stands a critical text, an agitation, an attempted de-mystification of some part of the American social structure. But, secondly, as the issues widened and began to bite, there was also minted a new style of political activism: the freedom ride, community organising (whether in ghetto or southern backlands), the campus occupation, the teach-in, the mass demonstration, the spontaneous city-rising marked by looting and burning, the various types and styles of ‘confrontation’. In this matrix something – a whole generation, a continent, an era – of political shibboleths, evasions, ideologies and groupings were unfrozen and set afloat. The traumatic experience of the adult, now middle-aged, left – McCarthyism, Stalinism, the rout of the New Deal left, the withering of the old-line political sects, the drift of the liberal intelligentsia into political quiescence – began, at least, to be exorcised. The emphasis in the new type of activism was placed, instead, on involvement, on participation, on grass roots organising, on praxis rather than ideology, on by-passing the bureaucracies of established power (whether these were the major political parties, the labour unions, or the venerable old-stagers of the negro emancipation movements of an earlier era). In Wright Mill’s phrase, ordinary men and women were again to become, as a result of political involvement, ‘agents in the history-making process’. Against these incipient political foci of the loosely-organised but emergent ‘movement’ or ‘movements’, one could set the whole litany of politically-collusive myths and phrases coined as rationalisations for, or panegyrics to, the system’s stability and legitimacy: the ‘plurialist society’, ‘countervailing power’, the ‘end of ideology’, ‘the American century’, ‘the free world’. As these polite political euphemisms, one by one, bit the dust, a more consistent – some
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would even say, dangerously over-determined – picture of the society began to emerge: the image of corporate power and privilege joined with the political and military élites in defence of America’s manifest global destiny as the capitalist and industrial powerhouse of the twenty-first century; serviced by the multi-versities which channelled men of talent into the system, and the mass media, which provided mass distraction on a national scale – a seamless, powerful complex of interlocking bureaucracies which had, nevertheless, become the only history-making agency in the society at home, and was hell-bent (even to the point of some ultimate nuclear solution) on becoming the only history-making agency on the face of the globe. Soft sell – the affluent message – for the white majority at home: hard sell – napalm, CIA, defoliation, spheres of influence, Seventh Fleets – abroad. Marcuse’s ‘one dimensional society’. Hippies, though, committed to different concerns and types of action or ways of life, nevertheless share a version of this incipient, latent ‘ideology’ with their white radical generational counterparts, and also, though with important differences, with black militants. The task, nevertheless, remains – to situate the Hippies as a social formation within this set of structures. The customary way of ‘placing’ the Hippies is as a reaction against the political involvement of the more activist or militant groups in the early sixties. I have tried to suggest that there is this element of withdrawal and dissociation from the more overtly political, and element of retreatism, in the emergence of the Hippies at one particular ‘moment’ in the generational underground. But their wider meaning is somewhat different. We may interpret at least four ways in which the Hippies – perhaps in spite of themselves, and certainly without much conscious intention – have made a contribution to the growth of political contestation with the system. First, they have contributed significantly to movement style. The existential, spontaneous, loosely-organised, near-anarchic modes of Hippie society and ‘art’ provide the lived test of authenticity for this new kind of political movement. Their emphasis on the need for the individual radical to ‘live through’ his act of disaffiliation, the libertarian and anti-ideological mood of the sub-culture, find whole areas of sympathetic response in other political groupings and tendencies which are ideologically opposed to the Hippies. In the post-Hippie period activists and drop-outs come to resemble one another in personal style. The Hippies have not only helped to define a style, they have made the question of style itself a political issue. Second (and closely related), Hippies have helped to create a repertoire of ways of confronting and contesting society which have a highly imaginative, provisional and improvisational flair. They have made their mark on the dramaturgy of the revolutionary movement. They take a delight in the semi-staged ‘happening’, especially if it can be carried off in such a way as to reveal the surrealistic or Data-esque quality of middle class life. They have added obscenity, shock, play-acting, the ‘put on’, to the vocabulary of political confrontation. In doing so, they have given a new definition to the meaning of ‘the political act’, widening and deepening its circle of reference. This element has emerged as one of the peculiar strengths of the Yippies – who are Hippies half-a-stage on – though it has been present as an element from quite early Hippie days: from the free distribution of dollar bills from the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange, which had charcoal-grey, Brooks Brothers suited executives scrabbling on the floor after ‘bread’, to the sustained ‘put on’ of the Hippie groups which have been appearing at Governor Wallace’s political rallies (to the Governor’s consternation) bearing the slogan ‘Turn on with Wallace’, (‘After all, they say, he’s a gas!’) and the appearance of Jerry Rubin, one of the leading figures in the Yippies, before the House Un-American Activities Committee, his torso painted with the stars and stripes, and bearing a cardboard sub-machine gun. Third, they have made a most sustained effort, to define – by living out – a set of
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counter-values to those of straight society. Despite their apparently-patternless eclecticism, the latent value-system of Hippie society can be seen as a direct dialectical contraposing of alternative values to the sacred values of the middle class. One can make the consistency of this value-confrontation clear simply by listing a set of oppositions: ‘Straight’ affluent advantaged white urban-industrial sophisticated knowing adult male/female masculine genital work pain postponement of gratification anxious linear logic word power individual force orderly planned routine instrumental clean society body reason objective
Hippie poor disadvantaged Indian pastoral or urban-arcadian simple naive childhood youth feminine ‘polymorphous perverse’ play pleasure immediacy, the existential ‘now’ relaxed metaphorical or analogical logic image love communal flower spontaneous unorganised anarchic expressive scruffy self mind empathy personal
It is often said that new value systems are not created simply by inverting the existing moral order of things. Hippies might well reply that value-systems are never changed or replaced until they have been contested, until someone somewhere has tried to live their alternatives. Hippies are precisely engaged in such a tactical withdrawal. Like the Saints of the seventeenth century or the Bolsheviks after 1905, they have withdrawn into a nonsectarian ‘sectarian’ conspiracy, gone ‘underground’. Like the early Fidelistas, they have taken, figuratively, to the ‘sierra Maestre’. Passively, this represents a withdrawal of support from middle class America by its own chosen children – a retreat from suburbia into the counter-communities and the drop-out enclaves of society. In this mode, the Hippies look most like a millenarian sect. Indeed, one could compose a whole eschatology: those recruited to the sect must ‘turn on’ and ‘drop out’; they must be converted and then live the godly life, separate and apart, distinguished by habit and habits, and by their own regime of life. Others, too, can be converted: Hippies would love to ‘turn them on’. The ‘sect’ has its rituals, its ways of achieving nirvana or identity with the godhead; it has its galaxy of saints – Buddha, Ghandi, Jesus, Karma; it has its eucharist – the sacred cannabis, the sugar pill; it has its ‘sacred books’, its Kaballa; it suffers persecution – suffers it, frequently, with love, turning the other cheek; it has its apocalypse – when all America will heed the message, turn
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themselves on, and achieve the final, collective drop-out. But, in its more active mode, Hippies and ‘flower power’ are a way of carrying on a sort of spiritual politics by ‘other means’. Instead of taking society from in front, like the campus militants, or burning it, baby, to the ground, like the black ghetto militants, they mean to unravel it from within, destroying the rationale, undermining the legitimacy, the social ethic which is the moral cement which holds the whole fabric together. (And they have a point here, since, despite all that is said about the materialism of American society, it remains one of the most ideological and ideologicallybound societies.) The Hippies are second- or third-wave partisans in a new kind of cultural guerilla warfare: a warfare of the social consciousness. Of course, we are bound to write of this as if it were a conscious strategy, when most Hippies despise the whole interpretativeanalytic-causal-ideological ‘bit’. With Susan Sontag, they are ‘against interpretation’: to paraphrase her slogan, they want an erotics, not a hermeneutics of politics. Still, I believe that the Hippie phenomenon is a ‘manifestation’ of the sort I have been trying to describe. Drop-outs from the political struggle they may be: they are some of the first enlisted troops in a new kind of politics of post-modern post-industrial society: the politics of cultural rebellion. The fourth point stems directly from this analysis. The Hippies are an attempt to prefigure a new kind of subjectivity. In its present form, before any full revolutionay transformation gives that subjectivity a societal context, it exists mostly as a fragmentary anticipation or pre-figuring of the future, or as a deep and thorough-going negativity – contradictory, unresolved. It is not possible yet to make and live in the new society, but it is possible to catch a glimpse of what it could be like, to sketch out a model of future possibilities, through the broken forms, the split-structures of Hippie life and consciousness. What the activists plan and organise for, the Hippies start to construct ‘within the womb’ of pre-revolutionary society. And just as it is sometimes necessary to retreat, to de-totalise first in order to advance and re-structure, so the positive possibilities held out for the future in the movement are inhabited by the Hippies as a negation. They are trying to get through to the future by going backwards through the eye of time. Mailer, in one of the most profound social critiques of the whole period, his essay on ‘The White Negro’ and the birth of Hip, warned us that, both for white and black in American society, there would be a time when ‘the only life-giving answer’ would be ‘to accept the terms of death, to live with death as an immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self ’. In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention, the life where a man must go until he is beat, where he must gamble with his energies through all those small or large crises of courage and unforeseen situations which beset his day, where he must be with it or doomed not to swing . . . One is Hip or one is Square . . . one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed will-nilly to conform if one is to succeed. For most American militants and revolutionaries, black or white, the commitment to the revolutionary way of life has had, precisely, that double-character: in part, the confrontation and de-mystification of social structures and invested power, in part the exploration of the
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night-life of the psyche. Hippies too, in their own way, are pilgrims on that grim and provisional journey. They remind the more active that ‘society’ is not only a power ‘out there’ but also a structure inside the head, a code or imprint on the mind. They remind everyone of the deep levels at which society not only requires us to ‘collude’ with its values and way of perceiving reality, but help us to gain deep satisfactions from that collusion. Thus they give to the movement a broken, incomplete, still-mystified but necessary ‘language’ with which to define the system’s ‘psychic technology’, and they suggest acts – forms of praxis, kinds of ‘speech’ – by which that subjective infrastructure of American society can be de-passed. They do this, in part, by rejecting the ‘language’ given by society itself, which is coded by and for a given society, and in part by a negative immersion in the immediate experiences of multi-media art – and the intensified pleasure of personal relationships. Even in conditions of extreme material hardship, they ‘project’ other images from another consciousness on to the screen of the mind. If the sound is up loud enough, and the colours sufficiently kaleidoscopic, the ‘circuits’ of existing consciousness might simply splinter and fragment. To recover the sources and intimations of this briefly-glimpsed subjectivity they dip and choose with a wholly unstructured eclecticism: now turning to the life-experience of the dispossessed and the under-classes of society (as black militants find a direct source of values in the very despised life of the ghetto, and as, before them, Mailer’s white Hipster found a source of new feeling and energy in the Negro), now to music and the media, now to mysticism and religion.
III What the existence of the Beats and the Hippies reminds us of is that there has been a ceaseless dialectic at work in the growth of this ‘generational underground’ in the United States – one which, though different in many important ways from other parallel developments elsewhere, may nevertheless offer us a paradigm. This dialectic may now be seen as a movement between two poles – two ‘moments’ – in the materialisation of a revolutionary project. Those poles may be defined roughly as the expressive and the activist. (The slogan raised during the recent events in May in Paris also catches the same contradictory extremes: ‘Imagination Au Pouvoir’.) The Hippies, like the Beats before them, are prototypes of what Herbert Blumer calls ‘an expressive social movement’. Their appearance in 1966–67 marked the temporary ascendency of the expressive over the activist in the dialectic of general revolt (in fact, of course, both ‘moments’ developed simultaneously and overlapped). There is no rigid separation between these ‘moments’ – indeed, it is central to the argument that they belong together and are alternate manifestations of a common mood, critique, style and form of revolutionary activity. Nevertheless, around each ‘pole’ one can group apparently different clusters of ideas, feelings, concepts. The expressive includes the stress on the personal, the psychic, the subjective, the cultural, the private, the aesthetic or bohemian – elements in the spectrum of political emotions and attitudes. The activist ‘pole’, by contrast, stresses the political, the social, the collective, the engagement or commitment to organising, the public end of the spectrum. The expressive ‘moment’ gives emphasis to the development of a revolutionary style: the activist ‘moment’ puts the emphasis on the development of a revolutionary programme of issues. The expressive often provides the language through which is tapped the subterranean, anarchic, rebellious psychic fuel, the Id-forces – of rebellion: the activist phase provides the social, shaping, organising, driving thrust. In its expressive ‘objectivation’, the movement feeds off a kind of explosive, even destructive, negative energy – whether this be the hustling, the soul-music, rhythm, Afro-Americanism
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for the black movement, or the bohemian, acid-rock, multi-media mysticism of the Hippies. Activists require some source for, some authentication of, the values for which the sacrifices they make are given: and the expressive ‘moment’ is the point at which such counter-values and counter-emotions are defined as available, even in a negative form, to the movement. Each phase appeals to a different sector of youth, each has its own accent. The Hippies raise disaffiliation to a way of life. The revolutionary experience objectified in this moment thus finds its paradigm and model in the drop-out. The campus militants, draft resisters, community activists and so on raise activism to a way of life. In that moment, the revolutionary paradigm is the organiser. Hippies create scenes, activists build ‘the movement’. Yet, each moment, as it succeeds the previous one, carries forward elements from the past even as it seeks to detotalise it. Thus SNCC, SDS and other freedom-riding, draft-resisting kids, who attempt to engage society where the Beats withdrew, nevertheless took much from the Beats with them – including some actual Beatniks (men like Ginsberg have a way of re-appearing in each phase): they looked, talked, dressed and moved more like Beatniks than like any other recognised political style, their political meetings took on the free-form of those amateur group-therapy sessions and talk-ins of Kerouac’s On the Road and Holy Barbarians, and their political language bore the indelible mark of the rhythms and images with which Howl first announced the apocalypse. Similarly, when the Hippies retreat to the West Coast and other enclaves, or disappear temporarily into the electronic environment of acid-rock or the dream-life of LSD, they bear into this wilderness of the mind the scars and marks, metaphorically, of a hundred sit-ins, demonstrations and confrontations. Despite their frequent avowal of overt political commitment, the Hippies nevertheless appear at the ‘moment’ of, in the ‘disguise’ of, the first post-political Bohemia of the new politics: I mean post the new left, as well as the old. They are, in one and the same instant, political innocents and seasoned campaigners. Looking and acting like the flotsam and jetsam of the movement, they are in fact its most experienced cadres. Though literally few Hippies were old enough to march on Washington with Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin, or sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, or run the gauntlet of the Alabama police, they are nevertheless movement veterans of the mind. This is perhaps most striking to a British observer, for though the student activists and community organisers have given themselves to the political life as a sustained commitment, it is a group of Hippies with their dirty jeans and colourful scarves and granny glasses, their bed-rolls and boots, fitted out for all weathers, tethered to their guitars and wrapped in a blanket or shawl who most remind the British observer of the raggle-taggle scrag-end of an anti-nuclear Aldermaston march. That point of visual recall is not fortuitous, for in the anti-nuclear war movement in Britain – one of the early peaks of the ‘new politics’ as a movement – the same two strands, the expressive and the activist, were inextricably linked. The Hippies are voyagers, explorers, adventurers of the under-soul, the subterranean caverns, the unconscious sub-life of the revolutionary moment. While the more active, committed militants define the line of conflict with the system and seek frontal contestation to challenge and, if possible, transcend existing socio-economic structures, the less-committed, withdrawn disaffiliates of the Hippie and Beatnik phases begin to explore, live through and act out in a fragmented, broken form the outer limits/inner spaces of revolutionary and post-revolutionary praxis. They inhabit, embody and become, in Hegelian terms, ‘the negation of the negation’. Their role remains paradoxical and contradictory. Though they reach for, in their daily life, the intimations of a new kind of community and sharing, their style of rebellion remains boxed in at the level of the personal revolt against the system. Many of their characteristic modes of life seen adaptive to the system, rather than a surpassing of it.
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They often see themselves – and are seen by others, – as dissociates from, casualties of, politics. Nevertheless, in a negative form, they actualise and dramatise in microcosm fragments of that ‘future’ to which the activists point but of which, as yet, they are unable to speak. The Hippie way of life is a broken refraction of the so-far absent or missing ‘content’ of the emergent revolutionary project. In their present form, then, they are doomed to disappear. So long as the dialectical trajectory of the movement lasts, these two poles, the expressive and the activist, will continue to appear and disappear, absorbing and taking forward those things incompletely defined in one ‘moment’ into the next. The subtle mutation of the pure Hippie style into the ‘mixed’ Yippie style in the year of the Presidential election is a regressive-progressive movement of just this kind. There will be more reversals to follow. The ‘meaning’ of the Hippies for the movement is not defined by their capacity to survive intact as a separate formation, but precisely their capacity to flow back into and through the fluid forms which revolutionary activity continues to take in this pre-revolutionary ferment. But, despite their tendency to break up under the pressure of events, they ‘project’ for the sole movement some future forms even from within and through the negative distortions and experience of the present. As Fred Davis remarked recently, in an issue of Trans-action devoted to the Hippie, there is, as Max Weber would have put it, an elective affinity between prominent themes and styles in the hippie sub-culture and certain incipient problems of identity, work and leisure that loom ominously as Western industrial society moves into an epoch of accelerated cybernation, staggering material abundance and historicallyunprecendented mass opportunities for creative leisure and enrichment of the human personality . . . the point is that the Hippies, in their collective yet radical break with the constraints of the present society, are . . . already rehearsing in vivo a number of possible solutions to central life problems posed by the emerging society of the future. These ‘possible solutions’ are, of course, as yet utopian, for the societal context in which real solutions could be offered to real, emergent problems is precisely what, in the confrontation between the movement and the system, is being contested. Yet it is in Utopia that future possibilities are rehearsed. Hippie life is precisely such a negative rehearsal for the future. Men may not then have to ‘drop out’ – but that will be because a new kind of community will have broken through and fractured the alienations of capitalist/technical society. Men may not have to assert their right to ‘do their own thing’ – but that will be because society will have been made responsive to the authentic and spontaneous sources of the creative self. Men may not then went to deny society – but it will be because society is seen to be, and becomes, the transparent enactment of human freedom, rather than the prison-house of reification. Men may not wear beads and bells and flowers – but that will be because they have reappropriated sensuous activity as ‘their own essential powers’ (as Marx once remarked): because colour, language, the images of nature have become the emblems of vitality, unalien expressions of human subjectivity, of man’s place as a human subject and an actor in the world. Men will not necessarily be ‘polymorphous perverse’, but they will recover tenderness, a kind of holiness before relationships with others, they will learn the alphabet of love without guilt or remorse: they will bring Eros to the service of Civilisation. Men may not shun a day’s work or sleep on the sidewalk – but they will have broken through the existing framework which separates work from play, manual from mental labour: they will have ruptured the tyranny of rationalistic logic and one-dimensional thought. Above all, the reign of that shadow world which splits inner from outer, the objective from the
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subjective, the sensuous from the material, the instrumentalities of labour from the expressiveness of self, will disappear. Paradoxically, the Hippies are at their most revolutionary when they stress most uncompromisingly the terms of this new kind of subjectivity. It is only when the objective world becomes everywhere for man in society the world of man’s essential powers – human reality, and for that reason the reality of his own essential powers – that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, become objects which confirm and realize his individuality, become his objects . . . Marx: Economic and Phil. Manuscripts. It may be that all this is a utopian dream. But it is of such dreams that the revolutionary project is made. Trapped and surrounded by civil society as they are, breaking free of a tyranny as personal as that of the family and as world-historical as that of America as a global power, Hippies and their predecessors and successors cannot make actual, except fleetingly, these insubstantial possibilities. But, in their ‘moment’, they begin to suggest and anticipate it, to sketch it in, like some cast of hired actors perpetually ‘on stage’ in some theatre-in-the-round of the future.
References H. S. Becker, Outsiders: studies in the sociology of deviance, Free Press, 1963. P. L. Berger, An Invitation to Sociology, Penguin, 1963. P. L. Berger & T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, Doubleday, 1966. N. O. Brown, Love’s Body, Random House, 1967. L. Fiedler, ‘The New Mutants’, Partisan Review, 1965. S. Hall, ‘The New Revolutionaries’, in T. Eagleton and B. Wicker (eds), From Culture to Revolution, Sheed and Ward, 1968. R. Laing, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise, Penguin, 1967. T. Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy, GP Putnam & Sons, New York, 1968. N. Mailer, ‘The White Negro’, in Advertisements for myself, Putnam, 1959. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Lawrence and Wishart, 1959. M. McLuhan, Understanding Media, Routledge, 1964. J.-P. Sartre, The Question of Method, Methuen, 1963.
10 The meaning of Tom Jones Richard Dyer
R.D. is a graduate in French at St. Andrews University and has been two years at the Centre researching into the social and cultural values of entertainment and show business. This article is a study of Tom Jones, the entertainer, which proceeds through an analysis of the aesthetic qualities of the act to the cultural values implied in his performance, his shows, and the publicity surrounding him. The analysis is set in the framework of a discussion on the nature of popular entertainment and the notion of the star in our society.
This is a study of the public personality of Tom Jones, the most highly paid British entertainer in history. It takes this image as a significant complex of meaning and subjects it to an immanent analysis of its aesthetic and moral values. It is concerned with the determinant meaning of the image rather than with the particular meaning or significance the image may assume in a given situation. It seeks to define and understand what objectively the value dimensions of the image are, rather than to understand its subjective meaning to audience, manager or star. Even beyond the errors of naivety of ‘effects’ research, a great deal of contemporary research is focussed, in principle if not in practice, on the meaning of the phenomenon in question to the actors. The present research is based on the belief that this meaning-to-actor can only be comprehended within an understanding as precise as possible, of what the phenomenon is.
The problem of method It is necessary to probe a little further the fallacies of survey material intended to come to grips with subjective meaning. In the first place, work of this kind meets the particular difficulty that fans and the general public alike are not students of sociology, nor used to reflecting upon their experiences and tastes and articulating their reflections in a manner readily available to research workers. Responses are liable to sound banal on paper or tape, and, since neither popular art nor human aesthetic response is simply banal, to require interpretation. The task involved is not one simply of correlation of data but of interpretation on the basis of a fairly elaborate theoretical schema. Thus if one of the main findings of the survey was that Tom Jones is sexy, any understanding which takes us beyond such evident banality must involve either a psychological understanding of sexuality and the response to sexually suggestive objects or else an equally complex sociological notion of the role and function of sexuality and sexual symbols in the life of the individual and of society – and probably should involve both.
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Further problems arise from survey analysis of this kind; it is not quite clear what one is looking for. If the focus of interest is individual response, then to give this anything like adequate treatment, one would have to see the response to Jones as part of a total world view or organising perspective. Such analysis would ultimately indicate the significance of Jones in a particular context, and not Tom Jones as an independent cluster of meanings. Of course to establish Jones’ significance in the mind of an individual person is a difficult and important thing to do, but only perhaps when Jones seems to be or has been an inordinately influential experience in that person’s life. Alternatively, the focus of interest may be the general or consensual meaning of Tom Jones. Here the problem is not only that the uniformity of response does less than justice to the complexity and multiplicity of individual experience, but that it seems to imply an understanding of the production-consumption dialectic of professional entertainment which is naive when it is not perverse. For such a view might derive from its consensual formulation of the meaning of the Jones image the reason for Jones’ success. If this move were made then, a model must be assumed of a society in which a broad spectrum of choice is offered in the realm of entertainment from which individuals make a reasoned (if not rational) selection. Such a view is clearly untenable. Between the product and the consumer come a vast complex of official and unofficial promotion, the decisions of critics and disc jockeys, the influence of peer groups and trend-setters. Even before this, there is a limitation on what products there are – the network of decisions formed by the activities or managers, promoters, record manufacturers and so on. I am not tending here towards the equally untenable view of the simple manipulability of the audience, but rather wanting to stress that what is popular and what general images about it are available is not simply a result of consumer choice but of producers’ choice too, and that the latter necessarily limits the former. Consumers do choose, but only from an already defined field of choice. A second area of meaning is suggested by the above considerations, namely what Jones means to those who promote and sell him, and presumably what he means to himself. Such an area runs into similar problems of banality, in-articulateness, individuality and consensus. For only if one could seriously maintain a ‘Big Brother’ view of the mass media, in which every image and nuance of style is carefully, even viciously, planned (and adequately executed according to the plans), could one hope to gain an accurate assessment of the meaning of any particular product from examining the thoughts and intentions of the people who produce it. This is not to say that, just as with the audience analysis, such an examination should never be undertaken. A complete understanding of the total process would only be possible if both were undertaken, but they would always need to be related to a proper analysis of the objective features of the artistic product itself, to examine the continuity of intention and fulfilment and the relation of the objective features of the product to the objective situation in which it is consumed on any particular occasion.
The show The following analysis is structured on the basis of the ATV Network production ‘This is . . . Tom Jones’. There are several reasons for this. First, the analysis had to be of performance, since this is our primary definition of what Jones is. Second, television performances are the only kind available over a sufficiently wide area to make debate possible. That is to say that findings are needed upon which disagreements can be made, and this is only possible when the researcher deals with material that others can scrutinise; otherwise he will produce only journalistic assertion. Third, the
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television programme is much richer in evidence and semiological reference than other performance forms (cabaret, night club, variety one-night stand). Much of contemporary light entertainment on television consists of programmes built around a single performer and designed to present him or her not simply as a performer but as a personality. This it does by employing a variety of artistic devices to present a selection of facets which it is felt go to make up the public personality of the performer. Thus a television show will be particularly helpful to us when we are attempting to examine this public personality. Like many weekly television shows, ‘This is . . . Tom Jones’ has a regular structure or formula. The following treatment is essentially of this, rather than of any particular show, although reference to particular guest performers will be made later.
The show: opening The show opens with the camera trained on a microphone on a stand. A voice announces ‘This is Tom Jones’ and a hand grabs the mike. The camera tracks back to show Jones singing ‘It’s Not Unusual’. This opening, song and production, set off a train of associations that in effect set the tone for the whole show. The song ‘It’s Not Unusual’ was Tom Jones’ first record to become a big hit, climbing in a very short time to number one in the Hit Parade. Jones as a public personality began here. It is important to dwell on this moment of public celebration, because it is here that so many of the elements which go to make up the image were first stated, and with a powerful impact. These images would both carry Jones, colouring his every performance or appearance in the press, and have to be carried by him, something he would have to live up to and bear out. The song in itself, if one thinks of it apart from Jones’ performance of it, is not unlike a type of song particularly popular in that year, 1965. This was a type composed principally by Burt Bacharach and Tony Hatch, and characterised by unusual ‘sophisticated’ harmonics and difficult and surprising rhythms and leaps in the tune’s line. The words were also rather unusual, dealing with topics other than love and loss of love, or rather dealing with them distinctively – using urban or realistic images to express feelings – loss expressed by ‘there’s always something there to remind me’, or the injunction to the beloved to ‘walk on by’ ‘if you see me walking down the street’, or the advice to the lonely to go ‘downtown’. All this was supported by a luxuriant kind of orchestration which finally linked the songs to an older ballad tradition, different both to the frankly romantic ballads that put even comedians like Ken Dodd into the hit parade and to the beat, post rock’n’roll numbers that were also popular. It was the sophisticated music of the same middle class urban society that had applauded Cole Porter and Jerome Kern. That is the song, thought of apart from Jones’ performance of it. For when Jones took it, provided a simple up-tempo backing for it and sang it in his own distinctive manner, it no longer belonged to this genre of popular music. That is, its connection with this genre was readily discernible (note the quirky rhythms at the end of each phrase, the double negative and use of ‘wo-wo’ in the words) but it clearly also expressed a whole different approach to music – bluesy, aggressive, with a heavy beat. Jones thus introduced a new music (and hence new values) to the hit parade whilst still relating to a widely acceptable idiom. What was the difference? First, Jones was a man, and most of these songs had been
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sung by women (the song had itself been intended for Dusty Springfield). Not only this, he was very much a man, compared to the androgynous type that was then becoming popular. On the other hand, the masculinity was of a recognisable type – it did not have the strangeness, the shockingness, the hipness of a Mick Jagger. The masculinity was in the build, in the face, in the voice. On television he appeared in a string shirt of the kind Cliff Richard wore in ‘Summer Holiday’; on Richard it had been coyly sexy, on Jones it was really provocative. This masculine sexiness, surprising in the context of that song and that sort of pop singer, has remained the essential defining characteristic of Tom Jones, and we shall return to it repeatedly as we get nearer to understanding precisely what image of sexuality is involved. Newspapers were quick to pick it up at the time of the success of ‘It’s Not Unusual’. He was compared to P. J. Proby, at the time making headlines by splitting his velvet trousers on stage, but Jones had none of the campness and baroque which Proby introduced in his act. Nor was he like Billy Fury, who had seemed to be performing elaborate masturbatory rotes with the microphone when he was on stage. Questioned about his sexiness, Jones would always say that he was merely ‘presenting the number’ – it was the emotion he felt at the time, and since he was a living man, this (of course) had a sexual dimension to it. It is worth noting that the other elements of the Jones image – the working-class background, the Welshness – were also stressed right from the start, but I leave examination of them until later. The production The production of the opening number in ‘This is . . . Tom Jones’ is also important. The microphone seems to be waiting for the star, and this is emphasised by the delay in its being used, the camera’s concentration on it and the announcement over. The notion of the star will be considered at the end of this paper, but here it is important to consider the image of stardom which is part of Jones’ public personality. Jones is defined by his masculine values, by his performing ability (which the microphone heralds) but also by his ontological status as a star, or a superstar. That is he is not just a sexy man who sings well, but a different order of being. This kind of imagery is well expressed in two booklets, Tom Jones1 and This is Tom Jones.2 In both these the life of Jones is covered in a few pages and the rest is devoted to a celebration of what it is like to be a star. Two elements are particularly emphasised. The first is Tom’s admission into a kind of mutual admiration society of stars. Such ‘unquestionable’ greats as Frank Sinatra and Betty Grable seek fleeting contact with Tom, whilst both booklets devote considerable space to a visit Elvis Presley and his wife paid Tom while he was touring the States. The Purnell booklet emphasises Tom’s own admiration for Elvis as a teenager and continues: ‘The great moment came and suddenly Tom was standing face to face with the man who has remained the true superstar of the last decade, carrying fans who had cheered him when they were sixteen, and who had now married and turned twenty-six or more, with him.’ This extraordinarily loose sentence gives no specific idea of the kind of stardom Elvis embodies, but rather evokes a world of adulation, where existence is defined by the fact of being adulated. A second emphasis is Tom’s possession of a Rolls Royce. A picture of him standing by it is captioned ‘The symbol of success – showbiz style . . . a gleaming Rolls-Royce’. This is from the Purnell booklet; the Daily Mirror goes one better: ‘Not one Rolls-Royce in the garage, but two. That’s the ultimate symbol of success for Tom’ and and another picture shows him seated in one of them, a cut-glass decanter and
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glass in hand with the caption: ‘Just testing the luxury of his new Rolls Royce with a quick snifter from the concealed bar at the back’. The Rolls Royce is of course almost of itself suggestive of a different world of being – luxuriant, smoothness, wealth. Anyone who is at home in a Rolls Royce seems almost a different order of person. Or if that is felt to be going too far, the Purnell description makes a similar point rather more crudely: ‘Outside the house a gleaming car sits waiting, the light catching on the highly polished surface as though ready for instant flight. It is a Rolls Royce and it shrieks expense’. The Purnell booklet has a section entitled ‘A Day in the life of a Star’. Even the title seems to be suggesting that Tom is defined by being a star, rather than by more specific qualities. The article which follows shows Tom rising very late, driving to a club to rehearse, taking a sauna, giving a performance and going back to bed. This is spun out, but more time is spent discussing what Tom’s manager Gordon Mills does or says or the progress of the car through various streets to various clubs than in anything Tom does. Apart from signing autographs and the fifty minutes of ‘a-tomic Tom’, he does nothing but be. His car is chauffeur-driven, his decisions are made for him, even his body is ‘stretched, pulled and rolled into shape’ by someone else. A superstar precisely does not do anything but just is. These two booklets and the rest of Jones’ publicity gives substance and detail to the resonances set up by the actual production of the opening number. This interplay of production and promotion is what together constitutes the image of Tom Jones. Another aspect of production in the opening number of ‘This is . . . Tom Jones’ is the phallic significance of the microphone. One could argue that all microphones are, but in this instance the observation fits well with the imagery of Jones. There is something about the way his hand grabs the mike which immediately makes of the mike a live thing. Moreover, the camera’s concentration on it gives it a kind of vital, even autonomous quality. One might even speak of totems. It is evident that in discussing Tom Jones one must at some point or other mention his penis. The idea that male performers are sex symbols is hardly original. Hortense Powdermaker, in her extremely unreliable book Hollywood the Dream Factory reports that young male leads were commonly referred to on the film lot as the Penis. However, in the case of Tom Jones it is not just symbolic, it’s the penis itself. A series of articles in the Daily Sketch in the beginning of November 1969 referred repeatedly to Tom’s tight trousers, always managing to imply that they revealed the shape of his penis. Letters from female viewers were quoted: one woman asked whether Tom padded his crutch, to which Tom replied ‘There’s nothing false about me but my nose’. Certainly, the trousers are cut in a revealing fashion, although not as revealing as the Daily Sketch made out, and in several of the photographs in the Daily Mirror booklet the lighting and angle show clearly a bulge at the crutch. Moreover, Tom’s movements are either a thrusting forward of the groin or else, especially and increasingly, as the series has proceeded, a gyrating of the hips. He doesn’t dance properly nor does he use his arms expressively. Of course, one can overplay this kind of observation and certainly Tom’s sexuality cannot be reduced to a bulge in his pants. The point is that, with Tom Jones as compared to a sexy singer like Engelbert Humperdinck, the precise physical meaning of sexuality is not glossed over by a wash of sultry looks. Tom Jones has a penis and one does not forget it, but he has the personality to back it up. The opening sequence of the Tom Jones TV show then gives us Tom the singer and record maker, Tom the superstar, Tom the penis and Tom of ‘It’s Not Unusual’, a jumping off point for a complex series of understandings about what Tom is.
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The show: guests The next thing that happens is Tom’s introduction of his first guest. He does this by walking from the spot where he did ‘It’s Not Unusual’ to what looks like a rather plush and anonymous hotel lounge or first class passenger airport lounge. Like so much in the production of TV shows this lounge seems ill-calculated. Even if one were to claim it as some kind of extension of the Rolls Royce world, it would still not work, since the world of the Rolls Royce surrounds Jones but is not part of his act. It gives prestige to his act and his star quality but does not characterise his act. I do not intend to detail at length the guests Tom has had on his show nor the manner in which they were presented, although there have been some interesting arrangements and performances. I would like to pick out two instances which were particularly revealing. Sammy Davis Jnr. The guest on the first of the current series was Sammy Davis Jnr. – in himself a complex bundle of images. The show climaxed with him and Tom singing ‘She’s Good to Me’, a soul number. This was a quite stunningly performed number – socked out by both singers and with some vital dancing introduced towards the end. On the last line Tom sang slowly, gyrating. Sammy Davis looked on in admiration and said: ‘He’s coloured’. This referred back to a comment earlier in the show that only coloured singers could sing with real emotion, but it refers back also to much of Jones’ publicity. On the one hand, legend has it that before appearing in the USA it was believed that Tom must be coloured because no white man could sing like that. Furthermore, a constant theme of Jones’ publicity has been the phrase ‘body and soul’. It is a key expression for the image of Jones. We have already discussed his body, and an analysis of his publicity photographs (which I am not competent to do) would reveal I believe a careful attention to heightening his size and heaviness. But it is not just a body. For one thing it is a body in action, not the lazy narcissism of a Humperdinck or John Davidson. But more than this, the body is seen as the carrier of emotion, of deep soul emotion. In 1965 in the New Musical Express Tom is quoted: ‘I believe in an aggressive approach. You’ve got to move about a lot on stage. The more you move, the more you underline what you’re saying’; and since then it has been insisted in all his statements and publicity that this is not pure sex but sex plus – body and soul. It is important to distinguish between two categories which are interchangeable in Jones’ publicity (using the word in the widest sense to cover all aspects of his image not directly expressed in performance). On the one hand is the ‘soul’ sound, which Tom claims to admire intensely. This is a word which takes up the tradition of the blues, of negro revolt and suffering and which certain performers – Nina Simone, for instance – have used as a vehicle for radical expression. However, it also has a highly commercial aspect which has tended to play above all on the white man’s fantasy of the more primal, primitive nature of the black men. ‘Soul’ in this perspective takes up the theme of the greater naturalness and spontaneity of the negro – ‘soul’ stresses the physical ease of the negro against the cerebral awkwardness of the aryan. These concepts belong to an area of cultural concern that is not the subject of this study, but the linking of Jones with ‘soul’ does underline the total sexuality of his image. On the other hand, in describing Tom’s style more conventional words like ‘guts’ and ‘passion’ have been used. At one point Tom himself fuses the categories by saying that soul singers sing with guts; but although I don’t want to dissociate the two in terms of Tom’s
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singing style, it is helpful in that the guts-and-passion language introduces us to one of the most important aspects of Tom’s image. In the Purnell booklet Tom describes his performance thus: ‘My audiences are older and when I sing to them, I sing with all the guts I have, full-blooded and powerful’. This statement, which resembles hundreds of others issued by Tom during his career, leads us to his working-class background. At every point in his publicity, Jones’ working-class origins are stressed either directly by reference to his past or indirectly by the use of language, full of tough epithets and the populist tone of the more aggressive tabloid papers. The Purnell book opens with a description of Wales ‘. . . bold, brash and gutsy, where men are men and women are glad of it’; it describes Jones as ‘fashioned . . . from raw, exciting material hewn from the Welsh valleys’; he is quoted: ‘Change? Why should I? I’m the same as I ever was . . . I’m still the Tom Jones that my mates knew four years ago back in Ponty . . . The boys on the building site near my home still give me the thumbs up every morning as I pass, so that can’t be bad, can it?’ Throughout the booklet and in all the other material the allusions continue. The place of this in the Jones image is three-fold. First, it is specifying. A vague world of superstar-de-luxe living may provide the prestige and glow for the image, but it does not give the star a specific identity in biographical terms; born to the mining community like Jones, does. However, in that respect, any background would do, provided it was specific and not rarified. What happens in Jones’ case however is that the character of the working-class background as it is presented in the publicity takes on special qualities which work with the kind of performer he is to build up the image of. For Jones comes from a romanticised working class – the kind of romanticism that makes working on the pit face a touchstone of virility. The working-class background has been used to foster a particular concept of what a man is. First, the place of the man in society is made clear by Tom’s relations with his wife and the relations of his mother and father. ‘It’s a different world here in the valleys, you know . . . A woman’s place here for instance is in the home and she’s always there for her man coming back with a hot meal in the oven. I expect that’s why I believe in this, in my own house. I tell my wife she’s the boss. It’s her house and she makes the decisions.’ Woman’s place in the home is reinforced by the camaraderie of the pub and the clubs – Tom’s mother Freda talks about his father: ‘The only thing [he] missed when he first came [to Shepperton] . . . was the beer! He had to get used to a new brand here and you know what that’s like for a man . . .’ His father himself is quoted as saying that what he really misses are the working men’s clubs: ‘You have a lot of fun down there with the boys’. Tom himself has taken up these themes. More than just this social definition of what constitutes a man, Tom’s background has also furnished him with a further reinforcement of his sexual image. The reason he is so virile, runs the publicity, is because he was brought up a man in a man’s world, because doing a tough job has made him that way. Fans are further quoted time and again as saying they like him ‘because he is a real man’ – because he conforms to an image of virility which is identified with muscularity and sweat. (One of the key moments in Jones’ performance is mopping his brow and undoing his tie – the publicity also emphasises the weight he loses through sweat in performance.) In addition the working-class background is contrasted to the luxuriance of his present existence. ‘At 28, after years of hard graft on a building site in Pontypridd, where a hod of bricks once rested on his shoulders in place of a mohair suit and his take-home pay was fifteen quid, the soft lights are sweet music indeed after the long days of sweat and toil among the bricks and rubble.’ (Purnell). Part of this is the old rags-to-riches story and Tom’s political statements, never specifying party politics, always rings of fighting to get what you want, of it being up to the individual to get on under his own steam (although the biography usually
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reads as if Tom in fact got on under Gordon Mills’ steam). What it represents more importantly is the fusion in Tom of the superstar with the working-class background – that is the charisma of stardom with the identifiable character of a working-class lad. In a much more glamorous way, Tom unites the same kind of appeal (plus sexuality) as a leading trade unionist or working-class politician – one of us who is also one of them. This fusion of elements works both to characterise and reinforce Tom’s actual performance, and the performance with its exaggerated virility, emotion and professionalism live up to and reinforce the image. Welsh guests In his Christmas show Tom read extracts from Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales, with a male voice choir (the Welsh musical sound) accompaniment. This is the most extreme form his Welshness has taken, although another example is his scene when Mary Hopkin was a guest. Welshness is in fact a recurrent note in Jones’ publicity. Much of the time it serves to reinforce the functions of the working-class imagery, but it also introduces a note of respectability that is perhaps useful. It identifies Tom with the respectable working class and with a tradition of piety and patriotism. None of this is portrayed in the performance, unless in a stiff way as in the instance of the reading of Thomas, but it is a note which makes some of the more suggestive aspects of Tom’s performance acceptable.
The show: regular features Apart from the guest spots, Tom does four other spots in his show, most of which emphasise aspects that have already emerged in the discussion of the show so far. First, there is an up-tempo routine with the dancers. The dancing is frantic, and Tom stands in the middle moving but hardly dancing. Of particular interest are the sets and costumes for this sequence. In the first show, the routine took place before a huge blown-up photograph of Tom wearing a black leather outfit. The second show had him again in black leather, but had the dancers in weird lurex constumes, with bras for the girls and singlets for the boys, and a set that looked like a highly glamourised factory – the whole tone was industrial and dynamic. On 14th December 1969, Tom wore for this spot white trousers and Western jacket (see below), the dancers wore ‘wet look’ jumpsuits (trendy styling in a modern artificial fabric), the setting was back projection of circles and the camera work added to the hectic and gyrating effect. Another show had Tom and the dancers in Karate clothes, with the boys and the girls alternately defeating each other in bouts of very swiftly moving Karate. What these numbers do is project the dynamic aspect of Tom’s image and the aggressiveness, which comes from the machine age, the Western or newly discovered forms (on a mass scale) of Japanese violence. (In fact, these sequences, often inventively conceived, tend to drown Tom – the dancing and design are so much more dynamic and professional than he is.) Then there is his country-and-western spot, when he sings accompanied by a guitarist called Big Jim Sullivan. On one occasion Tom introduced this spot by saying that it was one of his favourite kinds of music and that he felt so at home in it. Compared to the kind of music broadcast on ‘Country meets Folk’ on Radio One, Jones’ country and western seems far more powerful and more in a tradition of industrial balladeering than the folksy flavour of most of what passes for country and western. Certainly with the Western gear and the heavy presence of Big Jim Sullivan it suggests a world of virility – the hard West.
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Another regular spot for Jones in the shows is the moment when he sings a sentimental ballad. After ‘It’s Not Unusual’ Tom’s hits were in fact far more of the type associated with Engelbert Humperdinck or Ken Dodd – ‘Delilah’, ‘Green Green Grass of Home’, and ‘Without Love’. They are characterised by big, soaring and easily memorised melodies, broadly sentimental lyrics and heavily romantic orchestration, closer to Rachmaninov than to Bacharach’s Mahler. Undoubtedly it is these that have earned him his strong following amongst older women. What they contribute to the Jones image is an enlargement of the area of ‘soul’, a kind of bastard spiritualisation of it. In a sense, this is another kind of respectability, taking up the banal reassurances of popular romantic ballads but I think it works more especially as an apparent enrichment (but in my view actual impoverishment) of the total sexual field we have already picked out. It has the bigness of manly emotion; if it is sentimental, it is generously so and in an uncomplicated way. It is usually shot in a part of the hotel lounge set already mentioned, and often benefits from imaginative fluid camerawork; Tom does not sing to a camera but is caught singing wrapped in emotion.
The show: closing sequence Finally there is the closing sequence of the show. This begins like the opening sequence, with a close up of a microphone and the voice over ‘This is Tom Jones’ but when the camera swings back it is to see Tom entering a large arena lit from below (that is, a glass floor with underfloor lighting), surrounded on three sides by ‘stalls’ of women and backed on the fourth by a large orchestra and chorus (The Mike Sammes Singers). He does three numbers, a fast one to open and close, and a slow one in the middle. At the end of the first number he undoes his bow tie (he is wearing a dinner jacket) and mops his brow. At points during the songs he goes up to the front rows of women, shakes hands with some and sometimes kisses a few. They in turn shriek and hold out their hands and bodies to him. This sequence has a live feel to it, almost like an outside broadcast and one half fears and hopes that at any moment the women will drag Tom down among them. By this point, he has everything working for him – the publicity and promotion, the big sound of band and orchestra, the big (working-class) body (penis) bursting out of the dinner jacket (upper class/superstar class), the kinds of song referring back to specific aspects (virility, romance) of his image. Moreover, for viewers, as opposed to those actually in the audience, it is a sight of a celebration of all these things – it is sex symbol and superstar in action, validated by the screams of the audience. We have been concerned above all with facets and features, with elements of meaning and aesthetic qualities. Of course, Jones is not a jumble or even an ordered collection of ideas or features. He is a human being and it is important to remember this. What gives any symbolic cluster its force in the world of entertainers is the fact that the actual physiognomy and existential reality of the cluster is unique and assured by the uniqueness of the individual human being. This is not a declaration of faith, but a simple observation of fact. Generalised values are here embodied in a particular person, and the fact that that person is particular acts as a ‘guarantee’ that the generalised values hold, have meaning. Jones does not simply symbolise or represent sexuality for instance: the fact that he exists means, or can be felt to mean, that this sexuality itself exists.
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The notion of stardom A star is someone in the world of entertainment who has charisma. He or she has that aura, that special magic, that star quality and excitement . . . cliches for the phenomenon are not hard to find – understanding is rather more difficult. Charisma has been defined as ‘an extraordinary quality of a person, regard less of whether this quality is actual, alleged, or presumed’.3 The qualification is important, since it raises the question of whether, in the present instance, a star really is extraordinary or not. Audiences and professional entertainers alike seem to need to believe that the charisma is real, an inborn ‘something extra’, but modern thought on charisma has tended to underplay this and stress the importance of social context. E.A. Shils writes: ‘The charismatic quality of an individual as perceived by others or himself, lies in what is thought to be his connection with (including possession by or emodiment of) some very central feature of man’s existence and the cosmos in which he lives. The centrality, coupled with intensity, makes it extraordinary’.4 There are two ways of understanding this in terms of how individuals come to have this particular role in society. On the one hand, the charismatic figures can be seen as simply a passive recipient of various social tendencies, someone who happened to be around when these tendencies were coming together. Clearly it is difficult – but not impossible – to hold such a view and in certain cases it may be singularly appropriate. The present Royal Family for instance may be said to have charisma, but it would be hard to think this an extraordinary quality they possess; infinitely passive they were born in the right place to embody certain central tendencies of our society. On the other hand, the charismatic individual may be seen as one more than usually responsive to the mood and tendencies of his society and able to act in such a way as to play an especially appropriate, and hence charismatic, role in it. The example of Napoleon may be relevant; one could argue that the condition of French society at the time made dictatorship by that kind of man possible and meaningful to the people, and that in addition Napoleon, being the kind of person he was, was able to understand the situation in terms of his won charismatic role in it. This ability to, as it were, ‘seize the time’, need not be deliberate or even conscious; in political history it does always seem to have been so (Louis XIV, Cromwell, Lenin, Churchill, Mao Tse-Tung . . .), but if we turn to the field of professional entertainers it seems less likely. Thus the apparent need of the American public for prematurely avuncular singers in the mid-twentieth century was surely not realised by Bing Crosby when he assumed this role and gave to it his own particular blandness and humour. He was neither passively in the right place, since the mass media industry is not highly structured in quite the same decisive way as the English class system, nor inexplicably charismatic, an extraordinary individual over-whelming all by his personality. The charisma came from both the appropriateness and the individuality of Crosby. In any event, whether or not you believe in the reality of the charismatic figure’s extraordinary qualities is ultimately a matter of choice that does not affect the analysis. That is to say that if one takes the line that the figure does possess these qualities, then one is still bound to show why these qualities should work at this time, which means examining the social context. My own bias, for what it is worth, is not to believe in the qualities themselves but to believe in the capacity of certain people to embody, sustain and effectively create these qualities. A star is someone who always manages to live up to his charismatic image. It may be that Tom Jones’ meteoric rise in the USA and the present falling-off of interest there is due to his inability to live up, over a sustained period, to his image. Having said this, I do not see a simple way of showing the centrality of the values Jones
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expresses to our society. For one thing, whilst they certainly are central, I don’t believe that one could show that there was a ‘need’ for Tom Jones. If he had not happened, there is no reason to suppose that he would have to have been invented. Peter Jones’ image, in his recent biography of Tom Jones, of a nation crying out for masculinity in an entertainment industry swamped by effeminacy doesn’t really seem adequate, although clearly this is part of the explanation. (But it doesn’t explain why effeminacy should have got so far in the pop world). Jones does represent forcefully traditional images and values of the working-class male, which may be said to be under threat from the seductions of affluence and hooliganism – but paradoxically Jones catches the violence of the latter and the respectability and materialism of the former. Again, Jones’ appeal to middle-aged women is suggestive, when one considers their role in the old working-class street culture, now diminishing, and their vulnerability to advertisers of consumer goods and labour-saving devices (which are associated too with respectability and knowing one’s place). Jones, by suggesting the old values of pride in class and toughness and yet by being affluent and respectable, may be providing a set of values comparable to the aggression-without-bite that has made the Sun so successful. These are of course only hypotheses, but it is perhaps in providing such hypotheses that the real usefulness of the analysis of the mass media lies. Rather than seeking to explain why Tom Jones is popular, in itself rather a trivial question, one is saying, given that Tom Jones is popular, and with these people, what does this tell us about the kind of society we live in. Given that he is like this what can we suppose (and set up for further research) about contemporary culture and consciousness? It is reasonable after all to want art to tell us about life, and not parasitically to call on life to tell us about art.
Notes 1 2 3 4
Tom Jones, a Purnell TV Special, 1969, BBC Publications Ltd., London. This is Tom Jones, A Daily Mirror Special, 1969, Hamlyn, London. Max Weber, Essays in Sociology. E.A. Shils, Charisma, Order & Status.
11 The politics of popular culture Bryn Jones
The purpose of this paper is to sketch very briefly the theoretical background to cultural studies, to emphasise the framework which links the other papers being presented here. It may be best to begin by saying what we believe cultural studies and culture are not. Currently the field of cultural analysis is dominated by four major tendencies, all of which will presumably have been voiced at one time or another, and all of which correspond to the major forms of bourgeois ideology present in the western world: the conservative, the liberal-humanist, the technical-rationalist, the vulgar-marxist. A conservative ideology is implicit in the oldest form of cultural analysis, which I call pessimistic cultural criticism. Here the only real and authentic culture is art, against which everything else is set. Theoretically it explains the current state of supposed cultural decline and malaise by a mass society thesis, in which the valued civilised culture of an elite minority is constantly under attack from a majority or mass culture which is inauthentic and a denial of life. Its main task in analysis is evaluation and discrimination, a search for the true values of civilisation, commonly to be found in the organic community, the countryside, Renaissance art, the great nineteenth century novels and so on. A principal opponent of this view adopts a more easy-going and tolerant attitude, but is again concerned first and foremost with evaluation. The liberal humanist perspective is essentially not much different from the conservative view of culture, except that culture is now positively rather than negatively valued. The criteria for evaluation draw on the same source, high art. Similarly, it approaches popular culture in the same way as it does art, in order to appreciate it and usually the appreciation has a sentimental character. So mass culture is now not all bad, or alternatively mass culture is bad but there is some good popular culture or folk culture. At a more theoretical level, its analysis is founded on liberal myths and pluralism, of change through liberal education and so on. Since the analysis begins and ends in evaluation, culture occupies a space in which history, politics, economics and social context are absent. Set against this arty approach is the technical rationality of positivistic sociology and social psychology which introduces a supposedly scientific quality to its research. It has liberal aims, notably in the sphere of social policy, and employs scientific means. Its classic study is the scientific analysis of the effects of the mass media on the audience. The cultural object is reduced to its quantifiable elements by content analysis; the participants are reduced to their socio-economic categories or ranged along various axes of sociological variables by such techniques as audience research; and the activities are reduced to clinically isolated simple communication flow models such as those developed in psychology. It has an absent theoretical heart, its place taken by a set of routinised research practices. It social engineering and reformist outlook imply an unquestioned adherence to consensual aims
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founded on myths and democratic decision-making, the national interest, the common good and so on. The conventional wisdom of orthodox Marxism has consistently devalued the significance of culture, seeing it, in the main, as simply the reflection of the base, the economic infrastructure of society. So culture is produced by the economic relations in a fairly direct way, and is this mere illusion or delusion, bourgeois ideology or false consciousness. This economist version of Marxism has its roots in some of the more positivistic assertions by Marx about the place of ideology. What is left out, however, is any sense of the relative autonomy of the superstructure, of the reciprocal determination of the base by the superstructure, which precludes any such undialectical analysis as that conducted by vulgar Marxism. The perspective on culture and cultural studies presented here draws on this inheritance with considerable reservations but is also influenced by writers of the New Left in Britain, Europe and America, by the new sociology of deviance, by social history, anthropology, linguistics, all within a roughly Marxist framework. How then do we understand culture? It is not simply either art, or collections of activities or objects, or signs, or even a whole way of life, since all these imply a static definition, i.e. culture is something finite, graspable, out there with its own definite privileged space and boundaries. Culture is both becoming and being, both practice and product. Culture is firstly a signification, an attribution of meaning to the world, making the natural world a human world. But this human production of signs cannot be considered apart from the materiality of this activity; signification requires objectivation and objectification. Both signification and objectification are perpetual works of transformation, of nature and the already given culture, occurring not merely at an individual level but at all social levels: the family, kinship group, youth group, work, class, media, ideology, language etc. etc. – that is, in all the mediations. The production of culture, however, takes place with the necessity for the production of material life as a pre-given. To put it crudely, you can’t eat culture. The competition for scarce resources, the development of the forces of production require and produce developments in the social relations of that production. We grant this theoretical priority even if, in practice, the precedence of material production over signification does not show itself in the simple, unequivocal and isolable determination of the superstructure by the base. They mutually determine each other but not freely and equally. In history, the social organisation of material life has meant organisation into relations of domination and subordination. In the bourgeois era these relations are maintained only in the last instance by physical force. Instead the capacity of a dominant social group to reproduce its dominance over time depends more and more on its ability to control the means by which the world is made sense of, i.e. culture and ideology. Culture then is an instrument of social control, but not just, for all we have done is give a bald account of its function for the dominant class in terms of the reproduction of the existing structure. Having the function of social control does not, though, exhaust the power to signify, to hold meaning. Culture is a site of struggle of conflict, of negotiations which constantly redefine (and usually reproduce in a new form) the existing relations of domination and subordination in the society. But control and the power to create and manipulate culture is variously situated, and variously held. It is not true, however, that there is no pattern there, that all the different powers merely cancel each other out, eventually to produce the ideal free democracy. Overall there are definite patterns of domination and subordination which exert themselves as such in the long run, even though in the specific instance they may on comparison to be quite different, and only accidentally related if at all.
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While, then, we stress the importance of structures in any discussion of culture and the relevance of a form of functional analysis, the hermeneutic-circle is incomplete unless we refer centrally to the subjective meaning complex of action; that is, we cannot merely talk of completed actions, of products, of institutions, of functions, of structures without reference to their production in human activity. Subjective meaning, however, should not be taken as simply personal experience, the ideas of an individual, or any man’s opinion, for this perspective works from a false and simplifying individual and society model in which the two poles represent the real social forces, and everything else is analytically marginal. Every individual is a social and historical individual, and, in Althusser’s words becomes a subject (both subjecting and subjected, determining and determined) an acting subject who experiences not only society as a generality, but society in and through its mediations. Subjective meaning is an essential part of the dialectic of culture but again one must stress that it is not simply an individual matter as it may be situated at all levels of the social structure and be produced socially rather than individually. As an example of this theoretical outline we might look at the culture of the industrial working class of the nineteenth century in England. Here we are searching not for the ‘pure’, the authentic culture of that class but rather the mainstream dominant culture of a subordinate class, since we are not dealing with that culture in isolation from its historical, political and social context which, in a sense, decides the subject of the study. The culture of the working class was and always has been a site of intense struggle for the control of their non-work time, what Marx calls a labourer’s disposable time. The culture of the working class was a developed response to their existence, to their environment, making sense of it, and making it bearable. But the culture was not pure, in that it developed in a state of intervention by the middle class; not that this negotiation was an amicable compromise, usually the opposite was the case. The institutional products of this conflict remain witnesses to the uneasy truce between the bourgeoisie and the working class in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, in that they are both instruments of social control (legitimate, non-disruptive use of leisure or representation of self-interest), and yet authentic response to the problems of their circumstances. This is not to say that matters have been settled: the struggle continues, although usually within fairly fixed guidelines. Some of the institutional responses have been Trade Unionism, professional football, working men’s clubs, the music hall, etc. Here we see how the culture of a class holds the subjective meaning of that class, often in a displaced form, and yet in a negotiated solution to the problems of existence where their control over their culture is only partial and the form their culture takes is often determined by the action of others in socially dominant positions. It would be wrong to describe the development of culture solely in terms of struggle between the middle and working classes, for within each class there are struggles as various class factions fight for hegemony; this is especially so within dominant classes founded on uneasy and contradictory alliances. The context of this sketch of culture is, then, political, not artistic, and it is necessary to continue to insist this as we move closer to the present day. Whereas the stress previously was on the need to control the activity, the behaviour of the working class, the site has now definitely shifted more to their consciousness which may be produced by a change in the political and economic structures in which the structures have become voluntarist: formal political democracy, and consumerism, themselves negotiated responses to changing general political and economic changes. The dominant group now requires the assent of the subordinate group, an affirmation especially in this continuing development of the political and cultural class struggle; not in terms of immediate opinion formation, but of long-term
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development of life-styles, and ideologies. An outline of this is given in that misunderstood book The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart where he refers to the mass media manipulating the language and ‘unbending the springs of action’; unfortunately, the analysis is sometimes obscured by his pessimistic cultural criticism and which has been the main way the text has been interpreted.
12 Breaking out, smashing up and the social context of aspiration Stanley Cohen
WILD ONES TERRORIZE A VILLAGE: Crowds of youngsters pour into a little fishing village each weekend. They come by bus, car, scooter and motor bike. With their guitars and haversacks they look as though they might be heading for a pop festival. But their arrival strikes a chord of fear in the hearts of the residents of Seahouses in North Northumberland. For among the newcomers are the wild ones – young thugs and their girlfriends whose only idea of fun is a weekend of wrecking and terror. Once again this summer, as the villages open their souvenir shop and camping sites, they know that trouble lies ahead. They had their first real taste of it last year, when the sunshine brought weekends of vandalism and violence. The pattern has already been set for 1971. Last weekend, extra police with dogs had to be drafted into Seahouses to break up gangs who roamed the streets, fighting, jeering and stealing. The gangs – up to 30 strong – head for the picturesque resort mainly from the Newcastle-upon-Tyne area, more than 40 miles away. Youths and their girlfriends sleep rough among sand dunes or in beach toilets . . . ‘The feeling in Seahouses is one of bitterness’, said local councillor Albert Brewer. ‘We try to provide reasonable and decent amenities for people to come here and enjoy themselves but these hooligans just come along and start breaking the place up. The stories we get of what goes on are disgusting. The summer simply brings us worry of what might happen. People begin to feel more and more apprehensive as the weekend draws near. I don’t consider myself an unreasonable sort of person, but these thugs want birching’. News of the World, April 18, 1971
The adolescent who commits acts of violence or vandalism is the archetypal repository of the large fund of moral indignation which societies have in reserve. The constellation of action which is difficult to understand, let alone sympathize with, and actors who belong to a group of low power plus high visibility and vulnerability, ensures that the whole battery of fantasy and mythology will be invoked to comprehend this action and justify certain forms of social control against it. The hooligan, the wild one, the vandal, the yob, the thug, the uncouth leather-jacketed gang member: these are the images used to focus attention on a particular sort of person and to evoke a particular moral attitude. The picture is a composite one, made up of Hollywood movies (such as The Wild One from which our News of the World report derives its headline), cartoons and folklore and, above all, years of tendentious, distorted and sensational reports in the mass media. Each generation supplies its images which make up the layers of the composite picture: spivs and cosh boys, Teddy Boys slashing cinema seats during Rock and Roll riots, Mods and Rockers brandishing deck chairs on the beaches of Brighton and
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Margate, vandals ripping out telephone kiosks, hooligans throwing bottles at football matches, skinheads putting the boot in. There is a tendency to see these socially created folk devils as if they were distinct types of personalities. Situational and structural factors are ignored and the behaviour is explained simply by attributing it to a type of person. And these persons are always ‘others’: football hooligans are not genuine supporters, but louts whose behaviour stigmatises the well behaved majority; Mods were not decent fun loving holiday makers; kids who throw bottles around on council estates come from the rougher (or ‘multi-problem’) families. Such images function to stress the discontinuity between deviants and others and heighten the sense or security to be derived from knowing that the deviant is not ‘one of us’. In addition, there is a tendency to attribute all variations of the disapproved-of action, to the same type of person. Thus, referring to trouble at football matches, the Daily Sketch (30.1.67) noted that: the trouble makers are young hooligans who merely use football and excursion trains as an excuse for their stupid behaviour. The same brainless wonders spend their midweek ripping telephone boxes, slashing seats, defacing walls, pushing old ladies off the pavement and pinching fruit from barrows. While the Daily Mirror (6.1.66.) thought that telephone vandals ‘are the same bird brained maniacs who slash railway carriage seats and throw bottles at the football referee and darts at the goal keeper’. But where do these brainless wonders and bird-brained maniacs come from, the creatures who week after week evoke from thousands of Councillor Brewers the same bewilderment, bitterness and the eternal parental reproach ‘after all we’ve done for them . . .’? In this essay, I would like to examine one context in which this question could be answered: that of the aspirations generated for working class adolescents in this country during the last two decades or so. I will concentrate specifically on the leisure context, the one that the Councillor Brewers of our society are so bitter about: young people today are affluent, they’ve got plenty to do, we’ve given them so much, but they ‘just come along and start breaking the place up’. I will assume that such disapproved of behaviour is not the reflex action of brainless wonders or bird-brained maniacs, but is the solution (not necessarily a very satisfactory or attractive one) of problems which are differentially distributed in our society and whose approved of solutions are similarly accessible only to some. As I will make clear, the leisure context is where such problems are felt: their origins go further back, in the direction of the structure of education and work. If any prescriptions emerge from this essay they are directed towards these structures, particularly the educational one. But for a youth work audience the leisure context seems the more appropriate to focus on.
Vandalism: an introduction Before this, let me mention a few points which I’ve dealt with elsewhere in regard to adolescent violence as a whole and vandalism in particular. The first is that terms such as vandalism should not be reified to make them into actual and unambiguous behavioural syndromes. The illegal destruction or defacement of property belonging to someone else (a minimal behavioural definition of this form of rule breaking) does not invariably lead to its classification as the deviant act, vandalism. The behaviour can be institutionalised under at least the following conditions: ritualism: on certain ritual occasions, such as November 5th,
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New Year’s Eve, property destruction is expected, condoned or even encouraged; protection: certain groups, particularly of high social status, such as students, are given some sort of collective licence to engage in property destruction; play in certain areas, or among certain groups such as very small children, the rule breaking is not regarded as deviant or problematic because it is recognised as local tradition, part of a game, or the targets say windows of derelict houses – are simply regarded as expendable. Part of the sociologist’s task is to look at the conditions, ideological and political, under which differential labelling occurs and the consequences of the actions so labelled. The second general point, is that contrary to the pervasive stereotype, even ‘ordinary’ vandalism is not a homogeneous category. Most people will probably not find much difficulty in distinguishing between a ten year old boy throwing an old tyre onto a railway line, a group of football fans smashing shop windows on a Saturday afternoon and someone deliberately wrenching off the coin box of a public telephone. People tend to react, however as if they cannot make these distinctions, as if there is a vandal type responsible for the whole range of behaviour. Common sense (as well as research!) indicates that there is no such thing as a vandal type, even within the range of officially labelled and apprehended vandals. Thus, nearly two thirds of telephone vandals are adults, while most railway vandalism (such as putting objects on the railway line) is carried out by young children between ten and twelve years old. Finally, vandalism is not wanton, senseless or meaningless. It is patterned both in terms of the type of property that is damaged (more often public than private, more often derelict than well kept) and in the clusters of different meanings and motives attributed to it by the offender. Elsewhere, I have distinguished the following six sub-types: 1
2
3
4
5 6
Acquisitive vandalism. Damage done in order to acquire money or property: breaking open telephone coin boxes, electric or gas meters, slot machines, stripping lead and wire from buildings. Tactical vandalism. The damage is a conscious tactic employed to advance some other end: breaking a window in order to be arrested and get a bed in prison, jamming a machine in a factory to ensure an enforced rest period, drawing attention to grievance. Ideological vandalism. Similar to the last example of tactical vandalism, but carried out to further an explicit ideological cause or to deliver a message: breaking embassy windows during a demonstration, chalking slogans on walls. Vindictive vandalism. The damage is done in order to gain revenge: for example, windows of a youth club or school are broken to settle a grudge against the club leader or head teacher. Play vandalism. The damage is done in the context of a game: who can break the most windows of a house, who can shoot out the most street lamps? Malicious vandalism. The damage is an expression of rage or frustration and is often directed at symbolic middle class property. It is this type that has the vicious and apparently senseless facade which people find so difficult to understand. Many types of juvenile vandalism have the elements of both play and malice: defecating in lifts (usually in council flats), urinating in public telephone receivers, cutting boats loose from their moorings, breaking lights in railway carriages.
The type of vandalism occuring during the episode quoted at the beginning of the essay may contain elements of vindictiveness, play and maliciousness. The analysis that follows is directed primarily towards vandalism which occurs one, during late adolescence; two, in the
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context of large groups; and three, in public or semi-public settings. Although I fully realise the problematic nature of the boundary line between ideological and non-ideological, I am specifically excluding from consideration property damage or disturbances which are overtly connected with political, religious or racial conflict.
The youth scene We must now turn to some generalisations about adolescence, primarily as it is manifested in a leisure oriented youth culture. I will then explore some of the links between this culture and ‘smashing up’ and ‘breaking out’ as types of fringe delinquency. In making these generalisations, I hope to achieve two incidental and quite modest objectives: the first is to remedy some of the more gross over-generalisations about the youth scene, particularly over the Sixties, and the second is to speak up on behalf of a section of young people whose voices don’t get heard too often. This second task may be looked upon as illegitimate for a sociologist to attempt and unnecessary for anyone to attempt. ‘Illegitimate’ because sociologists are supposed to talk about people and not on their behalf. I can only say that this is a view of the subject I do not hold. ‘Unnecessary’, because there are commonly supposed to be enough or too many channels for young people to be seen and heard. I doubt this is so, but in any event most of the group I will be discussing do not have access to such channels of communication. They do not appear on Late Night Line Up or at N.U.S. press conferences, they are not photographed going in a minibus to Afganistan nor promenading along the King’s Road; they are not seen under political banners in Trafalgar Square or going on charity walks for Shelter and Oxfam. They were not even to be seen in front of the cameras on Top of the Pops. The major distortion in talking about youth in Britain today (and the articulate defenders are as guilty as the articulate condemners) is not to understand that if there is a youth scene, there are many who are not on the stage and there are many more so insulated from where it’s happening, that they are hardly even in the audience. It is these outsiders, who form the majority of the adolescent population, the 75 per cent or so who don’t go on to higher education, who leave school at fifteen, whom I will be talking about. The dominant sociological model of the youth culture goes something like this: in non industrial societies, young people were given tasks functionally related to the work of the adult world, they knew their place. In Western industrial society, there is discontinuity: neither any preparation for nor any smooth transition towards adult roles. The result is conflict and deviance. This gap is widened by the increasing differentiation of institutions: longer schooling and sharper segregation of young people helps the development of an autonomous youth culture, embodying values which insulate it from the problems of the age transition. Most sociological writing elaborates on this sort of theme; the picture both leaves something out and contains too much. It leaves out the role of the rest of society in creating the teenage culture for its own needs and in doing, neutralising the conflict between the adolescent and society. The relative affluence and economic independence of the post-war adolescent in Britain means that he is now a new consumer, he can participate in the spectacle of commodities. This is his reward for mass production; any other participation is frowned upon. This is not a situation of one way ‘exploitation’: the cynicism this term implies is present on both sides. It is insulting to think that young people despite the education they’ve received, can be so easily conned. As Frank Musgrove has eloquently noted, adults conveniently consign the young to a
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self-contained world of juvenile pre-occupations, they resist their entry into adult roles, they resent their precociousness, their tendency to earlier marriages and higher earnings: Adolescents whose overt behaviour is suitably non-adult can be made. They can be excluded from responsible participation in affairs, rewarded for dependency, penalized for inconvenient display of initiative and so rendered sufficiently irresponsible to conform to the prevailing teenage stereotype. They can be made (via the teenage culture) into ineffectual outsiders. They are not just ineffectual outsiders and powerless (except in spending terms) but outsiders onto whom are projected a set of stereotypes which, as Edgar Friedenberg often notes, are similar to the stereotyping of all minority groups. The teenager is given the same characteristics as the Negro: exuberant, lazy and irresponsible with brutality just below the surface ready to break out in violence, childish and sexually aggressive. This leads on to the unnecessary element in the sociological picture: the apparent identification of the teenage culture with delinquency, particularly of the aggressive, destructive sort. A few years ago, the Rolling Stones put out a record, on the sleeve of which (eventually withdrawn) was the following: ‘Cast into your pockets for loot to buy this disc . . . If you don’t have the bread, see that blind man, knock him on the head, steal his wallet and lo and behold, you have the loot, If you put in the boot, good, Another one sold.’ One sociologist commented on this as follows: ‘One could hardly summarize the values of the delinquent youth culture more aptly or more adequately illustrate their convergence with contemporary entertainment values’. This view, stressing the total discontinuity between the conformist adult culture and the deviant youth culture is misconveived for a number of important reasons. The first is that a mainstream of teenage entertainment culture is, and has been since it creation in the Fifties, basically conformist in character. It is conspicuous for its passivity rather than its aggressiveness, its continuity with adult values rather than its encouragement of deviance. The first official representatives of the pop culture, those whom Ray Gosling called the ‘Dream Boys’ of the Fifties, embodied (at the same time as their music was being denounced) highly conservative aspirations. Let me quote Nicholas Walters’ remarks about the beginning of this age of the Ordinary Kid: The Ordinary Kid was born in a working class home around the time of our Finest Hour, brought up in a council house, taught in a secondary modern school, thrown out into a causeless world of affluence and opportunity (for other people), and left to look for his own dream by himself. He drifted about in the eddies of pop music, until he found his man and became a Dream Boy . . . Tommy Hicks, the merchant seaman from Bermondsey, found John Kennedy and Larry Parnes, and became Tommy Steele. Terry Williams, the record packer from Newington, found Hyman Zahl, and became Terry Dene. Reg Smith, the timber hunker from Greenwich, found Larry Parnes, and became Marty Wilde. Ron Wycherley, the deck hand from Birkenhead found Larry Parnes, and became Billy Fury. Terry Nelhams, the film boy from Acton, found John Barry and Evelyn Taylor, and became Adam Faith. Harry Webb, the factory clerk from Cheshunt, found George Ganjou and Norrie Paramor and Jack Good, and became Cliff Richard. And it was Cliff Richard, the first real pop figure in this country, who, at the height of his fame proclaimed that his Number One person in all the world was Prince Philip.
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This strand continued into the Sixties (Brian Epstein’s autobiography is a good record of this progress) not so much through the Beatles (in some ways an exception but such figures as Gerry and the Pacemakers, Freddy and the Dreamers, Cilla Black). At the end of the Sixties the lineal descendents of the Ordinary Kids were Tom Jones, Lulu, Englebert Humperdinck. The disc jockey and underground sage John Peel sadly remarked a couple of years ago that ‘young people in Britain have little to choose between Tariq Ali on the one hand and Englebert Humperdinck on the other’. There should be little doubt about the choice of the statistically typical teenager: the working class female, either still at school or at a secretarial course, or more probably working in a shop or factory. She found Tariq Ali irrelevant (and anyway thought he should go back where he came from), looked at students with more contempt than jealousy, didn’t listen to Zappa or Leonard Cohen and found the intellectualized rock scene boring although she might now dance to the music, say, of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple or Black Sabbath. While she might not have approved of his personal reincarnations, she would probably have agreed with John Lennon’s description of avant garde as ‘French for bullshit’. The stream that strikes a receptive note is the safely insulated, boy meets girl world of those weekly magazines, which, despite recent excursions into the risque by such products as Jackie and 19 are not far removed from the old days of Mirabelle and Marilyn. Of course, not all pop culture is Tom Jones singing about the ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’. The Underground has opened up and although it has been swallowed up by pop rather than transcending it, this has meant that thousands of kids have been exposed to influences richer and more diverse than the Dream Boys could ever have dreamt of. Over the Sixties, groups such as the Who and the Rolling Stones emerged in a more complicated way and with very different messages. Jeff Nuttall has described this background well. These were student drop-outs or hard working class kids with few illusions, who had come to pop by way of rhythm and blues and some identification with American Negro street culture. They had been through what he calls the ‘Sick Period’: the emptiness following the decline of the anti-bomb movement, passivity, avoiding work, disengagement, the first wave of amphetamine usage when swallowing a handful of bennies was all one could do. Here for the first time, the separate traditions of pop, protest and art begin their uneasy mixture. I’m sure that Nuttall and others are right in seeing the significance of this development and no student of youth culture can ignore what is happening on the pages of IT, OZ, Friends and the rest. (Although he might be well advised to remember Mick Jagger’s reply to a query about his views on an article about the Rolling Stones in New Left Review: ‘What’s New Left Review?’) But at this point the sociologist must part company with the cultural critic and ask just what these exciting developments mean to a million or so adolescents in Great Britain. The heady mixture of rhetoric and overgeneralisation which commentators on the youth scene employ must be translated into the day to day life of this group. This means looking at the considerable variations across educational, social class and regional lines in terms of the exposure to and meaning of the values which to the insider are core values. In a university town like Durham, the heads and the hairies might find a little common ground with the politicos, but all these groups are miles away from the rest of the university population with their college culture, their apathy, and their conservatism (nearly 50 per cent of a sample of third year students we surveyed wanted stricter control on immigration), and light years away from the skins and greasers of the town (who were not allowed to the dances in the union building). In his current study of working class boys in Secondary Moderns in Sunderland, Paul Corrigan has found a vast and so far inexplicable diversity even within an apparently
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homogeneous environment. In one school, the choice of favourite pop figures was in line with the continuity theme: the favourites were the Beatles, Tom Jones, Cliff Richard, Elvis Presley and the Hollies. In another very similar school, in a similar area only a few miles away, the choices were unambiguously: Deep Purple, Free, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Jimi Hendrix; all heavy, new sounds. (Tom Jones only got two votes here compared with Deep Purple’s 24 and his 13 votes in the first school). Evidence for this heterogeneity is immediately apparent and much recent sociological research has deepened our picture of normative diversity and how institutions such as the school perpetuate this. David Hargreaves, for example, in his recent study of a Northern Secondary Modern, shows how rigid this diversity is even within a school. In the boys’ Second Year, there is little evidence of normative or subcultural differentation within the streams. By the Fourth Year, the lines have hardened: the C and D stream boys have not absorbed any of the aspirations and values of the school; they see themselves as deprived of status; they are disliked by the teachers (who see them as ‘worthless louts’ with whom they cannot afford to ‘waste time’) and this feeling is reciprocated; they are given the worst teachers, who ridicule them and unfavourably compare them to the other boys (and they are aware of this discrimination: 73 per cent of the D stream boys compared with only 10 per cent of the A streamers gave negative responses to the question ‘Teachers here think of me as . . .’); they dislike the A and B stream boys, some whom in turn don’t even speak to them; they are more likely to spend their time in the billiard hall or beat club rather than in any ‘constructive’ leisure settings; they prefer the long haired, more rebellious pop groups, their occupational aspirations are lower, and they are more likely to be delinquent. I will come back later to the connections with delinquency. Let me repeat the point that to assess the meaning of sub-cultural values to the individual, it is not enough to point to superficial adaptations and changes, for example, in picking up certain expressions or changing clothing styles. Wearing beads does not mean that one is on the verge of transcendental experience; displaying a badge with the slogan ‘Make Love, Not War’ need be neither an affirmation of pacifism nor an invitation to promiscuity; saying ‘Yeah, man’ does not altogether imply an identification with the Negroes of Harlem. And this is not to speak of the groups who have not even made such symbolic changes: the kids such as those on the streets during Durham Miners Gala or on the beaches of resorts in the North-East (such as Seahouses) or North-West who are wearing shoddy Rocker or Teddy boy gear and paper hats saying ‘Kiss Me Quick’. This is not to say that symbolic changes are insignificant, but if we are talking about aspirations (and frustrations) these changes which take time to perculate through and their significance must be understood in terms of how they are mediated by day to day experience. There were kids who grew up on the early Dylan, but did not know what revolution he was on about, kids who knew the words of ‘Mother’s little Helper’ off by heart, but did not know what they sang was a cynical reference to drugs, kids who dance to music with little awareness of its ‘message’ or cultural history; this applies to Tamla and to Reggae as well as to heavy rock. This is not to put these kids down: why should they know? What ‘education’ has equipped them for such understanding? We should not expect the relationship between symbol and action to be too close and we should not be surprised if the same young men who have heard one of the 1970 hits, Blue Mink’s ‘What we need is a great big melting pot’, a few hundred times, go out of the disco and kick a Pakistani on the head. The connections between mass culture and active delinquency are there, but need a more complex teasing out than simply extrapolating from message to action.
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An absurd solution I want to condense a number of complicated arguments in this section. The first is that growing up in industrial society is absurd in the sense that Paul Goodman meant fifteen years ago in which is still the best book on the subject: ‘If there is nothing worth while, it is hard to do anything at all’. The second is that because of the structural and normative diversity in our society, this problem is felt in ways which lead to contrasting solutions. For some groups, the solution moves in the direction of drugs, dropping out, traditional Bohemian values or (and today these two sometimes coalesce) political rebellion, while for others (the group we are concerned with) it takes the form of fringe delinquency of the smashing-up type. The third argument is that for this last group, it is in the realm of leisure that the problem is eventually most acutely experienced. While my backdrop is essentially that depicted by Paul Goodman, the specific scenario is derived directly from the work on delinquency in this country by David Downes, and given empirical detail in studies by Peter Willmott (in the East End of London) and David Hargreaves. The process is described by Downes as the dissociation of the working-class class adolescent from school and conventional middle-class values and his entry into a low-ceilinged, dead-end job market. A whole stream of boys (not necessarily all) in working-class areas go through the school system without showing any allegiance to its values of absorbing the aspirations it tries to inculcate. ‘The school’, to quote from an essay written by one of Willmott’s boys, ‘was always trying to turn you into something you were not. It was a waste of time’. For a few, this perception is tied up with some sort of conscious revolt against the school, but most realise the pointlessness of lashing out here and retreat into a sullen resentment of the rules of the game. Thus, from preliminary findings by Paul Corrigan from his research in Sunderland, most of the boys think that long hair should be allowed, that school uniform should not have to be worn, that smoking should be allowed. But half the group accepted that teachers should punish boys for smoking. Nearly all the group thought that teachers didn’t understand them and agreed that teachers don’t really care what happened to them; they were just doing a job. As Hargreaves makes clear, while the boy is still at school he is powerless. The teachers make and apply the rules and little open rebellion against them can be sustained. The odd rule is broken, one is invariably detected and one is punished. The occasional arena for more active flouting of the rules is provided, for example by a weak teacher. The low stream boys do not simply reject the good pupil role because, as Hargreaves suggests, it is one he cannot succeed in or (later) is antithetical to delinquent values; but because it seems so absurd. Too much attention is placed on why the pupil identity is rejected rather than understanding what sort of identity is offered. If we think seriously about what is happening when boys who have jeans or long hair are ridiculed, punished, refused help in finding jobs and excluded from the Leavers’ Service in the local church because of the unfavourable impression they would create, then we begin to understand Jules Henry’s comment that ‘school metamorphoses a child, giving it the kind of self the school can manage and then proceeds to minister to the self it has made’. We should not be surprised if such ministrations are rejected, and we must expect these rejections to show outside the school, somewhere which offers a possibility of winning, or at least making a gesture. As soon as possible the boys leave their secondary moderns. They fairly accurately perceive the implications for their future lives of the education they’ve received. They are being realistic. The scope is small for non-apprentices and their aspirations reflect this
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low-ceilinged job market. As Downes says, they are not inherently disillusioned about jobs any more than they are about education, the jobs are also dull and tedious. Money is therefore and quite rightly, just about the most important occupational criterion. There’s no point in ambition if you’re driving a van, working on a building site or doing an unskilled factory job. Downes quotes the memorable words of Mandy Rice-Davis: ‘Nobody made a bomb by plodding along in a dull job’. Theoretically, they might want the job to be interesting, but they know it really won’t be. As Goodman says, nobody asks whether jobs are useful, worthy, dignified, honourable. People don’t think that way, they grow up realising that ‘during my productive years I will spend eight hours a day doing what is no good’. These feelings obviously cross class and educational lines, and Goodman’s diatribe against American society fifteen years ago, is painfully obvious to many young people in Britain today: . . . young people grow up convinced that everything is done with mirrors, by ‘influence’. Not even the personal influence of nepotism, but something more like the astrological influence of the planets. The sense of initiative, causality skill has been discouraged. Merit is a trait of ‘personality’. Learning is the possession of a Diploma. Usefulness is a Union Card. Justification is Belonging. Now however pervasive these feelings are (and I have little doubt that they will become increasingly apparent) the problem is more acute for the group we are interested in. If current trends in technology and the American experience are any guides, some of this group will simply be unemployable in a few decades. There are also differential modes of coping according to the person’s position in the system and his chances in life. Students, for example, many of whom are more cynical (or sensitive?) than we give them credit for, see some of this, but murmur ‘what the hell’ and immerse themselves in career aspirations, perhaps hoping to do something ‘useful’ in their spare time. Others, who perceive accurately enough that they are being used and conned, draw some consolation from their future ‘prospects’ and find plenty of momentary distraction: Charities Week, Rag, Rectorial Elections, politics on the level of getting another representative on the catering committee. Yet others rage a bit longer and take the Hippy trail, but with defeat already in their shoulder bags. Others take their politics and culture very seriously and join earnest left wing groups and/or hang up posters of Che, Marx and Trotsky alongside those of Lennon, Brando and Raquel Welch. And so on. In Goodman’s paradigm, life seems an apparently closed room in which there is a large rat race as the dominant centre of attention. Some will run the race; some will be disqualified from running, but hang around because there is nowhere else to go; some will run a race of their own, not on the official tracks; some will start, but break down and drop out; some will be more genuinely resigned and don’t want to or don’t have the heart to start; some will smash the track and shoot the starter some will stand aside as spectators and comment cynically on the race . . . For working class kids in this country over the last fifteen years or so, not all these options have been open and one significant element, the mass teenage leisure culture, has pointed to new aspirations, but aspirations which are difficult to fulfill. Although the more traditional leisure preoccupations much as football and the more esoteric ones (such as the juvenile jazz bands of the North East) are still strong they cannot on the whole compete with the glossy commercial image. The conventional youth service is equally unappealing and with few honourable and well-known (and mostly short-lived) exceptions it has never freed itself from
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its patronising image or has simply not been what the kids want. Involvement in political or community work (V.S.O., Task Force and so on) has never been the option it has been to their middle class peers, even in a transitory or uncommitted way. Direct satisfaction through education or occupation is, as we’ve seen, precluded, and anyway not aspired to. So only the town is left and here the group that asks the most gets the least. Opportunities for excitement, autonomy or, less ambitiously, a simple sense of action, are blocked. Either there is nothing there (in some housing estates, in towns about the 50,000 population mark, in the less glamourous outer suburbs of large cities) or what is there, is drab and medicore. What the young person wants, or what the Message tells him he should want to want, cannot be reached. He doesn’t have the talent, luck or contacts to really make it directly. The golden years of the Ordinary Kid are over and even those success stories look a bit jaded. Faced by leisure goals he cannot reach, with little commitment or attachment to others and lacking a sense of any control over his future, his situation contains an edge of desperation. These are the feelings that David Matza identifies in his account of the drift into delinquency. This mood of fatalism, of seeing oneself as effect rather than cause, of being pushed around (in school, in work, at home) does not ‘determine’ but is conducive to this drift. Rather than accept all this, rather than do nothing, one ‘manufactures excitement’, one ‘makes things happen’, one exploits situations. It is precisely this form which so much fringe delinquency in Britain over the last two decades has taken. To anticipate an obvious criticism of this perspective, I don’t think it reads into a situation things which the participants are unaware of, or endows them with an absent sophistication. The kids hanging around the street corners, Wimpies or amusement arcades who tell you that they want to do ‘nothing’ should be taken at their face value. The Mods that we knew in the middle Sixties were all too aware of the absurdity both of their problem and their solution. These were two responses on the Brighton beach: A journalist asked an Eltham boy whether he was enjoying himself. ‘Not really.’ Why did he come then, when this was all he knew he could find? ‘There’s nothing to do in London.’ But what is there doing anywhere that you’d like to do? ‘Well, if you put it like that, there isn’t.’ I asked a boy from Walthamstow why he’d come down. ‘Well, we’re bored at home, so it’s a change to come down here and be bored at Brighton.’ These were sharp, stylish Mods, nearly as aware of themselves as their archetypal hero Pete Townshend (to my mind one of the few pop figures ever to have understood the values of the group they’ve symbolised). I do not want to suggest that the same awareness or process of drift will be found among, say, the skinheads of today or the greasers of the News of the World episode. But some variant of this constellation of dissociation and the subsequent quest for action and control in late adolescence, is there. It should be stressed that this stress is transitory: depending on opportunity, action by control agents and other contingencies, some might find their way into career crime, others (a handful) might develop some political consciousness. For the rest, as the Situationists express it, ‘the lure of the product world proves too strong and the hooligan decides to do his honest day’s work: to this end a whole sector of production is devoted specifically to his recuperation. Clothes, discs, guitars, scooters, transistors, purple hearts beckon him to the land of the consumer’. Two further dimensions might be added to this constellation. The first is Downes’ argument that in addition to being originally aimed at the working class teenager, the leisure
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culture, or at least one important stream of it, represents working class culture transmuted to meet age-specific needs and styles. Each of what Walter Miller called the ‘focal concerns of working class culture’ is mirrored in some leisure value. These include:- one, trouble: being on the look-out for trouble (aggro), how to steer clear of trouble with teachers and police, how to deal with it when it occurs. In the leisure culture this is reflected in concerns to stay cool, to avoid being bugged and in the drug version, the folklore about busts; two, toughness: in the traditional form, this was concerned with physical strength, compulsive masculinity and still takes this strong form in punitiveness towards queers, hippies, hairies, and other passive deviants. In the weak form, it is to be found in the pop culture’s cynicism and stress on remaining uncommitted; three, excitement: this is obviously mirrored in adult phrases such as ‘doing it for kicks’. In a weaker sense the leisure culture stresses the need to come alive to be moved: to get stoned, smashed, turned on, high, all of which phrases have broader connotations than the strictly drug references; four, fate: the traditional stress on luck, lucky numbers coming up, things being in the stars is mirrored superficially in the romance oriented versions of the pop scene. More fundamentally, this sense of an ‘astrological influence of the planets’ reflects the lack of personal control in one’s destiny. The point of Downes’ argument here is not to stress the autonomous influence of symbolic communications, but to note the simultaneous dependence of the working class adolescent on the traditional culture and its teenage variants. To repeat: because he has low job aspirations and because he endorses traditional working class values, does not mean that the boy is content with his lot. He does not simply opt out of the work ethic, but has to insulate himself against what Downes calls the harsh implication of the creed which enjoins him either to ‘better himself ’ or ‘accept his station in life’. The deflection of aspirations into non-work, is of course not confined to the working class, to delinquents, or to adolescents. This leads on to a second dimension, particularly relevant in regard to vandalism and hooliganism as opposed to delinquency as a whole, the existence of what Matza and Sykes call subterranean values. Certain values and aspirations (the same ones ascribed by Veblen to the leisure classes) such as search for kicks, disdain of work and routine, the desire for the ‘big kill’, the acceptance of toughness as a proof of masculinity, are hidden and insulated just below the surface of many conventional values. They are publicly denounced, but viewed in private with ambivalence and tolerated in stylised forms (the Hemingway hero, the gangster movie, the James Bond cult) or rise to the surface on ritual occasions. Acting out delinquency, in this view, is not so much an inversion of the middle class ethic as a caricature of it. Again though, as in our discussion of pop culture, we must note that the postulation of some general values only makes sense alongside the existence of differentiated opportunities and options.
Breaking out and smashing up Using the examples of the Teddy Boys and the Mods and Rockers, I have tried to show elsewhere how such folk devils are created by society. My interest here is less in how deviant actions become attached to particular social types, with ready-made labels such as hooligan, vandal and thug, but how a specific class of rule breaking (property destruction, rowdyism, breaking the place up) might be connected to the social trends so far depicted. In what senses are these rules the ‘right’ ones to break? This form of rule breaking is probably the most pervasive of all among children and adolescents. No property seems immune from destruction or defacement: trains and railway installations, buses, telephone kiosks, street lamps, bus shelters, cars, schools, parks, golf
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courses, statues, dance halls, churches, cemeteries, public conveniences, sports grounds. Although the answers might seem obvious enough, it is important to see why such damage is seen as problematic; the societal response to deviance, and the perception or anticipation by the deviant group of this response is built into the nexus which affects the behaviour. Societal interests and values are concerned with both the real and symbolic value of the property. The real value is measured by such indices as the cost of repairing the damage or replacing the property and the cost of preventive measures. The symbolic value is represented by the threat to the ethics, obligations and rights surrounding the possession of property. More specific problems are posed in terms of inconvenience, annoyance, demoralisation and danger. Vandalism presents further threats because of its stereotype of being wanton and pointless. Even the mischievous play element in some vandalism is threatening as it represents the fun morality (very much a subterranean tradition) at its crudest. Vandalism is seen as an inversion of the Puritan ethic which demands that action is carried out for a recognisable utilitarian reason. The results of smashing up (and when it takes place in public settings, the actions themselves) are physically visible, in the sense that, say, theft or fraud are not. In a passage in The Naked Lunch, Burroughs catches perfectly a society’s horrific vision of uncontrolled adolescent behaviour. Note how many acts of ‘perfectly’ vicious and defiant vandalism are included: Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa’s face. They open zoos, insane asylums, prisons, burst water mains with air hammers, chop the floor out of passenger plane lavatories, shoot out light-houses, file elevator cables to one thin wire, turn sewers into the water supply, throw sharks and sting rays, electric eels and candiru into swimming pools . . . in nautical costumes ram the ‘Queen Mary’ full speed into New York Harbor, play chicken with passenger trains and buses, rush into hospitals in white coats carrying saws and axes and scalpels three feet long; throw paralytics out of iron lungs . . . administer injections with bicycle pumps, disconnect artificial kidneys, saw a woman in half with a two-man surgical saw, they drive herds of squealing pigs into the curb, they shit on the floor of the United Nations and wipe their ass with treaties, pacts, alliances . . . The ‘fusion of versatility and malice’ (as sociologists have more prosaically described delinquency) has always been taken as the characteristic of vandalism. Thrasher’s classic study of delinquency in the Twenties contains the following example: We did all kinds of dirty tricks for fun. We’d see a sign, ‘Please keep the street clean’, but we’d tear it down and say, ‘We don’t feel like keeping it clean’. One day we put a can of glue in the engine of a man’s car. We would always tear things down. That would make us laugh and feel good, to have so many jokes.’ Examples of this sort could be multiplied: pouring acid on car roofs; pulling out all the flowers of floral clocks; strangling swans in ornamental lakes; slashing the tyres of all the cars in a car park; stripping the insulation round water mains; dumping the manhole covers in a sewerage farm; putting matches in the tyre valves of police cars (which causes the tyre to leak, and when it gets hot, the match ignites); throwing life belts into the sea; placing sleepers on railway lines; throwing stones at the drivers of passing trains; urinating in public telephone
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receivers; defecating in the lifts of council flats; pouring dye or acid into swimming baths; sabotaging the engines of children’s miniature trains; ripping out lavatory chains in public conveniences; placing bicycle chains on railway overhead wires to cause short circuits . . . The edge of impotent rage rather than ‘fun’ is shown in the following example: Using the hatchet from the emergency tool kit, four youths smashed or tore off the following objects in fourteen parked train coaches: 228 windows, 128 compartment mirrors and picture glasses, 86 window blinds, 38 window straps, 190 electric light bulbs and 8 fire extinguishers. In all such examples the motivation is diffuse and ambiguous and we need to know more about each situation before consigning it to a particular category. In some cases, the element of hostility is more apparent and fun might be a secondary component, or, particularly in a large group situation, apparent to the actors well after the action has been initiated. In other cases, the game element may be primary. In some cases the act is intentionally designed to cause serious damage or injury, in other cases, the actor might be hardly aware of the consequences of what he has done. The difference is often one of age. There are two peaks, the one at about 12 which tends to be of the play type, while the next, among the 16–19 group takes place in the more general context of rowdyism and is usually, and quite rightly, seen to be more malicious and difficult to explain. The recollections of this 15 year old boy in Willmott’s East End group, give some idea of this sequence: When you’re a little kid, you smash up the things people chuck on the bomb sites, like old baths, old prams, old boxes and that. And motor cars – there’s always old motor vans on the bomb sites that the kids smash up. At first they think that the bits they pull off are going to be useful for something, but when they get them off there’s always something wrong with them, say some bracket won’t come off, so they do some more smashing up. It goes in crazes. After that we used to smash up builder’s boards and ‘House to Let’ notices. We didn’t do it very much, but I know for a time we was pulling up those ‘House to Let’ boards, and we used to dump them in the canal or in the Victoria Park Lake. I don’t know why we did it; it was for a giggle. It is this latter type that I am interested in here. Phrases such as ‘doing it for a giggle’ should be taken seriously, not just for the element of malice they contain but for their indication that behaviour which on the surface is meaningless and non-utilitarian, is responsive, directed and makes sense to the actor. At the most elementary level, the reason for vandalism being the chosen mode of attack is that it is simple and safe; no skills are required, there is seldom a personal victim at hand to retaliate, there is no property to dispose of, technological innovations as the aerosol spray and felt-tipped pen have helped things, there is overall little chance of being detected. Vandalism is not only easy, but it can also be particularly satisfactory. The oft-quoted lines about ‘the taste of the upper classes/for the sound of broken glasses’ conveys something of this enjoyment, which is not altogether inconsistent with stressing the mood of desperation behind some vandalism. Consider the following examples from life in the merchant navy: we brushed bucketloads of rust under the bends in L-shaped girders, and in the furthermost corners we brushed nothing at all. It would all come out when the next cargo of petrol was delivered, and we sincerely hoped that it would give engine trouble to
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Such illustrations are perhaps too specific to be generalised. General theories of vandalism tend to vacillate between the poles of ‘wholly deliberate’ or ‘wholly determined’. The first type, perhaps more the layman’s version, sees the behaviour arising out of a volitional perversity to destroy. Usually this desire is seen to be affected by a vague social malaise: breakdown in discipline, decline of national character, loss of respect for property and so on. The other view, more the social scientist’s, sees the behaviour as wholly determined, particularly by psychological forces. The actor has no choice. The merchant navy illustrations, I think, make clear that neither view is particularly satisfactory: any account has to recognise the spontaneous and situational factors in vandalism, but also the setting in which it occurs and the social processes which are involved in the action. The dominant context is the leisure one and we have already seen some of the structural reasons why this should be so. If one is looking for toughness, excitement, action then school and work (although as Laurie Taylor and Paul Walton have shown, this might be the setting for industrial sabotage generated by other important reasons), do not provide the right arenas. One deliberately enters into situations which provide real testing grounds, where the action is, where risks have to be taken. Here one plays what Goffman has called ‘character contests’. These are ways of seeing who will have the honour and character to rise above the situation. James Dean, of course, was the classic player, the real pro. Action gets restructured around the familiar settings of street, sports ground, the weekened by the sea, railway stations. These are given new meanings by being made stages for these games. Vandalism is ideally suited for this: it is a perfect activity to raise the stakes, to make things more contrived. Thus one sprays acid on a whole street of parked cars, one waits for the last possible minute to do what could have been done easily. If the stakes are raised in public, so much the better. This is a way not just of increasing risks of being observed and detected, but of deliberately provoking, of making a gesture. If the burghers of the town are outraged this is just the point. I don’t want to endow such gestures with a spurious meaning: the greasers descending on a dead coastal resort or hanging around a motorway caff are not holy barbarians, White Negroes, hipsters making some existenial gesture in the void. But they are only some distance from this. We must be wary of only allowing the more glamourous deviant an ideological interpretation and contemptuously dismissing the others through phrases which deny their actions any meaning. Some of these public settings are more suitable than others. Indeed certain situations (cinemas showing a rock and roll film during the Fifties, beaches at Bank Holiday weekends during the middle Sixties, outdoor concerts, football matches) have either traditionally been defined as the escape valves through which subterranean values can be expressed (having a fling, letting your hair down) or become defined (particularly through the media) as places where violence is expected. Violence is somehow built into the situation. These crowd
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settings are particularly important for young people: adults find it difficult to understand that for a whole generation, just simply being in a crowd, is something, a form of action. A final particular feature of smashing up is that it is very prone to unintentional elaboration. In a group context, particularly a large crowd, facing cameras, police and spectators, it is not difficult to go beyond one’s original intention. This type of group contagion is not a mysterious or pathological process. In some cases it contains elements of what has been called group psychological intoxication: ‘the way people act when they go to a convention in somebody else’s town’. More generally one finds mutual suggestibility, the ‘impression of universality’ (the perception that everyone else is doing it), and a high susceptibility because of the ambiguity of the situation, to rumours. These serve to focus on a particular target (‘there’s some skinheads moving into our pub’ or validate a course of action (‘they had it coming, you should have seen what they were doing’).
Some sort of conclusion I have so far talked about problems and solutions. Perhaps ‘escape’ or ‘gesture’ would be better than ‘solution’. For smashing up is a precarious, ugly and in the long run, not a particularly satisfying or satisfactory way out. But it is better than nothing. For a moment, it is a way of staking a claim to an identity other than that which you’ve been offered. It is not so much a release from commitment, because there is so little commitment there in the first place. It is self defeating not just because as an alternative identity it is precarious, but because it just confirms what people think about you anyway: you are a thug and a hooligan who has rejected the opportunities that society has so munificently provided for you. At the beginning of this essay, I noted the tendency to perceive not just violence and vandalism, not just adolescent violence and vandalism, but adolescence itself as a social problem. This problem is typically explained as if it had some autonomous existence. It is not understood that adolescence itself is a creation of industrial society and the attribution to it of problem status sometimes tells us more about the society than the problem. Further, the shape the problem takes is crucially affected by the way society reacts to particular manifestations of rule breaking. These patterns have yet to be fully explained. Sociologists in their roles as observers (the cynical commentators standing on the touchline) direct their criticism correctly but incompletely at two sorts of responses. The first is the sheer punitive one (‘I don’t consider myself an unreasonable sort of man, but these thugs want birching’) and this manning of the moral barricades is dismissed because of its failure to try to understand. This dismissal is incomplete because it too, fails to understand: what are the roots in terms of community and political conflict, power and ideology of such moral indignation and what is its effect? The other criticism, incomplete because of our unawareness of when we do it ourselves, is directed towards the romantic attitude. Wallowing in the youth culture, going native by adopting the poses and symbols as if they were one’s own, is at best misleading and at worst ludicrous. What is the sociologist’s own response, not just to smashing up, but to the whole range of drugs, hippies, political radicalism? Too often it is in terms of ‘identity crisis’, ‘role confusion’, ‘generation gap’, ‘undersocialisation’, ‘failure of communication’. But perhaps, as Paul Goodman says, there has not been a failure of communication. Perhaps the social message has been communicated all too clearly and has been found unacceptable. It is hard for adults to realise this, even when they are told it in articulate, literate and politically sophisticated terms; it is harder still if they are told in a muffled and ugly way.
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Author’s note This paper was originally prepared for a book on youth work and leisure and aimed primarily at an audience of youth workers. This accounts for the style: unacademic, somewhat polemical and more than a little thin conceptually. It was written at the beginning of 1971 and this in a subject area such as youth culture, accounts for it being so touchingly out of date. The Working Papers’ editors have convinced me that it is worth publishing completely unchanged (only the references have been up-dated) and to rescue it from the status of a quaint historical relic have allowed me to make these few observations. They are confined to problems other than those of simply incorporating developments in contemporary pop culture over the last three years, although this is no easy task in the light of phenomena as diverse as David Bowie, the Osmonds, Alice Cooper and the extraordinary difficulty now of finding any sort of identity in the current stagnation of pop culture. First, the paper was far too pre-occupied with unravelling the connections between the mass leisure culture and a particular form of delinquency. Although these connections were located in the overall educational and class contexts, this location was not explicit enough. If writing on the subject again, I would want to take into account the more finely drawn research on the actual uses of pop culture in the school setting, especially the work of Graham Murdock and his colleagues1 and (to be faithful to my concern expressed elsewhere2 to be much more careful in placing the interaction in specific local settings and traditions. On this latter point the work of Armstrong and Wilson in the Easterhouse estate of Glasgow,3 some of the work of Patrick, also in Glasgow4 and more recently Parker’s fine research in the Roundhouse area of Liverpool5 all reinforce the need to see delinquency in terms of total life styles and local traditions. Second, a related point, one of considerable theoretical density and not just a matter of ‘taking into account’ further research, is connected with the current work at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies on the development of youth cultures in post-war Britain. My paper wholly glosses over the complex links between history and subjective experience or (more concretely in this case) the links on the one side between the history of youth subcultures and their articulation in the dominant culture and on the other, their intrusion into the individuals’ biography. It remains to be seen whether current work on skinheads, Teddy Boys, hippies and the like can do justice to both these forms of analysis. Third, one link between history and subjective experience implicit in the paper is that which can be made through the conceptual apparatus of accounts theory, derived from Mills’ critical article on the sociology of motivation.6 The work being currently carried out by Laurie Taylor and myself in this area has tried to be much more careful than my ‘Breaking Out’ paper is in extricating the meaning of individual actors’ statements of their own motivation. Although I would want to retain the emphasis on showing how society only allows what I called the ‘more glamorous deviant’ an ideological meaning, we are somewhat more sceptical of our earlier attempts in this field which might have led to the spurious attribution of such qualities. The reverse problem is also apparent: in trying to normalise forms of deviance by rescuing them from the clutches of positivist criminology and the grosser stereotypes of the media and control agents, one might miss those cases (and certain forms of breaking out and smashing up are included) in which the rejection of everyday life is more noteworthy than the institutionalised, almost banal, features of the deviance on which I laid such great stress.
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Notes 1 See, for example, Graham Murdock and Guy Phelps, ‘Youth Culture and the School Revisited’, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. XXIII, No. 4, December 1972, 478–482. 2 S. Cohen, ‘Directions for Research in Adolescent Group Violence and Vandalism’, British Journal of Criminology, October 1971, 319–340. 3 Gail Armstrong and Mary Wilson, ‘City Politics and Deviancy Amplification’ in I. Taylor and L. Taylor (eds), Politics and Deviance (Penguin, 1973). 4 James Patrick, A Glasgow Gang Observed (Eyre Methuen, 1973). 5 Howard Parker, ‘The Catseye Kings: Some Notes on the Delinquent Careers of a Down Town Adolescent Network. Paper given at 14th National Deviancy Conference, September 1973 and The View from the Boys (David and Charles, forthcoming). 6 C. Wright Mills, ‘Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive’, American Sociological Review, Vol. 5, December 1940.
References Cohen, S. ‘Who Are the Vandals?’, New Society, 12th December, 1968. —— Folk Devils and Moral Panic: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (MacGibbon and Kee, 1972). —— ‘Property Destruction: Motives and Meanings’ in Colin Ward (ed), Vandalism (Architectural Press, 1973). Downes, D. The Delinquent Solution (Routledge, 1966). Friedenberg, E.Z. ‘The Image of the Adolescent Minority’, Dissent, Spring 1973. Goffman, E. Where the Action Is (Doubleday and Co. 1967). Goodman, P. Growing Up Absurd (Random House, 1956). Hargreaves, D. Social Relations in a Secondary School (Routledge, 1967). —— ‘The Delinquent Subculture and the School’ in W.G. Carson and P. Wiles (eds.) Crime and Delinquency in Britain (Martin Robinson, 1971). Henry, J. Culture Against Man (Tavistock, 1966). Khayati, M. ‘Of Student Poverty’, Situationist International, Vol. 10 (1966). Matza, D. and Sykes, G. ‘Delinquency and Subterranean Values’, American Sociological Review, October 1961. Matza, D. Delinquency and Drift (Wiley, 1964). Musgrave, F. Youth and the Social Order (Routledge, 1964). Nuttal, J. Bomb Culture (Paladin, 1968). Rock, P. and Cohen, S. ‘The Teddy Boy’ in V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelski (eds.) The Age of Affluence: 1951–1964 (Macmillan, 1970). Taylor, L. and Walton, P. ‘Industrial Sabotage: Motives and Meanings’ in S. Cohen Images of Deviance (Penguin, 1971). Walters, N. ‘The Young One’, Anarchy, May 1963. Willmott, P. Adolescent Boys of East London (Routledge, 1966).
13 Working class youth cultures John Clarke and Tony Jefferson
Introduction This paper was presented as a continuation of Graham Murdock’s earlier paper at the conference. This provided us with the starting point of our argument, and this paper takes for granted his critique of the idea of a ‘classless’ youth culture, and it is from that point that we develop our analysis of distinctive styles in working class youth cultures. For the purposes of this paper, the examples we have used are the Mods and the Skinheads. Though not wishing to deny the existence of some more general youth cultural developments during the post-war period, we feel that the analysis of styles and the way they signify crucial themes of the period is of primary importance. Some general comments are necessary by way of introduction to the paper. Firstly it is essentially a ‘work in progress report’ on a collective project of post war British youth cultures which is being undertaken at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, consequently, we are both indebted to all the other members involved in that project for the development of the ideas presented here. We owe special debts to those whose work has been specifically used in this paper, Brian Roberts, whose work on Phil Cohen is used extensively, and Dick Hebdige, for his work on the Mods which forms the basis for the discussion of the Mods’ style. We would also like to thank Stuart Hall for his advice and suggestions. The paper represents an attempt by us to critically come to terms with some of the crucial theoretical formulations of the field, which at times necessitates extensive analysis of other authors. For another reason, the paper is also rather dense and compressed in its presentation. This is because we have attempted to convey a full account of our analysis of youth cultures, rather than present one particular element of the work. This has meant that instead of being able to present each aspect of the work with the full detail that it deserves we have been forced to compress some difficult and complex arguments. We hope that the reader will follow this in the interests of having the overall approach established. The structure of the paper is a movement through a number of levels of analysis, each necessary to a full understanding of the phenomena in question. We move from some necessarily brief introductory comments on the nature of post-war capitalist production and its relation to major post-war social changes. The effects of these on working class culture generally and on the youth of that class are next considered, to allow an understanding of how crucial aspects of those changes and the responses of the young to them become crystallised into distinctive styles of youth culture. Finally we look briefly at some aspects of the societal reaction to youth culture.
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Part I – post-war capitalism and the problem of hegemony Because we are neither specialist economists nor attempting to offer a detailed consideration of the forms of advanced capitalism, our comments here are necessarily schematic and brief. However the consideration of such a level is necessary for the further analysis of more general social change in post-war Britain. What we are concerned with is the reorganisation of capital in response to its earlier crises, and the forms which this reorganisation took. The shift to monopolistic and oligopolistic capitalism may be seen as an attempt to preserve capital from the threats of recurrent crises, by increasing its stability in the face of temporary economic fluctuations through diversification and the rationalisation of production. Perhaps of more importance is the shift from product oriented to market oriented industry in an effort to constantly realise the surplus value of the product by ensuring that it is constantly and fully consumed – an attempt to overcome the recurrent possibility of overproduction. Thus the increased employment of sophisticated techniques of market research and mass advertising are intimately connected to the need to ensure the matching of demand with production. Related to this is the continual effort to exploit existing markets more fully and to develop new markets and new needs for new products to maintain and increase profitability.1 Finally we must note the increasing acceptance of the necessity of state intervention to minimise the worst effects of economic crises on the mass of the population, to maintain what has more recently become known as the ‘human face of capitalism’. These points direct us to one central factor which is crucial to the understanding of the social change of the 1950s and 1960s, which is the need for the bourgeiosie to rule by the consent of the population rather than by visible coercion. For example, consent is necessary, to ensure the full consumption of products, including those which lie beyond necessary demands. To achieve this, the bourgeoisie must ‘universalise itself ’, it must spread to as much of the population as possible its way of life and way of seeing the social world as being the natural and only possible patterns. In doing this, it must attempt to negotiate the sometimes conflicting demands of other classes and to minimise the extent to which alternative patterns of life and ways of thinking about society have any force. This attempt to rule by consent, or, as Gramsci2 describes it, hegemony, is at root an educational relationship in which other classes are made subject to the world new of the bourgeoisie. We trust that this general notion will be made more explicit in looking at post-war social changes – the more visible forms of the reorganisation of production. Social change in the 1950s and 1960s One of the most visible changes in the 1950s is the advent of ‘affluence’ – increased production and higher levels of income made the new patterns of consumption realistic ones for many families (albeit often underpinned by easier hire purchase rates). The shift in social emphasis away from work and production to a focus on the home, leisure and consumption was a vital base for the ‘consensus’ politics of the period, offering visible proof that the problems of capitalism had been solved, and politics was now about who could manage our advanced industrial society most efficiently. Consequently, the argument ran, as all could now share in the benefits of consumption through this newly discovered affluence, class conflict was dead, trade unions and class based politics and unfortunate and redundant legacy from the ‘bad old days’. One central commodity of this new era, the television set, was both a symbol of affluence and a channel which allowed the ideological designation of
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‘classlessness’ to penetrate areas which might otherwise have remained impervious to it. Linked to this is the Conservative government’s policy of creating a ‘property-owning democracy’ by focussing building resources on private rather than public development, again creating an image of a prospectus and open society.3 However, more direct repercussions were visible in public redevelopment (for the bulk of the population remained excluded from private ownership) which effectively destroyed many traditional working class communities. Whether such redevelopment took the form of moving families out of areas like the East End to new towns or estates, or the later form of rebuilding old estates, their consequences for the local community, one of the major institutions of working class culture, was the same. The removal of families to new towns and estates fragmented the extended family links so central in the traditional community, and both this geographical movement and the design of new houses and flats based on the needs of the ideal (i.e. bourgeois) nuclear family were instrumental in this destruction of the bases of the community. The further consequences for those who remained behind was either the ‘downgrading’ or less frequently ‘upgrading’ of the area. Downgrading was accompanied by the influx of numbers of coloured immigrants, in search of inexpensive housing, whose presence was interpreted by the indigenous population as lowering the social standing of the neighbourhood. It also involved the presence of speculatory property owners whose minimal interest in the property furthered the appearance of decay and dilapidation of the estate.4 Upgrading involved the movement of young middle class and professional families in search of housing into areas possessing a certain local ‘character’. Through either mechanism the end product was a further disintegration of the cultural homogeneity of the area.5 In the redevelopment of the areas themselves, the model of housing needs was again that of the nuclear family, and nor were whole areas (streets, families etc) necessarily rehoused in the same area. A further consequence was the destruction of what Phil Cohen terms ‘communal space’ and the major foci of it, the pub, the street and the corner shop. ‘Instead there was only the privatized space of the family unit, stacked one on top of each other, in total isolation, juxtaposed with the totally public space which surrounded it’. As far as we are concerned this destruction of the community is crucial, for we would follow Frank Parkin6 in seeing the working class community as being one of the central institutions of working class culture, a culture possessing its own partially independent sets of social relations and understandings of the world, which differ from those of the bourgeoisie. A further significant area of these changing social patterns is that of leisure, where previously clearly demarcated class boundaries became comparatively blurred. With the shift in emphasis from production to consumption, leisure came to assume increasing social importance, and leisure as a social problem has come to occupy the attention of applied social scientists, educational bodies, leisure consultants and so on. One major dimension of this change has been the decline of the neighbourhood as the focus of leisure and the concentration of major leisure facilities in city centres. The closing of local cinemas has been followed by the redevelopment of multi cinema centre town sites, while city centre pubs have set the redesign standards and patterns for many one-time ‘locals’. Many of the stylistic changes owe much to the image of the young as affluent and potential consumers. This clustering of central facilities meant that local provisions have been forced into competing for trade on the terms set by those facilities – the result: the development of stylised interiors for pubs, the provision of evening discos and the restructuring of some surviving local cinemas. The changes in leisure provision are structured by a belief in the changing
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nature of the users of such facilities, seeing them as possessing the once clearly middle class characteristics of affluence, mobility and the ability to make ‘rational’ selections among the leisure alternatives offered to him. This change is reflected in the emphasis on ‘competition’ in the ‘leisure industry’, and is captured in the description of the image of the user as moving from that of ‘member’ to that of ‘consumer’. The post-war changes in football illustrates well these types of changes, for football is important as a major focus of pre-war working class culture and relevant here in terms of our later consideration of the skinheads. The main post-war changes in football may be summarised as those of professionalisation, internationalisation and commercialisation.7 These cover such changes as an increasing concentration on the physical, tactical and financial requirements of success, extra facilities to entertain and make the spectator comfortable and the increasingly financial concerns of the professional game generally. Football clubs, anticipating the disappearance in the new social order of the traditional cloth capped football fan, felt they would have to compete for audiences with the providers of alternative types of entertainment, television especially. If the traditional fan no longer existed, then nor would traditional loyalties, and they would have to compete for the favours of the new classless, rationally selective consumer of entertainment. Consequently the game had to be made as exciting and dramatic as possible to appeal to the uncommitted, and the spectator had to be made comfortable, and his every whim catered for. Further the uncommitted were unlikely to attend each saturday to watch an unsuccessful team, and so greater attention had to be paid to avoiding failure. Ian Taylor describes the effects of these changes as ‘bourgeoisification’, which is the process that: ‘legitimizes previously working class activities for the middle class, or more accurately, activities which were previously seen as legitimate only for the working class, such as watching doubtful films or congregating on the kop’.8 This process has carried with it a changed conception of the football supporter. The ‘genuine’ supporter is no longer the traditional cloth-capped figure, living for the Saturday match, his own fortunes inextricably mixed with those of his team and actively participating in the game, but has moved towards the passive, selective consumer of entertainment, of the game as ‘spectacle’ and who objectively assesses it. Consequent upon this changed image of the supporter is the redefinition of certain previously normal aspects of crowd behaviour as illegitimate – notably those of physical violence and bad language. These changes are by no means total, either in the character of the crowd, or in the clubs’ attitudes to their supporters, but those changes which have taken place have certainly had the new ‘spectator’ in mind. One final area of these changes is the growth of the welfare state, indicating the ability and the will of the new social order to care for and protect all members of society from ‘the cradle to the grave’. The welfare state performed a double function, giving a secure grounding to the establishment of consensus politics, and absorbing some parts of the produced industrial surplus. One central area for the young in this general provision of facilities (though not itself specifically part of the welfare state) was the changes in education. The 1944 Education Act with its ideological redefinition on the education system as an open and achievement oriented process, with the transformation of secondary education provision from its previous income determined base where class inequalities were clearly visible to a position of its provision according to the abilities of the individual. Although this only marginally affected the in-school experience of working class youth, who still experienced school largely as a situation where one was forced to take in irrelevant knowledge by external and alien figures of authority – the traditional THEM of working class culture, it did have
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the effect of transforming the responsibility of educational failure from its previously classbased terms on to the individual himself. This was especially true where parents invested their hopes in their childrens’ performances in education as a means to success through the opportunities they never had. To summarise this part of the paper, we would suggest that the major social changes of the 1950s should be seen as a move towards minimising the economic crises of capitalism and to involving the working class in a major role in consumption. By mitigating the most visible forms of class inequality and subsequent conflict, at least at a symbolic level, the ground was laid for the consensual politics of a supposedly affluent and classless society. If this section has read as a somewhat ‘conspiratorial’ account of post-war social history, this is not our view, but occurs because we have collapsed the complex processes of class conflict and negotiation into what proved to be their hegemonic outcome. As Gramsci stresses, the maintenance of hegemony is always the outcome of a struggle against challenges to it. Thus we would suggest that what we have described is the result of the hegemonic incorporation by the ruling class of demands from the working class (e.g. for improvements in housing, education and for more state protection) into the terms of their dominant world view. Cracks in the veneer of classlessness Nevertheless these moves have been by no means totally successful and cracks in the veneer of classlessness and consensus became increasingly visible in the middle and late 1960s and produced further attempts by the dominant order to come to terms with them, both in terms of social reorganisation and at the ideological level of redefining problems – a point to which we shall return later. Thus in the different areas we have noted above – stability and consensus became increasingly threatened. Industry and the state were confronted by worsening economic crises as the measures of the 1950s proved inadequate and even counterproductive, and new measures, usually involving more state intervention were instigated, for example, the establishment of the tri-partite National Economic Development Council, a variety of measures to control prices and pay changes and industrial relations legislation, all with the definition of the government in the ‘neutral’ role as representative of the ‘national interest’. One added feature was the role of both economic crises and the increasing rationalisation and mechanisation of industry in creating a growing ‘reserve army of the unemployed’. Local councils found themselves faced by criticisms of new estates and redeveloped areas, and the general dissatisfaction of residents manifested in a variety of forms, rising request lists for transfers and increasing vandalism and delinquency. Some responded by rethinking their housing policies away from tower block developments. Education found deep discontents manifesting themselves, especially in secondary education where teachers began to complain of having to face classes of hostile, disinterested and aggressive working class youths. Linked with this were academic criticisms of the poor performance of the ‘meritocratic’ system in enabling working class children to take advantage of the supposed opportunities. Among the attempts to deal with these problems were the shift towards comprehensive education, the growth of Educational Priority Areas, the theories of ‘cultural deprivation’, and a variety of attempts at child-centred education and curriculum redesign. One must also note the emergence of a new ‘social problem’ – that of race. White racism, previously comparatively invisible, became increasingly overt and finally was given institutional definition and legitimation (beginning with Peter Griffiths’ Smethwick campaign in
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1964), shifting through a variety of measures such as conciliatory and assimilatory stages of Community Relations Councils and anti-discrimination acts to more overtly antiimmigration policies. Finally the politics of consensus were threatened from a variety of directions by groups who found themselves excluded from the legitimated parliamentary channels of democratic politics, or who found these increasingly irrelevant to deeper and more serious questions. Thus in the late 1960s are found growing trade union militancy, more overtly oppositional community based politics, and the proliferation of direct action oriented groups with both specific and wide ranging aims.
Part II – the working class response How did the working class respond to these changes? Before answering this question, and, more specifically, the question of how the working class young responded to these changes, we need some conception of how the working class responds generally, in its position of subordination, to the social formation it finds itself in: a social formation shaped largely by the bourgeoisie – the dominant class in terms of both its actual and legitimating power. In short, we are asking how does the social formation reproduce itself through its subordinate class? This question can perhaps best be answered diagrammatically. We have offered just such a diagram overleaf (1). The following notes are intended merely to clarify it. We are all born into a social formation which is not of our own making or choosing (left hand side of diagram). Within this formation we believe it is possible, and helpful, to distinguish between ‘structures’ ‘cultures’ and ‘biographies’. ‘Structures’ for us are all the elements of the productive system and the necessary forms of social relations and institutions that result from a given productive system: its necessary objectivations. By ‘cultures’ we mean attempts to come to terms with structures: attempts to impose meaning. As such they are internalised maps of meaning: ways of understanding the productive system: ideologies. This is not to say that cultures exist only in the head. Over time they too become objectivated or concretised into characteristic forms of social relations and institutions. In short, cultures too have structures though we still feel the distinction between the two worth making. Finally, ‘biographies’. These represent, for us, an individuals personal experience of both structures and cultures: the unique path that constitutes each individual’s own life-history. But though man is born into a social formation – a structural-cultural-biographical nexus which is highly constraining, men do, within limits, ‘make their own history’ (Marx). They respond in ways which alter the social formation. In short, they both make and are made by history with which they are in a constant dialectical relationship. Now to return to the question of how the working class respond to this social formation. Our right-hand side of the diagram shows the range of observable responses: men making their own history. This part of the diagram is largely and adaption and modification of a typology developed by Parkin in Class Inequality and Political Order.9 In this text he talks of ‘dominant’, ‘negotiated’ and ‘oppositional’ working class consciousness’s: the three possible responses to subordination. The dominant form – the ‘working class Tory’ – is of two types, the ‘deferential’ and the ‘aspirational’. The deferential accepts the world as it is, and his own, subordinate, place within it. His is an organic view of the universe where every element has its ‘natural’ or ‘ordained’ place within the hierarchy which is ordered as it is for the most efficient and harmonious functioning of the whole. To question the hierarchy with a view to changing its order, or to question the notion of hierarchy as such would be sacriligous on one level and, on another level, would invite serious malfunctioning of the social organism.
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Diagram 1 Reproduction of the social formation.
Similarly, the aspirational working class Tory accepts the social world as it is, but not his place within it: he ‘aspires’ to cross the divide from ‘us’ to ‘them’. Both of these responses are aspects of ‘dominant’ consciousness in that they tend to reproduce the social formation in its entirety: without, or with minimal, questions. By ‘negotiated’ consciousness is meant that
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consciousness which recognises its subordination but which does not totally acquiesce, like the deferential, nor ‘seek to join them’, like the ‘aspirer’. However whilst it falls short of total acquiescence, it also falls short of total opposition. As ‘negotiated’ suggests, it compromises, and both ‘accepts’ and ‘does not accept’ the dominant ideology. This statement is not as nonsensical as it might sound. At one level it is the difference between the public and private ‘faces’, both attitudes and actions, of many traditional working class neighbourhoods: the public face that supports, in the abstract, many of the principles and ideals of the dominant ideology and the private face, which is much less likely to show, in the concrete situation, such allegiance. Thus stealing, in principle, is likely to be condemned in public in such a neighbourhood, but individual acts of pinching, in certain contexts, will probably escape, in private, such censure. Thus, too, diligent ‘dressing up’ by parents for school speech day in order to create a good impression with the school authorities is likely to be the ‘public’ norm, whilst the private opinion of school is likely to be that education is really only for ‘them’. We have, in short, been talking of the ‘us/them’ consciousness: a consciousness that fatalistically accepts and recognises the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and comes to terms with it by paying public lip service to many of the dominant class’s ideals whilst actually, in private, carving out a life of a very different texture: where morals and ideals, in action, are much more situationally based. In this way the dominant ideology is both ‘accepted’ and ‘not accepted’. The Trade Union consciousness represents a less fatalistic view of the us/them division. Stemming from a realisation of the strength of ‘us’ if organised collectively, it has led to the formation of unions to ‘claw back’ as much of the ‘surplus value’ from their member’s labour as has previously been extracted by ‘them’. Typically this takes the form of higher wages and better conditions. Conflict that arises as a result of these demands is, usually, restricted to this level, though, in times of crisis, such as the period surrounding the General Strike, it has the potential to become a revolutionary consciousness. A similar consciousness, in that it is less fatalistic, is that of deviance or crime. But here again the conflict is usually a restricted one: for deviants to the level of definitions, and for criminals to the legal level, though, as Hobsbawne’s examples of social banditry remind us, these too have the potential, in times of crisis, to take on a revolutionary perspective. All of these consciousnesses (‘us/them’; ‘trade-union’; ‘deviant/criminal’) remain ‘negotiations’ since they conflict with the dominant social formation only at certain points: they do not represent a total challenge to the social formation and its legitimacy. The ‘oppositional’ consciousness does represent such a challenge. It does not accept the legitimacy of the social formation and attempts to transform it totally, traditionally through organised political action of various kinds. It is, ultimately, totally subversive of the established order, though it may well recognise, as a strategy, the importance of a strong trade-union consciousness. If the negotiated responses are varieties of ‘contingent’ consciousness, then the oppositional response represents the ‘necessary’ (from a revolutionary perspective) consciousness.10 (We prefer this nomenclature to the more widely used, but less helpful, ‘false-true’ consciousness distinction made by many writers.) We have worked out a similar range of possible responses for the working class adolescent. The embryonic working class tory consciousness mirrors the parental response being either of the ‘aspirational’ (‘college-boy’) or deferential variety. The three types of negotiated responses we have identified as ‘traditional’ delinquency, ‘main stream’ youth culture and ‘deviant’ youth culture. Though, empirically, these three responses may well prove to be somewhat mixed in that a ‘traditional’ delinquent might well be involved also in a ‘deviant’ youth culture style, we still feel the distinctions worth making, theoretically, for the moment.
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The essential differences between the three would be, in ‘ideal-typical’ cases, as follows: the traditional delinquents would be those juvenile delinquents whose ‘opposition’ was limited to the extent of their delinquency or illegal activities. These activities would be largely those fairly common, and traditional, in certain working class neighbourhoods i.e. petty thieving, taking and driving away cars, vandalism, some fighting. Though the content of such delinquency might alter with time so that car radios would be more popular now than say 30 years ago, we believe the form has probably altered little.* In this sense we believe it strongly parallels the ‘us/them’ consciousness of working class adults: though a less sophisticated version of it. The ‘mainstream’ youth cultural response represents, briefly, the ‘incorporated’ version of the ‘deviant’ style: the version that has been bought up, sanitized, ‘made safe’ and resold to the wider youth market: the ‘deviant’ life become ‘consumption’ style: the commercial version of the real. We have placed this mainstream response in the ‘negotiated’ box since it is a compromise, albeit largely engineered by commercial interest, with ‘pure’ dominant consciousness – the difference between flared trousers and cavalry twills perhaps – though it might, more properly, belong in the ‘dominant’ consciousness box. The ‘deviant’ style represents the ‘more extreme’ version of the main stream response: its deviant original and progenitor. This is not to deny the role of commercial interests in the perpetuation, modification and eventual incorporation of these styles. But it is to assert a ‘moment’ of originality in the formation of such a style. It is this formative moment we are most interested in when we later read the styles of the Mods and the Skinheads. These styles, though deviant, remain ‘negotiated’ and not ‘oppositional’ because they operate in only one area of life: the leisure area. Since they are not oppositional in all areas of the social formation they cannot hope to transform it. Nevertheless we do feel that these styles offer a symbolic critique of the established order and, in so doing, represent a latent form of ‘nonideological politics’. Whilst there are no fully ‘oppositional’ working class adolescent groups, we feel the deviant youth cultural styles come nearest to being such. So much for diagram 1. Needless to say it has all the disadvantages of any model which is ahistorical and static. What follows will attempt to historicise it and make it more processual i.e. it will attempt to look at the actual responses to the changes outlined earlier, of the ‘deviant’ youth cultural element of the working class young throughout the post-war period. To do this, we have again found it easier to resort to a diagram (2). What follows is an elucidation of this diagram.† The left-hand side of the diagram represents the effects of the changes of the mid 1950s, in housing, employment and income primarily, on the working class parent culture. These changes caught the respectable working class – the ‘staple backbone’ of the community as
*
†
This is to ignore the whole question of the differential policing as between working class and middle class neighbourhoods and the consequent largely hidden figures for middle class delinquents. Whilst we would subscribe to the importance of this question, we do not feel it affects our notion of much working class juvenile delinquency being widespread, traditional and, usually, a temporary phenomenon of mid to late adolescence. A note on the genesis of the diagram. The diagram represents an attempt by Brian Roberts to extract the kernel of a complex article on post-war youth cultures by Phil Cohen: probably the best and certainly the most sophisticated explanatory model of the genesis and evolution of post-war ‘deviant’ styles. The full article can be found in W.P.C.S.(2) and should be read in conjunction with this article, if possible, since it still provides a pivotal axis for our thinking on the subject. (P. Cohen ‘Subcultural Conflict and Working Class Community’, W.P.C.S. (2) 1972.)
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opposed to the socially mobile, elite, working class leadership (‘labour aristocracy’) and the permanently outside lumpen – in the middle of the two dominant but contradictory ideologies of the day: the new ideology of ‘spectacular consumption’ and the traditional ideology of work and production. Since the bargaining power of this group was threatened by new automated techniques which weakened their actual economic position (as opposed to their, largely mythical, ‘affluence’) and since similar changes in production techniques made traditional pride in the job impossible to maintain, they were left in the worst of all possible worlds. This predicament was registered most deeply in and on the young, and was worsened by the intensification of parent/child relationships due to nucleation of the family caused by redevelopment schemes. It was this area which became the major focus of all the anxieties engendered by these changes, and which resulted in both an increase in early marriages and the emergence of specific youth cultures in opposition to the parent culture. In short, the internal conflicts of the parent culture came to be worked out in terms of generational conflict. Thus, ‘the latent function of subculture is to express and resolve, albeit ‘magically’, the contradictions hidden, or unresolved, in the parent culture’: the unresolved ideological contradiction between traditional working class puritanism and the new hedonism of consumption, and the unresolved economic contradiction between a future as part of the socially mobile elite as opposed to a future as part of the new lumpen (the contradictions we have labelled in the diagram ‘embourgeoisement?’ and ‘ghettoisation’). If we move now to the right-hand side of the diagram, and the subcultural styles of the young, we come first to the box labelled ‘life-style’. In looking at life-style it is possible to distinguish between the more ‘plastic’ forms of dress and music, which are selected and invested with subcultural value insofar as they express the underlying thematic, and the more traditional forms of argot and ritual which are more resistant to change, but do reflect changes in the more ‘plastic’ forms. Given these ‘symbolic subsystems’ of the life-style; ‘Mods, Parkers, Skinheads, Crombies all represent, in their different ways, an attempt to retrieve some of the socially cohesive elements destroyed in the parent culture, and to combine these with elements selected from other class fractions, symbolising one or other of the options confronting it’. For example, the Mods were an attempt to realise, but in an imaginary relation, the conditions of existence of the socially mobile white collar worker. Whilst argot and ritual stressed many of the traditional parental values, their dress and music reflected the hedonistic image of the affluent consumer. Its dynamic was derived partly from its relation to other class fractions e.g. the Rockers (from the manual working class). The Parkers or scooter boys – transitional between Mods and Skinheads – distressed the alien elements of music and dress and re-asserted the indigenous components of argot and ritual. The Skinheads represented an exploration of the lumpen: an inversion of the Mods. Utilising the protest music of the West Indian poor (reggae) and a dress that caricatured a model worker, they represented ‘a metastatement about the whole process of social mobility’. They were a reaction against contamination of the parent culture by middle class values, and a reassertion of the integral values of working class culture through its most recessive traits: puritanism and chauvinism. The puritanism crystallised in opposition to the hedonistic greasers and hippies and the chauvinism in ‘Queer Bashing’ (1969–70). The crombies/casuals/suedes represent a further transitional phase and a move back to the Mods but incorporating certain elements from middle class subcultures (e.g. dress and
Diagram 2 Post-war youth cultural styles.
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soft drug use from the hippies) but still conserving many of the distinctive features of earlier versions of subcultures. If the whole process appears circular, it is because it cannot break out of the parental contradiction – it merely transcribes its terms at the micro-social level and inscribes them in an imaginary set of relations. So much for our attempt to compress a complex article into one diagram with the above accompanying notes. Earlier we acknowledged our indebtedness to this article. We wish, now, to present our critique of it, followed by our view of the whole process. But this has not been a detour but the essential foundation stone to our conception of all this. Though there are minor criticisms which, given more space, we would want to elaborate, we wish to concentrate on two major ones. The first relates to the historical dimension. Though the article is grounded, in detail, in a particular area, the East End, at a particular time, the 1950s and 1960s, the notion of ‘circularity’ – of being ‘unable to break the historical changes more than the model itself does. Thus the structural/cultural nexus would seem to be the same for the Mods as for the Skinheads. For us, this ignores the changes that took place between the early and late 1960s: changes which meant that the social situation of the Mods was different from that of the Skinheads and it is this – their different situations – that accounts for their different responses. This is not to deny that there were also similarities between the experiences of both groups. Hence the form of their response, in terms of a symbolic style, was similar, but the symbolic contents were different because they were expressing different social situations. Furthermore, Cohen’s notion of ‘variations on a theme’ does not explain why the Mods should choose to explore the upward option (and not the downward one) and the Skinheads the downward one (and not the upward one), at the points in time when they did. Why could not, for example, the Skinheads have preceded the Mods? Why was the ‘upward option’ explored first? Cohen’s analysis is not equipped to answer these questions and yet a full theory of youth culture needs to explain not only their evolution, but why they evolved when they did, in the order that they did. The corollary of this limitation, that the skinheads reacted to the middle-classness of the mods, whilst partly true, is too mechanistic an explanation of human action. Without reference to the detailed social situation of these groups, the mechanistic notion of ‘circularity’ cannot be surmounted. And this notion of ‘circularity’ also fails to explain what the young of the new ‘lumpen’ parents were doing during the end of this period (the late 1960s). This criticism leads onto the second one which is Cohen’s ignoring of the discontinuities between the experiences of the young and their parents. Though we agree that the young ‘cannot break out of the parental contradictions’, we do not see why the young ‘magically resolve’ contradictions of their own to live through and come to terms with and their parents, through their own adaptations, come to terms with their contradictions in their own way. These contradictions which are specific to the young – what we have termed parent-young discontinuities – Cohen ignores. There are, of course, continuities between the general experience of the young and their parents – being members of the same oppressed class fraction ensures this. We do not wish to ignore these. Redevelopment, for example, affected the class fraction as a whole, young and old alike. But other changes demonstrate the discontinuities between the two groups which make many of the experiences age-specific. Changes in the structure of employment, whilst affecting the whole class, would be differentially experienced according to age. Not only is the prospect of redundancy in the middle of a working life, after more-or-less continuous fulltime employment, a different experience to the prospect of being an unemployed schoolleaver with the possibility of all but permanent unemployment, but in a contracting unskilled job market inexperienced youngsters fare badly as against more experienced older men. The
212 John Clarke and Tony Jefferson unemployment figures of the late 1960s bear this out: unskilled school-leavers were twice as likely to be out of work as unskilled adults. Changes in the area of education, on the other hand, offer an even better example of parent-child discontinuities since such changes only ever directly affect those of school-age. We have argued earlier that to ‘fail’ within the post-war educational system with its underlying meritocratic ideology, where all had ‘equal’ chances to succeed, was a radically different experience to failing in the more openly class-based system of the pre-war years. In the former case, onus for failure rested on the individual’s ‘merit’ or ‘ability’; in the latter on one’s social position: a position that has made ‘educational failure’ much harder to bear in the post-war period – and the more galling if one’s parents, too, believe the myth. Thus, again, we are brought to the social situation of the young themselves and the importance of this in any explanation of youth cultural styles. What follows is our explanation or reading of such styles. The social situation of the young themselves is paramount in our ‘reading’ since our notion of ‘style’ is one of instants when, momentarily, the social formation becomes crystallized via specific, symbolic systems which express that formation.
Part III: reading youth cultural styles We now want to consider how to understand the symbolism of distinctive youth cultural styles. Style we consider to be the appropriation of disparate objects and symbols from their normal social context and their reworking by members of the group into a new and coherent whole with its own special significance. Such a process is only possible because all objects, symbols and actions possess a variety of potential meanings for social actors, and not simply one closed definition. However in any given historical situation, each such symbol has one meaning which is preferred or dominant, that meaning which it is given by the dominant culture and which represses and conceals its other potential meanings. What the creation of a style involves is the selection of certain objects (clothes, hairstyles, music and so forth) which are relevant to the focal concerns of the group in question, its investment with the meanings of the specific group, and its use as a distinctive whole to symbolically express that group’s self conception and focal concerns. It must be stressed that these visible, symbolic elements of the style are not separate from the group who create them, but are shaped by the group and are consistantly carried and reaffirmed in the group’s shared activities and relationships. To locate these general comments on style more specifically we have chosen to consider two youth cultures as examples of how to ‘read’ styles in this way. Firstly, the Mods,11 who are often portrayed (as we saw with Cohen) as living out the lifestyle of the upwardly mobile affluent worker and being dedicated to consumption for its own sake. This view is essentially superficial, for it misses the Mods’ own distinctive relation to the commodities they consumed, and the self conscious exploitation of that style of consumption. Such an understanding cannot occur if separated from the Mods’ experience of their social situation and their demands on it. Being mainly unskilled or semi-skilled workers or in routine white collar jobs (clerks, shop assistants etc), their experience of the world was characterised by the recurrent themes of working class youth – routinised domination and control by others, and the threat of eternal boredom – an experience intensified ‘by the disjunture between if and the promised of the ‘Golden Age’ of affluent – consumerism. The Mod life style cannot be understood without this search for ‘action’12 and the related need to escape the patronising adult reaction to youth. But if the daytime world was controlled by a
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succession of ‘grey adult’ then the leisure time of nights and weekends offered the possibility of autonomy and excitement. The style of the Mods took on the qualities and forms formally approved by the ‘straight’ world (notably its smartness, neatness) in an attempt to disarm adult disdain, but subverted them into a style which seemed simultaneously ‘normal’, and yet incomprehensible and threatening to the adult world. Thus as Dave Laing commented, they ‘looked alright, but there was something in the way they moved that adults couldn’t make out’.13 This subversion of the ‘normal’ characterised the Mods’ relation to the other commodities they used. In order to project style it became necessary first to appropriate the commodity, then to redefine its use and value and finally to relocate its meaning within a totally different context.14 Consequently, far from being the ideal passive consumer of capitalist society, consuming the commodity in the form in which it is presented, the Mods raised the possibility of an active relation to the commodity: Thus the scooter, a formerly ultra-respectable means of transport, was appropriated and converted into a weapon and symbol of solidarity. The metal comb was honed to a knife-like sharpness, thereby providing the mod’s individual narcissism and collectively projected menace with a mutual symbolization in a single object. Thus pills, medically diagnosed for the treatment of neuroses, were appropriated and used as an end-in-themselves, and the negative evaluations of their capabilities imposed by school and work were substituted by a positive assessment of their credentials in the world of play.15 This emphasis on the active role of the Mod may also be seen in the Bank Holiday ‘riots’ where the Mods’ search for action led to a rejection of the passive role of consumer and spectator in favour of being an active instigator of events. Finally the Mod’s relation to the media in these and other instances indicates the culture’s concern with the image – the self projection. Their courting of attention made them the perfect subjects for the media’s search for sensational content. The image of the Mod life is perfectly exemplified by Denzil’s description of the Mod week in the Sunday Times : Monday night meant dancing at the Mecca, the Hammersmith Palais, or the Streatham Locarno. Tuesday meant Soho and the Scene Club. Wednesday was Marquee night. Thursday was reserved for the ritual washing of the hair. Friday meant the Scene again. Saturday afternoon usually meant shopping for clothes and records. Saturday night was spent dancing and rarely finished before 9 or 10 Sunday morning. Sunday evening meant the Flamingo, or perhaps, if one showed signs of weakening, could be spent sleeping.16 This image – the image of the style – was more significant than the more mundane reality . . . ‘every mod was preparing himself psychologically so that if the opportunity should arise,
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if the money was there, if Welwyn Garden City should be metamorphosed into Piccadilly Circus, he would be ready. Every mod was existing in a ghost world of gangsterism, luxurious clubs, and beautiful women, even if reality only amounted to a draughty Parker anorak, a beaten-up Vespa, and fish and chips out of a greasy bag’.17 The Mods’ victories, then, were symbolic, victories of the imagination, and in the last analysis, imaginery victories. For the Mods underestimated the dominant culture’s ability to incorporate and exploit the subversive and anarchic imagination. ‘The magical transformations of commodities had been mysterious and were often invisible to the neutral observer, and no amount of stylistic incantation could possibly affect the oppressive economic mode by which they had been produced’. The state continued to function perfectly no matter how many of Her Majesty’s colours were defiled and draped around the shoulders of skinny pill-heads in the form of sharply-cut jackets.18 The Mods, then, were the children of affluence but were not simply its product. Their own mode of appropriation offered the possibility of a collective and active experience of consumption. Ultimately their attempted self sufficiency and introspection (which attempted to ‘magically’ remove the real constraints on their situation) led to the incorporation and exploitation of their stylistic innovation – Mod became ‘manufactured’ not ‘created’. The Skinheads We have already talked of the different social situation of the Mods and the Skinheads, and presented an abbreviated account of their style in Cohen’s terms of its ‘exploration of the downward option’ of social mobility. At this point we intend to substantiate these earlier general statements with a more detailed analysis of the Skinheads’ style.19 The connection between the Skinheads and football is not, as some would suggest, fortuitous – that they could have gone anywhere but just happened to pick on football grounds. Rather, the traditional working class activity is crucial because it allows some of the Skinheads’ crucial concerns to be symbolically articulated. Most importantly, the support of a particular team provided a focus for the assertion of territorial loyalties, involving both a unified collective identity (‘We are the Holte enders, the Shed, etc.’) and an assertion of territorial rights – not those of property ownership, but of community identification. As Cohen notes: Territoriality is simply the process through which environmental boundaries (and foci) are used to signify group boundaries (and foci) and become invested with a subcultural value.20 This assertion took place both physically, through the defending or taking of the ‘home end’; and symbolically through the sloganising such as ‘Smethwick Mob rules here’. The emphasis or territory is a crucial one, and the ‘mob’ may be viewed as an attempt to retrieve the disappearing sense of community, with an emphasis on the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and the stress on mutual assistance in times of need. Thus, one fundamental rule was not to ‘cut and run’ from fights, as one ex-Smethwick Skinhead said: The only real thing they’d put pressure on about was if you were the first to run and leave a fight. They’d get you for that, no matter what happened.
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The other major Skinhead location also has strong cultural roots in the working class – the pub, which acted as a territorial base and landmark. Here, supported not by pot or pills, but by a rather more traditional drug – beer, was the place where exploits could be discussed, plans laid, and time killed. Unlike his predecessor the Mod, the disco and club were not the Skinhead’s natural habitat – they were perhaps functional locations where birds could be chatted up,21 or fights held with whatever opposition were available – but they were not the ‘natural’ resting place. We have talked about the element of communal assertion, and another element of the style may be read as involving the ‘defence’ of the community – the widely publicised activity of ‘paki bashing’. Coloured immigrants are understood as a threat to the homogeneity of the community, to its cultural and racial unity. They are also obvious scapegoats for the problems of the working class being doubly visible. Firstly in a racial sense, and secondly by visibly competing with the white working class for limited resourses (notably housing and employment) within a particular district. By comparison, the real nature of structural inequalities are obscured by geographical and ideological barriers. In addition to this, at the time of the Skinheads’ crystallisation, such racial scapegoating was, as we mentioned earlier, being given increasingly vocal public and official support by the statements and actions of both the Labour and Conservative parties and by sectors of the media. However, ‘paki bashing’, unlike the dominant public expression which found little to distinguish between different groups of immigrants, was overlaid with a significant cultural dimension, which distinguished between Asians and West Indians. The latter were less of a threat to the cultural homogeneity of the area because many of their cultural patterns were much closer to those of working class youth than were those of Asians whose introspective, family-centred and achievement-oriented way of life were nearer to a middle class outlook. For example, West Indian youths were respected because they were tough and willing to physically defend themselves. However, the violence associated with Skinheads was much more closely articulated around football. Football crucially provides and allows for the expression of excitement, although its expression is supposed to take place within certain legitimate and institutionalised boundaries (e.g. those of chanting and cheering but excluding the use of crude or vulgar language). Similarly, the legitimate source of that excitement is supposed to be the match itself, but the Skinheads extended both the source and expression of the excitement (illegitimately, of course) through their own violence. Fighting both expressed their involvement in the game, and was a source of excitement both directly, in the physical activity of the fight, and indirectly, in its providing a topic of conservation to dispel the continual threat of boredom in the periods between fights and other group exploits.22 The violence, both actual and discussed, acted as an expression of toughness, of a particular working class self conception of masculinity, and of particular symbolic importance here is the activity of ‘queer bashing’. The Skinhead definition of ‘queer’ extended to all those males who looked ‘odd’, that is those who were not overtly masculine looking, as this statement indicates: Usually it’d be just a bunch who’d find someone they thought looked odd – like this one night we were up by Warley woods and we saw this bloke who looked odd – he’d got long hair and frills on his trousers. This emphasis on overt masculinity was visible in the most obvious areas of Skinhead symbolism, most importantly the clothes and the ‘prison crop’ hairstyle from which their name
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derived. The clothes (heavy denims, plain or striped button down shirts, braces and heavy boots) created an image which was clean cut, smart and functional – a youthful version of working clothes. The haircuts completed the severe and puritanical self image, a formalised and very ‘hard’ masculinity. (It is also important to note that both the Mods and the hippies had gone some way towards undermining traditional stereotypes of masculine and feminine appearance and behaviour). Thus we would argue that by reading the Skinheads’ style in terms of its creators’ structural and cultural context, it offers a reassertion of traditional working class culture, displaced certainly into a symbolic leisure style, in a period when the norms of that culture and its social base had been threatened by erosion and disappearance, and yet when social conflicts were becoming increasingly visible and demanding a form of articulation. The erosion of some expressions of working class culture and the incorporation and quiescence of others in the 1950s and early 1960s had removed crucial articulations of this consciousness. For the skinheads, whose experience was grounded in some of the crucial nexi of this economic and cultural conflict (e.g. housing, education and employment), their style attempted to revive in a symbolic form some of the expressions of traditional working class culture which could articulate their social experience. This we take to be the process behind what Cohen describes as choosing the ‘downward option’, a ‘choice’ which is grounded in and structured by their experiential situation.
Part IV: the social reaction to youth cultures We have not the space in this paper to deal properly with this topic, but this should not be taken to mean that we attach no importance to it. Indeed, it is an integral and indispensable part of what the authors of the New Criminology 23 call a ‘fully social theory of deviance’. We must be content here to sketch out some of the elements of our view of this area. An analysis of the social reaction must deal with its structural base: with the State and its complex institutional mediations, especially between the formal organisations of social control and the major public signifiers – the media. Secondly, it must deal with the cultural forms of expression of the social reaction: that is, the way in which groups and events are publicly defined. Their definition must be considered in terms of the State’s attempts to mobilise public support for its actions and to tighten their support for the legitimacy of the State. Youth culture is worthy of special attention here, because one of the consequences of the closure of the political discourse to ‘consensus’ politics in the post-war period was to displace the discussion of society and social change into moral terms, in which youth was a central metaphor in the articulation of such concerns (e.g. for the discussion of the consequences of affluence and for the likely effects of the growth of mass media.) It is as a consequence of this displacement that Cohen can say: The Mods and Rockers symbolised something far more than they actually did. They touched the delicate and ambivalent nerves through which post-war social change in Britain was experienced.24 The social reaction to youth cultures cannot be fully understood without an awareness of this prominence of youth as a vehicle for the discussion of wider matters of public concern. The third element which must be taken into account in the social reaction to youth cultures is the element of commercial reaction, which attempts to universalise, at a purely
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stylistic and consumption level, the innovations made by distinctive youth cultures, while simultaneously defusing the oppositional potential of the exclusive life-styles. Finally, the form of this presentation has suggested a separation of the youth cultures and the social reaction. However, to produce a ‘social history’ of youth cultures necessitates an analysis of the relations and interpretrations of these two domains in historicised, processual terms.
Conclusion In this paper we have been attempting to establish our view of the necessary bases of an analysis of youth cultures in relation to the situation of the English working class in post-war Britain. Our main emphasis are two fold: one is the stress on the historicity of such analysis; and the second is that the analysis must relate the specific phenomenon in question to the social totality. We have attempted to do this in two ways: through the analytic distinction between different levels of the totality which must be understood; and through our formulation of structures, cultures and biographies. This enables us to locate groups within the organisation of the totality, and allows us to locate their practices in terms of their established and emergent cultural definitions of the situation. For us, this is perhaps the crucial area. Class conflict is increasingly being fought on the terrain of a struggle for the control of cultural as well as material resources. It is within this location that we see the symbolism of working class youth cultures as representing both a significant dimension, and a signification of the struggle for cultural hegemony.
Notes 1 See, for example, Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital Penguin, 1968. 2 Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and Wishart, 1973. 3 See, for example, some of the articles in Bogdanor and Skidelsky, The Age of Affluence, Macmillan, 1971. 4 See, inter alia, Rex and Moore, Race, Community and Conflict, O.U.P. 1971. 5 For a presentation of these and subsequent points, see P. Cohen, ‘Subcultural conflict and working class community’ in W.P.C.S.2., 1972. 6 Frank Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order, Paladin, 1971. Especially Ch.3. 7 On football, see I. Taylor ‘Football mad’ in Dunning (ed.) A Sociology of Sport, Cass, 1971; C. Critcher, ‘Football as popular culture’. CCCS; and ‘Football and cultural values.’ in W.P.C.S.I., 1971. 8 Taylor, op. cit., p. 364. 9 Parkin, op. cit. 10 The distinction is Meszaros’, in his article in Aspects of History and Class Consciousness, edited by Meszaros, R.K.P., 1971. 11 The text here draws heavily on Dick Hebdige The Style of the Mods, Annali – Univ. of Naples (forthcoming). 12 See S. Cohen on the search for ‘action’ on the beaches: Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Paladin, 1971, also Hebdige, op. cit. 13 Dave Laing: The Sound of our Time, Sheed and Ward, 1969, p. 150. 14 Hebdige, op. cit. 15 ibid. 16 Sunday Times Magazine, Aug. 2 1964, quoted in Hebdige, op. cit. 17 Hebdige, op. cit. 18 Hebdige, op. cit. 19 The material here is drawn from J. Clarke. The Skinheads and the Study of Youth Culture, Annali (forthcoming).
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20 P. Cohen, op.cit., p. 7. 21 See Pete Fowler, ‘Skins rule’ in C. Gillet (ed.) Rock File, N.E.L., 1973. 22 This discussion compresses a number of points about football and working class culture, see the papers by Taylor and Critcher (note 7). 23 Taylor, Walton and Young, The New Criminology, RKP, 1973. 24 S. Cohen, op.cit., p. 192.
14 Girls and subcultures Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber
Earlier in this issue it was pointed out that sub-cultures ‘provided for a section of working class youth, mainly boys, one kind of strategy for negotiating their concrete collective existence’ (our emphasis). The absence of girls from the whole of the literature in this area is quite striking, and demands explanation. Very little seems to have been written about the role of girls in youth cultural groupings in general. They are absent from the classic subcultural ethnographic studies, the ‘pop’ histories (like Nuttall, 1970), personal accounts (like Daniel and McGuire, eds., 1972), or journalistic surveys (like Fyvel, 1963). When they do appear, it is either in ways which uncritically reinforce the stereotypical image of women with which we are now so familiar – for example, Fyvel’s reference, in his study of Teddy Boys, to ‘dumb, passive teenage girls, crudely painted’ (1963): or they are fleetingly and marginally presented: It is as if everything that relates only to us comes out in footnotes to the main text, as worthy of the odd reference. We come on the agenda somewhere between ‘Youth’ and ‘Any Other Business’. We encounter ourselves in men’s cultures as ‘by the way’ and peripheral. According to all the reflections we are not really there. Rowbotham, 1973: 35 The difficulty is, how to understand this invisibility. Are girls, in fact, for reasons which we could discover, really not active or present in youth sub-cultures? Or has something in the way this kind of research is done rendered them invisible? When girls are acknowledged in the literature, it tends to be in terms of their degree of, or lack of, sexual attractiveness. But this, too, is difficult to interpret. Take, for instance, Paul Willis’ comment on the unattached girls in the motor-bike sub-culture he studied: What seemed to unite them was a common desire for an attachment to a male and a common inability to attract a man to a long term relationship. They tended to be scruffier and less attractive than the attached girls. (1972) Is this, simply, a typical and dismissive treatment of girls reflecting the natural rapport between a masculine researcher and his male respondents? Or is it that the researcher, who is actually studying motor-bike boys, finds it difficult not to take the boys’ attitudes to and evaluation of the girls seriously, reflect it in his descriptive language and even adopt it as a perspective himself, within the context of the research situation? Willis does comment on some of the girls’ responses to questions – giggling, reluctance to talk, retreat into
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cliquishness, etc. Once again, these responses are complex and difficult to interpret. Are they typical responses to a male researcher, influenced by the fact that he is a man, by his personal appearance, attractiveness, etc? Or are the responses influenced by the fact that he is identified by the girls, as ‘with the boys’, studying them and in some way siding with them in their evaluation of the girls? Or are these responses characteristic of the ways girls customarily negotiate the spaces provided for them in a male dominated and defined culture? We must be able to locate and interpret these responses, which are extraordinarily complex, before we can understand the experiences and positions which are being mediated through them. For example, girls – especially young girls – may retreat from situations which are male-defined (where they are labelled and judged sexually) into a ‘groupiness’ or cliquishness of which ‘giggling’ is one overt sign. In other situations (for example, in the classroom) group solidarity between girls may push them into a more aggressive response, where they use their sexuality to open avenues of approach to the young male teacher, or to embarrass him or undermine his authority. The important point is that both the defensive and the aggressive responses are structured in reaction against a situation where masculine definitions (and thus sexual labelling, etc.) are in dominance. We therefore have to interpret these responses before we can define properly the territory in which girls really operate, the spaces in which they are, sexually as well as socially located. What follows is simply a first, tentative attempt to sketch some of the ways we might think about and research the relationship between girls and the sub-cultures. In doing so, we adopt some of the perspectives sketched out for boys in other parts of the journal: for example, the centrality of class; the importance of the spheres of school, work, leisure and the family; the general social context within which the sub-cultures emerge; the structural changes in postwar British society which partially define the different sub-cultures. We must, however, add the crucial dimension of sex and gender structuring. The question is then, how does this dimension reshape the analysis as a whole? It has been argued that class is a critical variable in defining the different sub-cultural options available to middle and working-class boys. Middle class male sub-cultures, for example, offer more full-time ‘careers’, whereas workingclass sub-cultures tend to be restricted to the leisure sphere. This structuring of needs and options by class must also work for girls. Thus it is probably easier for girls to find alternative careers in, say, the hippie or drop-out (i.e. middle class) sub-cultures than in, say, Skinhead culture. But then, in general, boys are more likely to take up sub-cultural options than girls. Such an analysis suggests that what is true for boys’ subcultures – e.g. the structuring effect of class – is similarly true for girls, only more so. This assumes that the sub-cultural patterns are, roughly, the same for boys and girls, only girls are necessarily, more marginal on every dimension. It may be, however, that the marginality of girls is not the best way of representing their position in the sub-cultures. The position of the girls may be, not marginally, but structurally different. They may be marginal to the sub-cultures, not simply because girls are pushed by the dominance of males to the margin of each social activity, but because they are centrally into a different, necessarily subordinate set or range of activities. Such an analysis would depend, not on their marginality but on their structured secondariness. If women are ‘marginal’ to the male cultures of work (middle and working class), it is because they are central and pivotal to a subordinate area, which mirrors, but in a complementary and subordinate way, the ‘dominant’ masculine arenas. They are ‘marginal’ to work because they are central to the subordinate, complementary sphere of the family. Similarly, ‘marginality’ of girls in the active, male-focussed leisure sub-cultures of working class youth may tell us less than the strongly present position of girls in the ‘complementary’ but more passive
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sub-cultures of the fan and the fan-club. (We attempt, in the note following, to represent this complementary and subordinate kind of analysis in rough diagrammatic form.) Bearing this general argument in mind, we can now try to identify a number of key questions to which subsequent work can be addressed. (1) Are girls really absent from the main post-war sub-cultures? Or are they present but invisible? (2) Where present and visible, were their roles the same, but more marginal, than boys; or were they different? (3) Whether marginal or different, is the position of girls specific to the sub-cultural option; or do their roles reflect the more general social-subordination of women in the central areas of mainstream culture – home, work, school, leisure? (4) If sub-cultural options are not readily available to girls, what are the different but complementary ways in which girls organise their cultural life? And are these, in their own terms, sub-cultural in form? (Girls’ sub-cultures may have become invisible because the very term ‘sub-culture’ has acquired such strong masculine overtones.)
Are girls really absent from sub-cultures? The most obvious factor which makes this question difficult to answer is the domination of ‘sociological’ work (as in most areas of scholarly academic work) by men. Paradoxically, the exclusion of women was as characteristic of the new ‘radical’ or sceptical theories of deviance as it had been of traditional criminology. The editors of Critical Criminology argue that the ‘new deviancy theory’ often amounted to ‘a celebration rather than an analysis of the deviant form with which the deviant theorist could vicariously identify – an identification by powerless intellectuals with deviants who appeared more successful in controlling events’ (Taylor, Walton and Young, 1975). With the possible exception of sexual deviance, women constituted an uncelebrated social category, for radical and critical theorists. This general invisibility was of course cemented by the social reaction to the more extreme manifestations of youth sub-cultures. The popular press and media concentrated on the sensational incidents associated with each sub-culture (e.g. the Teddy Boy killings, the Margate clashes between Mods and Rockers). One direct consequence of the fact that it is always the violent aspects of a phenomenon which qualify as newsworthy is that these are precisely the areas of sub-cultural activity from which women have tended to be excluded. The objective and popular image of a sub-culture as encoded and defined by the media is likely to be one which emphasises the male membership, male ‘focal concerns’ and masculine values. Or, as is the case with hippy sub-culture, when women do appear as part of the moral panic generated, it is usually in the relatively more innocuous roles – e.g. as sexually permissive. Female invisibility in youth sub-cultures then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious circle, for a variety of reasons. It may well be that girls/women have not played a vital role in these groupings. On the other hand the emphases in the documentation of these phenomena, on the male and masculine, reinforce and amplify our conception of the subcultures as predominantly male. Our ‘way in’ to the relationship between girls and subcultures is not an easy one. Secondary evidence suggests, for example, that there were small groups of girls who saw themselves as Teddy Girls, and who identified with Teddy Boy culture, dancing with the Teds at the Elephant and Castle, going to the cinema with them and apparently getting some vicarious pleasure from relating the violent nature of the incidents instigated by the Teddy Boys.1 – But there are good reasons why this could not have been an option open to many working-class girls. Though girls participated in the general rise in the disposable income available to youth in the 1950s, girls’ wages were, relatively, not as high as boys’. More important, patterns of
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spending would have been powerfully structured in a different direction for girls from that of boys. The working-class girl, though temporarily at work, remained more focussed on home, Mum and marriage than her brother or his male peers. More time was spent in the home. Teddy Boy culture was an escape from the family into the street and the cafe, as well as evening and weekend trips ‘into town’. Girls would certainly dress up and go out either with boy-friends or, as a group of girls, with a group of boys. But there would be much less ‘hanging about’ and street-corner involvement. In the working-class parental value system, boys were expected to ‘have fun while they could’ (though many working-class parents regarded Teddy Boy kinds of ‘fun’ as pretty peculiar): but girls suffered the double injunction of ‘having fun’ while not ‘getting yourself into trouble’. The sexual taboo, and the moral framework and ‘rules’ in which it was embodied continued to work more heavily against girls than against boys. While boys could spend a lot of time ‘hanging about’ in the territory, the pattern for girls was probably more firmly structured between being at home, preparing (often with other girls) to go out on a date, and going out. Boys who had, sexually and socially, ‘sown their wild oats’ could ‘turn over a new leaf ’ and settle down: for girls, the consequences of getting known in the neighbourhood as one of the ‘wild oats’ to be ‘sown’ was drastic and irreversible. There was certainly more attention than, say, in pre-war youth culture to the teenage leisure market and its accompanying manifestations (concerts, records, pin-ups, magazines), and girls as well as boys would have shared in this. But many of these activities would have been easily appropriated into the traditionally defined cultural space of a home or peercentred girls’ ‘culture’ – operated mainly within the home, or visiting a girl-friend’s home, or at parties, without involving the riskier and more frowned-on path of hanging about the streets or cafes. There was room for a good deal of the new teenage consumer culture within the ‘culture of the bedroom’ – experimenting with make-up, listening to records, reading the mags, sizing up the boy-friends, chatting, jiving: it depended, rather, on some access by girls to room and space within (rather than outside) the home – even if the room was uneasily shared with an older sister. This would lead us to suggest that girls were present, but in marginal or at least highly patterned ways, in Teddy Boy sub-culture: but that – following the position outlined above – their ‘involvement’ was sustained by a complementary, but different sub-cultural pattern. The point can be made more concretely by saying that, whereas the response of many boys to the rise of rock-and-roll in this period was themselves to become active if highly amateur performers (the rise of the skiffle groups), girl participants in this culture became either fans or record collectors and readers of the ‘teenage-hero’ magazines and love-comics. There were no teenage rock-star oriented ‘love comics’, such as emerged in the 1950s, for boys (though some boys may have covertly read their sister’s!). Equally, there is no single record of a girls’ skiffle group. The picture is compounded if we take an equally ‘hard’ male-oriented working-class sub-culture of two decades later – the Skinhead groups of the 1970s. To judge from the popular sensationalism of the media, commented on above, the media image of Skinhead culture is primarily masculine. Actually there are small groups of ‘Skinhead girls’; and, though their numbers are not large compared with the boys, their presence at football matches in an active role – traditionally, a massively male-oriented sport and occasion – may be significant. Moreover, whereas the ‘girl-friends’ of the Teds looked and dressed quite differently from the boys they were going out with, some Skinhead girls do look, dress and act in rather similar and supportive ways to their Skinhead boy-friends. There is some slight evidence to suggest a greater direct participation by a few groups of girls in this male-defined
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and focussed working-class sub-culture in the 1970s than, perhaps, would have been the case in the 1950s. But it is not sufficiently documented to build much of a hypothesis on. Certainly, there is more press coverage asking questions about the involvement of girls in gang and group activities (including violence) now than there was in the period of the Teddy Boys. But this may merely reflect the general increased visibility of women, and the greater attention to the question of the position of women generally in the culture now than was the case then. Again, it is difficult to decide whether the role of girls in the sub-cultures has actually changed, or whether their role has simply become more publicly visible. Certainly, a paragraph like the following, with its implicit attribution of a causal connection between violence and the rise of the women’s movement, could not have appeared in the 1950s: Why are women, traditionally the gentler sex, so ready to resort to force? Is it simply that society itself is becoming more violent, or is it part of the fight for equality, a sort of ‘anything a man can do I can do better’? Berry, 1974 If we wanted to begin, tentatively, to sketch in some of the things which form a sort of bridge between the relative absence of girls from Teddy Boy culture (except ‘secondarily’) and the small indication of a ‘presence’ of girls in Skinhead culture, we would need to touch on at least four intermediate features. First, there is the emergence of a ‘softer’ working-class sub-culture, in the mid-1960s, in which girls did much more openly and directly participate (though they remained, of course, subordinate to the boys). This is the Mod sub-culture (discussed more fully below) in which (a) there were, clearly, Mod girls as well as boys; and (b) the boys and the girls in the Mod styles seemed to look more like each other, based partly on the fact that (c) Mod styles, and the Mod preoccupation with style and appearance made even Mod boys, in the eyes of their Rocker competitors as well as their own, more ‘feminine’. Secondly, is the appearance, in the later 1960s of a middle class sub-culture – the Hippies – in which some girls and women played an active and visible role (though, again, we would argue, remaining in a subordinate position). Thirdly, there is the growth – no doubt related to the Mod and Hippy styles, as these came to be diffused and defused through the fashion trade and image-business – of ‘Unisex’ styles, with clothes designed to be worn equally by girls or boys, and the accompanying blurring of the sexually-distinct fashion images. Fourthly, there is the rise, within the pop industry itself, of the deliberately ‘feminine’, camp, or bi- and trans-sexual singer and star. These form certain important intermediary positions in the path which girls have taken from total invisibility to a ‘relative’ visibility in the sub-cultures between the 1950s and the 1970s. Again, this is extremely difficult and complex cultural material either properly to document or to interpret. It would be important, in any more substantive interpretation, to note both the relative shift in the visibility of girls in relation to the sub-cultural trends, and the fact that, no matter how visible and active a small group of girls become, or how much the sex-based images are blurred, the relative subordination of girls in the sub-cultures remains. As any study of the iconography of Mick Jagger, Gary Glitter or David Bowie would soon reveal, it is possible for male pop stars to be both ‘more feminine’ and ‘aggressively male chauvinist’ at one and the same time, within the same image. The feminising of the male image may in no way signal the complementary liberation of the female from the constraints of the feminine image. The fact that, despite these surface shifts in the provided culture, the root attitudes towards the position of girls in the sub-cultures may not have changed all that much in two decades, is evidenced in the sexual attitudes of the Skinhead boys quoted in The Paint House (Daniel
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and McGuire, eds., 1972). There is nothing new about the kinds of crude typing in use in, say, the boys quoted in the ‘Jilly Crown, the Certified Whore’ chapter. What we don’t know is how the girls themselves respond to this kind of labelling – again, typically, no Skinhead girls contribute to The Paint House. In short, the evidence about how active and present girls are in the main post-war subcultures is difficult to interpret finally, one way or the other, on what is presently known. Certainly, the weight of the evidence we have suggests that the majority of girls organise their social life almost as an alternative to the kind of ‘qualifications’ and risks which direct entrance into the boy culture (sub or mainstream) involves. Though the girls know that where sex is concerned boys ‘have it easy’, they don’t have a sense of solidarity with girls who are ranked among the boys as having ‘cheapened themselves’, as the following quotation illustrates: It’s always like that you know – it’s not fair – but you have to watch who you’re going around with. Yeh – there’s one up the club, I’m not saying her name but she’s a proper one; she walks past and says, ‘alright Tina’? – But she’s one person I wouldn’t go around with ’cause you’d get a name for yourself. ‘Tina’, teenage girl2 It may, then, be a matter, not of the absence or presence of girls in the sub-cultures, but of a whole alternative network of responses and activities through which girls negotiate their relation to the sub-cultures or even make positive moves away from the sub-cultural option.
Where girls are visible, what are their roles? And do these reflect the general sub-ordination of women in the culture? Three selected images will have to do duty here – where girls clearly are present, but where the way they are present suggests the way their cultural subordination is retained and reproduced. The first is the image of the Motor-bike girl, leather-clad, a sort of sub-cultural pin-up heralding – as it appeared in the press, certainly – a new and threatening sort of aggressive sexuality. This image was often used to herald the new sexual permissiveness in press and media. But it is important to note how this presence was encoded in a purely sexual (albeit new, modern and bold) way: the pan stick lips, the blackened eyes, the numb expressionless look and the slightly unzipped leather jacket. This sub-cultural image was only a hair’s breadth away from, on the one hand, the new sexuality of advertising and the modern fashion trade, on the other hand, the classic fetishism of the pornography trade. Within this apparently new sexual permissiveness the real sexual subordination of the Motor-bike sub-culture was mystified. In the general motor-bike culture, a girl remained excluded from the central core of the culture: she depended on the offer of a pillion seat by a boy rider, to enable her to share in the particular sub-cultural highs – the ‘ton-up’ or the week-end away. Few girls penetrated to the symbolic core of the sub-culture – the motor-bike itself, a technical knowledge of the machines, their limitations and capacities. A girl’s membership of the group was dependent on the boy she was with – it was always tentative, easily resulting in her expulsion from the group, depending on the state of her relationship with the boys. In the tighter versions of the motor-bike culture – in Hell’s Angels groups, for example – the whole focus of the group was overwhelmingly masculine: a machismo culture of hard men. Only the few women who could be as hard as one of the boys could
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gain entry – and then only if she were the leader’s woman or a sort of ‘Mama’ to the chapter as a whole. Hunter Thompson suggests, in Hell’s Angels (1967), that Angels frequently treated most women as sexual objects: they were either ‘Mamas’ or objects of the gang-bang. The content and images of relationships in this sub-culture may have been new and highly deviant: but the way Hell’s Angels tended to divide the female world, into women-with-hearts-of-gold-who-looked-after-them and prostitutes, is a binary opposition as old and traditional as the hills. As we suggested above, Mod culture and the high visibility of girls within it is probably more relevant to our argument. Girls have always gone out to some kind of work in the brief space between school and marriage; but, in the early 1960s, there may have been more late-teenage girls at work, and there were certainly new kinds of occupations opening up, especially ‘glamorous’ jobs in the boutique, cosmetic and clothes trades, and secretarial jobs, which, though in fact ultimately routine and dead-end, had a touch of dressing-up and going to work ‘in town’ about them, at least in the big cities. In the boutique trade, glamour and status often compensated for poor wages. The changing economic and occupational structure may have helped girls in these kinds of jobs to take a more active part in the consumerism of Mod culture. But this greater involvement was also structured culturally. The Mod ethos of individual ‘cool’ could be more easily sustained, by girls, at home, in school or at work, without provoking direct parental or adult reaction, than a more aggressive and abrasive sub-cultural style. Parents and teachers knew that girls looked ‘rather odd, these days’, with their white, drawn faces and cropped hair, but, as Dave Laing remarked of the Mods, ‘there was something in the way they moved which adults couldn’t make out’ (Laing, 1969). This relative fluidity and ambiguity of the culture meant that a girl could be ‘around’ without necessarily being directly coupled with any one Mod boy: she could ‘be a Mod’, in a Mod couple, in a crowd of other Mod girls, or even alone. Participation had much to do with clothes, appearance and the stylised look – like her male counterpart the Mod girl demonstrated the same fussiness for detail in clothes, the same over-attention to appearance. Mod girls may have become more visible because boys and girls in the sub-cultures looked more alike – it was probably the diffusion of Mod styles which led the fashion trade to the Unisex device. But, as we have suggested, it may also have been because the sub-culture, as a whole, as compared with either Teddy boy or motor-bike culture, looked, as a whole, rather ‘feminine’ – and this image was reinforced by the smartness of the Mod and his proccupation with style and consumption and looks, his general stylishness. It is impossible to tell at this stage why harshly chauvinistic attitudes, common elsewhere, seemed not to be so prevalent in Mod groups: but this is certainly the prevailing general impression. The position of Mod culture at the more feminine end of the sub-cultural spectrum may reflect simply their opposition to the other, ‘harder’, more masculine sub-cultures around them (the source of much Mod/Rocker competition). It may reflect the upwardly-mobile character and orientation of the subculture as a whole. It may have something to do with the greater relative confidence of the girls involved – a confidence which can’t have been unaffected by the emergence, at about this point in time, of the Brooke clinics and the increase in the availability of the Pill for unmarried girls over sixteen. Of course, we can’t say precisely what groups first took advantage of these facilities, but their availability must have enhanced the sexual confidence, at least of those who made use of them: and, as we’ve suggested, for girls in and around a male-focussed sub-culture sexual confidence is calculated to have an impact on social and cultural confidence. The general tendency for girls to become more visible and relatively autonomous in Mod
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sub-cultures must be taken together with the continuing hold of the basic material and social structures pre-determining the lives of the girls and constraining and limiting this relative visibility/autonomy/space. As has been suggested, Mod sub-culture may have enabled some participants to live out certain ‘imaginary relations’ to those constraining conditions, but not to transcend them. The ‘relative autonomy’ of Mod girls reflected their short-term affluence, but the jobs which provided the extra cash afforded short-term satisfactions, few career prospects, no opportunities of overtime bonuses nor wage-scales increasing much beyond the age of twenty. Longer, if not better educated, she had probably, none the less, been exposed mainly to the sort of Newsom thinking designed to ‘interest the girls’ as part of the ‘early leavers’ curricula: domestic or feminine subjects, child care, training in personal relationships, commercial and clerical practice . . . (see Newsom, 1948; 1963). There is nothing to suggest that participation in Mod sub-culture sharply loosened the bonds between mothers and daughters, or significantly undermined the girls’ self-conception and orientation towards marriage and the family. The term ‘Hippy’ is, of course, an umbrella term, covering a variety of diverse groupings and tendencies. The aspect which is of most direct relevance here, is the point through which most girls would have entered or been drawn into one or other part of this amorphous culture – that is, through the middle-class student culture. There is available, for middleclass girls, a more obvious amount of unstructured, yet legitimate, space, lying somewhere between the confines of the actual Hippy sub-culture and the mainstream middle-class culture (sixth-form or student culture). Thus for the middle-class schoolgirl, or first year university student, the flat, whether to live in or to visit, symbolises this gain in negotiated territory which cannot be penetrated by parents, and which because of the relatively unstructured nature of student life likewise cannot be forbidden. The middle-class girl student has more time, a more flexible timetable, three or four years during which marriage is positively discouraged, and finally, a softer environment, a more total experience not so strictly demarcated into work and leisure, which allows for the development of personal style. On the other hand, given this flexibility, it would seem fair to say that there was remarkably little shift, both within this peripheral culture and within the main body of Hippy subculture, away from those roles which are traditionally female. The stereotypical images we associate most with Hippy culture tend to be those of the Earth Mother, baby at breast, or the fragile pre-raphaelite lady. Again, of course, we must be aware of the dangers of accepting uncritically the images which emerge via press coverage, as part of a moral panic, though the chances are that this panic itself represents the double bind – sexual permissiveness linked with motherhood may be more palatable than aggressive feminism. Certainly, as in more conventional areas of music, it is almost always as singers that Hippy women have managed to exist and that, presumably, thanks to the uniqueness of the female voice. Given this, the types of images generally available seem to be very limited; the few women who have made it in this sphere usually fit either the gentle/lyrical/introspective image of, say, Joni Mitchell or the agressive/butch/whisky-sodden type associated with Janis Joplin or Maggie Bell. However, it would be misleading not to acknowledge the space which the underground provided for alternative occupations/life-styles in which women have figured quite highly. Spare Rib as an ‘alternative’ publication can be firmly placed within this context and Caroline Coon of Release was one of many women working in the information/aid/relationship centres which sprang up as part of the counter-culture.
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Do girls have alternative ways of organising their cultural life? Some of what has been conjectured above may lead us to the conclusion that the majority of girls find alternative strategies to that of the boys’ sub-cultures. The important question, then, may not be the absence or presence of girls in the male sub-cultures, but the complementary ways in which girls interact among themselves and with each other to form a distinctive culture of their own. One of the most significant forms of an alternative ‘subculture’ among girls is the culture of the Teeny Bopper. While this is in no way a new phenomenon (the girl/pop idol relationship has been in existence for the last twenty years), it is one of the most highly manufactured forms of available youth culture – it is almost totally packaged. Evidence of this can be cited throughout the entire pop trajectory, but what is significant about the Teeny Bopper syndrome of the 1970s is that it was directed expressly at an even younger market i.e. ten – fifteen year old girls, too young even to have heard the Beatles, and who were certainly not turned on by the new heavy rock (E.L.P., Yes, Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple) which their elder brothers and sisters listened to so avidly. The attractiveness of this market with its quick turnover potential (Mark Bolan this week, David Cassidy the next) offered ailing American film and broadcasting companies a chance to boost their profits too, Screengems and M.G.M. in particular. Even in relation to so manufactured a network we can locate a variety of negotiative processes at work amongst the girls themselves. (a) Teeny Bopper culture can easily be accommodated, for ten to fifteen year old girls, in the home, requiring only a bedroom and a record player and permission to invite friends; but in this capacity it might offer an opportunity for girls to take part in a quasisexual ritual (it is important to remember that girls have no access to the masturbatory rituals common amongst boys). The culture also offers a chance for both private and public manifestations – the postered bedroom or the rock concert. (b) Teeny Bopper culture is sufficiently flexible to allow anybody to join; it does not operate any exclusion rules or qualification on entry – thus differing greatly from the girls’ school environment, where participation in certain activities demands a fair degree of competence and money. (c) There are no risks involving personal humiliation or degradation, no chance of being stood up or bombed out. Some Teeny Bopper girls we have talked to show a remarkable awareness of the fact that boys are all out for ‘the one thing’, and that girls lose all the way along in that game. Involvement in Teeny Bopper culture, then, can be seen as a kind of defensive retreat away from the possibility of being sexually labelled, but also as displaying a high degree of self-sufficiency within the various small female groupings; ‘we have a great laugh with the girls’. (d) The obsession with particular stars, Donny Osmond etc., can be viewed as a meaningful reaction against the selective and authoritarian structures which control the girls’ lives at school. That is, ‘obsessions’ can be a mean of alienating the teacher, and, if shared, can offer a defensive solidarity, especially for those who are conscious of themselves as being academic failures. While there may certainly be elements in Teeny Bopper culture which enable girls to negotiate a space of their own, it has also to be said that the relationship between the girls and the idols conjured up, and, as far as one can tell, reciprocated, is suffused with fantasy
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elements – the displacement – and to some degree de-sexualising of what are patently commercial and sexually-manipulative icons of the Teeny Bopper market. Here the element of fantasisation and fetishisation which is present, at all times, to some degree in the heavy involvement – boys and girls – with the ‘presentational images of commercial pop culture’, is raised to a peculiarly high and powerfully charged pitch. There seems little doubt that the fantasy relationships which characterise this resistance depend for their very existence on the subordinate, adoring female in awe of the male on a pedestal. The culture also tends to anticipate the form of future ‘real’ relationships, and in so far as these are articulated in the magazine articles and stories, directs the girls hopefully towards romance and eventually an idealised version of marriage. All the way through the Teeny Bopper spectrum then, the dialectic is, as it were, tighter. The small, structured and highly manufactured space that is available for ten to fifteen year old girls to create a personal and autonomous area seems to be offered only on the understanding that these strategies also symbolise a future general subordination – as well as a present one.
Conclusion Our focus in this piece, then, has been one which tends to move away from the sub-cultural group phenomena simply because, in our view, the sub-cultural group may not be the most likely place where those equivalent rituals, responses and negotiations will be located. We feel that when the dimension of sexuality is included in the study of youth subcultures, girls can be seen to be negotiating a different space, offering a different type of resistance to what can at least in part be viewed as their sexual subordination. So, although it could be the case that female youth culture corresponds, in form if not in activities to non-sub-cultural male groupings, comprising of anything from five to ten boys who ‘hang around together’, we would tend to agree with Jules Henry who, describing the American teenage experience, points out that: As they grow towards adolescence, girls do not need groups, as a matter of fact for many of the things they do, more than two would be an obstacle. Boys flock; girls seldom get together in groups above four whereas for boys a group of four is almost useless. Boys are dependent on masculine solidarity within a relatively large group. In boys’ groups the emphasis is on masculine unity; in girls cliques the purpose is to shut out other girls. (1963) We would add that girl culture, from our preliminary investigations, is so well insulated as to operate to effectively exclude not only other ‘undesirable’ girls – but also boys, adults, teachers and researchers.3
Notes 1 See also the role played by girl ‘gang’ members – described by Patrick (1972) – in carrying weapons for male members to dance halls, etc., and in providing support for them against the police after incidents. 2 This quotation is taken from a series of interviews currently being carried out among fourteen-yearold girls in a Birmingham Youth Centre. 3 The girls we have spoken to at the Birmingham Youth Centre constantly make jokes among themselves for the sole purpose of confusing or misleading the researcher who may well be infringing on
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their territory by asking personal questions, or whose presence at the weekly disco they resent. For example, one group of three fourteen-year-olds explained to us that the fourth member of their ‘gang’ had male genitals. The ‘joke’ lasted for about ten minutes with such seriousness that we were quite convinced until one of the girls said ‘Dickie’ came from Middlesex. The girls shrieked with laughter and the interview came to a halt.
15 Defending ski-jumpers A critique of theories of youth sub-cultures Gary Clarke
Introduction Pop music can be a force of either the most unmitigated idiocy or of extraordinary emancipation, but as a very young, highly exploitative and very fluid branch of modern capitalism it offers unique chances. There is certainly a delicious vulgarity, infuriating megalomania, desperate clamour for glamour, and a bewildering style. But over the last five years since the punk explosion and the international recognition of reggae music, beneath all the crap a surprisingly high proportion of the music has aimed at educating rather than anaesthetising the senses – in illuminating rather than obscuring reality, in heightening awareness rather than promoting stupidity . . . There have also been depressing band waggons of near-rapist heavy metal music, vogues for arty nihilism and the current phase of military flippancy, elaborate hair-dos and pseudo-Latin vocalists keener on getting down and boogying than standing up and fighting. (Widgery, 1981, pp. 36–37, my emphasis) Since its publication, the new sub-cultural theory contained in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ collection Resistance Through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson, 1976) has more or less become a new orthodoxy on youth. The collection and its near-relatives and spin-offs (e.g. Mungham and Pearson, 1976; Willis, 1978; Hebdige, 1979) are firmly established on course reading lists1 at a time when youth has become a major focal concern of the state and of parties across the political spectrum. To a large extent, the acceptance of the literature and its acclaim are justified: the authors realistically outline the lived experience of post-war working-class youth sub-cultures in a sympathetic manner which was hitherto unknown. However, the approach has not been without its critics – many of whom are covered in this paper. Overall, this paper seeks to assess the value of sub-cultural theory especially in the light of recent developments among youth in the midst of a crisis in British capitalism. In particular, I shall conclude by questioning the value of decoding the stylistic appearances of particular tribes during a period in which young adults are the prime victims of a state policy of manufactured unemployment. I shall argue that a politics of youth or an analysis based on the signifying power of selected youth groups is especially inappropriate at the present.2 If particular youth cultural styles once possessed a subversive defiance, they have been severely disfigured, dis-coded we might say, since the punk ‘explosion’. The wardrobes of post-war styles have been exhumed, re-adapted and re-adopted in a way which makes conventional sub-cultural analysis virtually impossible. We need to focus on what-working class youths actually do and what the appropriation of particular clothing means to youths themselves in these activities.
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The time has come to turn our eyes away from the stylistic art of a few – however interesting this may initially seem to be.
The search for resistance: origins and limits Resistance Through Rituals emerged at a particular moment as a condensation of particular intellectual and political trends and I would argue that this defining moment overdetermined the authors’ approach. The forces and considerations of the early 1970s imposed severe limitations and restrictions upon the project, evident, not least, in the admitted neglect of ‘straight’ working-class youth. Primarily, the project was written as an attempt to produce a politicised and more sophisticated version of labelling theory – a perspective on the sociology of deviance which emerged from the work of Howard Becker and was developed at the National Deviancy Conferences of the late 1960s (Becker, 1963; Cohen, 1971 and 1973; Young, 1972; Taylor and Taylor, 1973). Labelling and interactionist theory quite radically permitted a sympathy for the oppressed by suggesting that deviance is a social creation; the result of the power of ‘moral entrepreneurs’ to label others as deviant rather than inherently deviant or criminal acts. By developing concepts and theories such as deviancy amplification and the differential application of labels, and by exploring the socially and historically relative nature of deviance, labelling theorists shifted the emphasis away from essentially deviant actors to those with the power to label. This opened up the possibility of a ‘New Criminology’ (e.g. Taylor, Walton and Young, 1973). Marxist theory of crime within the New Left, However, the resulting raid on the indexes for Marx’s own references to crime remained unproductive and was restricted to attempts to revitalise Marx’s discussions of the lumpenproletariat. Unfortunately, the logical move, a synthesis of labelling theory with a theory of the capitalist state did not occur due to the theoretical insecurity in this area.3 In the absence of a coherent stance on the relationship between base and superstructure such a fusion seems even more unlikely today and the potential uses of labelling theory have been lost – particularly since the development of the work on sub-cultures. The major problem with the labelling approach lay in its inability to explain ‘primary deviance’ – the initial acts or gestures which are singled out and in turn go through the circuit of labelling, moral panic and amplification. This absence provided the starting point for the emergence of the new sub-cultural theory contained in the Resistance . . . collection. The seminal paper by Phil Cohen (Cohen, WPCS, No. 2) and the subsequent work of the CCCS sub-culturalists defined the project as an attempt to explain this primary deviance through a specific analysis of the genesis of working-class youth sub-cultures in terms of their structural and cultural origins. This concern for the genesis of subcultures, combined with an emphasis on style as their sole defining feature, effected the character of the analysis of youth in Resistance and in the subsequent work. The authors themselves admit that their analysis restricts them to the spectacular post-war sub-cultures, but they never fully explore the implications of this. I would like to argue that the concern for the frozen moment in which styles are born restricts the resulting politics of youth to a flashpoint of symbolic rebellion – usually within the metropolitan Garden of Eden. Consequently, the authors (and certain sectors of the left) remain exclusively concerned with the few ‘authentic’ (and usually male) members of selected sub-cultures who are counterposed against what is presumed to be an undifferentiated ‘normalcy’ or ‘straightness’ among the vast majority of working-class youth. The absence of a concern for styles outside the moment of their first assemblage, for the way that
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the styles become popular and are continually reassembled, means that unfortunately the concern for working-class youth has become all too often conflated with a concern for a few. These are the few who make it into the Sunday magazines or the coffee-table compendiums on ‘style’. Nevertheless, the authors are sympathetic to the lived experiences of those working-class youth chosen for ‘decoding’. The literature certainly represents a major step forward, especially when compared with the debates of that time. In Marxism Today, for example, John Green (Green, 1974) dismissed a concern for youth as a diversion since it divided the working class, Meanwhile, John Boyd went so far as to suggest: ‘youth-revolt’ and its cultural offspring is someone else’s girlfriend whose father is Uncle Sam and current guardian is John Bull. Boyd, 1973 The uniqueness of Resistance Through Rituals lay in its break from such limited conceptions of culture. It was an early expression of a continuing project at the Centre based around Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (Gramsci, 1971). Culture was seen as central to the understanding of domination, reproduction and change in the social formation. Cultures were an aspect of the state of play between the various agencies in the state and civil society, especially a dimension of relations of force between classes. Hegemony was not the simple radiation or imposition of ideologies from above, from a ruling group, bloc or class (or even from Uncle Sam!). The winning of consent involved struggle, and hegemony referred only to a temporary balance of forces, which was inherently unstable. It’s only when consent is won and the dominant culture is able to represent itself as the culture, that the rule of the dominant class or bloc appears as natural, normal and eternal. According to the authors of Resistance . . . the political significance of the rituals of youth sub-cultures lies in their ability to resist, to win and create ‘cultural space’, to negotiate and burrow spaces and gaps within the hegemony. Alternatively, in the case of Hebdige (Hebdige, 1979) sub-cultural styles are evaluated on the basis of their power to shock, to present a challenge to the normalcy and naturalness of ‘common sense mystifications’.4 The value of discussing working-class youth in terms of such ‘symbolic resistance’ by sub-cultures will be discussed throughout this paper. Resistance . . . also emerged in parallel with earlier attempts by social historians to produce ‘a view from below’; to defend working-class culture historically (e.g. Hobsbawm, 1959; E.P. Thompson, 1963; and see the discussion in Johnson, 1979). Hence, the authors sketch continuities between the working class of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the activities of post-war youth through drawing, in particular, on Hobsbawm’s concept of ‘primitive rebellion’. Indeed, one strand in the Centre’s work seeks to develop a theoretically informed history of the working class since the mid-nineteenth century – in other words the point where E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class breaks off. This concern to re-assert class was still politically important even in the early 1970s. It was important to break the myth of classlessness rooted in the persistence of ideologies of embourgoisement and affluence.5 However, in the rush to re-assert class as the central structural feature of society, considerations of gender and race were reduced to footnotes and any consideration of the specificity of youth in structural terms was lost. If anything, the specificities of youth in the essays seems to be in their consumption patterns – hence perpetuating the 1950s myth of the young only as consumers. Finally, I would like to argue that the new sub-cultural theory was itself conceived during
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a particular moment in the history of sub-cultures. Angela McRobbie (McRobbie, 1980) has already noted the authors’ silences as regards their motives behind an interest in speeding mods or the drug-taking habits of hippies. Certainly Hebdige seems to possess a literally fantastic awe for both the Mods and the ‘negro cool’ of the black hipster stereotype (Hebdige, 1979 and in Hall and Jefferson, 1976). Similarly, Paul Willis bears a strong admiration for the ‘profane culture’ of the bikers and Hippies (Willis, 1978a). However, I would argue that the search for potentially subversive sub-cultural elements among working-class youth was determined by a mood of despondency and disappointment with the forms of politics arising out of the ‘1968 generation’ and the relative weakness of recognisably political resistance in the early 1970s. The collapse of the utopian dream blueprinted in OZ and elsewhere, combined with the failure of student radicalism, led many left academics to search for other groups pursuing a similar alternative life-style as themselves, particularly where elements of prefigurative class consciousness may have been present. As McRobbie has claimed: The writers, having defined themselves as against the family and the trap of romance as well as against the boredom of meaningless labour, seem to be drawn to look at other, largely working-class groups who appear to be doing the same thing. McRobbie, 1980 McRobbie quite rightly suggests that the New Left’s hostility to the family (and the sociology of the family) and ‘bourgeois’ commitments to children explains why the family, girls and domestic life are absent in the literature on youth. I would go further and suggest that the hostility to ‘meaningless labour’ led to a consideration of youth only in terms of leisure and that the search for alternative forms of resistance resulted not simply in the neglect but also a latent contempt for ‘straight’ working-class youth, defined as being wholly outside the subcultures discussed in the literature.
Sub-cultural resistance: main features of an approach In the previous chapter I argued that the new sub-cultural theory was overdetermined by its moment of inception. I would now like to examine the arguments in detail.6 The authors share the view that the distinct styles of post-war youth sub-cultures represent the collective expression of the shared lived experiences of youth in the social formation. As a consequence, youth sub-cultures are understood as problem-solving. They ‘magically resolve contradictions’ or make ‘imaginary transformations’. They provide a means of marking out territory or of winning ‘cultural space’. However, the sole defining feature of sub-cultures is taken to be their style. The few activities of working-class youth that are considered are only understood as an extension of the style or its collection of ‘homologous’ elements. Hence sub-cultures are seen as a highly structured hierarchy of artefacts and values which serve to differentiate a sub-culture from other sub-cultures, from the parent culture, and the wider society. Such styles are understood in terms of their ‘bricolage’7 their ability to appropriate, re-order and recontextualise objects to create and communicate ‘fresh meanings. So, each sub-culture is seen as an assemblage of different objects, meanings and signs which, according to the authors, provide both a resolution for youth and display a form of symbolic resistance. Great emphasis is placed on the ‘relative autonomy’ of youth from the market in order to stress the creativity, ‘art’ and ‘culture’ of the sub-cultures evident in their ability to borrow and transform ‘everyday objects’ or ‘objects of
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fashion’ into a coded style. Examples include the Teds’ appropriation of the Edwardian suit ( Jefferson in Hall and Jefferson, 1976), the Skins’ appropriation of proletarian work clothes (Clarke in Hall and Jefferson, 1976), or the Punks’ borrowing of clothes pegs and safety pins (Hebdige, 1979). These assemblages are in turn ‘decoded’ by the authors. However, authors differ in their interpretations of the relevance of style. Mike Brake, for example, reads sub-cultures primarily in psychological terms: Sub-cultures arise as attempts to resolve collectively experienced problems arising from contradictions in the social structure and (that) they generate a form of collective identity outside that ascribed by class, education and occupation. This is nearly always a temporary solution, and in no sense is a real material solution, but one which is solved at a cultural level. Brake, 1980, p. vii Aside from what is meant by the ‘cultural level’,8 I find vague discussions of youth in terms of ‘identity’ far too problematic. To some extent, such a view is latent in Resistance . . ., and all too often the underlying psychology, be it in terms of individual or collective identities, is never fully explained or brought to the surface. Brake asserts that ‘Young people need an identity which separates them from the expectations and roles imposed upon them by family, school and work’, although he is not clear exactly why this identity is needed. In the last instance, his argument rests upon the generation theories of Parsons and Eisenstadt (Eisenstadt, 1956; Parsons, 1954); sub-cultural styles are seen as a solution to the status deprivation associated with the period of transition between school and work and between families. Style is read as a means of developing a self and a status identity, so that it becomes ‘an objective statement about the actor’s relationship to the world’. I would like to ask how does this identity relate to the identities supposedly imposed elsewhere?9 Brake seems to be suggesting that the concept of ‘youth’ is an identity which is developed in the sphere of leisure. I would argue, on the contrary, that ‘youth’ is a category, involving a specific set of social relations, which is constructed (in racially and genderspecific ways) in the various sites of home, work, school, law, social security offices and other areas of state policy. Youth is a category which has been redefined throughout history, and cannot be seen in the simple terms of Brake – it is far more contradictory. For example, ‘youth’ is not simply a phenomenon which is celebrated in ‘youth culture’; simultaneously, and in contradiction, the very rituals which celebrate youthfulness also resist that very identity. Young people, through their activities – sexual relations, smoking, drinking, staying up late, resisting school etc. – strive to reach adulthood, the stage at which the second-class citizenship of being ‘treated like a child’ can be overcome.10 An examination of youth in terms of this contradiction is urgently required, especially at a time of deepening youthful dependency. Like Brake, the authors of Resistance explain the emergence of particular youthstyles in terms of their capacity for problem solving. Phil Cohen’s ‘Subcultural Conflict and the Working Class Community’ (Cohen, WPCS. No. 2) set the pace and most of the Centre’s analyses are based on an amplification of the ideas, and consequently the problems, in Cohen’s paper. Cohen’s complex analysis takes into account the full interplay of economic, ideological and ‘cultural’ factors which give rise to sub-cultures. In particular, the connections between parent and youth cultures are dealt with in a manner far more sophisticated than in Brake. Sub-cultures are seen as:
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. . . a compromise solution between two contradictory needs: the need to create and express autonomy and difference from parents . . . and the need to maintain . . . parental identification . . . ibid., p. 26 Cohen explains the development of sub-cultures on the basis of the redevelopment and reconstruction of the East End of London which resulted in the fragmentation and disruption of the working-class family, economy and community-based culture. He suggests that the sub-cultures among working-class youth emerged as an attempt to resolve these experiences: . . . the latent function of subcultures is . . . to express and resolve albeit ‘magically’, the contradictions which remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture. The succession of subcultures which the parent culture generated can thus all be considered as so many variations on a central theme – the contradiction, at an ideological level between traditional working class puritanism, and the new hedonism of consumption; at an economic level between a future as part of the socially mobile elite or as part of the new lumpen. Mods, Parkers (sic), skinheads, crombies, all represent, in their different ways, an attempt to retrieve some of the socially cohensive elements destroyed in the parent culture, and to combine this with elements selected from other class factions, symbolising one or other of the options confronting it. ibid., p. 23 Sub-cultures are seen as collective solutions to collectively experienced problems. Mods are seen to correspond to and subsequently construct a parody of, the upwardly mobile solution (Hebdige in Hall and Jefferson, 1976), while Skinheads are read as an attempt to magically recover the chauvinisms of the ‘traditional’ working-class community. However, Cohen (and adherents) are imprecise as regards the necessity of a correspondence between actual structural location and the problem-solving option. Is it possible, say, to have an upwardly mobile Skinhead? We are given little explanation of how and why the class experiences of youth crystallise into a distinct sub-culture. The possible constituency of a new style is outlined, but where do the styles come from? (For example, who designed the first fluorescent pink or leopardskin drape suite?) How do we analytically leap from the desire for a solution to the adoption of a particular style? This is a significant problem when it seems that both skins and teds seek to revive and defend the ‘traditional’ working-class community, but through different styles. Further, since any discussion of life chances is regarded as a ‘Weberian deviation’, we are given no clues for explaining the different degrees of commitment to a sub-culture other than through some neo-positivist reference to the extent of the problems which stimulate its emergence. One consequence of these absences is that the sub-cultures of Resistance are strangely abstract, non-contradictory and ‘pure’. They are the abstract essences of sub-cultures. They are also, as Chris Waters has argued, quite static and rigid anthropological entities. (Waters, 1981). There is an uncomfortable absence in the literature of any discussion as to how and with what consequences the pure sub-cultures are sustained, transformed, appropriated, disfigured or destroyed. It is also extremely difficult to consider the individual life trajectories of youth within the model laid down by Cohen. If each sub-culture is a specific problemsolving option, how are we to understand the way individuals move in and out of different sub-cultures? Cohen, for example, classifies Crombies and Parkes as distinct sub-cultures but
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wasn’t the only ‘problem’ which distinguished them respectively from skins and mods the need to keep warm? It may be that the immediate source of the abstractness of Resistance’s subcultures was the absence or weakness of its field work, but there are theoretical reasons too. The fundamental problem with Cohenite sub-cultural analysis is that it takes the card-carrying members of spectacular sub-cultures as its starting point, and then teleologically works backwards to uncover the class situation and detect the specific set of contradictions which produced the corresponding styles. This can lead to the dangerous assumption that all those in a specific class location are members of the corresponding subculture and that all members of a subculture are in the same class location. A basic problem is that the elements of youth culture (music, dancing, clothes etc.) are not only enjoyed by the fully paid-up members of sub-cultures. If we reverse the methodological procedure adopted by the Centre and start with an analysis of the social relations based around class, gender and race (and age), rather than their stylistic products, we can commence an examination of the whole range of options, modes of negotiation or ‘magical resolution’ that are open to, and used by working-class youth as well as the limitations of access and opportunity. Such an approach would require a break from the authors’ paradigm of examining the ‘authentic’ subcultures in a rather synthetic moment of frozen historical time. Any empirical analysis would reveal that sub-cultures are diffuse, diluted and mongrelised in form. For example, certain skins may assert values of ‘smartness’ which are considered by the authors to be restricted to the Mods. The anthropological analysis of unique subcultures means that descriptions of the processes by which they are sustained, transformed and interwoven are absent. Similarly, the elitist nature of the analysis (that is, the focus on ‘originals’) means that we are given no sense of how and why the styles became popular and how and why they eventually cease to be in vogue other than through a simplistic discussion of the corruption and incorporation of the original style. By focussing on sub-cultures at their innovatory moment the authors are able to make elaborate and generalised readings of the symbols from a few scant observations of styles and artefacts. Consequently youth sub-cultures are seen not simply as ‘imaginary solutions’ but also as symbolic resistance, counter-hegemonic struggle or a defence of cultural space on a ‘relatively autonomous’ ideological level. For example Hebdige considers the Mods to have created a magical yet temporary victory: The style they created therefore, constituted a parody of the consumer society in which they were situated. The mod dealt his blows by inverting and distorting the images (of neatness of short hair) so cherished by his employers and parents, to create a style, which while being overtly close to the straight world was nonetheless incomprehensible to it. Hebdige in Hall and Jefferson, 1976, p. 93 Similarly, the Teds’ reworking of the Edwardian dress is seen as a reassertion of traditional working-class values in the face of affluence (Jefferson in Hall and Jefferson, 1976) and the model-worker image of the skins is interpreted as part of a symbolic return to the ‘traditional’ working-class community (Clarke in Hall and Jefferson, 1976). Some elements in the paradigm developed in Resistance Through Rituals have more recently been taken to extremes in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, in which Dick Hebdige presents a detailed analysis of post-war subcultures.11 Hebdige is the theorist of style and sub-culture par excellence. He wheels in the entire left-offield band of gurus of art, literature, linguistics and semiology ‘to tease out the meanings
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embedded in the various post-war youth styles’. Springing from the art-school tradition himself, Hebdige prioritises the creativity of sub-cultures, their ‘art’, ‘aesthetics’, the ‘signs of forbidden identity’ contained in the styles. The secret lies in the ‘bricolage’ of sub-cultures, in their ability to create meaning and transform ‘everyday objects’, as if they were a walking Andy Warhol exhibition. Since Hebdige’s problematic is to witness and understand the transformative moment in which new meanings are created, (in the same way that the Resistance . . . project was set up to understand the emergence of deviant values) the resultant ‘semiotic guerilla warfare’ is restricted to a flashpoint of rebellion. This is necessary by definition in Hebdige since it seems that the symbolic potency of a style rests entirely upon the innovatory and unique nature of a sub-cultures’ appearance.12 Hence, for all the discussions of ‘the subversive implications of style . . . the idea of style as a form of refusal . . . a gesture of defiance or contempt’, when it all boils down, the power of subcultures is a temporary ‘power to disfigure’. The politics of youth are not only restricted to a consideration of the symbolic power of style, but also, this is confined to the moment of innovation, since as we shall see, stylistic configurations soon lose their shock potential in Hebdige’s analysis. But what is the symbolic power of style in Hebdige’s analysis? Quite simply it is a case of ‘shocking the straights’. The power of sub-cultures is their capacity to symbolise ‘Otherness’ among an undifferentiated, un-theorised and contemptable ‘general public’. Sub-cultures warn the straight world in advance of a sinister presence – the presence of difference – and draw down upon themselves vague suspicions, uneasy laughter, ‘white and dumb rages’ Hebdige, 1979, pp. 2–3 This false dichotomy between sub-cultures and an undifferentiated ‘general public’ lies at the heart of sub-cultural theory. The readings of sub-cultural style are based on a necessary consideration of sub-cultures at a level of abstraction which fails to consider sub-cultural flux and the dynamic nature of styles; secondly, and as a result, the theory rests upon a view of the rest of society as straight, incorporated in a consensus and willing undividedly to scream loud in any moral panic. Finally the analysis of sub-culture is posited upon the elevation of the vague concept of style to the status of an objective category. In Subculture the degree of ‘blackness’ of a sub-culture provides the yardstick, but generally, the basic consideration is (like the old song) ‘You either have or you haven’t got style’. Such a dichotomy between the public or straights and the sub-cultures (even if it is not always explicit) is extremely surprising particularly in the light of the Centre’s appropriation of Gramsci (Hall, Lumley, McLennan in CCCS, 1978). However, I wish to argue that in Hebdige’s case, the straight-sub-culture divide is premised upon a misreading of the concept of ‘common sense’. He quite categorically argues that ideology is not the same as false consciousness (Hebdige, 1979, p. 12). In the use of the term ‘common sense’, however, and in the treatment of the working-class ‘straight’ culture, he constantly counterposes the stylists as possessing an (albeit inarticulate) creative and radical consciousness, while ‘the public’ are drowning in ‘mythologies’ and suffocated by the Daily Mirror. Despite the inclusion of the theoretical equivalents of 12-inch import disco mixes to supplement the analysis, he fails to comprehend the nature of working-class culture (which is rooted in a highly contradictory ‘common sense’) except as a form of imposed false consciousness. As he puts it, ‘representations . . . are shrouded in a ‘common sense’ which simultaneously validates and mystifies
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them’ (Hebdige, 1979, p. 13). Consequently references to ‘straight’ working-class culture conflate ‘normalcy’ and common sense. The working class are presumably locked in to a subordinate acceptance of capitalist social relations and possess a bland culture of normalcy and naturalness. For Hebdige this is reflected in the very absence of style in their attire. The clothes of these undifferentiated normals ‘masquerade as nature’. Further, Each ensemble has its place in an internal system of differences – the conventional modes of sartorial discourse – which fit a corresponding set of socially prescribed roles and options . . . Ultimately, if nothing else, they are expressive of ‘normality’ as opposed to ‘deviance’ (i.e. they are distinguished by their relative invisibility, their appropriateness, their ‘naturalness’). Hebdige, 1979, p. 101 This presentation of normal and sub-cultural styles as necessarily approved is clearly rooted in the failure to examine the ways in which styles are dynamic and diffuse. However, holding this dichotomy is a necessary part of Hebdige’s analysis if he is to suggest that sub-cultures are to signify ‘the Other’ and subvert naturalness through ‘bricolage’. The uncreative, bland and incorporated nature of working-class common-sense culture is consequently necessarily (and wrongly) overstated. As Gramsci suggests, common-sense culture is highly contradictory. It contains the sedimentation of previous philosophies and is rooted in practical activity. It is not simply a form of mystification or ideological snow which falls from above. The crucial concept is that of ‘good sense’ which requires closer attention – particularly if the current trend towards derogatory uses of common-sense (or its conflation with false consciousness) is to be halted. As we need to be reminded: the healthy nucleus that exists in ‘common sense’, the part of it which can be called ‘good sense’ . . . which deserves to be made more unitary and coherent. So it appears that here again it is not possible to separate what is known as ‘scientific’ philosophy from the common and popular philosophy which is only a fragmentary collection of ideas and opinions.13 Gramsci, 1971, p. 328
The punky reggae party: Hebdige on punk and race The most intriguing part of Hebdige’s Subculture . . . lies in his break from an exclusive emphasis on class to assert the centrality of race in sub-cultural formations. After a convincing and sympathetic outline of black cultural forms, Hebdige suggests that youth sub-cultures provide a ‘phantom history of race relations since the war’ (Hebdige, 1979, p. 45). I shall return to this, but firstly I wish to begin by examining punk since it is central in the thesis. Hebdige’s analysis of punk is unique since it breaks from the theoretical tradition laid down by Phil Cohen. Rather than being seen as an attempt to retrieve elements of the parent culture in the light of the restructuring of the working-class community, the punks seem to be parodying the alienation and emptiness which have caused sociologists so much concern . . . ibid., p. 79
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This is achieved by, celebrating in mock-heroic terms the death of the community and the collapse of traditional forms of meaning ibid., p. 29 Thus, the cartoon characteristics of punk, the bondage trousers, ripped and zipped shirts, the safety pins, the leathers, the S & M clothing so vividly described by Hebdige, are seen as a parody of the poverty and the crisis which had been represented in the media. In doing so, Punk reproduced the entire sartorial history of post-war working-class youth culture in ‘cut-up’ form, combining elements which had originally belonged to completely different epochs. ibid., p. 26 This reading of the ‘Anarchy-in-the-UK’ aspect of punk is, it seems to me, fairly accurate and is well-documented by Hebdige. However, I would like to raise some objections. Firstly, Hebdige only concerns himself with the innovative punks, the original, ‘authentic’ and ‘genuine’ punks concentrated in the London area. This is characteristic of most of the Centre’s sub-cultural theory – it usually explains why certain youths develop a particular style say, in the East End, but youth sub-cultures elsewhere are usually dismissed as part of the incorporation and containment of subversive implications of that style. We are never given reasons why youths ‘in the sticks’ are inclined to adopt a particular style. Hebdige’s analysis of punk begins with a heatwave in Oxford Street and ends in a Kings Road boutique. This metropolitan-centredness contradicts Hebdige’s emphasis on creativity since most of the punk creations that are discussed were developed among the art-school avant-garde, rather than emanating ‘from the dance halls and housing estates’. Hebdige’s vision of punk is extremely elitist; despite the proletarian stance of punk (constantly emphasised by Hebdige), the concern is typically for the ‘art’ of the innovators: This is not to say, of course, that all punks were equally aware of the disjunction between experience and signification upon which the whole style was ultimately based. The style no doubt made sense for the first wave of self-conscious innovators at a level which remained inaccessible to those who became punks after the subculture had surfaced and been publicized. Punk is not unique in this, the distinction between originals and hangers-on is always a significant one in subculture. ibid., p. 122 I would like to ask for whom this distinction is significant? Certainly most punks would have liked to have been one of the few regulars at the Roxy or the 100 Club in the early days of punk. However, I feel that accepting this distinction between ‘the faces’ (the term for the elite Mods) and what Hebdige terms, ‘the unimaginative majority’ in each sub-culture is highly problematic. I cannot accept style as an objective category to be measured implicitly, by bona fide stylistic critics. The originals/hangers-on distinction is particularly problematic when there is no discussion of the restrictions on access and opportunity to become an authentic member of a sub-culture. Such questions are of great relevance in considering the relationship of girls to sub-cultures and the possible effects the recession may have on youth styles.
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But what of the readings or decoding of these authentic sub-cultures? Hebdige admits, with some pathos, that it is highly unlikely . . . that the members of any of the subcultures described in this book would recognise themselves reflected here. ibid., p. 139 I would suggest that this is largely due to the failure to examine how sub-cultures make sense to the members themselves – a project which Hebdige sets up but never achieves. Indeed this would require Hebdige to enter a different terrain. By defining sub-cultures in terms of their style and symbolic power, many analysists of sub-cultures elevate themselves (and not the youths themselves) to the privileged position of expert semiologists, those able to read the signs, to ‘decipher the graffiti, to tease out the meanings’. This eliminates any question of intent, any consideration that the members of a sub-culture are knowing subjects. Rather than taking the meaning which style has for youths as the starting point, the self-images of youth are explicitly denied. If we were to go further still and describe punk music as the ‘sound of the Westway’, or the pogo as the ‘high-rise leap’, or to talk of bondage as reflecting the narrow options of working-class youth, we would be treading on less certain ground, Such meanings are both too literal and too conjectural. They are extrapolations from the subcultures own prodigious rhetoric, and rhetoric is not self-explanatory: it may say what it means but it does not necessarily ‘mean’ what it ‘says’. In other words, it is opaque: its categories are part of its publicity. ibid., p. 115, my emphasis Thus, we can only assume that sub-cultures are only allowed to speak through their clothes. Earlier and more crudely, Phil Cohen drew on linguistics to make a similar point: Delinquency can be seen as a form of communication about a situation of contradiction in which the ‘delinquent’ is trapped, but whose complexity is ex-communicated from his perceptions by virtue of the restricted linguistic code which working class culture makes available to him. Cohen, WPCS 2, p. 31 To return to punk, although Hebdige correctly chastises Taylor and Wall14 and produces an interesting analysis of the Bowie-ites, he makes the fatal faux-pas in (expertly) judging punk as a reaction to glam rock which ‘tended to alienate the majority of working class youth’. (Hebdige, 1979, p. 62). Glam consisted, in Hebdige’s eyes, of either contemptible Teeny Bop or the music and styles of Bowie, Lou Reed and Roxy Music, whose extreme foppishness, incipient elitism, and morbid pretensions to art and intellect effectively precluded the growth of a larger mass audience ibid., p. 62 This is simply wrong; glam rock did achieve a popular mass audience. Further, punk was not simply ‘proletarian’ in style; it drew heavily on the glam rock forms – particularly its use of make-up. Also several punk bands produced cover-versions of glam hits, Bowie remained popular with the punks, and Marc Bolan and Lou Reed contested for the title ‘Godfather of
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Punk’. In addition, rather than being ‘an attempt to expose glam rock’s implicit contradictions . . . an addendum designed to puncture glam rock’s extravagantly ornate style’ (ibid., p. 63), punk emerged via ‘pub rock’ as a response to the excesses of technobores’ among ‘pomp-rock’ and the ‘progressive scene’, against the Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Yes, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake and Palmers of the world and not a reaction to Alvin Stardust, Mud, Roxy Music and co. Let us now turn to the question of race. Hebdidge argues that youth sub-cultural styles represent a coded recording of race relations since each sub-culture can be interpreted as a symbolic adoption or rejection of the presence of black culture. Hence the hipsters, beats, Mods, early skins and punks can be seen as emulations and accomodations of black style while the later skins, glam rock and the Ted revival are seen as a retractions into a purely white culture, either out of ‘chauvinism’ or in response to an increasing black consciousness reflected in the politicisation of reggae music. Hebdige claims that the reader can either take or leave the ‘phantom history’ thesis. I would generally accept that stylistic links are evident (White rock and pop music for example in all its forms has constantly drawn on black musical forms), but as the thesis stands it has major problems. I would have preferred a much broader analysis of the impact of black culture on white working-class youth culture as a whole rather than taking connections with a few elite members of a white sub-culture as evidence. For example, a discussion of racism among the sub-cultures is particularly absent. Hebdige’s site of the ‘phantom history’, that of sub-cultural styles, has several notable absences; blackness is only understood to be expressed through early soul music and reggae while other elements of youth culture – particularly the long Hippie period – are missing. More significantly, Hebdige’s analysis forbids any analysis of the connection between black culture and the straights. To read Hebdige, soul music ended after the Mods (when for example, Tamla Motown has dominated turntables for over 20 years) and funk and disco music are something to be sneered at. Consequently, Hebdige fails to fulfil the potential of his analysis since he examines only select areas of articulation as opposed to the massified appropriations of black music.15 Hence he (wrongly) suggests that black and white links were absent during the early 1970s and that, Left to its own devices, pop tended to atrophy into vacuous disco-bounce and sugary ballads. (My emphasis) The problem is that Hebdige tends to equate black culture with Jamaican culture (hence Asians are particularly noted by their absence),16 a Jamaican culture which is unproblematically imported. Although he presents an excellent and sympathetic account of Rastafarianism, we are given no account of its transformation as it became a youth subculture. Further, Hebdige tends to equate reggae with the armagidion sound of the roots-rockers variety while there is no mention of the lighter ‘Lover’s rock’ which also fosters black solidarity and is particularly popular among black girls. Clearly, forms of nonRasta black culture require examination.17 Generally, Hebdige’s own accounts of the black/white nexus are far too tenuous and brittle and, of course, restricted to the level of style: For example, one of the characteristic punk hair-styles consisting of a petrified mane held in a state of vertical tension by means of vaseline, lacquer or soap, approximated to black ‘natty’ or dread-lock styles. Hebdige, 1979, p. 66
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Nevertheless, elements of black and white musical fusions cannot be denied although it should be noted that black culture is transformed when it is adopted by whites. For example the reggae of white bands like the Clash or the Police is not the same as that of say, Black Uhuru. However, since punk there have been conscious attempts to adopt black styles, as evident in the explicitly anti-racist stance of ‘Two-tone’ bands such as the Specials which unleashed the possibility of reggae and dub for white audiences, notably found in UB40. However, more recently, soul, disco, funk, latin and salsa have become the latest areas where rock and pop have appropriated black styles and it would be a mistake to see punky-reggae (predominant five years ago) as the only viable form of youth culture.18
Subcultures and working-class culture In this section I shall argue that, despite relying heavily on the work of Gramsci, an inadequate conception of working-class culture underlies sub-cultural theory. As I have already argued (Section 2), there is an uncomfortable absence of a satisfactory outline of ‘common sense’ as the basis of working-class culture, and this has in turn produced an overstated dichotomy between sub-cultures as static anthropological entities and an untheorised and undifferentiated ‘normally’ among the rest of the working class. As the Corrigan and Frith essay in Resistance suggests (Corrigan and Frith in Hall and Jefferson, 1976), we need to re-locate youth sub-cultures within working-class culture as a whole. In particular, I would argue that the relationship between youth and parent cultures requires a closer re-examination – particularly since ‘fashion’ styles often possess a cyclical history. For example the parent culture tends to adopt styles which were originally developed among youth cultures. In the case of punk, the subculture stimulated a move back to straight-legged trousers, smaller collars on shirts and shorter hair among ‘straights’ of all ages. In contradiction, youth sub-cultures draw upon styles from previous eras in the parent culture such as Oxford bags, flat-soled shoes, ties, gaberdine macs or the current trend in pedal pushers or knickerbockers, in order to define youth against the styles adopted by parents. Such paradoxical stylistic strategies have become more prominent as the appropriation of second-hand clothing has become more widespread. However, any future analysis of youth must transcend an exclusive focus on style. The Centre’s sub-culturalists were surely right to break away from a crude conception of class as an abstract relationship to the forces of production. However, sub-cultures are conceived as leisure-based careers (Hebdige, 1979, p. 195), and the ‘culture’ within ‘youth sub-culture’ is defined in terms of the possession of particular artefacts and styles rather than as a whole ‘way of life’, structured by the social relations based around class, gender, race and age. Consequently we are given little sense of what sub-cultural groups actually do, and we do not know whether their commitment is full time or just, say, a weekend phenomenon. We are given no sense of ages, income (or source of income), the occupations of the members of a subculture, or an explanation as to why some working-class youths do not join the subcultures discussed. Consequently the members of the sub-cultures are reduced to the status of dumb, anonymous mannequins incapable of producing their own meanings and awaiting the arrival of the code-breaker of their secret identity. Even if we accept that it is possible to read youth styles as a form of resistance, the Centre’s claims that sub-cultures ‘operate exclusively in the leisure sphere’ consequently mean that the institutional sites of hegemony – those of school, work and home – are ignored. Surely these are the sites in which any resistance is located and they need to be considered in order to examine the relationship between working-class youth and working-class culture in
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general. Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour presents such an analysis through an examination of boys’ resistance at school to explain the reproduction of a shop-floor culture of masculinity (Willis, 1978b).19 Unfortunately, Willis’ categories of ‘the lads’ and ‘the earoles’ tend to reproduce the dichotomy between deviant and ‘normal’ working-class youth which underlies the rest of the literature. Hence, ‘the lads’ are the focus of attention in the study, while the modes of negotiation (probably based around instrumentalism) adopted by ‘the earoles’ are ignored, since they are presumed to be unproblematically incorporated into state schooling. I wish to argue that, generally, the literature’s focus on the stylistic deviance of a few contains (albeit implicitly) a corresponding treatment of the rest of the working class as incorporated. This is evident, for example, in the distaste felt for youth deemed outside sub-cultural activity – even through most ‘straight’ working-class youths enjoy the same music, styles and activities as the sub-cultures. Such disdain is also evident for selected cults such as glam, disco and the Ted revival since they lack ‘authenticity’. Indeed, there seems to be an underlying contempt for ‘mass culture’ (which stimulates the interest in those who deviate from it) which stems back to the work of the Marxism of the Frankfurt School20 and, within the English tradition, to the fear of mass culture expressed in The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart, 1958). As Simon Frith has argued, the dichotomy reflects the assumption of the state, that youth is significant mainly as a problem of public order. Hence: Working class culture is divided into the ‘rough’ and the ‘respectable’, and the rough are seen as having most class consciousness. Thus youth’s street deviants, from Teds to skins, are taken to express working class values (even in the act of racial assault) while the majority of ‘ordinary’ teenagers are considered to have no positive political interest at all. Frith, 1981a I am not attempting to revive some crude argument that the emphasis on youth subcultures divides an essentially united working class. I merely wish to suggest that the ‘new’ sub-culture politics is simply an inversion of the Left’s previous stance. Rather than being seen as a diversion from the ‘historic destiny’ of the working class (or an expression of ‘false consciousness’) youth sub-cultures have been seen as the expression of the working class in struggle. Consequently, the sub-cultures are seen as non-contradictory, all sub-cultural styles are seen as subversive transformations, and youths’ activities are seen as empathetic forms of class expression, no matter how violent or racist they may be. Of course, the Centre’s use of the concept of ‘hegemony’ in the theoretical overviews, means that any accusation of understanding working-class cultures through an incorporation would be rejected as too simplistic. However, I wish to suggest that the richness of the theoretical chapters is lost in the ethnographies, in particular the sense of a general struggle involved in the winning of consent. Hegemony now appears as an imposed value consensus, reflected in stylistic normalcy.21 The treatment of post-war sub-cultures as the resisters and rupturers of hegemony or the only expression of the working class implies that the rest of the working class (especially girls) are locked in passivity. This is evident in the failure to examine youthful activities defined as ‘normal’, but I wish to argue that it is also evident in an ‘historicist’ treatment of working-class culture, and in the ways in which ‘the death’ of sub-cultures is understood. To some extent, what I shall term ‘historicism’ is rooted in the attempts to draw together cultural studies and social history – particularly the analysis of ‘primitive rebellion’. By historicism, I refer to the tendency for the analysis of youth to rest upon an essentialist
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conception of the working class (and its culture) which seems unchanged since the nineteenth century and is, to some extent, typified by the East End male. This has consequently resulted in romanticised accounts of working-class culture, classically found in Geoff Pearson’s discussion of the ‘paki-bashing’ skins as if they were the younger brothers of the Luddites and Chartists (Mungham and Pearson, 1978). I would agree with Stan Cohen’s suggestion that sub-cultural analysis posits resistance as the defence of an essential, leisurebased culture against simple, one-dimensional historical trends – the destruction of the community, the erosion of ‘traditional’ forms of leisure (such as the embourgoisement of football).22 This forms the backbone of the analyses. However, the Centre offers no explanation as to why the culture is so defensive and nostalgically conservative. Neither, unfortunately are we given any indication as to whether or not this culture continues when the community is disrupted and re-located within the new housing estates. Nevertheless, as Hebdige has recently argued,23 a form of cultural conservatism tends to pervade the working class as a whole – as evident in the rituals of the Labour movement. However, I would argue that we need to examine the forms of ‘popular memory’ which pervade society as a whole.24 The desire to return to a mythical past as a ‘magical resolution’ is not restricted to the skinhead sub-culture – particularly in the absence of left constructions of a future possible society.25 For example, the ‘Swing’ and ‘Gatsby’ revivals, popular among many working-class youths in the early 1970s, involved a magical return which has been hitherto ignored. Further, the Hippie movement constructed its own forms of nostalgia in Britain. I would, rather tentatively, suggest that this involved a conflation of a return to a whole-food pre-industrial age (see the work of bands such as Jethro Tull, Family, Stackridge, or folk rock bands such as Steeleye Span or Fairport Convention) with a return to a mythical Garden of Eden in a long Edwardian summer, complete with an assemblage of Victorian antiquaria, Sergeant Pepper, Lord Kitchener posters and other elements of a middle-class quintessential Englishness. Since the Hippies are absent in Hebdige’s ‘phantom history’, it would be interesting and rewarding to examine how this nostalgia combined with Eastern mysticism to produce a reaction to a black presence which would neatly fit into Hebdige’s theory. In any case, what I am arguing here is that assumptions about a workingclass past should be replaced by a developed understanding of the role of ‘memory’ within working-class culture as a whole, and, indeed, within the whole society. Let us now examine the treatment of the ‘incorporation’ of youth cultures: The death knell of a style in youth culture is its appropriation by younger age groups, ‘bubblegum’ groups, or its mass production by chain stores. This popularization means that the style has been robbed of its authenticity and its message. Another complication is separating the parttime and full-time adherents, separating the righteous from the poseurs. In a subculture with literary and artistic affiliations, there are core members at the centre of the culture, often creative artists, but followers and peripheral members who may adopt the lifestyle, or appearance, and who may or may not be perceived as ‘real’ members Brake, 1980, p. 72, my emphasis Each subculture moves through a cycle of resistance and defusion . . . subcultural deviance is simultaneously rendered ‘explicable’ and meaningless in the class-rooms, courts and media at the same time as the ‘secret’ objects of subcultural style are put on display in every high street record shop and chain-store boutique. Stripped of its unwholesome connotations, the style becomes fit for public consumption. Hebdige, 1979, p. 130, my emphasis
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As mentioned earlier, sub-cultural theory concerns itself with the original authentic members of a sub-culture and their creativity rather than how the styles become used among youth more generally. As I argued in Section 1, this was outside the original problematic of the literature. Major problems arise, however, where sub-cultural studies, focussing on the genesis of styles, are regarded as the study of youth per se, even of its cultural aspects. The above two quotes reveal the consequent logic of this conflation: the diffusion of a sub-cultural style is seen as the main reason for its loss of subversive power. Sub-cultures are brought back into line, rendered meaningless, ‘incorporated’ within the consensus, as their creativity is adopted by the ranks of the ‘artless’ working class. It is true that sub-cultures do lose their popularity but the discussions of the ‘incorporation’ of styles are inadequate for various reasons. Firstly, the ‘creativity’ of the initial members of a sub-culture is overstated and the ‘relative autonomy’ of youth from the market is inadequately theorised. Within the accounts, the ‘moment’ of creative assemblage is before the styles become commercially available. However the innovators usually have a firm stake in the commodity market themselves. For example, the partnership of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood has been central in manufacturing and selling both punk (‘Cash from chaos’ – McLaren) and the ‘Warrior-chic’ of the 1980s. If we are to speak of the creativity of working-class youth in their appropriations from the market, the movement from stylistic assemblage to marketing needs to be reversed. As Hebdige himself notes, ‘in the case of the punks, the media’s sighting of punk style virtually concided with the invention of punk deviance’. In the light of this, I can see little point in an analysis which worships the innovators, yet condemns those youth who appropriate the style, when it becomes a marketed product and is splashed across the Sun’s centre pages. Surely, if we are to focus on the symbolic refusal contained in items of clothing such as bondage trousers, we ought to find out when and how the style becomes available – either as a commodity or as an idea to be copied, for example, by attaching zips and straps to a pair of old school trousers. Any future analysis of youth should take this breakthrough of a style as its starting point and not as the end of the analysis. It is true that most youths do not enter into the subcultures in the elite forms, described in the literature. Large numbers do draw, however, on particular elements of sub-cultural styles and create their own meanings and uses from them. The concept of ‘bricolage’ does not simply apply to an exclusive few. Most youths (and adults) combine elements of clothing to create new meanings. If anything, what makes sub-cultures outstanding, is not the obviousness of their bricolage (which Hebdige argues). An examination of working-class youth will reveal that the forms of clothing adopted by the ‘normals’ involve the capturing of elements drawn from government surplus stores, sportswear (such as training shoes, track suits, rugger shirts, ‘Fred Perry’ tops, hunting jackets, rally jackets, flying suits, etc.), elements of sub-cultural style clothing appropriated from different eras via the second-hand clothing markets, and finally the mass market styles which themselves involve forms of recontextualised meaning, be it ski jumpers or work overalls. Obviously, girls are less free to experiment, but a closer examination is required since women’s fashion cannot be simply conflated with an unchanging cult of femininity. In particular, it may be possible for our semiologists to make detailed readings of the bricolage which passes off as ‘accessories’ in the fashion pages. If we are to consider the ‘symbolic refusals’ contained in items of clothing we should not only be concerned with reading the styles of sub-cultural mannequins during their leisure time while dismissing other styles as if they were as bland as the SDP. Instead we should focus on the diluted ‘semiotic guerilla warfare’ in particular sites: in particular, those of school, home and the workplace. This is evident, for example, in the stylistic disruptions of school uniform, the non-regulation jumper, earrings (on boys and girls) hair that is too long
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or too short, the trousers that are too wide, too straight or that should be a skirt, the shirt or blouse of an unacceptable colour or with a collar that is too short or long, the wearing of plimsoles in class and so forth. Similarly, a youth does not have to adopt the complete uniform of a subculture to be sent home from work or on training scheme, to annoy parents, to be labelled ‘un-masculine’ or ‘un-feminine’, to be refused service in a bar or cafe, to be moved on by the police and so forth. Clearly, the diffusion of styles cannot be classed as a simple de-fusing and incorporation of the signifying practice of an elite few; an entire library of ‘texts’ awaits our semiological readership – everywhere.
Girls and boys: romance and sexuality One out of every four people is Chinese but one out of every two people is a Nolan!26 The absence of girls in the literature on youth sub-cultures (due to the exclusive focus on immediately observable and spectacular styles) has rightly become the major critique of the approach (McRobbie, 1980; Frith, 1981 a & b). Since girls have not been regarded as part of the male street clans, they have been implicitly defined as being outside the working class. Hence, in Hebdige’s ‘phantom history’, the forms of resistance and the magical resolutions, transformations and nostalgic returns adopted by working-class girls, are conspicuously absent. In this section I seek to argue that any consideration of youth necessitates the centrality of gender relations within the analysis. ‘Doing Nothing’ is one of the most interesting essays in the Resistance . . . collection. (Corrigan in Hall & Jefferson, 1976). However, combined with the authors’ emphasis on style, the literature has taken ‘doing nothing’ far too literally and has consequently tended to ignore the activities of working-class youth. Corrigan’s account typically ignores girls and never raises the possibility that killing time in the streets and shopping centres, and the masculine rituals of violence and vandalism, may be purposively orientated towards initiating some kind of sexual encounter. (For example what is going on in the photograph on page 97 of Resistance?) Although I would tend to accept the arguments by feminists that the youth culture of working-class girls is over-determined by women’s subordination and the eventual prospect of marriage, the actual encounters between boys and girls or young men and women have not been adequately covered. Many of the feminist critiques have begun by nothing the absence of girls in the accounts of subcultures and consequently begun to theorise ‘girls’ world’ as a separate or marginal entity, when in fact gangs of girls do come into contact with gangs of boys. A conceptual and theoretical absence has been mistaken for a physical absence of girls from the cultural spaces of youth. Hence, girls are taken to be secluded within ‘bedroom culture’ interested only in ‘teenybop’, and only hit the streets on the way to a dance.27 Since girls are denied access to the sub-cultural solutions described in the literature, girls have been taken as absent or spatially separate, and denied an ‘authentic’ (sub-)cultural form. Consequently, sub-cultures are taken to be exclusively male (and rock is taken as a male phenomenon) since ‘the streets’ remain taboo for women since their presence is associated with prostitution. I do not wish to deny that the spectacular styles tend to be male-dominated (although the balance has been slightly redressed by punk), nor that girls have less room to experiment than boys; however, the absence of a discussion of sexual encounters means that the reproduction of marriage is not understood. How do we theoretically and conceptually leap from marriage as a fantasy in the pages of Jackie to actual marriages, if a discussion of courtship rituals is absent?
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Consequently the positive forms of negotiation and resistance that girls adopt in these courtship rituals are absent. For example, girls aren’t simply locked into romance. Engagements are broken, boys are ‘wound up’ or ‘chucked’, and men’s sexual advances are resisted and rejected. Clothing styles aren’t simply used as a form of attraction for boys and I would tentatively suggest that they may inspire confidence among women and play up men’s fear of failure. The forms of solidarity, sisterhood, mutual support and resistance that already exist among working-class girls require further explanation. Forms of ‘good sense’, resistance and negotiation require as much exposition as the detailed descriptions of oppression. Girls are selective in the choice of men they associate with and quickly acquire the skills needed to resist men: One respondent told me of how he went down a line of waiting girls to be brushed off with a crude ‘Piss off – Dracula!’28 I would tentatively suggest that a strong sense of solidarity and mutual support exists among working-class girls in response to the dangers posed by men or drinking too much. This is evident in the phenomenon of ‘Girls’ Night Out’ which stretches across all ages (women in factories tend to refer to themselves as ‘The Girls’) and usually takes place on quiet nights in midweek when there are fewer men about. The collective taxis home, dancing around circles of handbags, staying overnight at friends and the singalongs involved, all seem to indicate that an autonomous and supportive women’s culture already exists among the working class.29 Within the literature on sub-cultures, the focus on the signification of styles has meant that the uses of styles in gender relations have been swept under the carpet. For example in a typical put-down of the ‘straights’, Hebdige denies the sexuality of punks: Punk dances bore absolutely no relation to the desultory frugs and clinches . . . intrinsic to the respectable working class ritual of Saturday Night in the Top Rank or Mecca. Indeed, overt displays of heterosexual interest were generally regarded with contempt and suspicion (who let the BOF/Wimp in?) and conventional courtship patterns found no place on the floor in dances like pogo, the pose and the robot. Hebdige, 1979, p. 108 Considering the sexual symbolism of punk attire, I find this quote absurd. Further, the phrase ‘Boring Old Fart’ (BOF) does not refer to one’s sexuality but to one’s taste in music. Similarly, wimp does not only refer to ‘wetness’ (which Hebdige claims) but usually the term refers to inadequate masculinity. Also, like ‘gobbing’, the pogo was soon passé and became restricted to the few rows closest to the stage or to student parties, and, after all, the pose and the robot were ‘witnessed only at the most exclusive punk gatherings’. (My emphasis) An alternative approach to youth requires an examination of the meaning which youth culture has for the youth itself. The major problem facing working-class youth is how to kill time, yet I wish to suggest that ‘Doing Nothing’ usually involves complex rituals (such as the art of looking ‘coy’) and long apprenticeships in the art of courtship. Clothing styles require an examination not in terms of their semiotic value but in terms of their use in ‘doing nothing’. None of the authors consider the pleasure of ‘dressing up’ (a central feature of the working-class weekend or night out) or explain styles in terms of their power to attract more friends and acquaintances, to appear as ‘different’ (which is the explanation youths themselves tend to give) or to appear a more ‘interesting’ person. Consider the following:
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Such memories reveal the extent to which male sexuality involves pressures to adopt styles which have been hitherto seen as confined to women. It is likely that most working-class young men interpret their appropriation of styles and fashions (and peer group pressure to do so) in such a way. Sub-culture theory outlines the role of styles in formulating a ‘magical resolution of contradictions’31 However, in failing to examine the specificity of youth as a transitory stage, the most significant magical resolutions are ignored by the authors: here I refer to romance and marriage. As many mainstream sociologists recognised long ago,32 marriage is the principal means of ‘escape’ for working-class males and females. It provides a means of obtaining the physical, sexual and leisure space denied at home. It provides the independence which students take for granted. The significance of marriage and romance for girls has been adequately covered elsewhere33 although the reasons why boys marry has been ignored or has been seen as a purposive entry into ‘patriarchal’ marital relations. What I seek to argue is that the importance of romance and marriage within boy’s life trajectories requires consideration. Youth is a ‘site’ of cultural reproduction as much as a site of cultural struggle. Youth culture and styles require a re-examination in terms of their contributions to gender relations. As Frith (1981) has suggested, romance has been assumed to be aimed at women whereas the majority of pop songs are addressed to men: I’m sure that pop romance of all sorts means more to men than women. In youth culture it is the boys who draw the sharp distinction between ‘casual’ sex and ‘true’ love, who possess their partners with a special fervour. Girls’ fantasies are about babies, home-making; they have no illusions about husbands. Frith, 1981b, p. 153 This inversion of the orthodoxy on romance is challenging. Romance needs considering not only as a form ‘for’ women, but as a means through which men make sense of their relationships with women. Indeed, the male fantasy of man as protector and provider is central in men’s understanding of their relationships with their wives and crucial in the reproduction of culture. Consequently, male romance needs to be considered in relation to youth culture. As Frith suggests, we need to consider pop music in terms of the way in which it is appropriated and given meaning: Pop love songs don’t ‘reflect’ emotions but give people the romantic terms in which to articulate and so experience their emotions. ibid.
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The social use of pop songs lies in the way they ‘provide a conventional language for dating’. They are ‘useful for couples negotiating their own path through the stages of a relationships’ (ibid.) Songs can be used to deal with happiness, frustration or the end of a relationship, records can be dusted and played to bring back memories of a lost relationship or to remember the early stages of a relationship. Married couples tend to possess a piece of reflection in ‘our song’ played or requested on anniversaries and such, be it Flanagan and Allen’s ‘Underneath the Arches’, a Beatles ballad, or even ‘Anarchy in the UK’. Clearly, youth culture needs to be read as more than the soon-incorporated stylistic gestures of defiance of a few; future analysis needs to consider all youth in terms of the meanings attached to that culture and their relation to the reproduction of culture in society.
Conclusion: beyond a parody of the crisis This paper has argued that we need to move away from analysing youth in terms of the semiotic defiance of sub-cultural styles at their inception. I suggest that future research requires an examination of the meanings and uses the artefacts have for working-class youth within social relations – particularly sex-gender relations. Consequently, attention should be focussed on what youth actually do, such as hanging around chip shops, babysitting, part-time jobs etc., rather than ‘reading’ the stylistic nuances of a chosen sub-culture. Where styles are considered, the analysis should fully take into account their importance for working-class youth after what has been taken to be a moment of incorporation. As the recession deepens, and particularly since the riots of last summer, youth has become a metaphor for the crisis in the same way as it symbolised social change in the 1950s and 1960s.34 The political economy of youth is beyond the limitations of this paper although it is clear that youth is a crucial locus in the current restructuring of capital.35 I would like to conclude by examining the significance of what has been taken to be ‘youth culture’ in a period of crisis. Since working-class youth are now denied the sources of income which financed the spectacular subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s, a de-emphasis on style could be expected – the relative cheapness of the attire could explain the current popularity of skins. However, the removal of the restrictions imposed by wagelabour mean that youth is more free to experiment with dyed mohican haircuts or long, one-sided fringes. On the whole, the absolute distinction between sub-cultures and ‘straights’ is increasingly difficult to maintain: the current diversity of styles makes a mockery of sub-cultural analysis as it stands. Punk and Two-Tone had two very important consequences. Firstly, in disinterring the entire wardrobe of post-war styles, they ‘dis-coded’ or freed styles and greatly expanded the field of stylistic options among an increasingly self-reflexive and stylistically mobile youth. Since punk, virtually any combination of styles has become possible. To name but a few of the styles and subcultures which can be blended and diluted, there currently (autumn, 1981) exists: revivals of Skins and Mods and of Teds, Rude boys, Suedeheads, a psychedelic revival, Rockers (both the traditional type and the younger, denim-clad heavy metalists), Rastafarians, Soulheads (short-haired blacks), Disco, Ant-people, Northern Soul, Jazz-funkateers, Bowie-freaks, Punk (sub-divided into: Oi . . . ‘hardcore’ or ‘real’ punk, and the avant garde wing), Futurists, New Romantics, Glam Revivalists, Beats, Zoots and so on . . . The second change resulting from punk has been a re-definition of youth. The ‘New Wave’ eroded the distinction between ‘Teeny Boppers’ and youth which was largely based on the progressive LP/pop single distinction of the early 1970s. Punk made singles and single-artists acceptable. Much to the industry’s delight, the current stars – Madness, Adam
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and the Ants, and the New Romantic bands – ‘cross over’ conventional market categories. However, the possible effects of this, such as the potential for nurturing some degree of solidarity among youth have yet to be considered or realised, but this may be important if class-based politics becomes increasingly meaningless to unemployed youth. Another interesting development has been the increasing amount of semiological readings that have been conducted by cult-leaders themselves. For example, the unification of black and white colours in the style of the ‘Two-Tone’ movement was consciously intended to be part of the anti-racist struggle. More recently, Adam Ant’s theatrical images of pirate/indian/highwayman have been consciously used to symbolise a defence of the oppressed. Similarly, Malcolm McLaren’s piracy/‘Go for gold’ image for Bow Wow has been explicitly theorised as an attempt to irritate monetarist belt-tightening36 Even the latest trend in zoot suits has been understood as being one in the eye for austerity.37 Such analyses reveal that sub-cultural theory has had an impact – although the stylist’s own readings seem more down to earth than, say, Hebdige’s flights of fantasy. I would argue that the politics of youth cultural styles is not contained within the semiotic value of particular artefacts. Rather, I wish to tentatively suggest that the very existence of a youth culture, the quest for ‘good times’ and ‘good clothes’ contains an element of resistance as part of a struggle over the quality of life. State monetarism involves an attempt to lower working-class expectations, to ‘tighten our belts’, yet the youth culture represents an anchor for refusal, to resist a return to austerity by expecting a certain standard of living during youth based on good clothes, records, nights out or whatever. I’d suggest that such relatively high expectations explain the growing feelings of frustration and anger among youth. Note, for example, that articles looted during the riots tended to be those associated with youth culture such as clothes, records, radios and tape-decks. The decadence and the glamour of the new romantics may be important in this – particularly since the style has become widely accepted by ‘straights’ since its diffusion from the elite London clubs. Further (particularly since the popularity of the Human League), girls have become increasingly central and dominant within the cult and may be becoming more selective in their choice of partner and rejecting ‘drab’ patriarchs – although, of course, a great deal of empirical work is required to verify this. But where does unemployment fit into this? As Frith has recently (though rather polemically) argued: The state’s fear (evident in every MSC report) is that the more successfully the young do survive nonwork, the less they’ll ever be willing to do ‘real’ work. Hence the ideological and physical crackdown (which black youth have long experienced) on any suggestion that the young unemployed are enjoying themselves. If the young learn to enjoy ‘unearned’ leisure, then the concept of leisure itself is thrown into question. Frith’s argument goes on to challenge conventional wisdom: Youth’s most disruptive political demand is not the right to work, but the right not to work. Frith, 1981b This crisis in capitalist social relations demands an analysis of the culture of unemployed youth – the means by which unemployment is negotiated, survived and transformed into
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leisure and how this relates to conventional ‘youth culture’. Forms of negotiation such as home-taping records and radio programmes, jobs in the ‘black economy’, second-hand clothes, daytime TV, lie-ins and reduction in cinema charges etc. For the unemployed require closer examination. Obviously ‘doing nothing’ reaches a new importance and I would like to end by focussing on a local example in Birmingham. The recent introduction of a 2p flat fare for under-16s (and anyone who dares to pass themselves off as under 16 – and many do) has resulted in a moral panic concerning the way in which youth kills time by riding around on buses – particularly the circular routes. Usually clad in the semiotically innocent ski jumper38 youth have appropriated the upper decks as an area of cultural and physical space. Alternatively, the cheap fare provides the opportunity to ‘do nothing’ in the town centre. When is the West Midlands County Council going to appreciate the misery it is causing shoppers and shopkeepers . . . They have nothing better to do than cause havoc among shoppers and shopkeepers. We are having to pay pounds more to finance the 2p policy that helps them play their game. (Mailbox letter in Birmingham Evening Mail, November 4th 1981) We have seen nothing yet. Wait till the school Christmas holidays – children will flood into Birmingham city centre to lark about in the shops. I’m sure that shopkeepers won’t thank these generous councillors who think that the 2p fare is marvellous. Shop assistants have enough trouble spotting shoplifters without having to keep an eye on children as well. What the stores gain on the roundabouts they will lose on the swings. Why should children be given this ridiculous concession? In no way is it necessary. (Mailbox letter, October 21st) The autumn letters pages of the Birmingham Evening Mail were bursting with a moral panic over the buses, orchestrated in relation to a campaign against rate increases in the area. However, the main focus has been on youth. Assorted letters complained about noise, truancy from school, youths occupying seats, unemployed youth wasting time and not looking for jobs, overcrowding in the town centre – with the possibility of theft or ‘trouble’ – youths smoking, drinking or glue sniffing on buses and so forth, as Birmingham youth have created new meaning from the conventional activities of shopping and public transport. The ‘ski-jumpers’ are, however, a particular example of a much wider argument. We need analysis of the activities of all of youth. We need to locate the crucial contemporary shifts and continuities in youth activities have for the young themselves. I hope that this paper has shown that youth culture is not the overworked topic it seems initially to be. Indeed, it is time to examine what has hitherto been regarded (by Widgery at least) as ‘all that crap’.
Postscript. Some points of clarification. April 1982 I took the ski-jumper as an example of one of the many forms of style among supposedly ‘straight’ youth which have been ignored due to their failure to draw attention from the media or cultural studies. These styles consequently never reach the status of the drape suit or the (omni-present) leather jacket. The ‘moment’ of the ski-jumper has since passed (I’m still not sure if they ever were popular outside the Midlands) and the ‘style’ has mutated into abstract winter patterns or, more recently, into a row of World Cup footballers. Such are the problems of the contemporary!
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More significantly, the abolition of cheap fares in Birmingham (since March 7th – little thanks to Lord Denning) has put a block on the short-lived culture of ‘doing nothing’ with the aid of public transport – although the practice has not entirely disappeared. Finally, although I’d accept many of the points raised by Phil Cohen in New Socialist No.3, (which presents a critique of Frith’s arguments discussed in my conclusion) I still feel that it is necessary to examine empirically how youths manage to kill time and how the strains of unemployment are managed and survived as the state tightens our belts.
Acknowledgements This paper was originally written as an MA dissertation at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. I would like to thank Dan Finn, Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie for their comments on the first draft and the Centre’s Stencilled Papers group for considerably tidying up my own manuscript. The dissertation was completed in December 1981.
Notes 1 For example, Resistance has this year been included in the AEB A-Level sociology syllabus. 2 In other words, the politics of Widgery or Hebdige. 3 See the near-legendary Miliband-Poulantzas debates in numerous editions of the New Left Review, reprinted in Robin Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in Social Science, Fontana, 1972. 4 I shall discuss the adequacy of this conception of ‘common sense’ in section 2. 5 The theoretical overview, ‘Subcultures, Cultures and Class’ by J. Clarke, S. Hall, T. Jefferson and B. Roberts in Resistance, presents an excellent, historically-situated analysis of the relationship between hegemony and ideologies of embourgoisement. 6 In this chapter I shall focus particularly on the theoretical overview of Clarke, Hall, Jefferson and Roberts in Resistance, and Hebdige’s Subculture and Mike Brake, The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures, RKP, 1980. I have included Brake within the new sub-cultural theory since he has a similar perspective to the Centre’s. His book is a development of an earlier position (critiqued in Resistance) in the light both of punk and the Centre’s work. 7 The concept is borrowed from Levi-Strauss and developed by John Clarke in the essay on ‘style’ in Resistance. 8 It seems common these days to find Althusser’s discussion of the political, ideological and economic levels extended to include this untheorised ‘cultural level’. 9 Also, we need to ask, to what use is this identity applied? 10 See Paul Willis, Learning to Labour, Saxon House, 1978, where entering work is the resolution of childhood for ‘the lads’ in the study. The work of Angela McRobbie suggests that marriage is a comparable resolution for girls (e.g. McRobbie, 1978). 11 D. Hebdige, Subculture. The book has received favourable reviews both inside and outside academic circles. See, for example, the reviews by Stephen Hayward (Time Out, Aug. 31st 1979, No. 487), Ian Penman (NME, 24th Nov., 1979) and Trevor Jones (Tribune, 28th Sept., 1979). 12 Note the contempt in which Hebdige holds revivals, such as the re-emergence of the Teds in the 1970s. 13 For a recent discussion of the value of ‘good sense’ see Terry Lovell, ‘Ideology in Coronation Street’ (Lovell, 1981). 14 I. Taylor, and D. Wall, ‘Beyond the Skinheads’ in Mungham and Pearson, 1978. Taylor and Wall, writing in defence of the ‘progressive rock’ of the 1970s, suggested that glam rock (particularly Bowie) was part of a manufactured conspiracy to destroy the skin sub-culture. 15 An examination of such areas is of vital importance if we are to break away from Hebdige’s exclusively male ‘phantom history’. For an excellent discussion of soul music, see Haralambos, 1974. 16 I would tentatively suggest that Asian boys have built up a youth culture (literally) of self defence based around training in the martial arts and the numerous Kung-Fu derived films. 17 By black I refer to anyone classed as non-white. An interesting point of note is the growing tendency for disco and jazz funk to be played at blues dances.
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18 See the Widgery quote at the beginning of my introduction. 19 Despite the richness of the analysis, Willis’ explanation of ‘how working class kids get working class jobs’ is ultimately based on the unproblematic socialisation of sons into the values of their fathers. 20 See the discussion of Adorno and Benjamin in Simon Frith’s The Sociology of Rock. Constable, 1978. 21 Outside CCCS, Mike Brake explicitly theorises the working-class culture as being incorporated, deferential and fatalistic. 22 S. Cohen, ‘Symbols of Trouble’ (Introduction to the New Edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Martin Robertson, 1980). Cohen presents an otherwise excellent critique which is handicapped by a treatment of youth as alienated (relying on Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd) and a general treatment of the working-class youth as if they are stupid. 23 D. Hebdidge, ‘Skinheads and the search for white working class identity’ New Socialist, No.1 (Sept/Oct. 1981) I would regard this article as a major advance from Hebdige’s previous work, although the focus is still on the authentic skins. Also, Hebdige’s analysis seems to rely heavily on a forward projection of G.S. Jones’ argument that the working class ‘remade’ itself at the end of the nineteenth century into a closed, incorporated and leisure-based culture. See G.S. Jones, ‘Working Class Culture and Working Class Politics in London 1870–1900’, Journal of Social History (Summer 1974). 24 This section draws on the current work of the CCCS Popular Memory sub-group. The group’s project seeks to analyse the ‘national popular’ in relation to dominant representations of the past – particularly representations of World War II. See ‘what do we mean by Popular Memory’, CCCS Stencilled Paper No. 67 and ‘Popular Memory: Theory, Method, Politics’ in CCCS History Group, Making Histories, Hutchinson 1982. 25 No wonder punk’s basic message was ‘No Future’ (as contained in the Sex Pistols’ legendary, ‘God Save The Queen’). It will be interesting to see if CND has any positive or negative contributions in this area. See CCCS Media Group, ‘Representations of CND in the Media, October 1981’, Report to CND, April 1982, and CCCS Stencilled Paper forthcoming. 26 Quote from a Julie Burchill article in the NME, May 23rd, 1981. The Nolan Sisters are a ‘normal’, girl-next-door pop group generally condemned to be figures of fun (among males). 27 It would also be rewarding to examine the ‘bedroom culture’ that exists among boys. 28 Quoted in Brake, 1980. However, rather than exploring the resistance, Brake regards this as evidence of girls’ obsession with romance. 29 These suggestions are drawn from my personal experiences – particularly as an F.E. teacher in Birmingham. I realise that as a ‘middle class’ male teacher lacking a common experience, my observations may be open to a different interpretation – particularly from women. 30 Gary Kemp (member of vanguard of the New Romantics, Spandau Ballet) in the NME, 1st Aug. 1981. 31 The concept of ‘magical resolution’ is not without its problems. The term is vague and the contradictions to be resolved aren’t always clearly specified. The major theme – the problem of how to spend leisure time – is by no means exclusive to working-class youth. Also, the concept of ‘magical resolution’ can apply to an infinite number of situations whether it be conspicuous consumption, a night out, or a secret cigarette in the factory. 32 See, in particular, the work of Michael Schofield. 33 See the work of McRobbie, Christine Griffin and others, although there is a strong tendency for McRobbie to over-emphasise marriage as a response to ‘ideologies of femininity’, rather than as an attempted material solution.
Conclusion 34 Notice that the styles of youth have increasingly preoccupied the Sunday magazines perhaps as a reassurance that further riots are unlikely. See especially The Sunday Times, Magazine, Nov. 1st, 1981 which devoted the issue to ‘British Youth’. 35 The political economy and institutional experiences of youth in the crisis have begun to be covered elsewhere. See for example Part 3 of CCCS Education Group Unpopular Education Hutchinson, 1981, Mike Cole and Bob Skelton (eds.), Blind Alley: Youth in a Crisis of Capital Hesketh, 1980, and the work of Dan Finn (forthcoming). 36 See the interview with McLaren and subsequent debates in the HME, Aug.–Sept. 1980. 37 C. Sullivan, ‘The Zoot Suit: A Historical Perspective’ The Face, (Sept. 1981).
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38 Ski jumpers are cheap, imported, acrylic sweaters depicting a row of three skiers as a band across the chest. The origin of the style or the cult is impossible to trace, yet they are worn by a large majority of working-class youth regardless of race or gender.
Bibliography Althusser, Louis. 1969. For Marx. New Left Books. Althusser, Louis. 1971. Reading Capital. New Left Books. Becker, H. 1963. The Outsiders. Free Press, Glencoe. Blackburn, R. (ed). 1972. Ideology in Social Science. Fontana. Boyd, J. 1973. ‘Trends in Youth Culture’, Marxism Today, Dec. Brake, M. 1980. The Sociology of Youth and Youth Subcultures, R.K.P. CCCS Education Group. 1981. Unpopular Education. Hutchinson. Clarke, J. 1976a. ‘The Skinheads and the Magical Recovery of Community’, in Hall and Jefferson (eds.), Resistance Through Rituals. Hutchinson. Clarke, J. 1976b. ‘Style’. loc.cit. Clarke, J. Hall, S. Jefferson, T. and Roberts, B. 1976. ‘Subcultures, Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview’ in Hall & Jefferson, loc.cit. Cohen, P. WPCS No. 2. ‘Subcultural Conflict and the Working-Class Community’ in Working Papers in Cultural Studies, No. 2 n.d. Also reprinted, in part, in S. Hall et al (eds.), Culture, Media, Language Hutchinson, 1981. Cohen, S. (ed.), 1971. Images of Deviance, Penguin. Cohen, S. 1980. Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Martin Robertson. Cole, M. and Skelton, B. (eds.). 1980. Blind Alley: Youth in A Crisis Of Capital. Hesketh. Corrigan, P. 1976. ‘Doing Nothing’, in Hall and Jefferson, op.cit. Corrigan, P. and Frith, S. 1976. ‘The Politics of Youth Culture’ in Hall and Jefferson, op.cit. Corrigan, P. 1979. Schooling the Smash Street Kids, Macmillan. Eisenstadt, S. 1954. From Generation to Generation, Free Press. Frith, S. 1978. The Sociology of Rock. Constable. Frith, S. 1981a. ‘Dancing in the Street’. Time Out, No. 570, 20–26 March. Frith, S. 1981b. ‘Hooked on Love’, New Society, 23 July. Green, J. 1974. ‘Trends in Youth Culture’, Marxism Today, Nov. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. (ed. & trans. Nowell-Smith and Hoare). Lawrence & Wishart. Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds.), 1976. Resistance Through Rituals. Hutchinson. Hall, S. Lunley, B. and McLennan, G. 1978. ‘Politics and Ideology: Gramsci’ in CCCS, On Ideology, Hutchinson. Haralambos, M. 1974. Right on: From Blues to Soul in Black America. Eddison Press. Hebdige, D. 1976a. ‘The Meaning of Mod’ in Hall and Jefferson, op.cit. Also available as CCCS Stencilled Paper no. 20. Hebdige, D. 1976b. ‘Reggae, Rastas and Rudies’ in Hall and Jefferson, op.cit. Also available in an expanded version as CCCS Stencilled Paper no. 24. Hebdige, D. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Methuen, New Accents. Hebdige, D. 1981. ‘Skinheads and the Search for White Working Class Identity’ New Socialist. No. 1. Sept/Oct. Hobsbawm, E. 1959. Primitive Rebels. Manchester University Press. Hoggart, R. 1958. The Uses of Literacy. Penguin. Johnson, R. 1979. ‘Culture and the Historians’ in Clarke, J., Critcher, C., and Johnson, R., Working Class Culture. Hutchinson. Jones, G.S. 1974. ‘Working-class Culture and Working-class Politics in London 1870–1900’. Journal of Social History. Summer. Lovell, T. 1981. ‘Ideology in Coronation Street’. in Coronation Street B.F.I. Monograph, No. 13.
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McRobbie, A. and Garber, J. 1976. ‘Girls and Sub-cultures, in Hall and Jefferson, op.cit. McRobbie, A. 1978. ‘Working-Class Girls and the Culture of Femininity’. in CCCS Womens Studies Group, Women Take Issue, Hutchinson. McRobbie, A. 1980. ‘Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Critique’, Screen Education, Spring. Mungham, G. and Pearson, G. 1978. Working Class Youth Cultures. R.K.P. Pearson, G. 1978. ‘ “Paki-Bashing” in a North-East Lancashire Cotton Town’ in Mungham and Pearson, op.cit. Taylor, I. and Taylor, L. 1973. Politics and Deviance. Penguin. Taylor, I. and Wall, D. 1978. ‘Beyond The Skinheads’ in Mungham and Pearson. op.cit. Taylor, I., Waton, P. and Young, J. 1973. The New Criminology. R.K.P. Thompson, E.P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. Penguin. Waters, C. 1981. ‘Badges of Half-formed Inarticulate Radicalism: A Critique of Recent Trends in the Study of Working-Class Culture’. International Labour and Working Class History. No. 19. Spring. Widgery, D. 1981. ‘The Rise of Radical Rock’, New Socialist, No. 2 Nov/Dec. Willis, P. 1978a. Profane Culture, R.K.P. Willis, P. 1978b. Learning to Labour, Saxon House. Young, J. 1972. The Drug Takers, Paladin.
Section 3
Media
Introduction David Morley
The news from Brummejum: how media studies got culture (with a Birmingham accent) At one point in their essay on Stuart Hall’s ‘Encoding/Decoding’ paper as a ‘canonical’ text in media research, Michael Gurevitch and Paddy Scannell say that ‘to a very considerable extent, a new academic field emerged from the work of CCCS in the 1970s’ where ‘30 years ago none of this existed’ (Gurevitch and Scannell, 2003: 233–4). In this context I see my task here as that of tracing how this came about, outlining which specific contributions to this process were made by the Media Group, particularly during the 1970s, and what that work’s longer term influence has been on the constitution of the field of media studies today. To this end, I shall try to trace how the work of the Media Group developed through its various different phases, what processes of intellectual development were involved, and what theoretical and practical resources it drew on. This history cannot be told as self-contained story, for it would make no sense if shorn of the contexts – social, cultural, political, academic, intellectual, and institutional – in which the work developed. Moreover, the Media Group’s development is itself only comprehensible if one also maps in the institutions outside CCCS in collaboration with whom its work was conducted. Perhaps even more importantly, it is also necessary to identify some of the established intellectual orthodoxies of the day and the key interlocutors with whom the Media Group was debating these issues, often in sharply critical terms. Without the questions and issues to which the group was responding, the (always avowedly provisional) ‘answers’ produced in its work would make no sense at all. Precisely to the extent that Gurevitch and Scannell’s claims about the significance of media work at CCCS in shaping the field are true – in the sense that the paradigm originally developed in that context now provides a large part of the taken-for granted ‘common sense’ of the field – its influence is also, in one sense, almost invisible. It now seems almost to ‘go without saying’ that there is more to the media than questions of economics; that issues of culture, representation and signification are equally important; that we must pay attention not only to questions of class but also of ‘race’, gender and sexuality; that low-status fictional media forms can play just as important a political role as high profile news and current affairs television; and that audiences are evidently not passive dupes or zombies. However, in the early 1970s none of this was widely accepted in the field. If it now seems no more than common sense, this is because cultural studies media work has, over the subsequent period, made it so. The Ur-Story of media work at CCCS is so well known that it may appear otiose to rehearse it here. However, that story has largely come to be known at second hand, through
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numerous accounts of the development of cultural studies work on the media retailed in student texts and primers on cultural studies by people who had no direct involvement in its production. Only a small proportion of the original work was ever brought to publication and relatively little of that (until now) has been in print and thus available for first hand study. Moreover, the story of the development of this work is often read backwards, with the dubious wisdom of hindsight. What now look like the major contributions were not necessarily seen in that way at the time (or were read with quite different emphases) – and vice versa – so a variety of determinations have led to some very promising avenues of work not being followed through. There is also the further complication that, given the interdisciplinary nature of the Centre’s work, the trajectories of the different subgroups are not readily separable and the Media Group itself often drew on theoretical resources developed within the broader framework of the Centre’s intellectual debates. To take one example, the group’s turn to Gramscian theories of hegemony in the later 1970s was largely made possible by the theoretical work done in the Centre’s State Group. By no means all mediarelated work was produced in the Media Group itself – some of the work which later came to be seen as of considerable importance in the field was produced by other subgroups (see below). Beyond this, there is also the consideration that the later impact of the paradigms originally developed in the group often had their major impact on the field indirectly – for instance, in their subsequent influence on more widely available undergraduate courses at the Open University (after Hall’s move there in 1979) and elsewhere. In that context, and while recognising the complexities of the differential ‘historical times’ involved, I have chosen to treat my task here as the (deceptively) simple one of reconstructing the chronology of ‘what happened’ in the Media Group during the 1970s. It is, of course, always useful to establish the storyteller’s credentials, before listening to their tale. Mine rest on the fact that I was both there (as an ‘associate member’ of the group for most of the period from 1972–79) and not there (being formally registered at another university and continuing to live elsewhere) – which hopefully meets the generally accepted anthropological criteria for studying a culture as both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’. Previous first hand versions of this story already exist – notably Hall’s own ‘Introduction to Media studies at the Centre’ (Hall, et al 1980). Charlotte Brunsdon and I have also attempted to trace some threads of this story in our account of the group’s work on Nationwide (Morley and Brunsdon, 1999). The story I will trace here is different from them in various ways, partly because I aim both to survey some of the Centre’s earlier work in this field, which rarely appears in its conventional history and also because I want to consider, more broadly, the subsequent influence of this work in its later incarnations in other institutional contexts. However, in the first instance, let us begin with matters of chronology, at least in an outline form . . .
Media studies at CCCS in the 1970s Work on the popular media was a part of the Centre’s agenda from the beginning, given Richard Hoggart’s concerns with the influence of popular forms, such as comic books, on working class culture. As early as 1964, before joining the Centre, Hall had published, with Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (Hutchinson) and an early (unpublished) Centre project on ‘The Western’ attempted to follow through this concern with cinema. Richard Dyer published his analysis of ‘The Meaning of Tom Jones’ in 1971, in Working Papers in Cultural Studies (WPCS) 1 and followed it, in 1973, with his study of Light Entertainment (BFI TV Monograph 2). This early period also saw the genesis of work on the popular press and
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social change, subsequently published as Paper Voices, on violence in TV crime drama and on the visual representation of femininity (see Smith, et al 1975; Shuttleworth, et al 1974 and Millum, 1975). More sustained work in this field begun with the formal institutionalisation of the Media Group, set up as one of the Centre’s four new working groups in 1971. The group’s initial agenda encompassed questions of impartiality, objectivity, ‘professionalism’, bias and the ‘politics of dissent’ in the UK news media – which were then beginning to come under sustained critique. These issues were pursued in dialogue with activist networks such as the ‘Free Communications Group’ set up by disaffected TV journalists. The group also addressed questions of the representation of deviance and ‘consensus politics’ (in connection with the burgeoning work on these issues by radical sociologists with an interest in the media, such as Jock Young and Paul Walton of the National Deviancy Symposium). The group also addressed the significance of the development of the ‘Alternative Press’ in the context of Enzensberger’s work on the democratic potential of new media technologies, alongside Situationist theories of the ‘Society of the Spectacle’. At a theoretical level, the group was also beginning the long process of working through the varieties of Marxist theorisations of ideology and of the relation of the media to the state, from The German Ideology onwards, through the (then) contemporary Marxist work of authors such as Barry Hindess and Frank Parkin, as well as engaging critically with the Leicester Centre for Mass Communications’ work on the media representation of political demonstrations and its supposed ‘effects’ on audiences. By its second year, under the growing influence of work in semiology by Barthes and Eco, alongside that of Metz in cinema studies and Levi Strauss in cultural anthropology, the group was beginning to move towards the application of these theories in an attempt to develop its own distinctive approach to the textual analysis of what was described as ‘the level of the programmes themselves’. While the Media Group was in the early period a large one, including at various stages Ros Brunt, Bryn Jones, Marina de Camargo (later Heck), Rachel Powell and Bob Willis, and later, Ian Connell, David Morley and Janice Winship, its leading member was undoubtedly Hall himself, and the period 1970–73 saw the publication of a flurry of papers by him on the media: ‘A World at One with Itself ’ (New Society 1970); ‘Innovation and Decline in Cultural Programming on Television’ (Unesco 1971); ‘The Social Eye of Picture Post’ (WPCS #2, 1972); ‘The Determinations of News Photos’ (WPCS #3, 1972); ‘The External /Internal Dialectic in Broadcasting’ (CCCS 1972); ‘The Limitations of Broadcasting’ (The Listener 1972); ‘Deviancy, Politics and the Media’ (in P. Rock and M. McIntosh eds. Deviance and Social Control Tavistock 1973); ‘The Structured Communication of Events’ (Unesco 1973 and reproduced here); and also ‘Encoding and Decoding in Media Discourse’ (CCCS 1973 and also reproduced here) – perhaps Hall’s single most influential paper. Besides Hall’s own output, the period 1973–74 also saw the issue of WPCS #3, devoted to the work of members of the Media Group, with a strong focus on visual matters in the news media and including articles by Brunt on ‘Whicker’s World’ (reproduced here), Powell and Jones on news photographs, and de Camargo on theories of ideology. Following the publication of Barthes’ essay on ‘The Rhetoric of the Image in WPCS #1, WPCS #3 also carried a translation of an important essay by Umberto Eco on the semiotics of television. The same period saw the publication of Stencilled Papers by Morley, one addressing issues of media coverage of industrial conflict and the other further developing the theoretical framework outlined in Hall’s ‘Encoding/Decoding’ paper in relation to studies of audience decoding of media texts.1 Outside the confines of Media Group itself, the Women’s Studies Group produced their pathbreaking ‘Images of Women’ paper (Butcher, et al 1974, in this volume).
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Later, Angela McRobbie published her ‘Jackie: An Ideology of Adolescent Femininity’ in 1978 (Stencilled Paper (SP) 53), while Janice Winship produced two studies of Women’s Magazines (Winship, 1980, 1981). Members of the Subcultures Group, working on ‘moral panics’ about media coverage of what became known as ‘mugging’, were involved in the production of the pamphlet ‘20 Years’ (1972), which provided part of the initial genesis of the work on ‘race’ and ‘law and order’, which later came to fruition as Policing the Crisis (Hall, et al 1978).2 The period from 1973–74 had been one of extended industrial and political crisis in the UK, with large-scale strikes by the miners and other unions, the reduction of the industrial working week to three days, as a result of the energy crisis and calls for an emergency Government of National Unity. Much of this conflict was fought out through the media and in this context, in 1974 the Media Group decided to centre the focus of its work more directly on media representation of these issues, and in theoretical terms, on the exact nature of the media’s relation to the state. Crucially, the group’s work was designed as a critique of the received wisdom of Marxist political economy in which ‘this relationship . . . has been . . . defined a priori and thus taken for granted in the course of analysis’ (Media Group Report, 1974–75). Influenced by their reading of Althusser’s essay on the ‘ideological apparatuses of the state’ and his concept of the ‘relative autonomy’ of the media, the group thus focused on the ‘specific role played by the media’, not just in relation to ‘media messages and their own rhetoric’ but also on ‘those emanating from the political forces, which are then taken up by the media and subjected to their own process of interpretation’ (op cit). This project, much influenced by Ian Connell’s contribution, was to dominate the group’s concerns over the period from 1974 through to 1976, providing the genesis not only of Connell’s own PhD3 but also of the group’s extensive textual analysis of the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Panorama, written up by Hall, Connell and Lidia Curti as ‘The Unity of Current Affairs TV’ (1976, in this volume).4 During the period from 1976–78, with a largely new membership, including Roz Brody, Charlotte Brunsdon, Bob Lumley, Richard Nice and Roy Peters, and influenced by new debates concerning the politics of popular culture arising from a variety of sources, including feminist critiques of patriarchy and work on Gramscian theories of hegemony, the group began to shift the focus of its work away from the analysis of ‘hard news’ and ‘serious’ factual television, towards the ideological role of the popular media – both factual and fictional – in the construction of the forms of lived ‘common sense’. As Charlotte Brunsdon recounts in her own retrospective on this stage of the group’s work, the initial suggestion made by her and other women (including Roz Brody and Dorothy Hobson) was that the group should take, as its focus of analysis, the low status Midlands TV soap opera Crossroads – but this suggestion met overwhelming resistance from the men in the group who, she explains, regarded this as ‘a rather ludicrous suggestion’ as they saw the programme as an ‘object of study that just wasn’t serious enough’ (Brunsdon 2000: 8). In this context, the group’s ‘compromise’ choice was to concentrate its collective work on the analysis of the BBC’s early evening light current affairs ‘magazine’ programme Nationwide – for many years the bedrock of the BBC’s early evening schedule. As Brunsdon notes, this was ‘clearly not soap opera – but not hard news either’ (op cit: 8). Nonetheless, this shift away from the study of programmes such as Panorama did signal a redefinition of ‘the political’ into much more quotidian terms, in relation to a broader, popular audience and allowed a return to the issues raised by Barthes’ early analysis in Mythologies concerning the ideological dimensions of everyday life. On the basis of the group’s collective work on the programme, Brunsdon and Morley then wrote up this analysis, which subsequently appeared as Everyday Television: Nationwide (BFI 1978).
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In theoretical terms, one of the other main concerns of Media Group work during the period from 1977 through to 1979 was its engagement with the forms of psychoanalytic cinema theory then appearing in the UK in the pages of journals such as the BFI’s Screen. While the group took much from this work, with its focus not only on questions of ‘ideological problematics’ but also on ‘modes of textual address’ there was a substantial resistance to what was seen as Screen theory’s overly deterministic approach to the (seemingly ‘automatic’) positioning of the audience (or ‘subject’) by the text.5 This issue came into particularly sharp focus in 1978, when the group decided to ‘operationalise’ Hall’s Encoding/ Decoding model in a piece of empirical audience research which would have at its core the question of which audience members were, in fact, ‘positioned’ by which texts, in which ways. This concern with audiences had a long, if slow, gestation within the group’s work, beginning with Hall’s 1973 model and subsequently reworked by Morley in his 1974 paper.6 During this same period, Dorothy Hobson had also begun work on housewives as audiences for radio programmes (see her essay reproduced here). In fact, Connell, Hall, and Morley had initially attempted to win funding from the Social Science Research Council for an audience research project on Panorama in 1976 and when that failed, the project went ‘on hold’ until 1978, when it was decided to use the group’s collective analysis of Nationwide as the baseline against which to try to track differential audience decodings. In 1978 the BFI agreed to fund that work, which later appeared as Morley’s The Nationwide Audience (BFI 1980). In one sense the publication of the Culture, Media, Language collection in 1980 provides a natural conclusion to this story – or, at least, a convenient place for us to leave it. Previous members of the group continued to produce influential work throughout the early 1980s, and outside of the group’s confines both Brunsdon and Hobson were able to develop the work on Crossroads which had been so strongly resisted when it was initially suggested as a focus for the group’s work in 1976 (see Brunsdon, 1981; Hobson, 1982). There were also continuities with the group’s previous work on popular entertainment, such as Adam Mills and Phil Wright’s ‘Quizzing the Popular’ (Screen Education No 41 1982) and Gary Whannel’s work on gameshows, which also had parallels with Roy Peters’ earlier work on ‘Television Coverage of Sport’ (SP 48, 1976). In 1981 the Media Group returned collectively to issues of political representation in the news media, with its analysis of ‘Representations of CND in the Media’ (SP72), and Esther Adams’ ‘Television and the North’ (SP78,1985) returned to some of the issues raised in the Nationwide work about television’s representation of regionalism. In 1987 work on audiences came back to the group’s agenda, with Mark Pursehouse’s publication of interviews with Sun readers ‘Life’s more Fun with your Number One Sun’ (SP # 85). However, in the face of mounting cutbacks in university funding and the Centre’s increasing focus on undergraduate teaching, it proved difficult for the group to maintain the momentum as it had displayed in the earlier period.
So – what was all that about? Having offered a chronology of the development of media work at the Centre during the 1970s it remains to now offer some retrospective, more analytical perspective on these matters. I shall do so under four headings: Contexts, Stories, Limitations and Legacies.
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Contexts As I said earlier, it is impossible to understand the development of this work without reference not just to the broad social (and more narrowly institutional) contexts of the time, but also without reference to the question of who the other protagonists (and associates) were in the debates in which the Media Group was engaged. In the early 1970’s, in the context of the political crisis in UK politics, the group’s work was able to develop initiatives with sympathetic organisations, such as the Association of Cinematographic and Television Technicians, whose report on media coverage of industrial relations, One Week (ACTT, London, 1971) was among the first to explore questions of ‘bias’ in the news media. At that point, as indicated earlier, the group also worked in close alliance with ‘activist’ organisations such as the Free Communications Group and in the academic world, with radical sociologists organised through the National Deviancy Symposium who were also concerned with what later became known as ‘the politics of representation’. However, on the specific terrain of how these matters should be analysed, there were important differences of emphasis and serious intellectual disagreements with others engaged in this field. While relations were cordial, if at times mutually critical, particularly in relation to the question of exactly how ‘bias’ in the news media was to be conceptualised, between the Centre’s Media Group and the members of the Glasgow Media Group,7 the group found itself drawn into sharper conflicts with other leading academic institutions in the field. The Media Group’s work in the early 1970s was, in fact largely produced in debate with two principal protagonists: in the first instance, with the version of the sociology of mass communications then enshrined at the Leicester Centre for Mass Communications Research and later with the version of Marxism espoused by those associated with the ‘Political Economy’ of communications, such as Nicholas Garnham (then of the Polytechnic of Central London) Graham Murdock and Peter Golding (both influential at the Leicester Centre). The extent to which the first of these was the object of critique at the Centre is evident in the initial (1973) version of Hall’s Encoding/Decoding paper, if occluded in the version of the paper published in Culture Media, Language in 1980. In his reviews of the Leicester Centre’s work, Hall had been complementary about the extent to which they represented a welcome ‘break in the field’ away from ‘an essentially stimulus-response based model’ of media effects to a critical social theory based more firmly on the study of social meanings and definitions of the situation’ (Hall, 1970; Halloran, et al 1970 and Halloran, 1970). However, by 1973, in the context of the Media Group’s collective critique of the Leicester Centre’s work, he had become frustrated with the extent to which that work still operated with a ‘conveyor belt’ model of the transmission of media contents, which was impervious to the questions being raised by semiology about the imbrication of power in the complex process of the construction of meanings. Thus, as he says in his retrospective interview with Cruz and Lewis ‘the Centre for Mass Communications at Leicester was . . . [still] using traditional empirical positivistic models of content analysis, audience-effects survey research, etc. . . . So the paper [Encoding/Decoding] had a . . . polemical thrust. . . . I had the [Leicester] Centre in my sights – that was who I was trying to blow out of the water..’ (Cruz and Lewis, 1994: 253–255). CCCS’s roots in a tradition of literary scholarship and close textual analysis, having been re-invigorated by the engagement with semiology and cultural anthropology, led to this critical break with even the most politically sympathetic modes of the sociology of mass communication – a break which centred on the conception of language and communication itself.
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The break made by the Media Group with the work of the political economy tradition within British Marxist studies of the media at that time was no less decisive. To return to my earlier comments about the role of cultural studies media work in transforming the ‘common sense’ of the field, while one often finds scholars associated with the political economy tradition, such as James Curran, nowadays quoting Gramsci in their work, at the time they were fiercely critical of the Centre’s move away from the classical Marxist position (as expressed in The German Ideology) through Althusser to Gramsci. In this connection, it is instructive to look again at the acrimonious debate on these issues between Ian Connell and Nicholas Garnham conducted later through the pages of Screen (Garnham, 1983; Connell, 1983). Nonetheless, it was only the move towards this more complex theorisation of hegemony which enabled the Media Group to explore more fully the ramifications of the relative autonomy of the media. Up to that point, the received Marxist wisdom was that all you really needed to analyse was who owned the media. Once you understood the structure of ownership, and given the presumption that the state was merely a ‘committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie’ then you could predict both the nature of the media’s content, and also predict, given the further assumption of the ubiquity of media power, the media’s inevitable ideological effects on their audiences. On this basis, neither close institutional analysis of the exact relations between the media and the state, nor textual analysis, nor audience analyses were deemed to be necessary. The influence of the Media Group’s work is perhaps nowhere more apparent today than in the dethroning of these presumptions. Stories: received, revised and recovered Let me now return to my earlier comments on how so much of the story of this work is now ‘read backwards’ – and how much of what is important in it is thus lost. Nowadays, the conventional story of cultural studies’ work on the media equates it mainly (if not in its entirety) with the study of consumption of popular culture by ‘active audiences’. In the view of some critics, this work, we are told, has simply led us into a variety of ‘Dead Ends’ and forms of ‘Pointless Populism’ and ‘New Revisionism’ from which questions of politics have supposedly been evacuated (Philo and Miller, 1997; Seamann, 1992; Curran, 1990).8 As I have tried to show, it is certainly true that, over the period of the 1970s, the Media Group worked to extend the definition of the political so as to incorporate the field of popular culture and to address matters of gender (if not at that stage ‘race’) as well as class. However, to confuse that with the abandonment of ‘politics’ requires a return to the antediluvian definition of what politics is from which the media group struggled so hard to get away. Moreover, if one looks again at the titles of much of the Media Group’s work, especially in the early period of the 1970s (see above) one readily sees that a large part of it, right up to the moment of the Panorama project, was precisely about media coverage of politics in its conventional sense – a contribution to that field which, while now largely invisible, remains influential to this day, in the way in which it has transformed the paradigm for studies of that kind. The further irony is that while Habermas’s theory of the ‘public sphere’ only came to prominence in political economy circles in the 1990s, Hall’s original Encoding/Decoding paper was, as Gurevitch and Scannell recognise, centrally informed by his gloss on Habermas’s conceptualisation of the nature of ‘systematically distorted communication’ between the elites of broadcasting and their audiences, in any society riddled with social and cultural divisions (Gurevitch and Scannell: 236). If, in the later period, the group moved on to broaden its concerns from questions of ideology to questions of culture, this can also be seen
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as a return, in an updated (and politicised) form, to some of the roots of the Centre’s early work in studies of the politics of popular culture inspired by Richard Hoggart. As for work on audiences and cultural consumption, if this is now what ‘cultural studies’ work is largely equated with, it was at the time a relatively minor, and long-submerged, thread of the Media Group’s work. Notwithstanding Hall’s early theoretical intervention in debates about audience studies in his Encoding/Decoding paper, neither Morley’s nor Dorothy Hobson’s interests in audience work (the latter having been pursued in the context of the Ethnography Group as much as the Media Group) were central to the main agenda of media work in the centre at the time. As Charlotte Brunsdon and I have noted elsewhere, while the programme analysis of Nationwide (Morley and Brunsdon: 2) is now largely forgotten, and the audience study has been much cited, at the time, things were quite different. The programme analysis attracted a considerable degree of attention, while the audience study appeared to a deafening silence and only came to subsequent prominence in the wake of the broader turn to audience work in the field, following the publication of Hobson’s Crossroads (1982) Ien Ang’s Watching Dallas (Methuen, 1982), and Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (Verso, 1987). What easily gets forgotten here is that the two parts of the Nationwide project were designed to throw light on both sides of Hall’s ‘Encoding/Decoding’ model, and the audience study only makes sense in relation to that now forgotten piece of textual analysis. Certainly, the editorial changes made between the 1973 and 1980 editions of Hall’s paper, which deleted much of the original material on the semiotics of the Western, obscured the extent to which that paper was about questions of genre and encoding as much as it was about decoding. Thus, as Gurevitch and Scannell note, the result is that today the paper has come to be read solely as a theoretical contribution to audience studies, rather than also as the contribution to the semiotic analysis of texts which, in its inception, it originally was (Gurevitch and Scannell: 238). Limitations If we are to resist the temptation of judging the Media Group’s work of the 1970s by the standards of today, we must also bear in mind one simple, but significant, practical limitation, which follows from the fact that, for most of the period, it was operating without the benefit of video recording technology, which made detailed programme analysis very difficult. The same kind of practical difficulties – in relation to the prohibitive costs of the technology required for film hire and screenings – had vitiated the earlier attempts to develop work on cinema at the Centre. The Media Group’s 1974 Report talks excitedly of attempts to negotiate access to material that the Glasgow Media Group had been able to video with equipment bought from its SSRC grant, but nothing came of it. Brunsdon reports that as late as 1976, when the group was conducting its collective programme analysis of Nationwide, in the absence of video facilities, their method involved going to each others’ houses to watch the programme, and taking notes during the broadcast. To this extent, while the earlier work on press photography published in WPCS #3 had been able to focus very effectively on visual matters, this crucial level of the television analyses produced by the group necessarily remained underdeveloped. This was particularly regrettable, precisely to the extent that the main focus of the group’s work throughout this period was on television, rather than any other medium. While as I have noted, in the earlier period important work had been done on cinema, and a little on the press and on radio, television was the group’s main focus, given its centrality to the political debates of the day. Despite the later shift in emphasis towards more popular forms
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of television, the vast bulk of the group’s early work was restricted to the specific area of news and factual current affairs television. Even within that realm, the focus of attention was limited, for much of the period, to questions of class – with gender representation only coming to attention late in the period and questions of ‘race’ in relation to the media mainly being pursued within the Subcultures and Race Groups. Moreover, the intellectual framework of the day dictated a resolutely national focus. At this period, the processes of globalisation which today we take for granted had not yet dislodged the presumption that the nation-state provided the effective context of politics, cultural or otherwise. In that pre-satellite age, television was still a resolutely national medium. Thus, although Centre members had already debated texts such as E. P. Thompson’s ‘The Peculiarities of the English’9 and Perry Anderson’s earlier ‘Components of the National Culture’10 it was only later that the full significance of the national particularity of the field of study on which the Media Group was focussed, became more apparent. This, of course, became particularly problematic in the period when its thoroughly UK-centric model of analysis began to be exported world-wide and was sometimes used, quite inappropriately, and without significant adaptation, to analyse media systems of quite different kinds, in other cultural contexts. Legacies I noted earlier that while the Media Group was very much a collective enterprise Stuart Hall himself was, for a long period, its leading member. To that extent, the achievements of the group’s work cannot readily be separated from the trajectory of his career. Before he left CCCS, the Group’s work was already beginning to make significant contributions to undergraduate courses at the Open University, such as the 1976 ‘Mass Communications’ course. After his move there in 1979, that work also provided a substantial part of the paradigm of the OU’s long-running and very successful ‘Popular Culture’ course in the 1980s and continued to inform the structure of other OU media courses, right up to the production of the last course on which Hall worked, ‘Culture, Media and Identities’ (1997).11 The continuities here are remarkable – the paradigm of the ‘circuit of culture’ on which that last course was founded drew not only from the model which Hall had outlined in ‘Encoding/ Decoding’ but also from his broader theorisation of Marx’s own work on the circuit of production and consumption in the Grundrisse, as outlined in his ‘Notes on Method: A Reading of the “1857 Introduction” ’.12 In their discussion of Hall’s work, Gurevitch and Scannell (op cit) point to the need to distinguish between ‘canonicity’ and the more important question of the ‘seminality’ of any body of work. It may well be that some aspects of the Media Group’s work have been inappropriately (and at times, uncritically) ‘canonised’ in some quarters, but the work has undoubtedly been seminal. Far beyond the specific role of the OU in bringing work inspired by the group’s approach to a much wider audience, the group’s work has also provided the template for media courses in many parts of the English-speaking world and beyond. As I have argued elsewhere, the problem today is not in further propagating that model, but rather in trying to insist that where ‘exported’, it must be properly adapted, revised and reworked in the light of local circumstances (Morley, 2006). To return to an earlier thread of my argument, not only has cultural studies rewritten the common sense of media studies, but it has also rewritten other disciplines. The Media Group’s work has certainly rewritten the agenda of the political economy of the media, so that it too now incorporates insights on the nature of power derived from cultural studies. As
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early as his article on the ‘Hinterland of Science’ (WPCS # 10,1977) Hall was arguing that one of the jobs of cultural studies was to do sociology better than the positivistic sociologists of the time did – principally, by re-excavating the ‘lost tradition’ of Durkheim’s work on culture, which can be traced from his Primitive Classification onwards through the work of Mauss and Levi-Strauss. The recent, much vaunted ‘cultural turn’ in sociology (and in other disciplines, such as history) would seem to show that, in this respect, emulation is the sincerest form of flattery (Curran and Morley, 2005: Introduction). David Morley is Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He was member of the CCCS Media Group from 1972–76 and a Research Fellow at CCCS from 1977–79. His publications span from The Nationwide Audience British Film Institute (1980) to, most recently, Media Modernity and Technology: The Geography of the New (Routledge, 2006).
Notes 1 ‘Industrial Conflict and the Mass Media’ SP #8, 1974 and ‘Re-conceptualising Audiences’ reproduced here. 2 See also Hall et al’s ‘Newsmaking and Crime’ from 1975, reproduced here for another incarnation of this work. 3 The first chapter of which is reproduced in an edited form here. 4 Published in WPCS #9, 1976 and reproduced here. 5 On this, see the critiques of Screen theory by Hall and Morley subsequently published in Hall et al eds Culture, Media, Language Hutchinson 1980. 6 For Hall’s own retrospective views on all this, see his interview in J. Cruz and J. Lewis eds Viewing, Reading, Listening Westview Press 1994. 7 The GMG was funded by the Social Science Research Council from 1974 onwards to study media coverage of industrial and political conflict – see Glasgow Media Group Bad News Routledge and Kegan Paul 1976 and subsequent volumes. 8 For one reply to these inane charges see my ‘So-Called Cultural Studies’ Cultural Studies Vol. 12.4 1998. 9 Socialist Register Merlin Press 1973. 10 New Left Review No 50, 1968. 11 OU Course D 318, 1997. 12 WPCS #6, 1974.
Bibliography ACTT (1971), One Week: A Survey of Television Coverage of Union and Industrial Affairs in the Week January 8–14, London Anderson, P. (1968), ‘Components of the National Culture’, New Left Review, 50 (July-August): 3–57 Ang, I. (1982), Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, London: Methuen Brunsdon, C. (1981), ‘Crossroads: Notes on a Soap Opera’, Screen, 22.4: 32–37 Brunsdon, C. (2000), The Feminist, the Housewife and the Soap Opera, Oxford: Oxford University Press Connell, I. (1983), ‘Commercial Broadcasting and the British Left’ Screen, 24.6: 70–80 Cruz, J. and Lewis, J. (eds), (1994), Viewing, Reading, Listening, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press Curran, J. (1990), ‘The “New Revisionism” in Mass Communications Research’, European Journal of Communications, 5.2/3: 135–64 Curran, J. and Morley, D. (eds), (2005), Media and Cultural Theory, London: Routledge Dyer, R. (1973), Light Entertainment (BFI television monograph; 2), London: British Film Institute Garnham, N. (1983), ‘Public Service versus the Market’, Screen, 24.1: 6–28 Glasgow University Media Group (1976), Bad News, Vol.1, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
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Gurevitch, M. and Scannell, P. (2003), ‘Canonization Achieved? Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” in Katz, E., Durham Peters, J., Liebes, T. and Orloff, A.(eds) Canonic Texts in Media Research, London: Polity Press Hall, S. and Whannel, P. (1964), The Popular Arts, London: Hutchinson 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., Hobson, D., Lowe, A. and Willis, P. (eds) (1980), Culture, Media, Language, London: Hutchinson Halloran, J.D. (ed.), (1970), The Effects of Television, London: Panther Halloran, J.D., Elliott, P. and Murdock, G. (1970), Demonstrations and Communications: a case study, Harmondsworth: Penguin Hobson, D. (1982), Crossroads: the drama of a soap opera, London: Methuen Mills, A. and Wright, P. (1982), ‘Quizzing the Popular’, Screen Education, 41: 15–25 Millum, T. (1975), Images of Women, London: Chatto and Windus Morley, D. (1998), ‘So-Called Cultural Studies: Dead Ends and Reinvented Wheels’, Cultural Studies, 12.4: 476–97 Morley, D. and Brunsdon, C. (1999), The Nationwide Television Studies, London: Routledge Philo, G. and Miller, D. (1997), ‘Cultural Compliance: Dead Ends of Media/Cultural Studies’, Glasgow Media Group, University of Glasgow Radway, J. (1987), Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, London: Verso Rock, P. and McIntosh, M. (eds) (1973), Deviance and Social Control, London: Tavistock Seamann, W.R. (1992), ‘Active Audience Theory: Pointless Populism’, Media, Culture and Society, 14.2: 301–12 Shuttleworth, A., Hall, S., Camrago Heck, M. and Lloyd, A. (1974), Television Violence: Crime drama and the analysis of content, Birmingham: CCCS Smith, A., Immirzi, E. and Blackwell, T. (1975), Paper Voices, London: Chatto and Windus Thompson, E. P. (1965), ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ Socialist Register, 311–62
Centre reports Media Group Report, 1974–5
16 The spectacular world of Whicker Rosalind Brunt
Trevor Philpott has a File, James Cameron had a Country, Alan Whicker has a World. Obviously alliteration counts in the choice of titles, but of the three television reporters assigned regular, personally surnamed documentary series in recent years, it is Whicker who has gained the sort of prestige which in television terms most appears to justify his acquiring a World. How does this happen? What are the television terms in which it happens? and what constitutes ‘his’ World? This paper offers an examination of such questions by treating The World of Whicker as a case-study, and selecting certain typical features of it for discussion. That is, following the dialectical notion of typicality, the study does not move from-the-particular-to-the-general and search for common denominators, but takes an oscillatory course, selecting elements which, while being at once unique and peculiar to Whicker, may be taken as having ‘representative’ significance. The study then takes for its ‘case’, and the main focus of attention, the programmes ‘written and introduced by Alan Whicker’, and chosen from a television period between 1970 and 1971.1 It seeks to relate them to the ‘world’ of television: for they are both in and of that world, while at the same time belonging specifically to Whicker’s. Since it is the Whicker-made programmes themselves which are actually designated Whicker’s World, I take as the starting point of the case how that designation is conveyed and presented to the television viewer. In the first instance, it happens by means of the opening titles of any World of Whicker programme. This is how the ‘establishing’ sequence goes: A Boeing 707 takes off with a whooshing roar; signature music faded in to accompany a series of stills of Whicker sitting alone in a gangway seat of the plane: reading magazines, looking up and smiling as a hostess with a loaded trolley of food and drink leans towards him, holding a glass of wine as he is served; a global shaped earth-map with the superimposed caption, The World of Whicker, the ‘I’ of ‘Whicker’ being in the form of a silhouette of the man himself, carrying a briefcase and positioned as if coming down from the top of the world; followed by a caption containing the phrase, Television’s Most Travelled Man, (as in the title: . . . encounters Tribes lost and found or Landmarks and Landfalls of . . .; the shots will vary here according to which series-title it is, but one sequence is:) – the silhouette growing rapidly larger until Whicker’s face is in close-up, then diagonally cut with a map of the area he is visiting; finally comes the title, in one block or a succession of them, of the particular programme in the series over a panning shot of the particular location. This sequence is matched by the end-titles: as the credits roll, starting with ‘written (and introduced) by Alan Whicker’, the Boeing, to musical accompaniment, taxies into a final turn on an unidentified runway, takes off, blurred in
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a haze of sun and exhaust fumes, and is in middle distance up in the air as Whicker’s voice breaks in with a trailer (‘and next week, it’s up and away to . . . join us then. Goodnight’), followed by a distant jet-roar. The proclamatory nature of these titles, reinforced by the musical accompaniment of strident trumpet fanfare and stirring melody of strings, clearly identifies Whicker as a Big Name. Through repeated assertion and by the manner of already taking-for-granted the audience’s previous knowledge and expectations of Whicker and his career, the build-up of this identity serves to pre-empt the question: but how and why Whicker? It is enough to promote the claim, Television’s Most Travelled Man, and to encapsulate his professional qualifications in the briefcase-carrying silhouette. But since this silhouette takes the form of personal ideogram, it calls attention again to Whicker as a celebrity: he is never ‘just’ a reporter. The start of each programme reconfers celebrity-status on him in a way which assumes that his claims for having The World are manifestly obvious: he has been identified in vision and title with it before and will be again. Such tautologous star-billing is not automatically accorded to other television reporters with their own series. This may be brought out by briefly comparing how James Cameron and Trevor Philpott are first visually established. With Cameron, the opening sequence varied according to the theme of the programme, but every Cameron programme included a held shot of him captioned My Name is James Cameron: as if the surname was not yet enough and it was a valid question to ask ‘Who?’. Then came a series of travel-documents being stamped, luggage-labels being checked, followed by Cameron Country imposed at an angle across the screen to represent a passport stamp. Additionally, Cameron was often shown walking through an airport; and, immediately preceding or following the programme-title, he would be describing, in vision, where he was and what he intended to find out. Unlike Whicker, Cameron had, to a degree, to ‘explain himself ’ before gaining a programme; and his professional ‘credentials’, those suggesting a long-established foreign correspondent, needed visual demonstration. He could not merely be ‘most travelled’. Trevor Philpott, Whicker’s one-time colleague on the Tonight programme, is also visually introduced as a professional, established as a working reporter, and, in addition, one who is conscientious, unafraid and concerned. This is suggested by an opening sequence which shows him more directly on the job. For instance, he walks briskly down a street carrying his File; a gun comes down across the screen and he is halted by border-guards; he raises the File against a high barbed wire barrier. Several extracts from previous programmes, or the current one, then follow, for instance, he is shown being the central target for a knife throwing act in a circus. And finally he is sitting on the floor surrounded by children from the Dr. Barnardo’s orphanage and he is showing them the contents of his File; the programme titles are subsequently ‘embossed’ on the File. The fact that Whicker does not have to walk through his opening titles, nor come up against barriers and customs between locations, that the jet, which seems to be travelling specially for him, since no other passengers are seen, ‘magically’ lifts him off from one location to another, emphasises how celebrity status takes precedence over that of reporter in the way he is established. He gets star-treatment on the plane; his only encounter is with someone who is of service to him; and the smile to the hostess recalls the ‘well-known’ fact made much of in the surrounding publicity that Whicker-the-Star is a bachelor and a ladies’ man. Meanwhile he remains a television professional, but this has only to be established in an ‘of course’ manner – it simply provides the original basis of his stardom. Why should these be the particular order of associations in which Whicker is presented?
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The build-up can be viewed in marketing terms as creating a cluster of ‘essential selling points’; within this, the Whicker ideogram can be likened to a brand-image and ‘Television’s Most Travelled Man’ becomes the ‘unique selling proposition’ for the company that owns the Whicker programme. For Whicker is Yorkshire Television’s hottest property. His series frequently get the highest ITV ratings for the period of transmission, and he has, as he often mentions in ‘star’ interviews, a ‘round the world audience’ of 35 million. The first factor ensures a high advertising revenue, which in Britain is calculated on a ‘cost per thousand’ (viewers) basis; and the second, since companies are increasingly ‘forced’ to expand into foreign markets, brings in export revenues from Australia, Canada, America and New Zealand. But Whicker’s relation to the company works reciprocally: it is especially in his interest to promote the company, for he is one of the original consortium that bid for the new ITA contract in 1967–68 and became a major shareholder, ‘worth’ £625,000, in 1968. So Yorkshire forms a large part of his property, as he himself is Yorkshire’s property. Whicker got to this position by one of the recognisable career routes for his own and slightly older television generations (he is now in his mid-forties). War service: Director of the Army Film and Photo Section, 8th Army; rose to Major rank; war-correspondent in Korea. Correspondent for the Exchange Telegraph; freelance writer – one book, Some Rise by Sin, and radio broadcaster. He joined the BBC Tonight team when it was formed in 1957. Tonight was considered a television breakthrough at the time; its programme-intentions were to create ‘surprise and spontaneity’ with a style of popular journalism based on a ‘magazine’ format that was fast-paced, versatile and irreverent. It announced that interviews were no longer to be occasions for respectful solemnity, but should take the form of unpredictable ‘events’. Whicker, came to embody this style, learning ‘on the job’, with nightly appearances as a studio interviewer or sending in short filmed reports from abroad. The ‘professional’ reputation was quickly acquired: he got his first full-length documentary series as early as ’59: Whicker’s World. It was consolidated and his Name ‘made’ by the series of reports he did on The Rich, starting in ’63 with The Solitary Billionaire, an interview with J. Paul Getty. By 1965, he had a regular monthly documentary spot on BBC2, repeated on BBC1, again called Whicker’s World, which lasted until he resigned from the Corporation along with Donald Baverstock and Tony Essex, the two main originators of Tonight, to bid for Yorkshire. Baverstock was to become the company’s Director of Programmes and Essex, Whicker’s executive producer as Head of Documentaries.
The professional career or the career into professionalism The professional expertise that this Tonight grouping represented, probably played an important part in the eventual award of the Yorkshire contract. ITA had made clear that it was looking for bidders who placed primary importance on programme-making rather than profits; they wanted bidders who would concentrate on what the Authority defines as ‘serious or informative output’, that is, programmes of a broadly TV journalism-documentary nature, rather than of a ‘mass’ (high rating) ‘entertainment’ kind. The Authority also insisted on a strong commitment to regionalism: newly contracted companies should transmit more locally-originating material for their own areas and concentrate less on producing for the mass network audience. In its first year of operation, Yorkshire showed willing on this score, and, no doubt in the spirit of its confidential submissions to the ITA, used Alan Whicker to present a regular series for local transmission only, on ‘aspects of Yorkshire’. During this period he only managed to make three random appearances on the network, with film
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reports from abroad. But one year of regionalism sufficed for Whicker. Certainly, in programme terms he was ‘worth’ more to the company than a regional series: he must also have been in a position to dictate his own terms. In the Christmas period, 1968–69, Yorkshire secured its first networked series of six documentary programmes: The Reporters, ‘a brand new concept in TV journalism’, with a ‘specially recruited task-force of top-flight journalists . . . to report the world’s vital events and trends’. Alan Whicker was one of the team of six Reporters. This meant that he, like the others, only had a chance to appear in one single film during the series, although he was given star billing in the publicity as ‘probably the prince of TV journalists’. As a company asset he was still under-employed. And since no ‘room’ could be found in the network schedules to turn The Reporters into a permanent, regular weekly programme, the ‘brand-new concept’ was abandoned on the grounds of ‘low ratings’, and the space next booked for it in the following summer schedules was taken by Whicker who now had his own series entirely, called New Worlds – observing ‘six strange cults in the American lifestyle’. Since then Whicker has retained his hold on the schedules with a twice-yearly networked film series of half-hourly programmes, lasting six or seven weeks each, plus a couple of longer, single documentary features during the year. To get the series onto the network means that, alternately, the This Week programme has to be ‘rested’ in the winter and World in Action during the summer. The Big Five Companies’ Networking Committee which controls the scheduling arrangements for ITV justifies this policy by designating the rest-periods as holiday seasons, and claiming that regular programmes ‘have to’ give way then because they cannot ‘afford’ to fit in additional documentary material at peak-hours; besides, the massaudience does not ‘want’ any more, and is now amply catered for by the (formally) ‘30 minutes current affairs show’ at daily peak hours: ITN’s News at Ten.2 According to such pre-emptive arguments and organisational procedures, Alan Whicker becomes the only reporter in ITV to be assigned a regular networked appearance in his own name, and to obtain it by being alone able to ‘command’ the retirement of one or other of the only two major weekly current affairs programmes in the ITV schedules. That this is possible, represents a further endorsement, at the administrative level, of his professional competence. The journalistic prestige of the slots he takes over is automatically conferred on him – as reporter. What then constitutes Whicker’s brand of professionalism? What are its dominant aspects? It is usual for those of reporter status in television to connect their notion of professionalism to some kind of ‘philosophy of broadcasting’. For instance, they may refer to the ‘need’ or ‘right’ of the public to be informed and given ‘access’ to argument and different points-of-view. They may emphasise the importance of learning about other people’s lives and particular ‘social problems’ – perhaps within the context of presenting a Window on the World, of being where the action is. And their statements may well contain a notion of ‘responsibility’, both to the subject and to the audience, and express concern to preserve ‘balance’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ in reporting. But Alan Whicker adopts none of these claims as a rationale for his professional standing. Rather, he tends to assume those characteristics of professionalism that are predominantly self-referring and self-evident. His television career stands for itself, and does not require any validation other than of the assertive order: ‘I am a very experienced professional observer’, I travel 100,000 miles a year’ (and so, ‘Most Travelled’ . . .), ‘I have never said anything on television that I have not written myself – poor words, but my own’, (hence, the unusual ‘written by’ emphasis in the titles). Such statements recur almost word-for-word throughout the available publicity material, and it is on these grounds that he asks, and is determined, to be taken as a ‘professional’ – the term he applies most frequently to himself. But others too confirm him in
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his professionalism. He frequently recalls that the nicest thing ever said about him was the description offered by Cliff Michelmore, the Tonight presenter: The TV Man’s TV Man. It is how he would most like to be known; and in this connection, Alan Whicker maintains that ‘I have always striven for the respect of my peers. I work for myself. I work for my peers’. This aspect of professionalism is a commonly held one. It suggests that only others ‘in the profession’ are competent judges of work done. One’s colleagues in the apparently autonomous world of television serve as the primary reference-group because they alone understand the practices and routines by which one operates. They alone can spot the mark of a ‘true’ professional in a way which cannot be conveyed to those outside the television world. In Alan Whicker’s case, he has received further ‘official’ recognition of his professionalism through the many television-awards granted to him by various associations of his peers. He said of the award that he won in 1970 for the film Papa Doc – The Black Sheep, which was valuable both in money and prestige terms: ‘I’m thrilled, because the film has been judged against world-wide competition by an impressive panel of people’. In this sense, too, there is no more to be said: the professional reputation exhibits a fetishistic property. It is irrational; it defies qualitative modes of evaluation. Yet that award was presented for an explicit reason, namely, ‘excellence in international TV journalism’. It has an apparently evaluative context; and by referring Whicker’s professionalism back to its basis in documentary reporting, it suggests that his work is to be taken seriously. Besides, the film chosen for the award has particular pretensions to seriousness. For Papa Doc is an example of the ‘one-off ’ features which are specifically designated ‘Reports’ and do not come under the half-hourly ‘World ’ series heading. They are made for ITV’s Tuesday Documentary slot, which is always ‘off-peak’, that is, after 10.30 p.m., and allows a longer running time. Because of the nature of the slot, its films are designated ‘minority interest’ and ‘full length’ documentaries – in Whicker’s case, the length is between 3/4 – 1¼ hours – and carry the further connotations of ‘in-depth’, investigatory reporting. These single Whicker features are also distinct from the Whicker series, in that their subject-matter tends to originate from recognisably ‘current affairs’ area. However, as I want to argue later, these factors constitute only an apparent difference between the reports and the series. Both reports and series programmes will therefore be taken together in the analysis of what makes Whicker’s World. Further, I suggest that although each type of programme is formally defined ‘documentary’, both of them are documentaries only to the extent that they show Whicker travelling and going to places and meeting people that actually exist in objective reality. Beyond that, the ‘documentary’ designation has an administrative validity only: it serves to fulfil the required ITA quota of documentary material. But then follows the ITA’s bureaucratic equation: documentary = serious or informative (= one third of ITV’s output); everything-mass-else = entertainment (= two thirds output). By ITA definition, therefore, Whicker ‘passes’ along the first equation, conferring prestige on his company by maintaining its original, serious-programming intentions. But this administrative categorisation, as well as the ‘official’ recognition of his professional peers, legimates the documentary purpose of his work only on the basis of crude programme-content. The programmes have much more to do with the second equation: Whicker knows how the masses want to be entertained.
The telling style The basic Whicker programme that follows the opening titles composes an assemblage of two main elements: the Commentary and the Interview. Both elements relate to
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Whicker’s overall perspective by virtue of being controlled by him, but each provides a distinct orientation on the visual material to which it refers. To put it this way is to place the critical emphasis on the verbal components of the films and therefore to go against the prevailing orthodoxy which takes television to be pre-eminently ‘the visual medium’. But supposing the analysis made its primary distinctions on the basis of various compositions of visual sequence instead, and started with, say, different types of location-shot combinations which were then seen in relation to the verbal component, it could not provide adequate critical means to account for the ‘world’ that is presented in the programmes. For it would not equip the analyst to grasp the crucial significance of Whicker as the central mediator of symbolic meaning. It is according to what Whicker says, in the commentary, and in the interview he sets up, that his World is organised, and the camera is then manipulated to ‘see’ only what is identified by and through Whicker. Commentary and Interview are taken as the basic elements for analysis, in the sense that they constitute two modes of presentation. That is, they offer distinguishable ways of presenting the World of Whicker; in each case, the verbal component is seen in relation to the visual, but with the verbal always predominating. Almost invariably, the moment a particular Whicker programme opens is also the moment Alan Whicker starts speaking. And from then on the occasions are few when his presence is not being made actual, either verbally or verbally-and-visually. Such selfpresentation is a style that is deliberately opposed to a current documentary practice based on apparently unobtrusive and ‘natural’ reporting. Whicker frequently attacks this approach as pretentious – ‘in some arty TV circles there has been an attempt to do away with the reporter, poor chap, and rely instead upon . . . the “naturalness” of careful rehearsal and disembodied, voices intoning in the background’. Against this, he insists that his programmes are ‘personal’ and ‘signed’ because ‘I think it’s more valid that way’. Certainly it is more patent. The ‘unobtrusive’ style tends to lead its audience into a piece of filmed action or fragment of interview that presents an already ongoing situation and depends for its sense on what follows. Whicker, on the other hand, usually addresses himself to the audience immediately with an introductory commentary. This establishes where he is and who he’s come travelling to meet. It is commonly given in ‘voice-over’ form while the camera illustrates his description with shots of the location, and at some stage, of himself at large in it. But also, sometimes, his introduction is spoken directly to camera, which means he is temporarily obscuring what he is describing, and it is only when he turns to point behind him that the camera can move in to bear out his commentary. Both the voice-over and to-camera approaches, which are used subsequently in the shorter, linking pieces of commentary, demonstrate the subordination of the visual to the verbal component in Whicker’s World. The voice (if not Whicker’s, his interviewee’s) is seldom silent; the camera rarely moves independently of Whicker in a way which would allow it to make an additional, or exclusively visual, point: its function is essentially to reinforce the World in Whicker’s terms. Here again Whicker is at odds with a prevalent media doctrine: that of ‘letting the pictures speak for themselves’. This doctrine may of course serve to conceal the degree of manipulation involved in all the stages of selection and editing that precede transmission, and is especially dubious when used as the rationale for the sort of direction that insists on a wide range of sophisticated televisual ‘effects’, rapidly shot and subsequently arranged in elaborate montage. But there is also a sense in which ‘pictures speaking for themselves’ represents the programme-maker’s intention to attempt ‘maximum closeness to the subject’ – as Trevor
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Philpott, for one, claims – and recognises an audience’s learned capacity to interpret certain kinds of visually-transmitted material without requiring commentary. It is this aspect which is not conceded by Whicker; by condemning the whole notion on the charge of ‘artiness’, his omnipresence is preserved. As a result, a notable feature of his commentary is the amount of redundant description it contains: time is absorbed in telling the audience what they can already clearly ascertain, for example, how people, currently or previously in vision, are dressed, their manner of conduct, particular gestures or facial expressions and so on. But then it is precisely the how, the style, of the telling, that is to the point. The commentary serves to convey Whicker’s capacity for descriptive interpretation. After the build-up for himself as star in the opening sequence, he now creates the build-up for what is to be performed in his World. The introductory commentary is then crucial in setting the anticipatory tone which the linking commentaries subsequently reinforce. This example, taken from I wanted to welcome Prince Philip – but I was too tied up (The World of Whicker, 30.8.71) is ‘typical’ in that it brings together representative features of the Whicker telling-style: The most famous hotel of America’s most popular resort, Miami Beach, is to make people feel rich. (music; dice-playing) And the Fontainebleu, or Fontaine-blue, as it’s called here is to send them away – poor. ( fade out music; AW first seen, in lightweight suit walking between occupied deckchairs). For within a – phantasmagoria, more like a movie set than an hotel, you can just get by on £50 a day if you’re prepared to – cut a few corners. (laughing women) This improbable palace, known as the Jewish Pentagon, tries to answer the ultimate American question: what do I do with my time and money now that I’ve made it? It’s entertained a Who’s Who of guests: all the Presidents, various kings, Prime Ministers, a – scintillation of showbiz, James Bond was here you remember, with Goldfinger. (AW exploring inside) To its followers, the Fontainebleu’s a fashion, a way of life, or maybe – a way of pretending. For, on holiday, why use your own personality when there are so many more interesting personalities you can borrow? Why be satisfied with conventional surroundings (chandeliers), when, for a few daily dollars, you can strut a stage, like this? (fade in eighteenth century music) A certain ostentation, designed to make guests paying anything up to £200 a day feel they’re really spending twice that. Relentless airconditioning allows women, though in the tropics, to wear furs all the time. It’s a Mozart Muzak minuet in swing time – with a Gallic accent (rooms with French names) The French motif only occasionally requires – translation (‘Mesdames’, ‘Messieurs’ notices on doors; pause: music becomes ‘beat’) Most of the – 2,000 let’s pretend guests who scramble for the thirteen hundred rooms of this Pyramid of Pleasure come from the New York rag-trade. (middleaged people dancing) In this extreme corner of the United States, the Kosher Nostra can swing loose and let go at the very end of their hunt for the fast buck. The Fontainebleu was created seventeen years ago by – Ben Novak, who arrived in Florida in 1940, almost broke. Now he’s very rich, so when a newspaper says the Mafia control Miami Beach and have a piece of this hotel, Novak sues them for ten million dollars. He’s possessive about his – Technicolor Extravaganza (outside shots) with its Florida French accent. In his tanning yard (mainly middleaged people lying by a pool) his cast of 2,000 comatose guests go through the colour bar, turning in oil like French fries. They’re here to show – they’ve made it. Ben Novak’s certainly made it. He values his fun palace at – 25 million pounds. (Ben Novak in shot, indoors interview with him starts). [ The descriptions in brackets do not of course contain the full list of ‘visuals’, but the commentary is indicative . . .]
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A printed transcription cannot adequately convey the extent to which the commentary relies on a special rhythm of delivery. The pattern of the rise and fall of the voice is extremely ‘marked’ for emphasis on phrasing. Additionally, particular phrases and keywords are pointed up by cesural pauses, nasal underlinings, elongated syllables and the accentuation of certain initial consonants. This verbal effect specifically recalls the build up as applied in showbiz: a dramatic way of getting and holding attention. It is reinforced by the stylistic devices of repetition, alliteration and punning, which also relate to the conventions of marketing: the tendency to sloganise, for instance, and popular journalism: headlining and a Time-Life style of accumulating detail. Further, the prolific use of metaphor suggests the journalistic convention of the ‘colour piece’, by which a series of imagistic impressions is set up to generate ‘atmosphere’. Specially chosen mood-music frequently accompanies the commentary, and the way it is faded in, up and down, recalls cinematic treatment – especially because particular pieces often allude directly to a recognisable type of film, like the horror movie or Hollywood romance. Television is the most ‘heterogenous’ of media in any case, but how do these various associations and techniques work coherently through the commentary? What is their presentational purpose? As a kind of media-entertainment ‘set’ they do not, for instance, serve well for conveying information, and, considering the length of an introductory commentary, the amount of informational content is minimal. There is, of course, a lot of ‘data’ there, but these are not calculated to ‘inform’ on a primarily cognitive basis. Again, the analysis of Whicker’s World has to proceed according to the criterion of absence, for there is also nothing in the commentary that indicates a controlling point-of-view, whether explicit or underlying, by which priorities are to be evaluated and explanations offered. It does not, for instance, like Cameron Country, set up as a personal programme-intention ‘to ask the reason why’. And Whicker himself always puts his intentions negatively, implicitly parodying other documentary approaches in the same moment as he opposes them. His programmes, he claims in advance-publicity, will contain ‘no definitive statements’, ‘no cosmic views’, ‘no heavy moralising’, he is not aiming at ‘running campaigns’, he is against ‘punditry’, he is not going to ‘pontificate’ or be ‘judgemental’.
Sensationalism Since such indeed proves to the case, what may be positively claimed? As with Whicker’s professionalism and celebrity, the commentary is self-justifying in its manner. It arouses the audience to respond for the very experience of arousal. The heterogenous devices it draws on can therefore be seen as contributing to a frame of reference which is controlled by the notion of sensationalism. For sensationalism offers a mode of apprehending the world that is dependent, precisely, on the manipulation of ‘effects’ aimed at achieving the most heightened emotional reaction. It adopts the behavioural mechanics of stimulus-response in a way which implicitly pre-empts the making of considered judgements on the part of an audience. It invited the audience into a ‘conditioned’ world of constant fascination, where the possibility of boredom is unremittingly denied. Sensationalism operates according to an imposed system of relevances.3 In the case of Whicker’s World, this system exhibits certain key dimensions. First, there is the establishment of a maximal-minimal scale: locations and people are described in terms of the most, the ultimate, the only, the unique or the least. These extremes either constitute the unique selling propositions of each programme, or else the most is juxtaposed to
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the least to provide a contrast that is inexplicable in its very violence. Then there is the provision of facts-and-figures. These usually refer to dates, size and number of –, property-values, amounts of money, and are conveyed as accumulations of data. They are piled up to invite amazement in themselves and are not given in order to make sense of situations: they act as vehicles whereby quality is transformed into the quantity of commodity-fetishism. Finally, there is the attribution of improbability. From this notion Whicker derives his most used adjective and adverb, and these are used in combination with other characteristic counters like ‘strange’ ‘curiously’ ‘unexpected’ to highlight areas of oddness and eccentricity. Similarly, the point of metaphorical comparison tends towards the unpredictable or the grotesque. ‘The Whicker speciality – on his programmes always expect the unusual!’ says the TV Times, referring specifically to the idiosyncratic, off-beat nature of the programme-titles, which obviously anticipate something to be said later, contriving meanwhile to keep the audience ‘in suspense’. The notion of improbability again offers no basis for active cognition. It implies that circumstances cannot be rationally explained and serves to obscure the existence of real contradictions. On all these levels, sensationalism works to provoke reactions of the kind: Fancy that! Who’d have thought it! Never! It presumes the stance of the permanent spectator, one who sees peculiar things ‘happen’ as if by accident or magic, and can only conclude that the world is like that, really: a funny old place. The commentaries of the longer, ‘current affairs’ type Whicker Reports, which are presumed to be more ‘informative’ about the world, exhibit similar sensationalist tendencies. The introduction to the most prestigious one, Papa Doc – The Black Sheep, 11.2.71,4 again shows the build-up of ‘atmosphere’ through a pattern of redundant identifications that inhibits real knowledge. Where motivation is questioned, reasons become tautologous – ‘How does this insignificant little man . . . inspire such fear? Perhaps because he kills ruthlessly and with indifference’ – and hence, fateful, the work of magic: Papa Doc poses ‘the inescapable threat’ to the survival of his country. His guards, the Ton-Ton Macoute, are characterised throughout the commentary as ‘hoodlums’, ‘thugs’ and ‘murderers’ – fascinated evocations that do not explain their existence. Such isolated bits of information that are made available about them again fit sensationalist dimensions of extremity, the numbers of people murdered, for instance; or improbability, ‘the many hundreds of bogeymen are controlled – improbably – by Madame (So-and-So)’ who ‘packs her own gun, demurely, in her handbag’. The most sustained piece of information in the whole commentary comes in digest form over a Voodoo dance sequence: . . . Today, with the lowest income, food intake and life-expectancy in the hemisphere, 5 million Haitians live lives little changed since the slavedays, two centuries ago. In 50 years, they’ve known 69 revolutions. They are not really in touch with the outside world. Haitians are 90% Catholic, but, it’s said, 100% – Voodoo. (Drum-beats, trance induced. AW then evokes the grotesque nature of Voodoo symbolism) But why such poverty, so many revolutions? Such questions have little relevance to the World of Whicker – especially when there is the stronger entertainment-appeal of strange natives making magic. Besides, the commentary has another sensationalist priority to establish: that only Whicker is able to report such scenes for he alone has managed to ‘gain entry’ into Duvalier’s Haiti and thereby obtain, once more, a ‘television first’. His programmes repeatedly attest his capacity for penetrating locations that are normally ‘closed’ to the media, and often dangerous, and for meeting individuals who, generally by
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choice, have not received television exposure before. But the approach is not so much that of the journalistic ‘scoop’ which has a story-line to advance. What counts is the very fact that it is he, Alan Whicker, who has got into a location: his presence there is ‘automatically’ justified. He has gained ‘an exclusive’. This aspect is brought out especially on those occasions when Whicker speaks to camera, which he does more usually in the linking bits of commentary than in the introduction. Here he is clearly established for the audience as actually present and the commentary is quite different in style from the elaborately written pieces already quoted which are only dubbed on in the final editing stages well after the location has been left. Speaking to camera, Whicker uses a colloquial style of address which fosters immediacy and invokes the audience this time in the person of the single viewer. Sensationalism in the grand manner previously discussed treated the audience as a generalised ‘mass’ to be worked upon; but here it is a case of between-you-and-me: the sensationalism of the ‘exclusive’, based on apparently intimate disclosure. The style is well-captured in the Papa Doc film: Alan Whicker stands directly in front of Duvalier’s palace-gates while armed guards patrol behind, and opens, sotto voce, ‘I’ve just heard the most eerie story, which does – to a degree – illustrate the – complete unpredictability of President Duvalier . . .’ Again in the same place, he relates the terrifying-but-comic difficulty of gaining access: ‘. . . So I stood outside and waited, and he, presumably, was in his study there, waiting and nobody has the courage – to – knock on his door! So what I’ve done is to come out and I’m going to a telex office because I know he has a telex up there and I’m going to send him a message – saying “Please sir, ha-ha, I’m outside your door” . . .’ Such examples illustrate the daring of Whicker, telling us such details live on the very spot where he is most at risk; and demonstrate the manner of his telling: a buttonholing confidentiality, emphasised by much gesticulation, animated close-up and glances over the shoulder; an anecdotal trust placed on the viewer-as-if-present, who is presumed to be showing signs of reciprocating, of already seeing it Whicker’s way. This manner of apparently creating a face-to-face primary relationship with an unseen audience, has been termed parasocial interaction.6 It is described as a means of maintaining the image of a media celebrity as a familiar – someone who can be regarded by the audience as ‘one of us’. And since television is taken to be the most intimate of media, by virtue of its domestic position and its transmission of life-size close-up, for instance, the ability to sustain an ambience of parasocial interaction would seem to be a significant factor in the making of a TV Personality: it is what makes him ‘popular with the viewers’. And ‘most viewers, it seems think the world of Whicker’ said the People when he won the TV Derby of 1970. Public legitimation of Whicker’s personality status on the basis of viewers’ polls and official awards (TV Guild Personality of the Year, 1964, for instance), has been forthcoming throughout his career; and, while he insists on his status as professional reporter, he does not stand aloof from popularity-ratings. With the understated sincerity that personalities adopt when describing their job in terms of their public, he says, ‘it gives some people some pleasure. There’s a certain reward. One is very low in the table compared with the significant people – the surgeons, the doctors, the priests, but when people come up to you in the street and say ‘Hullo Alan, haven’t seen you lately’ that’s another reward’. (TV Times, 1969). But Whicker is not only ‘Alan’ to us, the ‘ordinary viewers’ in the street, he is also ‘Alan’ to the people he meets in his anything but ordinary television world: people whom the build-ups of his programmes have defined as, in some sensational way, distinctly not like us. The familiar encounters he is seen to have with them in his films must not exclude the
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audience he has been working on during the commentary. His reputation as TV Personality depends crucially on his ability to keep the audience ‘in the picture’ while these encounters take place. Reference to his immediate subject must be in the context of reference outwards to the audience. The situation must be at once most intimate and most public, and it is a function of the interview, as point of mediation to achieve this.
The Whicker interview Because the Interview, and not some other TV element, constitutes the other main mode of presentation in a Whicker programme, and takes up the most film-time, the personality aspect is reinforced and Whicker’s control over his World is further demonstrated. The element of action for instance is minimal: Whicker’s subjects do not act independently of him. The convention of people being ‘followed’ by the camera, carrying on ‘as normal’ and doing the sort of things they would be doing anyway at that time and place if television were not present, hardly figures, if at all, in the programmes. Whicker, as personality, as interviewer, is the only initiator of significant action. Of course, the convention of the autonomous subject also depends, at some stage, on the initiative of an interviewer. But in normal practice his presence is subsequently edited out – entirely, in the extreme version of the style – so that the subject appears, either in vision or voice-over, to be speaking unprompted, spontaneously. Whicker represents the opposite extreme. He remains present in all situations clearly labelled interview: his questions are not cut, he is seen putting them and responding to his subject. For he is there not so much to serve, to bring out, the subject for the subject’s sake, as for the sake of the interview itself, for the interpersonal and public-relations dynamics of the situation. This purpose is visually conveyed through the maximum use of two-shot pictures. These are of two characteristic kinds: 1) Whicker side-by-side with his subject, a position in which both are equally favoured by the camera; they are usually sitting, on adjacent chairs, the same settee or car-seat, close enough for Whicker, turning into the picture, to lean his arm behind his subject’s back. Or 2) Whicker standing close, but at an angle to his subject, in an upright yet receptive stance, one leg bent forward, arms folded across his chest, or one hand moving to rest on his chin. These are the positions of intimate proximity: even when it is the subject who is favoured in close-up, Whicker is still in the picture, showing a profile, or more, and laughing or nodding frequently. These shots establish Whicker as being supportively with his subject: the sympathiser and friend; and the absence of notes and microphone ensures a manner that is relaxed and conversational. However, the interview also bears the signs of a public performance, ‘set up’ for the camera. It never starts before Whicker and his subject are ‘in position’; and the settings chosen for it are already those where people habitually carry out performances for others and maintain front. Indeed for all the interest taken in documentary ‘actuality’, it could almost as well be happening in a TV studio. And if this were the case, one of the main conventions at work here would become quite apparent: namely the potential form of the TV chat-show. The chat-show convention plays on the notion of ‘entertaining’ in a double-sense: hospitality – ‘guest’ and ‘host’ establish friendly relations; and show-biz – the audience is invited to legitimate the act. This could be taken as a basic model for the Whicker interview: Whicker plays host to his subject-guests. But additionally, there are often ambiguities: while he remains the host as celebrity-personality interviewer, he may also be appearing as the privileged guest of his subject, more or less in his own person. This will be made visually
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apparent in various ways, as when the interview-setting demonstrates that Whicker is being privately ‘entertained’ by his subject, and more notably, during such few bits of action that are not strictly ‘interview’. For instance, in the Harold Robbins feature, I’m the World’s Best Writer, There’s Nothing More to Say, Harold as host is shown giving a party for Alan on his yacht: ‘Happy Birthday Dear Alan! . . . blow out the candles!’ ‘Ha-ha, thank you, how sweet!’ ‘Champagne! I said you couldn’t have your cake and eat it! Yum yum yum’. In this case, Alan had been a real-life friend of the Robbins’ for several years. But a more typical course is that Whicker becomes a friend of his subject following the interview. This is made much of in publicity material, and here Whicker frequently gives as his reason for avoiding the confrontational approach, ‘You can’t force yourself into someone else’s life. People invite you in’, and, ‘You’ve got to bear in mind you’re always someone else’s guest.’ Conversely of course Whicker’s subjects may be both his guests on the show and his hosts: in addition to Robbins, Papa Doc is named ‘host’ in the film-titles, and, in Everybody Loves the Secret Police, Premier Gairy drives up in his Mercedes dressed for tennis, gets out his raquets and shakes hands with Whicker: ‘Very glad to have you here.’ He wasn’t, after Whicker named him in the commentary as the next Papa Doc and hinted at corrupt dealings over Miss World. But then, that is Whicker’s privilege; he can always have the last word, whether favourable or not, because it remains throughout his show, whatever are the various ambiguities of guesthost relations with various subjects. But these very situations, where Whicker and his subject are both guest and host to each other, serve merely to reinforce the chat-show ambience of the mutuality of interests. The interview becomes an elaborate exercise in impressionmanagement, in which Whicker and his subject realise themselves to themselves as well as to the unseen audience. The primary impression managed by Whicker in his own person is that of being a most likeable chap. Although this is a moral and affective characterisation, which invites the ‘personal’ corroboration of others, it can be demonstrated independently of whether individuals, in his films or in his audience, actually do like him or not. For, both verbally and visually through the interview, he is giving off all the signs of being likeable: stance, tone of voice (never hostile or disagreeable), gesture, content of the conversation, ability to draw people out and make them talk. And nowhere is this more clearly established than in his role as ladies’ man. This is the feature of the Whicker persona that is most celebrated and which figures prominently in publicity-photography (‘Whicker’s Birds of Paradise’ ). The ladies’ man interview relies on the technique and conventions of the chat-up, and therefore tends to exhibit maximum verbal redundancy and to place most emphasis on the (extraverbal) dynamics of the situation itself. This is particularly so when the women interviewed are being encountered primarily as women and not established in their own person – not given names or commentary build-up, for instance. In the chat-up, Whicker adopts an insinuating manner, but keeps it at a bantering, chuckley level. He flatters the women-subjects into responses that are, variously, flirtatious, giggly or outrageous, it is difficult to illustrate this from transcript-notes, but the shot of Andrea, society-hostess, on the sofa with him in Whicker’s Walkabout shrieking: ‘No! Don’t you play that game with me!’, when the matter of adultery in Australia is jokingly alluded to, may convey something of the ambience. Whicker plays women along to capture their unguarded, intimate moments, but he himself always maintains his front. In this respect, the way he is dressed, always immaculately ‘smart’, is important. For instance, on a Grenada beach a middle-aged woman in a lowcut beachdress reclines on a chaise-longue: sitting on the end of it and leaning forward, sharing a drink with her is Alan Whicker. A long-shot has established them to be completely ‘alone’ and Whicker is dressed in his most characteristic
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location-clothes, crisp collar-and-tie, sharply pressed lightweight suit with pocket handkerchief, and leather buckled handmade shoes. The interview starts: ‘What is the position of a lone and attractive white woman on an island like this? Ha-ha . . . an enviable one? You’re courted on all sides?’ ‘Yes, why not?’ ‘Why not indeed!’ and ends: ‘You’re not insecure as a lone white woman, ha-ha?’ ‘Well I’ve still got some of my arms, legs, head – and some of my reputation!’ (both laugh). The very ‘Englishness’ of Whicker’s appearance in this case allows him to maintain a professional distance while continuing to exercise his ladies’ man reputation. That the chat-up may reinforce this reputation, is further brought out when he specifically asks women how they regard the men in their own location and it is clearly established, both visually and verbally, that Whicker appears in a more attractive light. But there are occasions when the course is less smooth and the routines of chat-up and chat-show are challenged. When this happens the challenge becomes, of itself, the point of the interview and thence the orientation of the programme. For example, whilst ‘islandhopping the Caribbean’ to meet ‘dusky Dick Whittingtons who have turned again to their sunny homelands after sampling London Life’, Alan Whicker encounters a girl who repeatedly refuses to be realised through him: ‘I’ll say thank you, dear England – is that what you want?’ He then incorporates the irony and anger of the question by turning it into the programme-title.
Managing impressions It is rarely, however, that people are so disagreeable. The attempt to take the questioninitiative from Whicker more commonly arises from the friendly ambiguities of the guesthost relation. The Road from Rose Linda’s represented the furthest attempt when it showed Percy Shaw, The Cat’s Eyes Man, enquiring about Whicker’s age, whether his parents were living, the state of his capital and how he could live on it, his ‘excuse’ for remaining a bachelor, and how all his sweethearts were getting on. Whicker remained polite guest and always volunteered answers without resorting to the professional’s I’m-doing-the-asking formula. But the programme-billing made a point of ‘the man who turned the tables on Alan Whicker’, and the film itself went against custom by leading in with an interviewextract: Percy Shaw in the back of his Rolls-Royce saying he was glad he’d had to ‘rough it’ and commenting on Whicker’s softness – ‘Have you ever been mucky?’ Although impression-management of a kind was clearly being employed here, the manner of forthright interrogation is not characteristic of Whicker’s world. When Whicker has full charge of the questioning, he shows how impression-management in his terms has more to do with the manipulation of various images associated with a persona: (from A Giddy Head in Paradise – interview with the Hon. Colin Tennant, owner of Mustique Island, Caribbean, 21.1.71). AW:
CT: AW: CT: Commentary:
What about your own lifestyle? . . . I see that in Vogue you describe yourself as a headwaiter of Mustique . . . You’re more of a king it seems to me. (CT’s servant hands Whicker a drink: Oh splendid! thank you) er – not a king (musing) Aren’t you a king of Mustique? Not a king, nor even a Regent. Um some kind of – possibly a Proconsul . . . I suppose 25 years ago I would have been called a planter. Today he’s planting people: the Debretter the better . . .
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According to chat-show convention, the moods shift from jokeyness to those of a ‘Let’s be serious for a moment’ kind as various confirmatory images are offered and tried for size. The publicity-image is compared with the self-image to produce: more publicity. Besides, the introductory and linking bits of commentary have set most of the images to work already: the interview just offers further reinforcement. This is seen in the interview with Ben Novak when the first question asked in all ‘seriousness’ after the lengthy build-up is: ‘Now how would you describe the style of the hotel?’ But behind the redundantly impressionistic question-and-answering that then ensues there is something that could have borne a reporter’s investigation: namely, the extent of Novak’s association with the Mafia. In a later, ‘serious’ part of the interview, Whicker does raise this matter, but he puts it to Novak merely as a ‘newspaper story’. In the reply he is then able to detract from the issue by pointing out how the press invariably have a grudge against the rich and successful and recounting lengthy anecdotes about taking legal action. These stories serve only to reinforce his self-image further, and the Mafia charges, by remaining unspecified, merely add glamour to the image by association. Besides, Novak does not inhabit the ‘real world’ that is open to investigation. The whole location has already been identified as a let’s-pretend fantasy, a Hollywood set. Novak’s relation to the Mafia has then to be translated into Hollywood terms and it transpires that while his guests are living out a ‘technicolor extravaganza’, a romance, he is enjoying a different filmic fantasy and looks ‘like an actor – in some gangster movie maybe’ talking ‘as tough as any – George Raft.’ But the effect is similar when the interview does have investigatory pretensions. In the Papa Doc film, Whicker tells Duvalier: ‘There’s no doubt Mr President, you have had the worst international press of any president that I have ever known’. That’s right, yes, Duvalier says, acknowledging the unique prestige conferred by Whicker’s claim before referring to himself as victim of an international conspiracy. Whicker then asks about the Ton-Ton Macoute, but the question ties them in as a feature of Duvalier’s ‘bad publicity’ in a way which obscures the fact of their real existence. Finally he asks again: AW: Why then should the American press be critical of you? PD: Because . . . they are not well prepared mentally to study the situation. I should be, what you call, a – ‘child’ – ? AW: The favourite child? PD: The favourite child, yes, that’s right, of the United States. (smiling) AW: Instead of which, you’re the – (smiling) PD: Instead of which (laughing) they consider me like a black sheep! (Both laugh. Programme ends) The modes of Commentary and Interview combine, then, to present a series of fascinating distractions in a manner which avoids disturbing the existing social distribution of knowledge and control. The audience are invited to react to stimulation for its own sake and remain uninformed of any basis for possible future action or control. Aroused in order to stay passive, they are indeed only viewers of the show. Hence Papa Doc’s ‘stricken nation sinks deeper into its zombie trance – watched by a critical but helpless world.’
The spectacle ‘Trance’, ‘coma’, ‘dream’, ‘fantasy’ . . . The World of Whicker composes a zone of mystification and the people he meets there typically inhabit ‘utopias’. That is, following Dahrendorf ’s7
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sense of ‘utopian’, they live in places that ‘have but a nebulous past and no future’, places that ‘are suddenly there, and there to stay, suspended in mid-time’ and consequently exhibit no signs of ‘structurally generated conflict’. In Whicker’s language of religious alienation, these places are ranged between two totalitarian extremes: ‘paradises’ and ‘sinister’ nearhells. Neither has an explicable origin, nor any historical development that can be traced to the actions of men. But somehow, or by ‘luck’ certain individuals, dictators, celebrities, owners of property and suchlike, are granted the powers, in his frequent phrase, of ‘making it’. For the rest, there can be no change because magical assertion precludes the existence of real contradictions. However, it is recognised that ‘all is not perfect – in paradise’. It would be very boring otherwise, and there would be little to tell the viewers at home. The purpose of visiting utopias is, then, to ‘go behind the scenes – in paradise’ and discover: all manner of ‘improbable’ happenings and eccentricities, incongruities, of behaviour among the inhabitants. ‘So let’s see if one man’s island is – everyman’s dream.’ Well no, it isn’t quite, because it keeps raining, and the people who have come here to ‘escape’ keep meeting the people they thought they had escaped from! (Mustique). And as for the more sinister sort of utopia: well it does have its humourously grotesque aspects. On ‘Miss World’s Island of Sugar and Spice Where Not Everything’s Nice’, they have a premier who is ‘wild-eyed’ and believes he is governed by – Cosmic Forces, and a governor who is – a woman, and who isn’t very – punctual at ceremonies; the electricity tends to fail and it’s all pretty – shambolic, but while ‘the living may be difficult, dying is the absolute end! Whatever you do don’t die there! But if you should be so – unfortunate’, they’ll put you in a casket with a free offer of whiskey and send you off in an ‘endless Cadillac’! While Gairy may worry about his public relations, the basis of his power is not affected: dictatorships thrive on not being taken seriously. The sensationalist knack of looking for the grotesque effectively obscures or renders impotent any manifestations of conflict or opposition that might be emerging in utopias. As Whicker says when he learns of the attempted coups in Haiti: ‘There’s a certain – black comedy about this murderous merrygoround.’ In this perspective, odd incongruities serve to displace contradictions, and going-behindthe-scenes manages to leave the secrets of inner reality intact – indeed contributes to their remaining obscure. Surface appearances are uncovered to reveal: more appearances. The ‘real truth’ is yet another show: especially when, as so often happens, the illusions of utopias get referred back to the illusions of the world of media-and-entertainment: it is all really just like a comedy or a movie. In Whicker’s World of accumulated appearances, the inhabitants can have no social being. It is as isolated and singular individuals that they enter into relations which only Whicker can mediate. They are all ‘characters’ in the show. If they happen to be playing leading parts, their performance will always be guaranted ‘unique’. And even if Whicker takes an unfavourable rise out of them while off-stage, the ambivalence renders their public image more interesting at least. He has, anyway, to discover something odd about everyone – so odd indeed that it is predictable, fitting a media pattern of expectations on which the survival of celebrities depends. Thus he finds out that although Ben Novak is an hotel-owner, he can’t stand his guests; although Percy Shaw is a millionaire, he is ‘eccentric’ because he has no curtains and few carpets in his home; although Papa Doc is a dictator, ‘there is no doubt he is a most courteous man.’ Then follow the ‘extras’: so long as each has at least one redeemingly ‘unusual’ feature – that is what gets them into the show, whether or not it has any subjective relevance. Outside of that, they have no authentic existence. The zone of everyday life has no meaning in Whicker’s World: here people do not carry
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on a living but adopt styles-of-life. These are some of the discoveries Whicker makes about a ‘typical day’, as he sees it, in one utopia, the ‘new tribal society’ of Australia: he finds a ‘most improbable English export’, fox-hunting, going on in suburbia, meets a Scottish lady gambling-addict and beats her on the fruit machines because she isn’t really concentrating, visits Surfers’ Paradise and chats up a girl wearing a bikini with coins pasted on it who keeps the tourists happy feeding their expired meters, the inspiration of the 75-year old Swinging Mayor of Paradise, who explains the ‘symbolism’ of the bikini, and ends up in a crowded bar talking to the members of the Limp Falling Association Devoted to the Relief of Nervous Tension, who deliberately make themselves collapse, especially on important and dignified occasions: they do a demonstration and knock him over as well but he’s up in a trice, brushing down his suit ‘I thought these things were done with delicacy and finesse’ he quips. (A Reverse Crucifix with Chair Demolition and Claret Spray, 7.9.70). When asked in star-interviews, why he keeps on travelling his World, Whicker says, ‘What’s in it for me is the intense pleasure of variety.’ But ‘just as the activities of the star are not really global, they are not really varied’.8 The continuing series of amazing events and encounters represent diversity only at the level of appearance and sensation. They belong, finally, to the world of the spectacle, the alienated world of ‘the seemingly lived’.9 The ‘spectacle’ is a term first proposed by Lefebvre10 to indicate how ideological ‘displays of reality’11 are manufactured as commodities for cultural consumption. He examines various specific manifestations of the spectacle, such as those generated in the ‘media’ world of publicity, TV, fashions, tourism, leisure, astrology, and interprets them as providing forms of magical, compulsive ‘satisfaction’ for the consumer-as-spectator. The term still requires adequate scientific formulation. But its usefulness in pinning down the typical features of Whicker’s World should not be missed. Alan Whicker, ‘TV Man’s TV Man’, is par excellence the agent of the spectacle. The embodiment of celebrity star professional personality traveller, he renounces all autonomous qualities to represent ‘the affirmation of appearances’. He tours the world only to identify it for the spectacle, and after each identification he moves on. What matters to him, he says, is that: ‘Wherever I am I don’t have to stay there. I don’t have to live with the people I meet or put up with anyone for ever. “I was born under a wandering star, I’ve never seen a sight that didn’t look better looking back.” My philosophy is that one is going this way only once.’ So to keep on travelling is justified in itself, but thereby the project becomes a ‘movement of banalisation’. Since he does not ‘belong’ to this world as an autonomous individual, has no authentic commitment to its places and people, he can only describe a world that is ‘his’ in terms of tautology and self-justifying assertion – outside of time and history. The identification can only employ the banal metalanguage of the spectacle: words about words which have no concrete referentials because not grounded in authentic experience. But for this very reason, no hesitation or uncertainty is involved: metalanguage is never ‘lost for words’. Assured and confirmed in tautologous existence as embodiment of the spectacle, Whicker keeps on travelling only to tell his audience that he has seen it all; to capture it in the knowing phrase that has no basis in active cognition, that refers only to the sensations of the spectacle. As he says,12 ‘You’ve seen it all before in a Hollywood B feature – the too-late show’.
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From Mr. Alan Whicker: Dear Sirs, I was interested to read Rosalind Brunt’s study of two of our Series. Wandering from the obscure to the inexact, it tells me far more about Alan Whicker than I wish to know; but thank you for your attention. Many of her strictures may be explained by her slight knowledge of the limitations and disciplines of television – though it is disturbing to be berated for failing in what we have not attempted. To come closer to your home, she disparages a 1,000-word Evening Standard feature for not being 25,000-words in Encounter; she complains that an unsettled earlyevening ITV audience, awaiting ‘Coronation Street’, is not offered a BBC 2 late-night meander. Miss Brunt’s uncertain grasp of television is supported by the curious conviction of the remote researcher that, if it has appeared in a newspaper it is evidence and must be true; the good old cuttings, she appears to believe, cannot lie. From a Group professing to study newspapers ‘exhaustively’, an ingenuous conclusion. So many points could be made: you cannot show boredom on television. Should you be unwise enough to try, you will immediately find whose finger is on the switch. Our visuals are never subordinated to the verbal: I have always written to picture. This takes time, and experience, but provides a precise marriage which Miss Brunt is not able to unscramble. Our 54-minute Documentaries grow-out of the 26-minute Series when possible and are not distinct – just longer; they permit, surprise surprise, a more thorough commentary. I am accused of suggesting that only other professionals ‘are competant judges of work done’. (sic). Never. What I have said (and this study reinforces the view scorned within it) that the most sound Critic is usually someone experienced enough to realise what is being attempted within the straitjacket of a television programme. People are of course almost always filmed in their natural surroundings, as far from the chat-show formula as can be; they are rarely shown walking-into interview positions (whatever useful contribution Miss Brunt thinks that would make) because in 26-minutes we have no time for dead shots. So goes her interpretation . . . The pretension of much of the study is underlined, for me, by the fatuous analysis of the way I sit or stand (one leg bent forward, indeed) when interviews are filmed. I shall doubtless be standing in much the same way should I ever pass the time of day with Miss Brunt, and the posture will have as much significance. Hopefully it will not ‘disturb the existing social distribution of knowledge and control’. I cannot speak for the ‘parasocial interaction’; or am I, to worry her interesting word, being ‘chuckley’? I hope you may enjoy our next Series.
Notes 1 The period chosen includes three series: Whicker’s Walkabout, starting 27.7.70; The World of Whicker, 19.7.71 – and three single reports, concluding with: I’m the World’s Best Writer, There’s Nothing More To Say, 13.12.71. From the twenty-two Whicker programmes scheduled during this time, I selected twelve for detailed examination. This article is a condensed and revised version of the original case-study. Where the present tense is used in the article, it must be taken to refer only to the period under study: certain programme and organisational details have altered since then. For instance, formats vary slightly in new series, the coming of extended broadcasting hours has affected scheduling arrangements, and the ITA became this summer: The Independent Broadcasting Authority. 2 The policy is unpopular with the respective production teams who urge that their kind of current affairs journalism should keep the public informed throughout the year and do not admit to the
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conventional notion of ‘off-periods’. But the additional pre-emptive arguments generated by the Networking Committee are subsequently adopted and regularly applied by the ITA itself, in a way which reveals its real, subordinate, position to the companies: despite its formal commitment to promoting more documentary programming, it is structurally unable to prevent economic forces constraining the range of programme-content. See Alfred Schutz’ chapter called ‘The Well-Informed Citizen’, in his Collected Papers Vol. 2, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1964. During the second World of Whicker series, there was a technicians’ dispute at Yorkshire Television which necessitated the showing of several repeats. Papa Doc, presented in a shortened, half-hour version, was one of these: it was first shown as a full-length single documentary film on 27.5.69. Similarly, The Road from Rose Linda’s – The Cat’s Eyes Man, also in this series and referred to later, was first shown on 8.10.68. At least 8 programmes during the period laid special claims, in commentary and publicity, to the notion of being ‘first’ or ‘exclusive’: eg: Everyone Loves the Secret Police, report 6.4.71: access to Grenada and its Premier, Gairy; Devil’s Island – The Dry Guillotine, series, 7.1.71: ‘for the first time Alan Whicker leads a TV team into the ghost ridden ruins, seeks out exconvicts . . .’ Broken Hill – Walled City, Australian report, 25.8.70: ‘the only city in the world controlled by its trade unions’; Alan’s Whicker’s commentary tells how, while he was filming, another TV crew was beaten up and sent away and emphasises that he is the first man allowed into the Barrier Industrial Council. D. Horton and R. R. Wohl: Mass Communication and Parasocial Interaction, Psychiatry XIX, 1956, pp. 215–29. Ralf Dahrendorf: Out of Utopia: Towards a Reorientation of Sociological Analysis, American Journal of Sociology, LXIV. Guy de Bord: Society of the Spectacle, A Black and Red translation, unauthorised, Detroit, 1970, paragraph 60. ibid. Henri Lefebvre: Critique de la Vie Quotidienne, Vols. 1 and 2, Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1959. Henri Lefebvre: Everyday Life in the Modern World, Alan Lane, The Penguin Press, 1971, p. 63. From the commentary of: In the Amazonian Jungle – A White Elephant, The World of Whicker, 26.7.71.
17 Television news and the Social Contract * Ian Connell
The ‘impartiality’ of television news and current affairs is now widely considered a myth. This standard critique is usually presented in terms of ‘bias’ and ‘distortion’. In this article I argue against the terms and implications of this position. In a wide variety of studies the pictures and definitions constructed by journalistic practices are said to provide ‘biased’ or ‘distorted’ accounts of an independent and objective reality; they are ‘biased’ or ‘distorted’ because they are informed by a body of ruling and dominant ideas, which are said to ‘belong’, in a simple way, to ruling political or economic groups. In short, television journalism is made to appear to be a kind of megaphone by which ruling ideas are amplified and generalized across all sectors of the social formation. The material examined here is television’s account of the Labour Government’s attempts, since October 1974, to win, and maintain the ‘voluntary obedience’ of trade unions to the policy of wage restraint. This account recruited and represented the different positions constructed in and through the struggles between unions, Government and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) leadership. There was no attempt to mask the controversial reception of the Government’s economic policy. Particularly during ‘Phase Three’ of this policy, much of the reporting concentrated on explicit trade union opposition. If television were ‘biased’, as the conspiracy theorists would have it, if it took its orders directly and unquestioningly from the ruling political-economic forces and if, moreover, it had no material presence and effectivity of its own, there would have been little or no representation of this opposition. It could certainly be argued that while the positions of all those directly involved in the negotiations and struggles over and around the Social Contract were aired, not all of them had access to television in the same way. As this article attempts to demonstrate, some of the already constructed positions on the Social Contract, particularly the position which argued for a return to free collective bargaining, were subordinated in the discourse of news and current affairs. At the same time, the Government’s position was taken over and constructed as the ‘basis of reality’ on which serious discussion was mounted. While Labour Ministers and their supporters, including, at crucial moments, the Economic Committee of the TUC, were asked whether a ‘voluntary policy’ would be effective, while there was speculation about whether the various limits set by the Government would hold and whether some ‘statutory measures’ would have to be introduced, television journalism did not question the basic premise that inflation was ‘wages-led’: on the contrary, this premise constituted the
* This revised chapter from Ian Connell’s Ph.D thesis was first published in Screen, vol. 20, no. 1, and is reprinted here with kind permission.
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baseline of television’s accounts. This form of constructing television’s account does not contravene the editorial imperative to demonstrate ‘due impartiality’. According to the Annan Committee’s Report, ‘broadcasters must take account, not just of the whole range of views on an issue, but also of the weight of opinion which holds these views’. To put it another way, the practices of television journalism reproduce accurately the way in which ‘public opinion’ has already been formed in the primary domains of political and economic struggle, how it has been structured in dominance there. Television journalism does not accomplish this work of reproduction by being ‘biased’, as this has been defined by the conspiracy thesis. It is not accomplished despite the basic editorial criteria, but rather precisely in and through their practical implementation. It is because this policy is put into practice that a complex unity is forged between the accounts produced by television and these primary accounts which are constituted in the social formation as the dominant, sometimes hegemonic, definitions of political-economic antagonisms. While the basic editorial criteria are, as a matter of course, scrupulously implemented, it does not follow, as many a professional broadcaster has imagined, that television journalism is ideologically inert. Television is an ideological instance precisely because of the effectivity of these editorial criteria. This can be seen, for example, in the shaping of ‘topics’ by the practices of television journalism. The explanations proffered by news and current affairs programmes are made to seem the ‘best sense’ of a given situation. They are, in the unfolding of television’s account, categorized as ‘common sense’, ‘moderate public opinion’, ‘rational understanding’ or ‘the consensus’. The basis of these explanations are the already constructed definitions in dominance. Television actively and independently contributes to their dominance by working them into the fabric of its explanations and by granting to them the status of what ‘many’ or ‘most’ people think. A precondition of this ideological labour is the separation and fragmentation of television’s coverage from the actual events covered. Through a series of visual and verbal operations discussed below, television’s account is made to seem apart from, above and beyond, the struggles over the Social Contract. It is made to seem a ‘neutral’ space for the serious discussion of controversies. Simultaneously, these same operations construct an ‘audience position’ which, like the account itself, is separated out: the audience is constantly hailed as witness of, but not participant in, the struggle and argument over issues. This is the result of the construction of a televisual space in which the struggles are dramatized through the employment of various ‘actuality forms’ and then framed and focused by an authoritative, informational address that offers its abstracted sense to the audience. It is here, in particular, that it is necessary to highlight how television journalism attempts the generalization of its explanations. So the main proposition which this article will elaborate is that in and through the signifying practices specific to television journalism political-economic antagonisms are contained and their development as antagonisms is neutralized. This is not accomplished by abandoning the basic editorial imperatives but, on the contrary, by fulfilling them. The following sections consider the relation between television journalism, the Government and trade unions, not by recording and examining what broadcasters have to say about their views of this relation, but rather by examining how these views are constructed and articulated in and through the routine operations of journalistic story-telling. We will therefore be focusing upon the perspectives, themes and propositions which have been advanced by journalistic accounts. This will be done by isolating and examining key elements employed in the construction of these themes and in their organization into apparently ‘adequate’ and
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‘coherent’ explanations. These same elements will also be examined to clarify the attempts made to align the explanations with the ‘lived experience’ of audiences. Something of this approach has been adopted by other recent studies of television’s account of political issues, studies which have worked with a notion that television is now the key ‘agenda-setting’ device in the sphere of public opinion. It has been argued, for instance, that beside the long-standing commitments to inform, educate and entertain enshrined in the constitutional documents of both television networks, television now plays the role, albeit unwittingly, of drawing public attention to, and shaping the understanding of, the political situations it chooses to cover. The major points of this approach can be summed up as follows. It has been argued that broadcasters possess the power to: (1) define which issues will enter the sphere of public awareness and discussion; (2) define the terms in which these issues will be discussed; (3) define who will speak on the topics that have been selected; (4) manage and control the ensuing debates and discussions. At the heart of this approach to television journalism is the notion that the professional ideologies of broadcasters – that body of ‘routinized and habituated professional “know-how” ’1 – uniquely and absolutely determines all decisions concerning subject matter, speakers and treatment. This approach transfers or displaces the power to define issues from dominant political and economic forces as attributed by the ‘conspiracy’ theorists to the broadcasters. As a consequence, programmes are not studied in order to specify what they reveal about the actual relations between broadcasting and other sectors. Television is regarded as an absolutely independent prime mover in the social formation; the main emphasis of studies which adhere to this position lies in determining how programmes set about effecting what Trevor Pateman has called a ‘relationship of complicity’ with audiences.2 The central argument of Pateman’s study leads him to suggest that the phrase ‘television coverage of an election’ is a misleading one. Television, he argues, can only be said to provide ‘coverage of ’ an election, or any other political event for that matter, if it has an existence independent of it. For him the evidence of television’s increased penetration of election campaigning suggests that such independence has withered away; ‘we do not have television coverage of an election: we have a television election’.3 From this perspective, television journalism is not seen as taking over and conferring authority on definitions of political situations that are initially formulated elsewhere. Rather, it is seen as creating these definitions itself. In Pateman’s study, as in others which hold this position, television is said, however, to mediate political events. But if we accept that television does play a mediating role, we must also accept that political events are distinct from the television events – programmes of particular kinds – which selectively represent them. The two events are certainly related: the latter consist of illustrated stories about the former. But they are not identical, nor can the television be said to have displaced politics – it signifies it in specific ways. The agenda of political issues, what I have called the ‘primary definitions’ at a given moment in time, is not constituted by broadcasters but rather by contending political forces and by economic forces that have pertinent effects for the conduct of the dominant parliamentary political practices. Television journalism takes its lead from political forces, the dominant ones at any rate. The process of journalistic story-telling, which will be referred to here as a process of informed speculation, represents and then attempts to generalize definitions which already dominate the political sphere. Like others, Pateman’s study is important in that it gives due weight to the specific, formal properties of this process, especially those by which generalization is attempted. He draws attention, for example, to the use of ‘inflexible formats and ritual repetitions’, generalizing definitions, and to a variety of other ‘attention-holding devices’. The nature of such devices
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and their application stems largely from the taken-for-granted and therefore generally unquestioned sense of what constitutes ‘good’, ‘telegenic’ material and ‘good’, ‘attractive’ presentation – in short, from professional ‘know-how’. Assessments of what makes for an attractive presentation of issues – that is, one which will win and hold the attention of an audience – are, ultimately, based upon the assumption about audiences, their interests and attitudes, which are held by professional broadcasters. The deployment of these ‘attentionholding’ devices has consequences for the way in which political issues and their primary definition by leading protagonists are made to appear on television. They are transformed in particular ways. One consequence of the different ways in which particular programmes make their appeal to audiences is that not all the issues that are selected and presented by news bulletins subsequently become items in current affairs programmes. Nor do those which pass into the sphere of current affairs receive attention from each programme located there. Some issues are considered to be more appropriately handled by particular programmes than by others. Certain issues, however, are covered by the full range of news and current affairs programmes. At the moment such issues include the contested policies of the Government to ‘curb inflation’ by preventing ‘excessive wage settlements’, encouraging ‘moderation in wage negotiations’ and ‘holding down’ public expenditure. Issues such as these, which are classified by politicians as well as broadcasters as ones that ‘affect the nation as a whole’, are more or less guaranteed access to each of the regular current affairs magazines – for example, Panorama, Tonight, Weekend World and Nationwide. There are other types of issues which are not granted this universal access. Some issues (crime, for example), while receiving extensive routine surveillance in television news bulletins, rarely set in motion the full current affairs apparatus. They will typically be handled by investigative documentary reports and by some of the magazine programmes, such as Tonight, which, over a period of time, have come to include higher proportions of ‘social problem’ issues. For a ‘crime issue’ to receive the more intensely speculative forms of coverage which, over a period of several years have come to be regarded as the province of Panorama, it would have to have passed through certain additional thresholds of definition by accredited witnesses in the primary domains of the political and the economic. An example could be a run of particularly violent crimes which were said to represent a whole social pattern of events, or something which was seen to be a more general crisis in the legal apparatus as such. We cannot speak of a universal journalistic mode of appropriation and transformation of these primary definitions. The same content, already formed in the primary domains, will be transformed in different ways depending upon the televisual ‘slot’ to which they are directed. This can be briefly illustrated by reference to the peculiarities of Nationwide. Political issues of the type regularly featured by Panorama occupy an exceptional and subordinate position in Nationwide’s repertoire of topics. When such ‘heavy’ political items do appear there they are typically marked out by some variation on the basic phrase ‘and now we turn to more serious matters’. The following statement from the programme indicates more clearly the basis upon which selections and placings are made: ‘Whenever we can on Nationwide we try to bring you the brighter side of life, to counter all the gloom and despondency around us. And tonight we have a success story. . . .’ Similar statements about the programme itself pepper its presenters’ narratives; they fulfil a meta-discursive function, reminding audiences of the status of the programme’s transformations and, simultaneously, marking their difference from the others paradigmatically possible within the field of television journalism. This cast to the programme’s transformations is carried through to the handling of issues
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demarcated as ‘heavy’. In general terms, it leads to a quest for the ‘ray of hope’ or the ‘good news’ amidst the ‘bad’. So prevalent is this orientation that the mere presence of contradictory forces within the events covered by the programme can be elevated as a ‘sign of hope’. Thus, for example, having failed to produce any measure of conciliation in the course of interviewing representatives of the ‘men’ and ‘bosses’ at Chrysler’s Coventry plant at a time when the company was seeking Government assistance to continue operating in this country, Michael Barrett wound up the interview thus: ‘Well, at least you’re sitting together here on a very cold night tonight, and let’s hope that kind of spirit moves on’ (Nationwide, 19 February 1976). In short, the mere presence of the ‘representatives’ in the discourse is mobilized to suggest that conciliation which was manifestly absent from the interview’s account. These kinds of transformations have mainly to do with generalizing, though they unquestionably structure the forms of appearance of issues. They are, however, secondary aspects of journalistic story-telling in the sense that they can only be engaged on condition that the ‘real’ has already been constructed. The fundamental aspects of the process of informed speculation are those which articulate the ‘real’, the processes and means by which primary definitions in the political and economic spheres are recruited to, and incorporated within, the overall fabric of television journalism’s accounts. Television journalism does not initiate definitions of political and economic issues. These definitions originate in the struggles between contending political and economic forces. Television does not take on board each and every definition in exactly the same way. I want now to examine this differentiating process of appropriation in some detail. I have referred to the process of journalistic story-telling as one of informed speculation. This is a process common to all the slots in the news and current affairs sector, though the precise form of its accomplishment will vary according to the particular slot. It is comprised of two relatively distinct stages. During the first the main concern is to establish the topic and its ‘basis of reality’. Between the first and second there is a transitional stage during which questions or points of interest are formulated. It is these which organize the second speculative moment in the process. Broadly speaking, it is possible to identify a repertoire of elementary televisual forms which are mobilized in the work of informed speculation. Together they constitute the formal paradigm of this sector of broadcasting – a basic set of formal possibilities from which selections are made and combined together in particular ways. This repertoire of possible forms has been developed and modified over time, but since the mid 1950s to the present it has remained essentially stable.4 It contains the following elements: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N
live studio ‘piece to camera’ live studio report live studio interview live studio debate actuality film sequence actuality film sequence with commentary over actuality film sequence with captions superimposed actuality extract actuality ‘piece to camera’ actuality report actuality interview graphics with commentary over stills with voice/captions over credits/titles with music over
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The repertoire of communicative roles in journalistic television includes: (1) presenter; (2) commentator; (3) reporter; (4) chairperson; (5) interviewer; (6) interviewee; (7) expert; (8) protagonist in debate; (9) man/woman-in-street (ordinary person). These roles are not abstract essences; they exist and are differentiated only in and through discursive practice. The elementary forms can, of course, be broken down into smaller units. The live studio debate, for example, a form used throughout the field but only within the speculative stages, can be broken down into lower units of ‘transaction’, ‘exchange’, ‘move’ and ‘act’. However, it can be regarded as elementary in the sense that each mobilization of this form contains certain necessarily fixed syntagms at each level of organization. Not all the forms and roles I have mentioned are mobilized in the ‘informational’ stage of journalistic story-telling. News bulletins do not, for example, employ live studio debate. Though the selections and combinations vary with the nature of the primary definitions, any item in a news bulletin would include, at the very least, A and B (live studio report). A not-infrequent combination is: A-B-E-F-K-A. This combination gives to the work of appropriation its manifest informational cast. There is a dialectical relation between the elements A, B (live studio ‘piece to camera’, live studio report) and E, F, K (live studio report, interview, debate) in which the latter appear to ground, license and authenticate the former. Conversely, the statements made in A and B function as metalanguage; they appear to highlight, to set in place for the audience, the ‘truth’ of statements made in K especially. Although manifestly informational, the work of establishing topics is not ideologically inert. The heavy reliance on ‘actuality’ forms, particularly when pre-definitions of an issue have already constituted it as having ‘grave-consequences-for-the-nation-as-a-whole’, masks the extent to which the issue is framed and focused by the broadcasters themselves. The work of framing and focusing accomplished by the discourse of A, B and the commentary over in F establishes, for the audience, a certain orientation or ‘point of view’. But this is grounded in the events and statements depicted in the actuality forms – ‘the real events out there’. The use of the actuality forms sustains a ‘transparency-to-reality’ effect which makes the constructed orientation appear ‘natural’ – the only one possible. To begin to demonstrate how this part of the process works and the nature of the orientations constructed, here are two examples from television news coverage of certain key moments in the proceedings of TUC Conferences. The first example is taken from the coverage of the TUC Conference in September 1974, at which the Labour Government’s Social Contract was ‘officially’ endorsed; the second, from the TUC Conference in September 1977 which rejected a further year of pay restraint but agreed to hold to the Government’s twelve-month rule. Each employs H (actuality extracts) extensively to recruit the Government’s definitions to television’s account.
1 Actuality scenes of delegates applauding. Voice over: The Prime Minister gets a standing ovation from the TUC at Brighton after a speech that is seen as reinforcing the prospects of an October election. In studio, newsreader talking direct to camera: Mr Wilson in a forty-five minute address outlined the achievements of a Labour Government, attacked Conservative policies and praised the Social Contract on which, he said, Labour’s policies and hopes for a better future depended. Mr Wilson also attacked
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2 Actuality scenes of delegates applauding. Voice over: A standing ovation for the Prime Minister from the TUC after telling them some hard facts about the economy. In studio, newsreader talking direct to camera: Good evening. The Prime Minister today delivered to the trade unions his plea for moderate pay deals and for maintaining twelve-month intervals between pay rises. He said he believed the moderate increases and reduced taxation were the best way forward. He refused to go back on what he called the absurd inflation of 1974/1975. Instead he hoped to see inflation below 10 per cent. Mr Callaghan believed this was possible with moderation and the Government could respond by stimulating the economy. He hinted at a mini-Budget later this year, saying, ‘I certainly do not rule out measures during the autumn.’ For half an hour Mr Callaghan spoke forcefully to TUC delegates in Blackpool who tomorrow will vote on the twelve-month rule. He argued that there were dangers in pay flexibility and free collective bargaining and he regretted that a third year of pay code was not possible. Callaghan seen addressing delegates: As I say I would have liked, eh, a third year, but, ehm, all right, I’m told it’s not on. Well, other things won’t be on either. And this is, I think, the situation that the movement as a whole has got to discuss. We believed, I still believe, that despite all the difficulties, a combination of moderate earnings increases and reduced taxation is the best way to safeguard the interests of your members. I dare say some of your members don’t believe it. Well, that’s a situation we all have to face because this is a democracy. I understand. I would agree that there is a case, a very important case, for flexibility. It’s the argument, if you like, against a statutory wage policy, which I am not in favour of. But flexibility implies that differentials will be allowed to grow. You can’t have an inflexible flexibility. And if we get into the situation in which, as a result of one excessive claim and settlement, others use that to make a back and leap-frog over it, Madam Chairman, there’s nothing the Government can do then to stop you all being back in the situation you were glad to escape from in ’74, ’75, when wage claims made at twelve-month intervals eventually became wage claims made at nine-month intervals and, if it had gone on, some of them were being made at six-month intervals and if you had continued, it would have been at six-week intervals and three-week intervals and you would have been in hyper-inflation (shouting up, but remains at the level of general
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background noise). Well, I don’t believe, indeed I would say with certainty, that the majority of your members and their wives do not want a return to that situation. (BBC News, 6 September 1977). The extracts presented here from these early-evening television news bulletins do not exhaust the accounts. In both cases the accounts, after the actuality quotes, are passed over to the Industrial Correspondent, who begins to fill in more details of the speeches and the response to them. His comments will be considered in a moment. In both cases the establishment of the topic relies heavily on the use of actuality forms of television journalism: direct verbal and verbal-visual quotes. Thus the accounts have the appearance of simple reports which do little more than give the main points of the Prime Minister’s speeches. The use of these actuality forms is the practical mode of demonstrating the objectivity of television journalism. They are ritualized means of affirming that what has been selected from the available pool of definitions has not been invented by the broadcasters. They are, then, the key means by which the ‘transparency’ effect of television is realized, an effect which denies the productivity of television’s specific practices. Undoubtedly, the broadcasters are appropriating a topic which has already, in some measure, been prestructured, articulated in the political discourses. The often extensive use of actuality forms masks the specific structuring accomplished by the broadcasters. They are not simply engaged in restating what has already been said; their appropriation of the topic represents it as a televisual event. What is particularly interesting here is that the process of authentication relies upon – and constantly reaffirms – the veracity of journalistic discourse as such. The process requires both modes of television: direct, live recording/transmission from the studio (marked principally by direct address to camera) and the transmission of recordings of events that have already happened (marked principally by the lack of direct address). Each requires the other; together they function to validate one another’s order of truth and to pose the former as the authoritative and predominant mode. The temporal register, marked by the system of address to camera, not only locates the studio-based discourse in the here-and-now but simultaneously reduces the actuality discourse to its content. The ‘elsewhere’ of activity and participation is, in and through the juxtapositioning, made to appear as the simple substance of the ‘here-and-now’ of witnessing. The moment of appropriation is one in which television can be said to be dominant over politics but without obliterating the latter. The articulations produced in the political discourses continue to exercise determination on television’s mode of appropriation. Between the prime ministerial speeches and what the journalists have to say about them, there is a reciprocity of perspectives. To put it another way, the journalists’ accounts not only provide details of the speeches, they are also positioned within the terms of reference of the speeches. The propositions and interpretations contained in the speeches are reproduced by the journalists’ accounts and, because these assume the form of straight reports, are made to appear as ‘facts’. The clue to this lies in the opening remarks of the accounts. In both examples these remarks function as headlines; that is, they announce, in summary form, a focus or an orientation to what follows in the main body of the account. The orientation provided by the headline in each example is contained in the statement that each speech received a ‘standing ovation from the TUC’. This observation is taken to convey that what the Prime Minister had to say was ‘well received’. In the case of example 2 this point was underscored by the current affairs coverage of the speech later in the day. Opening an interview with Ken Gill, General Secretary of TASS (Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section of the
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Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers) and Allen Fisher, General Secretary of NUPE (National Union of Public Employees), Robin Day said: First of all gentlemen, your verdict generally on the Prime Minister’s speech today, which was received quite warmly and, indeed, with standing applause at the end. Mr Fisher? Alan Fisher: Well, I wouldn’t have put it warmly. I would have thought it was respectfully by the Congress, and I think that’s usual with the TUC and the Labour Prime Minister. I wouldn’t think it was warmth. (Tonight, 6 September 1977) What Allen Fisher’s redefinition of the standing ovation indicates is that journalists had given not just an interpretation of the reception, but one which was favourable to the Prime Minister’s position. That this account was positioned within the Prime Minister’s terms of reference was also indicated by its calling the Prime Minister’s interpretation of the causes of and remedies for inflation ‘hard facts about the economy’. There is little questioning in this example of the Government’s proposition that excessive claims and settlements over wages brought about inflation and that ‘the best way forward’, therefore, lay in ‘moderate increases and reduced taxation’. What there was concerned how effective the Prime Minister’s presentation of his case would be ‘at shop floor level in the months ahead’. This direction was developed in the ‘news analysis’ section of the account which followed the run-down of the Prime Minister’s speech and the details of its immediate reception. News analysis, typically provided by the specialist correspondents, represents a kind of halfway house between ‘straight reporting’, the informational stage of informed speculation, and ‘comment and analysis’, contained in the second speculative stage of the process. The object of news analysis is to provide a preliminary contextualization of the themes contained in the report section of the account. As in this example, this typically means providing an assessment of the responses made by important people involved in the situation. On this occasion the BBC’s Industrial Correspondent began by noting that ‘there was nothing new in what the Prime Minister had said . . . though the style of delivery of the economic analysis seemed rather more determined . . . and he told delegates squarely that so-called free collective bargaining had not produced social justice’. From here he moved to the main concern of this part of the account, ‘union leaders’ reactions’, which were said to vary ‘according to the stance taken on the twelve-month rule and on moderation in pay settlements’. (Notice here that the yardstick by which union leaders are positioned is provided by the Government’s case and not their own.) This was presented by means of extracts from video-recorded interviews with two union leaders, Clive Jenkins, who was presented as ‘a militant exponent of free collective bargaining’, and Tom Jackson, who was presented, in an unqualified way, as ‘a supporter of incomes policy’. The questions asked of them set up a situation in which their replies were confined to an assessment of the effectivity of the speech and also prevented any detailing of the alternative case. The labels applied by the Industrial Correspondent to the alternative economic strategy that had been adopted by the TUC on the previous day in the form of ‘an orderly return to free collective bargaining’ and to its proponents further reproduced a sense of the Government’s case as ‘hard fact’. Although an alternative case is announced, it does not form the basis of the journalists’ account, nor is its logic developed. Indeed, in being marked out as the exclusive property of ‘militants’, it is made to appear as though it had no logic. The overall effect of this disposition of the available cases is to render the Government’s
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strategy – adherence to the twelve-month rule, moderation in wage bargaining and possible cuts in taxation – the only plausible one. This presentation of the Government’s strategy, the pursuit of a third round of ‘pay restraint’, in the informational stages of journalistic story-telling was by no means novel nor exclusive to this particular bulletin. By the time of this particular broadcast it had become a familiar and recurrent theme in the news. It began to emerge in the accounts provided of Denis Healey’s Budget of 29 March 1977, which, among other things, had made promises about cuts in taxation if another round of restraint could be agreed with the unions. It also was one of the fundamental organizing themes of the news coverage of the various trade union conferences between April and July. Throughout this coverage the case on which the Government’s strategy was based, namely that ‘excessive’ wage settlements were the cause of inflation, was as such only infrequently dealt with. The ‘transparency-to-reality’ effect is, then, not simply accomplished in and through the juxtapositioning of the formal modes of television journalism to which attention has been drawn. It also requires an ideological alignment between the definitions constituted in the journalistic accounts and those already constituted as dominant in the discourse of the political-economic sphere. The ‘reality’ of television journalism is not immediately identical with the ‘reality’ of the political-economic discourse, nor does the former in some simple way reflect the latter. Rather, the reality of television journalism must be formed in such a way that it corresponds to the reality that has been formed by the political-economic discourse. I want now to examine, in more detail, the specific journalistic practices by which this correspondence is attained, and to do so with reference to the television coverage of the trade union conferences held in the months before the TUC Conference of September 1977. In so doing, I hope to make it clear not only that between this coverage and the Government’s account there was a shared ideological problematic, but also that the signifying practices of television journalism actively constituted the dominant definitions as normal and selfevident. From earlier sociological studies of television journalism we know that it is centrally concerned with those actions which have been pre-signified as ‘unexpected’ – that is, with actions which break from the meaningful and consonant,5 to use Galtung and Ruge’s terms. It is the latter, the meaningful and consonant, the expected, which operates as a yard-stick for determining the ‘unexpected’. The expected, if it is manifested in the utterances of television journalism at all, does so as ‘what everyone knows’ and, therefore, does not need to be spell out. During the period we are concerned with here the Government’s proposition that inflation was wages-led was only rarely mentioned, let alone explicitly articulated. At an earlier moment, during the first months of 1975, after Healey had announced that ‘it is far better that more people should be in work even if that means accepting lower wages on average . . . that is what the Social Contract is all about’, the proposition was explicitly articulated and speculated on. It is not possible here to go into details of the form that the articulation assumed in television news. It can only be pointed out that it was prompted by a reversal in the position adopted by the Labour Party during the latter part of 1974, when the whole question of wages was subordinated for the purposes of gaining the assent of the TUC and winning the October 1974 General Election. By 1977 the proposition that inflation was wages-led had become a taken-for-granted in television news – an apparent ‘fact of life’ – and the form of the coverage actively reproduced it as such. Though rarely mentioned in the course of television’s monitoring of the trade union conferences held between April and September 1977, it nevertheless functioned as a premise, as the ‘always-already-there’ of the explicit articulations concerning the
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conferences. The substance of many television news items in this period was conference debates about wages. Only rarely were debates on other topics featured. The following is a typical example of how the wages debates conducted by the ‘minor’ unions were represented: Newsreader talking direct to camera: The National and Local Government Officers’ Association voted decisively for another phase of pay restraint today. The resolution before them was against restraint but they threw that out by 448,000 to 139,000. So that means that the fourth largest union in the country with 700,000 members and the largest of the white collar unions in behind the Government. (Independent Television News, 15 June 1975) The account does not simply provide information about the vote: it gives the vote a particular significance. The narrator transforms this, and indeed other votes in other unions, into evidence of support for the Government. It is made to be of interest only in terms of the relation to ‘another’ phase of pay restraint. Throughout this period then, the facticity of wage restraint was constantly reproduced. What television news constructed as the ‘unexpected’, what bulletins articulated, was the question of whether the unions were going to deliver. Certain conferences were expected not to deliver – for example, the Scottish TUC’s Conference in April 1977. Both the BBC’s and the ITN’s coverage elected to feature prominently the speech of the Scottish Secretary (Bruce Millan) to that conference. The BBC’s news analysis of the speech ran as follows: Industrial Correspondent, in studio, direct to camera: Mr Millan came to Rothesay to try to impress upon this pretty left-wing gathering the advantages of continuing pay restraint after July and of preserving the Social Contract between Government and trade unions, no less than the Prime Minister will be doing much the same thing at the Welsh TUC later this week – but again for the benefit of a much wider audience. Mr Millan’s message was that the next phase of the pay policy would not be an easy one to work out. How far and how quickly it was possible to return to normal collective bargaining without throwing away the benefits from the last two years in a general freefor-all. A wages explosion, he predicted, would push prices and unemployment even higher still and could bring down the Government. At this point there was a direct actuality extract depicting Millan setting out what he thought the consequences of a Conservative Government for Scotland would be. In this section of the transcript we see some of the key devices employed for handling not only the expected opposition of the Scottish TUC, but also other unions already known to be likely to oppose the Government’s policy. The narration, following the lead set by Millan and the Government Ministers, forms this likely opposition into a call for a wages explosion. In this case the advocates of opposition are presented as a ‘pretty left-wing gathering’, which in the register of television news talk has the effect of marking them off from ‘the moderates’, that ‘much wider audience’ spoken of in the narrative, which might just be seduced by decisions taken at this conference. Following the actuality quote, the Industrial Correspondent set about contextualizing the
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decision that the Scottish TUC might take on the issue of pay restraint. To convey the significance of the decision he said: Tomorrow the Scottish miners will lead the opposition to interference of any kind in free collective bargaining. If this move gains majority support, as it might, although there is some doubt tonight, it will really be the Scottish TUC doing its usual militant thing; opposing incomes restraint. And the foreign exchange markets were well-advised to ignore this. A couple of union leaders up here from London pointed out to me that issues like the Social Contract and pay policy are subject to discussion between the Government and TUC – the British TUC, not the Scottish TUC. (BBC News, 19 April 1977) The perspective on the Scottish TUC is, from the evidence of the final remarks, again licensed. It is not wholly the invention of the Industrial Correspondent, since he reproduces the statements of ‘a couple of union leaders up here from London’. Nevertheless, the perspective is supplemented by the reference to the possible majority support for free collective bargaining as the Scottish TUC ‘doing its usual militant thing’ and by opening this part of the account with a reference to the ‘Scottish miners’. It is a massively reassuring perspective; it is tantamount to saying that the opposition is mere ritual and, moreover, will have little impact on the eventual outcome of ‘national’ negotiations. When, on the following day, the move to oppose any form of wage restraint was ‘narrowly defeated’, the Industrial Correspondent back-pedalled somewhat on his previous estimation of the significance of the decision. He said: This is not a conference of any real significance in the decision-making process. But at this stage in the attempt to work out a phase three of pay restraint, the Government might be quite relieved that even the unions up here haven’t voted for a free-for-all. (BBC News, 20 April 1977) In the course of advocating ‘terminating the Social Contract’ at the Scottish TUC, Mick McGahey had argued that the main reason for doing so was that ‘the Government had not fulfilled its pledges within the Contract’. An earlier item in the same bulletin in which this was quoted could have been seen to have provided some evidence to support McGahey’s case. The opening item of the bulletin, read out in the studio direct to camera, announced: As the debate on pay policy continues, figures out today show that the rate of increase in earnings continues to fall. It’s now well below the current rate of price inflation. Average earnings in February were 11½ per cent higher than at the same time last year. The increase in prices over the same period was just over 16 per cent. Although the item on the Scottish TUC followed on immediately, no explicit connections were made, for to have done so would have run contrary to the plot structure of television’s accounts. The proceedings of the Scottish TUC, as represented by television, are of interest only because of the potential threat they posed to the Government’s strategy. The predominant feature of the plot adopted was to determine ‘how well’ the Government was doing, a feature which was retained throughout the following months. In May the information that ‘the rate of inflation was back where it was nearly a year ago. It’s now 17.5 per cent’ (BBC
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News, 22 May 1977) did not lead to any fundamental revision of the plot. Rather, it was transformed into a misfortune, a test of the Government’s fitness. The account noted that ‘at a time when the Government is trying to win a third year of pay restraint, the relationship between pay and prices is not helping’. But later the Government was redeemed. The narrator (BBC Industrial Correspondent) pointed out that ‘the Government sticks by its forecast of inflation falling to 13 per cent by the end of the year’, and that ‘the best that can be said about the figures is that they were expected by the Government, who made it clear before today that inflation won’t start coming down until the second half of the year’. That the figures were expected, known about, implies that the Government also knew how to deal with them. Later in the year, as the major unions, particularly the National Union of Miners and the Transport and General Workers’ Union, rejected the Government’s economic strategy, the plot was modified, but again not fundamentally revised. The Government was still allocated the part of hero and the unions the part of villain. There was, however, a marked shift from a heroic to a tragic orientation. In the coverage of the Transport and General Workers’ Union Conference the centrepiece was again made to be the consequences of their discussions on pay for the Government’s economic strategy. The BBC News bulletin of 5 July 1977 represented that union’s leadership’s attempts ‘to keep Britain’s largest union firmly in line with TUC objectives’, and in so doing emphasized that the leadership believed ‘that if there were a wages free-for-all, it could damage the long-term prospects for the British economy’. While this part of the account employed actuality forms to ground the narration, these were not employed in representing the ‘considerable ground swell of opposition to these policies’. This opposition was formed up entirely by means of the newsreader’s direct address to camera: And as Mr Jones and his executive left the conference hall tonight, they took with them copies of a motion that will also be put to the delegates tomorrow which calls for an immediate return to unfettered collective bargaining and the total ending of phase two on 1 August of this year – a call which, if it is heeded, would finally shatter what remains of the Social Contract. The articulation of the ‘considerable ground swell of opposition’ in this union considerably raised the stakes. The narration transformed that opposition into an act of destruction which threatened not only the remains of the Social Contract, but also the long-term prospects of the British economy. This signification of this union’s actions was massively re-enacted on the following day after its vote ‘against an orderly return to free collective bargaining’. We have, then, the lowering of wages represented as ‘orderly’ – a term bringing into play such semantic equivalents as ‘obedient’, ‘not unruly’, ‘well behaved’. The representation of the union’s vote against this opened with the statement that delegates had ‘defeated the moderate motion against the advice of their General Secretary, Jack Jones’, thus associating wages restraint with moderation. There then followed an actuality extract from a speech against ‘the moderate line’: Brothers and sisters, we’ve been conned [cheers]. The pensioners and lower paid workers are worse off. The social services have been cut to ribbons, and we’re in the grip of the talons of the international money-lenders. Of course we do not want a Tory Government. But if this Government does not reverse these disastrous policies and
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introduce the measures advocated by the Labour Party Conferences, that is, a socialist alternative, we’ll get Margaret Thatcher at the helm as sure as little apples. Recent election results have shown this. Wages a major cause of inflation? They never have been. The last two years have proved that. Another period of marking time? We’ve had enough. Mr Healey, you’re not on. (BBC News, 6 July 1977) It would have been possible, as on other occasions, when acuality quotes had been included from the speeches of Cabinet Ministers, to provide background information on the speech. But this did not happen. Instead, the journalists opted to emphasize that the ‘militants . . . dominated the whole debate’, and that the debate had been ‘noisy, emotional’. From here on the account concentrated on the defeated executive’s line and then included an interview with Jack Jones, ‘the architect of the Social Contract’ – a constructive image which contrasts sharply with the destructive images constructed for the opponents. The interview once again returns to constituting the destructive effects of the motion that had been carried. Jack Jones was asked, first of all, ‘whether the threat of a wages explosion now threatened the Labour Party’s own ability to govern’, and then, following an affirmative reply, (‘I think that is a danger . . .’), he was asked if he thought that ‘now, after this decision this afternoon, the political stability of the country is not threatened as a result of what has happened, that the Government may indeed not be in a position to govern any longer?’, which again received an affirmative response when Jack Jones said: ‘Well, the political stability could be threatened if the Liberals decided to withdraw support. . . .’ The transformation of the act of opposition into an act of destruction is consummated by the interview. It is not only authenticated; it is also rendered authoritative by the affirmations of the architect of the Social Contract. The television news bulletins which we have been examining here are not the ‘windows on to reality’ that they are made to seem by professional ideologies of broadcasting and by the extensive use of actuality forms (of which more shall be said in a moment). The point to be stressed is that we do not see ‘through’ the bulletins to an objective and independent ‘reality’ beyond. We see only that reality which has been jointly produced by the journalistic practices of signification and by the other practices of signification employed by journalism’s accredited witnesses in the political-economic sphere. In this respect, the simple ‘bias’ thesis is inadequate, based as it is on an untenable assumption of a separation between images and ideas on the one hand, and objective, material reality on the other. Within the terms of the ‘bias’ thesis we have no option but to regard television journalism as a mere (and inadequate) reflection of material reality rather than an active material process, itself intimately bound up in the construction and articulation of reality. This thesis takes at face value the journalistic practices of signification. The construction and articulation of ‘reality’ as seemingly independent, as natural, is inscribed in the most basic practices of television journalism. The organization of the visual discourse, for instance, which shows little variation between networks or across the period from 1974 to the present, is such that it produces this effect. Newsreaders and correspondents are always to be seen talking direct to camera (seemingly ‘to us’), while those placed in the drama of news as protagonists are always to be seen talking at an angle to the line of vision of the camera (seemingly ‘to others’). The depiction of protagonists in this manner constructs a potential sense of distance between them and viewers. This is a sense of witnessing (that is, of being present at, but not directly involved in) a ‘reality’ which is, in and through this visual mode, made to seem ‘out there’, separate from and independent
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of those positioned as witnesses. The relation in which the ‘audience’ is cast by this visual mode is that of onlooker: the proceedings of protagonists are ‘looked in on’. Whether the social beings who watch television news programmes, who are themselves sites of intersection of a multiplicity of discursive practices, actually assume this position is, of course, another matter. The point to be stressed here, however, is that the mode of vision currently in dominance presents the relation in this form – that is, as a relation between the ‘involved’ and the ‘uninvolved’. The exposition and interpretation of the actions of those cast as the ‘involved’ falls to the narrators, newsreaders or specialist correspondents. Their direct address is a posture which recreates certain of the conditions of interpersonal communication. Often, following their initial exposition of the pro-televisual action of the involved, newsreaders will turn from the camera to look at the monitor in the studio, signifying that they, like the viewer, are similarly detached, uninvolved onlookers. The direct address has, then, the potential effect of including the viewer in the process of communication. The viewer is positioned as a partner in the exchange: the direct look of the newsreader/reporter/specialist correspondent implicates the audience. So while the audience is set apart from the protagonists, it is lined up with the media personnel in the studio. These forms of vision of television news bulletins are based on, and contribute to the reproduction of, an already given political ideology. The visual disposition of the role of audience as onlookers in relation to what is shown of protagonists by actuality sequences and as partners to the exchanges initiated by media personnel reproduces the notion that the ‘nation as a whole’ is divisible into ‘activists’ and the ‘rest’, who are involved in problematic situations only in as much as they are affected by them. Within this lived view of the polity, with its assumption of a fundamental division between those who ‘do’ and those who are ‘done by’, the studio appears as the vantage point of the latter. It seems the site upon which those who are ‘done by’ – ‘the public’, ‘the majority’, ‘most people’, ‘consumers’, ‘taxpayers’ and so on – gain an insight into the actions of ‘doers’ – ‘the unions’, ‘politicians’, ‘militants’. This apparently fundamental division is further refined in what is said of the issues and activists featured. It is clear from the extracts above that not all those signified by television as ‘activists’ are spoken of in the same way. Some are verbally defined as ‘representative individuals’; they are not only named but have the authority to speak, their ‘representative’ credentials presented: ‘The Prime Minister, Mr Callaghan . . .’; ‘the union’s General Secretary, Mr Jones . . .’. Others are referred to only as a collective – ‘the militants’ motion . . .’. Not only are they presented without credentials but their representativeness is either heavily qualified or denied. Those opposing the policy of wage restraint within the Parliamentary Labour Party were presented as a localized grouping, as ‘the left wing of the Labour Party’. In the coverage of the Scottish TUC Conference the Scottish TUC was not only localized but also presented as having ‘no real significance in the decision-making process’. It is principally the verbal discourse which accomplishes the classification of activists, a classification which separates out the legitimate and acceptable activists from the illegitimate and unacceptable. As we have already suggested, these classifications are the effects of the adoption of a certain political perspective: that is, a certain way of understanding already given political positions. Any classification of positions is possible only on the condition that a system of classification already exists. The system of classification by which television news identified and placed the forces involved in the economic struggles of the last few years did not spring uniquely from the broadcasters’ professional ‘know-how’. Nor did it emerge ‘from the outside’, a wholly independent perspective. It is, rather, the reproduction of a system of
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classification already ingrained in the institutional procedures for the management of the clash of opposing activists. The perspective adopted by the news bulletins was, as we have said, that of the Government and the TUC in as much as they were its principal advocates. The adoption and reproduction of this perspective did not result, however, from a conspiracy between broadcasting, the state and the hegemonic organs of civil society, such as the TUC. Television journalists do not have to be explicitly instructed, as a rule, in how to classify appropriately the protagonists of a given situation and the positions they advance. As we have seen, the Government’s interpretation of the causes of inflation was accepted without question. It was a premise of the coverage, and the proposed solution, wage restraint or the lowering of ‘real’ wages, was thus made to appear a ‘natural’ consequence. Only the opposed interpretations were questioned and made to appear ‘unreasonable’, the product of ‘militant’ self-interestedness. In part, the unqualified acceptance of the Government’s logic proceeded from its status as the ‘elected representatives of the people’. But this is not a sufficient condition; the Government’s handling of inflation was questioned and probed, especially in the current affairs programmes, though not in a fundamental way. Its position was accepted, principally, because the broadcasters shared its logic. For both broadcasters and the Government it seemed ‘obvious’ that the prices of commodities are determined or regulated by wages. It was the acceptance of this ‘antiquated fallacy’ which placed the broadcasters, the Government and the TUC on the same side.
Notes 1 Stuart Hall, ‘The determinations of news photographs’, WPCS 3 (1972). 2 Trevor Pateman, Television and the February 1974 General Election, BFI Television Monograph no. 3 (British Film Institute 1974). 3 Pateman, Television and the February 1974 General Election. 4 It is not possible here to detail the establishment of this paradigm, but the 1960s represent a moment of consolidation and crystallization in this field of broadcasting. 5 J. Galtung and M. H. Ruge, ‘The structure of foreign news’, in J. Tunstall (ed.), Media Sociology (London 1970).
18 Housewives and the mass media * Dorothy Hobson
Mass communication, in the form of radio and television, has emerged as an important aspect of the day-to-day experience of the women in the study.1 Television and radio are never mentioned as spare-time or leisure activities but are located by the women as integral parts of their day. (The exception to this is the television viewing which is done after the children are in bed, but even then the period is not completely free for the woman because she still has to provide drinks or food if her husband wants them.) There is a separation between the consumption of radio and television, but both provide crucial elements in the experience and management of their lives.
Radio You’ve got a friend, the happy sound of Radio 1. Radio 1 jingle I have various people in mind. One is a man working in a small garage where perhaps there are two or three mechanics clonking around with motor cars but have the music on. And they’re enjoying it as a background. And then there is this dreaded housewife figure [sic] who I think of as someone who, perhaps last year or two years ago, was a secretary working for a firm, who is now married and has a child. She wants music that will keep her happy and on the move. Derek Chinnery, Head of Radio 1, in an interview published in Melody Maker, July 1976, quoted in Happy Birthday Radio 1, BBC Publications 1977 ‘Dreaded’ or not, the housewives in this study do listen to Radio 1 and find the experience enjoyable. The radio, for the most part, is listened to during the day while they are engaged in domestic labour, housework and child care. As Anne said, ‘It’s on in the background all the time’. In some cases switching on the radio is part of the routine of beginning the day; it is, in fact, the first boundary in the working day. In terms of the ‘structurelessness’ of the experience of housework, the time boundaries provided by radio are important in the women’s own division of their time. Lorna We do have the radio on all day. You know, from the time we get up till the time the tele comes back on. I usually put it on at 4 o’clock for the kids’ tele . . . * This is an extract from Dorothy Hobson’s unpublished MA thesis, ‘A Study of Working-Class Women at Home: Femininity, Domesticity and Maternity’.
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I listen to the radio. I put it on as soon as I get up. Six o’clock I get up (laughs), er, put on the radio full blast so that me husband’ll get up . . .*
The constant reference to time during the programmes on Radio 1 also helps to structure the time sequences of the work which women perform while they listen to the radio. Progammes are self-definitional, as The Breakfast Show, Mid-morning Programme, which includes Coffee Break at 11 a.m. At the time of the study Tony Blackburn was running the morning show (9 a.m. – 12 noon), in which he had the ‘Tiny Tots’ spot at 11 a.m., during which a record was played for children and Blackburn attempted to teach a nursery rhyme to the children listening while the ‘mums’ had a coffee break. During David Hamilton’s afternoon programme (2 p.m. – 5 p.m.) the ‘Tea at Three’ spot is included, when once more women are encouraged to ‘put their feet up’. The disc jockeys (DJs) use points of reference within the expected daily routines of their listeners, and some of these references are responded to by the women in the study. The programmes which are listened to are Radio 1 and BRMB local radio, the former being the more popular. Responses to questions about radio are always given in terms of the disc jockey who introduces the programme, with the records referred to in a secondary capacity. Pat P. I like Radio 1. Tony Blackburn. I think he’s corny but I think he’s good. Dave Lee Travis I like and Noel Edmunds. Noel Edmunds, I think he’s absolutely fantastic. . . . D. So do you prefer the radio? P. During the day, yes. D. Would you have the radio on while you were doing housework? P. Oh yes, yes. D. Why do you like the people you like? P. Erm . . . their personality – it comes over on the radio. Noel Edmunds, I think he’s really fantastic, you know, the blunders he makes, you know, I like (inaudible). I think he’s really lovely (laughs). D. And do you do your housework at the same time? P. Oh yes. Anne A. I listen to BRMB, you know, that’s quite a good programme. I like listening to the people that phone in, erm . . . I like the conversations. D. Why do you think that is? A. Er . . . I suppose it’s ’cos I’m on me own. D. Is it the music as well that you like or . . .? A. Yes, ’cos I find that nearly all my records are a bit old-fashioned and I like to hear a bit of the modern music. ((Yes)) I don’t want to get way behind the times, you know. The predominance of presenters or DJs in the respondents’ reactions to radio programmes * Key to transcripts . . . or (pause) pause ( ) non-verbal communication, e.g. (laughs) (( )) phatic communication, e.g. ((Mm)) . . . speaker interrupted
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can be seen from various aspects. First, it is necessary for the personality of the disc jockey to be a prominent feature in the programme, since all the records which are played throughout the day on Radio 1 are the same; the only variation which exists is in the chatter between records which the disc jockeys provide. Inevitably, then, it is their ability to form a relationship with their audience which gives the disc jockeys their appeal. The disc jockeys have become personalities in their own right, as have the presenters of television current affairs programmes, and the increasing professionalism and development of the necessary features and components of the successful disc jockey could be seen as analogous with the professionalization of other television presenters. As early as the first year of the existence of Radio 1, which began in November 1967, the following point was noted: ‘It soon became clear that Radio 1 DJs were going to be accorded almost as much attention by the media as the Royal Family.’ (BBC/Everest 1977) The disc jockeys are prominent as a structural feature of the production process of these programmes, and it is they who direct the discourse of the radio programmes towards their known audience – in this case the housewives. Secondly, the women respond to that notion of themselves as ‘feminine domestic subjects’ of radio discourse which is presented by the disc jockeys. In this study I have concentrated on the reactions of the women to the disc jockeys rather than on the production process of the media messages.2 Within the overall picture of isolation which has emerged in the lives of the women in this study, the disc jockey can be seen as having the function of providing the missing ‘company’ of another person in the lives of the women. As well as helping to combat isolation, it is not too far fetched to see the DJ as also playing the role of a sexual fantasyfigure in the lives of the women who listen. Pat’s comments about Noel Edmunds (above) are certainly not limited to his role as someone who breaks the isolation in her life; it includes references to his attractiveness and physical appearance, although she does not make this explicit. Nevertheless, my reading of the role of the DJs is that they play the role of a safe, though definitely sexually attractive man, in the lives of the women. The responses to other DJs confirm this assumption. Tony Blackburn is talked about more in terms of the content of his programme and his manner of presentation than in terms of endearment or enthusiasm. However, Blackburn himself obviously realizes the potential for fantasy relationships with his audience. When he was suffering from a throat infection, which made his voice sound rather husky, he said: ‘I hope I am not turning you ladies on too much. I know your husbands have left for work, it’s you and I together, kids.’ (Recorded from Radio 1, autumn 1977) Blackburn is a disc jockey whom it is impossible to ignore. Rather like Crossroads, the women either like him or hate him, but rarely do they remain indifferent to him. Blackburn himself provides interesting comments on his own views on radio and pop music, describing his show as ‘a pleasant bit of entertainment in the background if you like – inane chatter. I think there’s room for a station that comes on and is full of a lot of people talking a load of nonsense’. (Guardian, 9 January 1976) Fortunately for him, he does not have to listen to his own programme for, as he says, ‘It would drive me mad if I had to physically sit down and listen to David Hamilton’s show, or mine, for that matter.’ (ibid) And fortunately for the women in this study, they do not have to sit and listen either; they can treat the programme as background chatter. But if by chance they happen to listen to what Tony Blackburn has to say, they will be subjected to an onslaught of chatter which definitely reinforces the ideology of the sexual division of labour and places women firmly in their ‘correct’ place – in the home. It is in the direct comments which he makes about the record and current topics of interest that Blackburn reveals the
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depth of his conservatism. The ‘working man’, strikers, punk rockers, women involved in divorce actions, (in the wake of his own recent divorce) all warrant criticism from him. Women who are playing their traditional role as housewives and mothers constantly earn praise from him. In one programme in which he was promoting a record by Nancy Wilson (which was supposedly sung by a woman who had enjoyed a ‘liberated’ life, yet still yearned for the love and security of a husband and family and wanted to tell her ‘sisters’ of the truth of her misspent life), Blackburn fervently ‘plugged’ the record and consistently reminded his listeners of the ‘truth’ of the theme, saying, ‘If you understand this, ladies, you understand everything.’ In case his listeners did not fully get the message of the song, he took the trouble to explain it, using his own interpretation: ‘I hope you understood these lyrics. Nothing is more important, no matter what the press and the media tell you, there is nothing more wonderful than bringing up a child, nothing more difficult either.’ (Recorded from Radio 1, autumn 1977) Perhaps Tony Blackburn does represent an extreme form of the reinforcement of the ideology of domesticity of the housebound listeners of Radio 1, but far from providing background chatter which can be ignored, he obviously intends his comments to be heard by his audience – and he knows who his audience is. The reinforcement of the dominant ideology of domesticity is definitely a function of the encoded media messages emanating from Radio 1. The disc jockey, as well as providing relief from isolation, links the isolated individual woman with the knowledge that there are others in the same position.3 Similarly, this can be seen as a functional effect of ‘phone-in’ programmes. One of the women says: ‘I like listening to the people that phone in. I like the conversations. . . . I suppose it’s ’cos I’m on me own.’ These programmes not only provide contact with the ‘outside’ world; they also reinforce the privatized isolation by reaffirming the consensual position – there are thousands of other women in the same situation, in a sort of ‘collective isolation’. Radio can be seen, then, as providing women with a musical reminder of their leisure activities before they married.4 It also, as they say, keeps them up to date with new records. Since they do not have any spare money to buy records, this is an important way in which they can listen to music. Since listening to music and dancing are the leisure activities which they would most like to pursue, radio is also a substitute for the real world of music and discos which they have lost. Also, it provides a crucial relief from their isolation. The chatter of the disc jockey may appear inane and trivial, but the popularity of radio, both in national and local terms and in the responses of the women in this study, would appear to suggest that it fulfils certain functions in providing music to keep them ‘happy and on the move’. Radio creates its own audience through its constant reference to forthcoming programmes and items within programmes. As the jingle at the beginning of this section suggests, the women in this study do appear to regard Radio 1 as a friend, and they certainly view the disc jockeys as important means of negotiating or managing the tensions caused by the isolation in their lives.
Television – ‘two worlds’ Linda
No, I never watch the news, never!
The ideology of a masculine and a feminine world of activities and interests and the separation of those gender-specific interests is never more explicitly expressed than in the women’s reactions and responses to television programmes. Here both class- and gender-specific
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differences are of vital importance, in terms of both which programmes the women choose to watch or reject and their definition and selection of what are appropriately masculine and feminine programmes and topics. Also, they select television programmes much more consciously than radio programmes. This must partly be a consequence of the fact that they have more freedom during the evenings, and they can make active choices because they are no longer subject to constant interruptions caused by their responsibility for domestic labour and child care. This is in contrast to their listening to the radio during the day, when radio programmes are selected primarily as ‘easy listening’, a background while they do their housework or look after the children. There is an active choice of programmes which are understood to constitute the ‘woman’s world’, coupled with a complete rejection of programmes which are presenting the ‘man’s world’. However, there is also an acceptance that the ‘real’ or ‘man’s world’ is important, and the ‘right’ of their husbands to watch these programmes is respected: but it is not a world with which the women in this study wanted to concern themselves. In fact, the ‘world’, in terms of what is constructed as of ‘news’ value, is seen as both alien and hostile to the values of the women. For them television programmes appear to fall into two distinct categories. The programmes which they watch and enjoy are: comedy series (Selwyn Froggitt, Are You Being Served?); soap operas (Emmerdale Farm, The Cedar Tree, Rooms, Crown Court and, predominantly, Crossroads and Coronation Street); American television films (MacMillan and Wife, Dr Welby, Colombo); light entertainment and quiz shows (Whose Baby?, Mr and Mrs); and films. All these programmes could be broadly termed as ‘entertaining’ rather than ‘educational and informative’. The programmes which are actively rejected deal with what the women designate the ‘real world’ or ‘man’s world’, and these predominantly cluster around the news, current affairs programmes (Panorama, This Week), scientific programmes (Tomorrow’s World), the subject-matter of politics or war, including films about war, and, to a lesser extent, documentary programmes. Selected documentaries will be viewed as long as the subject-matter is identified as of feminine interest. The following are extracts from responses to questions about television, and it can be seen from these that there is a clear distinction between what men and women watch and what is seen to be the right of the husband to watch (news and current affairs programmes). Anne D. What programmes do you watch on television? A. Er . . . Crown Court, Rooms, Cedar Tree, Emmerdale Farm, Mr and Mrs. What else is there? Dr Welby. Then there’s film on of a Friday. D. This is all on ITV, isn’t it? A. (Long pause while she thinks of other programmes) Yes, er . . . yes, that’s another programme. Whose Baby? D. There’s a film on on Mondays as well, isn’t there? A. No, no . . . oh, yes, there is. It’s Mystery Movie. I don’t like, I’m not very interested in them, you know. I sort of half-watch them. D. So it’s more the short series. ((Yes.)) What do you like about the programmes that you watch? A. Something to look forward to the next day ’cos most of them are serials. D. Do you like them to . . . Which do you like the best, which type? A. Er, I like The Cedar Tree more than Emmerdale Farm. I’m not really keen on that. I only watch it through habit. Er, more romantic, I think, you know, there’s sort of, er, family life, that is, more than Emmerdale Farm. I don’t know, I . . . something about that isn’t so good.
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D. That only really takes you up to tea time, so do you watch the television at night? A. Yes, in between half-five and eight, that’s me busiest time, feed him, change him, sometimes bath him. I don’t bath him very often, erm, get Richard’s dinner and I always clean up straight away, the washing up, and then I get everything settled and that takes me up to about 8 o’clock, ’cos I stop at half-past six to watch Crossroads (laughs). And then from 8 onwards I just sit and watch the box (laughs). D. Why do you like Crossroads? A. Just that you like to know what’s going to happen next, you know. I mean they’re terrible actors, I know that, and I just see through that, you know. I just, now and then I think, ‘Oh my God, that’s silly,’ you know, but it’s not the acting I’m interested in, it’s what’s going on. I suppose I’m nosy . . . D. The time then between that – do you watch the news? A. I watch a little bit of it, erm (pause). I don’t really like the news much because it’s all politics, generally and British Leyland out on strike again, and this and that. I like to hear the news things if, er, – if there’s been a murder, I know that sounds terrible, but I like to hear – ‘Oh what’s happening next, what have they found out?’ That sort of news I like, you know – gossip. ((Yes.)) D. Do you ever watch documentaries? A. Now and then I find an interesting one. I watched one the other night about people who’d got diseases. Lorna L. We have the radio on all day, you know, from the time we get up till the time the tele comes back on. I usually put it on at 4 o’clock for the kids’ tele and they watch all the children’s programmes, and it might come back off at 6 and it might not go back on again till half-past seven. D. So you don’t watch the news? L. No, I never watch the news, never. D. Why don’t you watch it? L. I don’t like it, I don’t like to hear about people dying and things like that. I think about it afterwards and I can’t sleep at all. Like when I watched that thing, World at War, and I watched it once and all I could see were people all over the place, you know, heads and no arms and that and at night I could not sleep. I can’t ask him to turn it over ’cos he likes it, so I go in the kitchen till it’s finished. It is clear that the news, current affairs, political programmes and scientific programmes, together with portrayals of war (real or in the guise of war films) are actively rejected by the women. They will leave the room rather than sit there while the news is on. The world as revealed through the news is seen to be (a) depressing, (b) boring, but (c) important. The ‘news values’, as realized in agendas, are ‘accepted’, but they have alternative values which the women recognize but do not suggest should form an alternative coverage. In fact, the importance of accepted ‘news values’ is recognized, and although their own world is seen as more interesting and relevant to them, it is also seen as secondary in rank to the ‘real’ or ‘masculine’ world. In terms of what the news is seen to present, they only select items which they do not wish to see. Comments or judgements are made in terms not only of what the items are but also of the effect which they have on the individual. Thus the items are not judged solely for their ‘news value’ but also for the way they affect the individual. There would appear to be a model for the programmes which are discussed and then rejected.
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The news Content
Conceptualization of value of content
Effects on individual
Politics War Industrial troubles
Boring Male-orientated
Depressing Causing nightmares and sleeplessness
The women’s interpretation of news and current affairs programmes is an accurate reflection of the news items which are contained in these programmes. They may mis-identify the foci of some news reports, but this perhaps reinforces their claim not to watch these programmes. For instance, when Lorraine says ‘It’s all Vietnam, on the news’, she is not necessarily identifying specific examples. In fact, Northern Ireland is much more likely to have been the exact focus of the news at the time. The general point is clear enough: ‘Vietnam’ has become a generic term for war. The grouping together of the news and current affairs programmes by the women is a response to the circularity of these programmes, which is determined by the interrelation between the news and current events programmes and the prior selection of news items for their news value. A news ‘story’ becomes a ‘current events topic’, and the selection of news items according to the hierarchy of ‘news value’ puts political and military concerns, industrial relations and economic affairs at the head of topics for inclusion.5 The editorial selection of these items is premised on their ‘news value’, and this also reflects a masculine bias in terms of the ideology of the subjects of the items included. The women find little of interest for them in the news except for any ‘human interest’ items, which are necessarily low in news value and rarely occur. When domestic affairs do reach the news it is often in terms of deviation or murder, and this in turn reinforces the accepted absence of these items from ‘normal’ news bulletins. This is illustrated when Anne says that she likes to hear news about murders (see above). It is not the fact that someone has been murdered which she finds interesting in the news but the fact that there are elements within the situation to which she can relate. The ideology of femininity and feminine values over-determines the structures of what interests women. It is topics which can be regarded as of ‘domestic’ interest which they see as important or interesting, and it is also significant that ‘domestic affairs’, constructed in terms of ‘news values’ to include the economy and industrial relations, are not defined as ‘domestic’ in the categories which the women construct for themselves. ‘Domestic’ clearly relates to their own interests and not to the definition which is constructed through the hierarchy of ‘news values’. It can be said that the majority of items which are included in news, current affairs and documentary programmes have a content which has little or no intrinsic interest for these women, and the way that they are presented means that they exclude these women from ‘participation’ at the point of identification with the items included. At the same time, the women accept that these are important, and this reinforces the split between the masculine values, which are interpreted as being important, and the interests which they see as representing their own feminine values.
The feminine ‘world’ of television D. Do you like programmes that are like your life or that are entirely different? R. I think I like things different really, ’cos if it’s like me life, it’s not very exciting ’cos there’s nothing much really ever happens. Something exciting, different. I like watching detectives, anything creepy like ghost stories, I love ghost stories, anything creepy like that.
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First, in conjunction with the programmes which women reject, there are programmes which they choose to watch and to which they obviously relate. These can be defined as those which are related to their own lives, the programmes which can loosely be termed ‘realistic’ – Coronation Street, Crossroads, Emmerdale Farm, The Cedar Tree. Secondly, the programmes which can be described as having ‘fantasy content’ (horror movies, or American movies or television movies), although not seen as representing ‘real life’ in the women’s own terms, are seen as an alternative to the reality of their own lives. Finally, there are the programmes which can be categorized as light entertainment (quizzes, or competitions which often have an ‘everyday’ or ‘domestic’ theme, either because the contestants are seen as ordinary people or because of the subject-matter. In Whose Baby?, for example, the children of celebrity guests appear and the panel has to guess who is the famous father or mother – a direct link of parenthood between the ‘famous’ and the ‘ordinary’ viewer (in this case, the woman). The programmes which are interpreted by the women as portraying ‘everyday’ or ‘family’ life are, in fact, far from portraying anything which has a point of real identification with the women’s own lives. The programmes may not relate to the everyday lives of the women in the study. Within the programmes which are seen as ‘realistic’ there are common elements of identification. Many of the characters in the series Coronation Street and Crossroads are women who themselves have to confront the ‘problems’ in their ‘everyday’ lives, and the resolution or negotiation of these problems within the drama provides points of recognition and identification for the women viewers. It is in the ‘living out’ of problem areas that much of the appeal of the series is located. However, the resolution of areas of conflict, contradiction or confusion within a dramatic situation is double-edged. The woman can be confronted with the problems and also informed of the different elements which have to be considered in any ‘living out’ or resolution of problems. It is in the forms that the resolutions are made within programmes that the ideological basis of consensual femininity is reproduced and reinforced for women. As with the problems that are discussed in phone-in programmes and in the chatter of DJs, the very fact of recognition and seeming discussion or consideration by some ‘outside’ or ‘independent’ authority gives an impression that the problems have been aired. The outcome remains the same. The resolutions within either the soap opera series or the telephone conversations or talks are not revolutionary; what emerges is the reinforcement of the fatality or inevitability of the situation, without the need to change it. It is impossible to attempt a detailed analysis of the decoding of the programmes which is made by the women because at this stage this would be only supposition.6 What is clear, however, is that the programmes which the women watch are differentiated specifically in terms of both class and gender. Overall the programmes fall into the categories of popular drama and light entertainment, and although it is obvious that the women reject news and the political content of current affairs programmes, it would be wrong to contend that they do not have access or exposure to news or politics. Within comedy programmes, news and current affairs topics are presented in a mediated form – and often in a more easily accessible or even ‘joking’ or parodying manner. The news on Radio 1, which is transmitted every hour, is relatively accessible; it is also introduced by music which is recognizable, bright and repetitive and demanding of attention. The women in this study are exposed to news in this form, but they do not mention finding that unacceptable. Clearly, what is important is the definition of specifically feminine interests which women select from media output and the rejection of items which they see as specifically of masculine interest. They combat their own isolation through their interest in radio programmes during the day, and they see television programmes as a form of ‘leisure’ or relaxation. Radio is integral to their working
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day, but early-evening television is secondary to the domestic labour which they perform. The programmes which the women watch and listen to, together with the programmes which they reject, reinforce the sexual division of spheres of interest, which is determined both by their location in the home and by the structures of femininity that ensure that feminine values are secondary (or less ‘real’) than those of the masculine world of work and politics, which the women regard as alien, yet important.
Notes 1 This extract is part of a longer study which looks at the culture of young working-class housewives at home with young children. The research was conducted by tape-recorded interviews and observation in their homes, and it covered many aspects of their personal experience both before they were married and in their present situation. For a fuller discussion, see D. Hobson, ‘Housewives: isolation as oppression’, in Women’s Studies Group, Women Take Issue (CCCS/Hutchinson 1978); D. Hobson, ‘A study of working class women at home: femininity, domesticity and maternity’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1978). 2 In my present Ph.D. research I am looking at the production processes of various popular television and radio programmes, which involves interviewing and observing the programme makers in the encoding moment, and I will then move to the audience of those programmes to try to understand their decoding of the televisual texts. 3 The essential finding of the research from which this extract is taken was that it was the isolation of their lives which the women found most oppressive, coupled with their inability to escape from the home either to paid work or leisure activities (see Hobson, ‘A study of working-class women at home’). 4 For a fuller discussion of the absence of leisure activities, see ibid. 5 I. Connell, L. Curti and S. Hall, ‘The “unity” of current affairs television’, in Culture and Domination, WPCS, no. 9 (CCCS, University of Birmingham, 1976). 6 There has been some early work on the audience responses to radio serials. Hertzog looked at the structure of audiences and their responses to programmes of a similar kind – daytime radio serials. She was predominantly concerned with the psychological responses of the audience to features within the text and relied on the ‘uses and gratification’ theory. Also, Arnheim looked at the content of daytime radio serials in an attempt to identify features to which the audience responded. Both these works are important starting-points for future research into the possible identification which women may make to radio and television programmes, since many of the features of the programmes analysed in Arnheim are common to the present television series watched by the women in my study. My own work in this study starts at a point where the audience selects from the given range of available programmes. I have not been concerned, in this article, so much with how they decode those programmes as with the structures which have mediated in their choice of programmes. See H. Hertzog, ‘What do we really know about daytime serial listeners?’, in P. F. Lazersfeld and F. N. Stanton (eds.), Radio Research 1942–43 (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce 1944); R. Arnheim, ‘The world of the daytime serial’, in Lazersfeld and Stanton, Radio Research 1942–43.
19 Newsmaking and crime Stuart Hall, John Clarke, Chas. Critcher, Tony Jefferson and Brian Roberts
There is a powerful ‘common-sense’ view that the relation between crime and ‘the news’ is a simple one: crime occurs – the police act to apprehend the criminals – the courts punish them: all this is news – and gets reported, as accurate information, in the media. The aim of this paper is to challenge, and, if possible, to overthrow this viewpoint; for it seems to us naive and misleading. There is no consistent relationship between the rates for different kinds of crime in the Criminal Statistics and the relative frequency with which these are reported in the press. The post-war ‘crime wave’ does not seem to have been accompanied by a major increase in press coverage; but also, the decline in the official rate between 1950 and 1955 was not accompanied by a corresponding decrease in news coverage. Though the rates for different kinds of crime vary, the patterns of crime news remain remarkably constant. Some of the distortions are also strikingly consistent. For instance, more serious crime or crimes of topical social interest are consistently over-reported: murder is consistently ‘very markedly over-reported’: so are more serious punishments. Thus, though crime news must and does bear some relation to the rates of reported crime, this relation is neither simple nor transparent. (Roshier, 1973: Hauge, 1965) What in fact we are dealing with is the relation between three different definitions of crime: the official, the media and the public definitions of crime. Each of these definitions is a socially constructed social event not a fact in nature; each is produced by a distinctive social and institutional process. The official definition of crime is constructed by these agencies responsible for crime control – the police, the courts, the statisticians, the Home Office. This definition is the result of the rate of reported crime, the clear-up rate, the focussed and organised police response to certain crimes, the way the patterns and rates of crime are interpreted by judges and official spokesmen in the crime control institutions and so on. The media definition of crime is constructed by the media, and reflects the selective attention of news men and news media to crime, the shaping power of ‘news values’, the routines and practices of news gathering and presentation. The public definition of crime is constructed by the lay public with little or no direct experience or ‘expert’ knowledge of crime. It is massively dependent on the other two definitions – the official and the media definitions. The selective portrayal of crime in the mass media plays an important part in shaping public definitions of the ‘crime problem’, and hence also (through further feed-back) in its ‘official’ definition. So we must replace the simple equation: crime = apprehension = news about crime, with a more complex model, which takes full account of the shaping power of the intervening institutions. Thus: crime → ‘crime’ → news values → ‘crime-as-news’ → public definition of crime (volume & (product of institutional (the selective (the selective (the consequence of incidence definition by crime institutional practices portrayal of crime information provided by unknown) control agencies) of ‘news making’) in the media) official and media sources)
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The ‘common sense’ equation – crime = news – suggests that the primary function of ‘news’ is to give the public, accurate information about crime in society. But ‘crime news’ serves other, equally important, but less strictly informative, functions. Erikson reminds us that ‘confrontations between deviant offenders and agents of control always attracted a good deal of attention’ in the past; there was good reason why ‘the trial and punishment of offenders were staged in the market place’. The reform which abolished Tyburn and the other public spectacles of retribution, Erikson noted, ‘coincided almost exactly with the development of newspapers as a medium of mass information’. Crime is thus one of the oldest, most perennial topics of public interest. Similarly with punishment which has a symbolic as well as an instrumental value and must therefore be seen to be done as well as done. As Sir Charles Curran noted, ‘social rejection is part of punishment’. The stigmatisation of the wrong-doer is a critical part of the punishment process and for stigmatisation to work, it must be made public – publicised. ‘News’ about crime and punishment thus plays an important social function in demonstrating where the moral, legal and normative boundary lines which define ‘society’ fall and how they are applied. Society needs to be continually reminded where these normative boundaries, which define it as a community, lie: how they are being tested, redesigned or undermined: who is transgressing them. It also needs public reassurance that, despite these transgressions, the boundaries remain intact. Society is fascinated by this endless unfolding drama between order and disorder, consensus and dissensus. Since crime breaches our ‘normal’ expectations about the world, the people rely on the control institutions to define, place and ‘make sense of ’ the illegal, the ab-normal, the ‘unthinkable’. And if control is to be applied in defence of the interests of ‘society as a whole’, society needs to have publicly provided those explanations and rationales which legitimate that control. In Erikson’s memorable phrase – ‘In a figurative sense, . . . morality and immorality meet at the public scaffold, and it is during this meeting that the line between them is drawn’. There is, indeed, a striking convergence between crime as a topic and the structure of ‘news values’. Crime stands out against the background of all that is massively ‘taken-forgranted’ about the social world. That is why, though there has never been a society without crime, nevertheless crime always comes across as unpredictable, unusual, disruptive of the social order, and of the consensual moral framework, a break in the routine; and thus dramatic, sensational. But ‘news’, too, is defined against the background of normal expectations and taken-for-granted routines. The ‘news’ is precisely what is ‘new’, unusual, a break in the pattern, unpredictable, disruptive, dramatic, sensational. As Mr. Larry Lamb, editor of the Sun noted, ‘only big time crime is news, or small crime with big features, or which can be so featured’. What happens everyday to everyone is hardly ever ‘news’: but anything that goes thump or bang in the night is potentially a front-page story. Crime and ‘news values’ thus exhibit a strikingly similar structure. Consequently crime has for a very long period been a consistent and recurring focus of news attention: one of the most perennial of news themes, intrinsically ‘newsworthy’. In the history of the press, crime is one of the oldest, one of the most ‘natural’ of news categories. There is, in fact, a spectrum or continuum of types of crime. But crime news is basically structured around the two extreme poles of the spectrum. Basically, crime news is either routine or sensational. A study of the reporting of crime and violence in the popular press (‘A Mirror For Violence’ in Shuttleworth, Camargo & Lloyd, 1975) has remarked on the very small space, the impersonal and abbreviated manner, in which much ‘mundane’ crime is routinely reported. Like the 3½ column inch story about an elderly spinster found stabbed to death in her home (Daily Mirror, 5 May, 1973). These routine items seem to say little more than that ‘another serious crime has been committed’; they are simply blips on the crime
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screen. Nevertheless, the press remains so highly sensitised to crime that even the most routine and mundane transgressions are potentially ‘news-worthy’. Though crimes of this small order occur all the time and are clearly ‘normal’, they continue to appear, in small items in the press. Crime of any kind has potential news visibility. Where the small, routine items of crime news are concerned, the press does not give them much space: but it seems to continue to exercise the function of continually patrolling and monitoring the routine incidence of crime. TV and radio where ‘space’ (that is, time) is scarce, is, of course, even more selective in terms of this routine treatment, than the press. These media only ‘monitor’ ‘routine’ crime at the local programme level, or in the form of general comments about ‘the crime rate’. Only the more outstanding crimes catch the national radio and TV headlines. In the press, the consistent volume of ‘mundane’ crime stories is matched, on the other side, by the big, dramatic, sensational crime stories. Big, sensation crime stories possess some characteristics, embody themes or touch social preoccupations which enable them to be built up and featured. The size or volume of the crime involved, the characteristics of the gang or criminal personalities involved are open to the more dramatic application of news values and this pushes them out of the routine and into the more feature or spectacular category of news presentation. Stories referring to the spectacular exploits of gangs like the Krays, the Richardsons or the Great Train Robbers are ‘naturals’ for feature news or colour supplement treatment. But even lesser crimes can be built up to feature stories, or have the space and size devoted to them in the paper increased, as a consequence of the particular choice of news angles. The bizarre story of the murder of 3 babies impaled on some house-railings (S. Mirror 15 April 1973) rated inch-wide headline (HORROR OF BABIES SLAIN BY MANIAC), covered most of one tabloid page with a picture of a tent graphically spread across the garden wall. Undoubtedly the unusual nature of the murder and the fact that babies were involved helped to lift this crime story into its more sensational front-page exploitation. The Mirror story of how a press photographer was punched, with a lot of space, capitalized headline and aggressive photo would surely not have been there if the press hadn’t been involved and the man who threw the punch wasn’t a high status personality in the celebrity stakes – Marlon Brando. At least, in the 2 month period around this event, there is no other story of a remotely comparable kind in the paper. Trivial, and sometimes nonexistent, events can also be lifted into ‘news visibility’ if they can be connected with a prominent crime theme. The fact, reported in the Mirror of 30 May 1966, that the police had to use walkie-talkies to help two lost little boys would surely not have been news, had it not been possible to link this human interest tit-bit to the fact that the police concerned were on ‘Mods and Rockers patrol’. Nor would the story the same day in the local press (Evening Argus, 30 May 1966), under the strap-line, ‘Violence’, that ‘In Brighton there was no violence in spite of crowds of teenagers on the beach’. Thus, in the last story referred to above, the absence of violence in Brighton is ‘news’ only against the background of the expectation – much sustained previously by the press itself –, that there would be fresh outbreaks of violence between teenagers on the holiday beaches that weekend. This tendency of crime news coverage to polarise between the ‘routine’ and the ‘sensational’ must be related to the point made earlier: namely, that news consists of the ‘abnormal’ contrasted against what is consensually taken to be ‘normal’, the norm. ‘The media select events which are atypical, presents them in a stereotypical fashion and contrasts them against a backcloth of normality which is overtypical’. (Young). Sometimes this polarisation between the ‘untypical’ and the ‘overtypical’ is to be found within a single story, and provides its news pivot. The News of the World story (4 Feb 72) of the ‘mugging’ and death of a man outside his home must have gained extra news value from the counterpoint between
316 Stuart Hall, et al. ‘the brutal thugs’ . . . ‘cruel killers’ . . . ‘Horrible injuries’ . . . ‘Battered and kicked to death . . . all for the sake of just £ ‘2’; and ‘Tom, a quiet, inoffensive family man who enjoyed a pint and a chat at the local’, who that night was ‘his usual cheerful self ’. In general, the closer a story can be angled upwards towards the spectacular threshold – violence, sex or violence, gang or group crime, crime for pleasure, political crime, etc – or the more single events can be mapped into a ‘crime wave’ or (better still) ‘an orgy of crime’, the more newsworth it gets, the greater news value it realises, and the more sensational the treatment and presentation accorded to it. The media, then, select from the pool of reported crime especially those stories which fit the structure of news values: and they connect these crime stories with what they take to be the structure of public interest about crime. It is by way of this ‘connection’ that news values are realised, or, to use a more vulgar word, ‘cashed’. But there are many different kinds of ‘news interest’ or public interest in crime. There is the interest in the ‘one-off ’ spectacular or dramatic crime event or personality. Equally important, is the interest in crime itself as a ‘social problem’. The Evening Standard headline, ‘LONDON MUGGING? JUDGE TALKS OF CITY IN FEAR’ is clearly actively orchestrating a relatively minor event into a much larger, more menacing, threatening and resonant theme. This theme, – spreading panic about muggers – is the news value of the story; the facts of this particular case are really incidental to it. Hence what is headlined is not who mugged whom, but what the judge said and the ‘city in fear’ to which he referred. The report of the actual mugging here only provides the news peg, on which to hang the story. (Sept. 72). This is a particularly interesting example, since it is one of the stories which inaugurated the massive media build-up and public panic about mugging in 1972–3: and the tentative use of the question mark, there, by the Standard is important. A day or two later, the question mark was to disappear: a sign that unequivocally, ‘Mugging’ had at last arrived. But the news interest in ‘the problem’ behind the story is already perfectly clear from the story’s headline and details: ‘Londoners are afraid to use the underground and underpasses late at night for fear of being mugged (no question or quotation mark) . . .’; the Judge’s remarks that ‘Mugging is becoming more and more prevalent . . . We are told that in America people are even afraid to walk the street at night . . . This is an offence for which deterrent sentences should be passed’: These are the real points of news interest in the story. The specific crime event has been almost entirely swallowed up by the wider social themes. There is another kind of crime interest – in the crime rate itself, interpreted by the control culture and the media, as a ‘social barometer’. For example, the ‘use’ of the Moors murder in 1966 as a social indicator of the consequences of ‘permissiveness’ and ‘pornography’ (S. Express: ‘ARE BRADY AND HINDLEY THE ONLY GUILTY ONES?’). Then there is the interest in crime as an aspect of control – the ‘law and order’ link. This sort of connection is often made in editorials, which don’t refer to any actual crime news story in detail at all, but ‘take off ’ on the basis of one such incident to issue a general cry for stronger discipline, tougher sentences: more law and order measures. The Sunday Express, News of the World and other Sunday populars, frequently ‘moralise’ and campaign about crime itself in this way. But the connection is not exclusive either to Sunday papers or to editorials. The Daily Mail ended its story on the killing of 3 policemen in London in 1966 with the report that ‘A dazed incredulity is followed by the realization that order is not to be taken for granted. The jungle is still there. There are still wild beasts in it to be controlled’. Crime therefore engages a wide range of social themes: and the newsworthiness of crime stories can be directly increased by pushing a story down towards the ‘deeper issues’ which lie within it, or by linking and ‘mapping’ a particular crime story up into one of these broader themes.
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The media have little direct access to crime as such. Some papers are skilled at rewriting proceedings in court to make it appear that ‘your reporter’ was actually present when the dark deed was done. Some papers serve the function of private-public confessionals to quality villains. The TV networks have to be more circumspect about allowing criminals to appear: and if someone confessed on screen to a crime for which no one had yet been apprehended, the networks would be required to pass their names and addresses to Scotland Yard – which can’t greatly increase the numbers of villains taking the primrose path to Television Centre. Some papers do make a heavy investment in investigative feature crime reports and in the routinely sensational crime exposée: though, where the latter are concerned, illegality, immorality and engineered moral outrage tend to blur into one another. But the majority of crime stories, and the ‘good news’ about the crime rate, must come to the news media via the police, the courts and the control agencies and departments. This means that, with respect to crime and crime news, the crime control agencies are the principal and primary sources and thus definers of crime. Their definitions of crime and the criminal prevail: they stand at the apex of the ‘hierarchy of credibility’. This position of the control institutions in relation to the defining process about crime is enhanced by the ‘official’ and institutional nature of their role (they are also the controllers); and by the absence – of course? – of the criminal, in crime stories and reports and thus of any alternative counter-definitions. The power to control crime is thus inseperable from the primary power these institutions have to define what crime is, who the criminal is likely to be, and why the rates for different crimes are what they are: ‘the social and political definitions of those in dominant positions tend to become objectified in the major institutional orders, so providing the moral framework for the entire social system’ (Parkin). There is no mystery about the regular access which these control institutions have via the media to the public definitions of crime. They are, after all, the institutions charged with crime apprehension, production and control. They stand in the front line of the ‘fight against crime’. They see crime at first hand every day. Their knowledge, definitions and interpretations of crime therefore command the field. They are also the main sources of ‘the news’ about crime. The media depend on them as privileged sources. The more competitive news-gathering becomes, the more newsmen rely on the institutions in control, who can brief and pre-schedule events for the media, thereby reducing the ‘incessant pressures of time . . . resource allocation and work scheduling’ (Murdock). At the level of news gathering, there is considerable and widespread routinisation of contacts between crime reporters and correspondents, and official crime control sources. Sometimes – as in the case of the media transmitting news of police plans to apprehend a villain who is still at large and no doubt listening in – the goals of the crime controllers and the media diverge. But, routine contacts must be maintained and regularised. There is indeed, a ‘taking over wholesale of the institutional perspective’ by some newsmen who have been too long on the crime beat; so that their prose is only a heartbeat – so to speak – away from the policeman’s. (Roshier) This cannot be good for anyone – including the police. And it especially results in an overwhelming loading of the dice when we recall that, in this area, the criminal is unlikely either to be ‘accessed’ or to be ‘balanced’. So far as television and radio are concerned, as with the press, the spokesmen for the crime control agencies have privileged access – they are always called on first when an aspect of crime and prevention becomes controversial or a topic in current affairs treatment and they have an absolute right of reply should they care to exercise it. Two other practices of newsmaking confirm and reinforce this privileged access of the control institutions to the definition of crime in the news. The first is the requirement – a general one in the press, a tight and specific one in
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radio and especially TV – that the media should be balanced and impartial. This means that, in a controversial area like crime, the media would not go very far in reporting crime or interpreting the criminal statistics without substantiating their views by quotation from the ‘official sources’, or by grounding and witnessing what they say in the ‘official’ view of crime. This circle is further tightened by the fear of contempt and the constraints of sub judice rules. These may, indeed, partly account for the very abbreviated nature of many routine crime reports. But, in the more spectacular aspects of crime, the media are on safer legal ground, but also appear more impartial and balanced, if they can rest a report squarely on a direct interview with or indirect quotation from, a control spokesman or from proceedings heard and seen in court (again, if possible with direct quotes); or from a judge’s homily made during sentencing, or from an official interpretation – usually at high ranking level – of the statistics and rates and movements of crime. The whole range of crime news is thus massively founded in these official sources and definitions. Indeed, most extensive crime stories are really stories, not about a crime event, but about a court case: and many of the most vivid headlines about crime are taken directly out of a judge’s summing-up reflections on the (usually rapdily declining) state of the world as a result of crime. We can see both the process itself, but also the translation by the media up the scale of aggression in this example of a Mirror story, based on the Chief Inspector of Constab.’s presentation of his Annual Report in 1973 (14/6/73). What the Chief Inspector is quoted as saying – the first major interpretation of the movement of crime in that year – was that ‘the increase of violent crime in England and Wales has aroused justifiable public concern’. You will note that this is not a simple statement of statistical fact, nor even simply an interpretation of the statistical facts. It does not simply note that violent crime is going up: it affirms that the public is justified in its concern about violent crime. It is, therefore, public legitimation by a police spokesman, of what is and what is not ‘justifiably’ a matter of public concern. With this warrant behind it, it is hardly surprising that the Mirror then headlined this item: ‘AGGRO BRITAIN – “Mindless Violence” of bully boys worries top policemen’. As we have seen, the crime control agencies act as the primary definers of crime. But the media not only relay and reproduce these definitions – they transform, translate and mediate crime, as reported and interpreted, into the selective patterns of crime-as-a-news-event. We have already spoken about the general play of news values across the reporting of crime: of the angling and framing which extracts added news value to a story: of the thematisation and contextualising of crime in terms of issues and problems. Here we want to pinpoint certain broader features of this ‘translation’ process, as ‘crime’ moves from its official and institutional, to its media and news definition. Selectivity and angling are only some of the practices which are at work here. There is also the transforming of the crime event into a finished news item – the coding of crime stories within the formats and rhetorics of the journalistic discourse. The transformation of the Chief Inspector’s remarks into the AGGRO BRITAIN headline referred to above accomplishes at least three things. (1) It dramatises, sensationalises and exaggerates a considered official statement about crime – partly, no doubt, for effect; to catch attention, to strike home with its readers. (2) At the same time, it translates the measured language of an official spokesman into the vigorous public language of popular journalistic rhetoric. In this way it helps a carefully framed judgement to become more widely accessible – it slots the crime into a wellworn groove in public consciousness. It normalises and diffuses the statement, at the same time as it sensationalises it. But (3) it also interprets, contextualises, gives a social reference for a particular ‘fact’ about the crime rate. By using the terms ‘AGGRO’ and ‘Bully boys’, the report connects – whether legitimately or not is another question – the ‘increase of violent crimes’ specifically with
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Skinheads (the term ‘Aggro’ is theirs), and football hooliganism, both highly sensational social phenomena. It also connects the ‘facts’ about a particular crime with a wider, though less well defined, highly generalised theme – the fear of ‘mindless violence’ in the streets. This last point – the active giving of meanings and social contexts to crime, the broad identification of crimes with certain categories of individuals and the thematisation of crime in terms of public anxiety – these are the most pivotal translations of all, which the media accomplish. Here the press is no longer simply in an informative or reproducing role. The media have become active mediators. The process of mediation does not necessarily end with the representation of crime in press reports. For, a story about crime, especially when signalled as significant by a spokesman for the crime control agencies or by a judge in court as ‘a legitimate matter of public concern’, can then also support a newspaper; escalating into a more active editorialising role. By taking ‘the public voice’, assuming the mantle and aura of moral guardian, the newspaper can begin actively to shape public opinion on the issues of crime and punishment; a paper can even actively develop a campaign about crime. As the post-war consensus has withered and society has become more polarised around the basic issues of our moral, economic, industrial, social and political life, so the media have begun more openly and consistently to campaign about crime; issuing calls for harsher sentences, tougher measures, coupled with an attack on soft liberals, wishy-washy penal reformers and intelligent dogooders. The press, on some occasion, has actively stimulated the panic about crime as well as contributed to an informed public about crime. They have, at times, precipitated the development of ‘law and order’ campaigns. I make this charge seriously and directly, because I believe it to be of the utmost public concern. By ‘developing a campaign about crime’ we mean something more than the traditional adoption of a tough editorial stance about crime control – though this, of course, regularly and frequently occurs. The story about ‘Tom’ quoted earlier from the News of the World, beginning as a crime news-story, gradually evolves, via a substantiating quote from the Judge (‘Conditions in this country are approaching those that prevailed 200 years ago . . .’), into a crusading appeal ‘In all conscience’, for anyone ‘with the slightest scrap of information to go to the police station . . .’ ‘Let’s show the muggers, before anyone else gets hurt, maimed or killed, that they cannot get away with it’. This is quite a mild example, in fact, of press campaigns on the crime question. We have in mind, for example, the orchestration of whole centre or front pages in the popular press around the crime menace. Examples in the late 1960s and early 1970s could be selected in any week of that period from, say, the Sunday Express: with, for example, on the left hand, an editorial resuming the figures, the pro’s and con’s of the debate, but ending with a strong plea for tough measures and a prophecy of escalating danger: on the far right – – of the page, I mean – the ‘John Gordon’ column, with its unceasing onslaught on soft liberals and reformers and the menace of ‘soft crimes’ like homosexuality and permissiveness written in its usual vigorous polemical-swearing style: top, centre, a grim black Cummings cartoon, depicting the ‘threat’ promised editorially, with a headline which articulates closely with the centre ‘feature: such feature layouts might include a regular column by another accredited spokesman, definer and interpreter – often, in these years, Lord Hailsham, mobilising his immense institutional power and charisma in this area, with a ‘measured’ reflection on the state of society as registered by the crime thermometer and a warning that, though red paint on the cricket pitch may seem a long way from anarchy, it may be the thin edge of the red wedge . . . (cf: for example, a similar treatment of the Paul Storey ‘mugging’ in Birmingham in 1973 in the Sun). This kind of presentation is no longer just ‘good hard-hitting journalism’. It is the press in
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its fully orchestrated crusading role. Campaigns of this kind can spiral and develop a series of feed back loops, even when they are not laid out with the full rhetorical resources. One familiar spiral is where the paper quotes a judge giving sentence: endorses and reinforces the sentiments expressed: and campaigns behind him; at the same time, referring its editorial view to ‘increasing public anxiety and concern’ – perhaps simply as intuited by the paper, at other times as it surfaces in the letters from a selective slice of readers: this being then followed by a judge who, in giving (usually) a ‘tougher sentence’ grounds his use of deterrence in – ‘public concern’ as reflected and expressed in the press . . . and so on round the circle, the press warranting its chosen stance in judicial precedent, then orchestrating opinion and feeding it back into the judicial process. (6/10/72) Judge Hines told 3 ‘muggers’, in Birmingham sentencing them to 3 years ‘The course I feel bound to take may not be best for you young men individually, but it is one I must take in the public interest’, the Mirror added to this report its editorial weight by endorsing his judgement: ‘Judge Hines is right’. Then, a week later, there is the Sun (TAMING THE MUGGERS – 13/10/72) aligning ‘the public’ with deterrent sentencing: ‘if punitive jail sentences help to stop the violence . . . then they will not only prove to be the only way. They will regrettably, be the RIGHT way. And the judges will have the backing of the public’. This spiralling up the ladder of control by public spokesmen and campaigning media has been rightly described as a concerted ‘move towards closure’ in the control culture. It is most likely to occur at moments of social tension, when uncertainties about the future or fears about the polarising nature of social conflict assumes the all-too-convenient scapegoat form of a public panic about crime. In an area as delicate as that of crime and control the prospect of such fully-orchestrated spirals inspires terror. ‘Crime’ is, of course, also transformed (as well as reported on or campaigned about) by the presentational devices employed by the media. Visualisation by TV will inflect a crime story one way, accenting its vivid and spectacular aspects. National and local press treatments will also vary significantly. In all the media, the position of crime items in the news hierarchy, the length and forms of the coverage (in terms of the linking interviews, reports with expert opinion and so on) layout and visual means of exposition serve to bring emphasis, to rank and place crime news in the overall hierarchy of public attention. We call this the agenda setting function of the media – the placing of a particular topic, like crime, in the hierarchy of public concerns. It is in this way that crime has gradually become a major political cause for concern. The press employ different presentational devices from TV – using position, captioning, space, headlining, rhetoric, illustration and so on to lend an item emphasis and weight. The use of these devices make a story ‘more visual’ or ‘more interesting’ . . . But it also shapes how the public ‘makes sense’ of crime. As a story passes from one format to another, so different frameworks of meaning are brought to bear on it. Thus ‘news’ treatment places the accent on the factual legal side of a story. This highlights the eventfulness of crime – act, criminal, victim, circumstances, event, arrest – but necessarily displaces the social background, the causes or motivations, of crime from the centre of attention. Features in the press, or documentaries and current affairs ‘specials’ in TV, by contrast, are concerned with the ‘background’, the causes and explanations, the whys and wherefores, of crime. These ‘explanations’ draw on and reflect the various public ideologies about crime. There are often discrepancies between the ‘news’ and ‘features’ parts of a paper some of which are never resolved. The ‘news’, through its attachment to drama and event, may use (and abuse) common stereotypes of the criminal, and traffic in public labels, at the same time as the more ‘investigative’ features are questioning the stereotypes and figures and unpacking the labels. There is no necessary consistency here, even in the so-called ‘quality’ press, between the frameworks for crime adopted in one and another part of the same paper. The Sunday
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Times, for example, which takes often a sociological and environmental or ‘social problem’ view-point on crime, also regularly runs the Spectrum column which is unswervingly addicted to a psychopathic, chemical, genetic, indeed, near-Lambrosian, ‘explanation’ of criminal and deviant behaviour. Though criminology has long aspired to the condition of a science, the fact is that explanations of crime are powerfully and massively overlaid by lay ideologies. These ideological frameworks set whole chains of explanations in motion; whole families of criminal types and categories are set going, which knit together, while appearing to unravel, the enigma of crime and its causation. Here one often finds the complexities of crime – those complexities to which the Governor of Chelmsford Prison made indirect reference – ‘classified out’ into the genetic, or the psychopathic, or the environmental, or the sociological, or the psychiatric – or the socially-disorganised and undersocialised ‘explanations’. To each cluster of explanations is attached an appropriate typology of criminal: the underchromosomed, the unregenerated evil, the criminally insane, the deprived, the sick, the weak, the mother-deprived, criminal type. To each is often also attached its chain of motivations: the irrational, the driven, the neurotic, the search for kicks, the congenitally-wicked, motive. To each, often also belongs the appropriate social setting or scene: the back street, or multiply-deprived working class area; the bomb site; the high-rise block and the unused telephone kosk; the football end; the drug scene or hippie pad . . . No doubt something of the truth lurks and hovers within and between these stereotyped and clustered maps of meaning. But they are rarely pressed through in depth and detail to the difficult and complex but necessary social connections which they index. Sometimes, after a parade of ‘explorations and explanations’, the argument is dissolved ideologically: into one of the great Public Images – Inner City Slum, Family whose Mother went out to work, etc – which bring the account conveniently to ‘an end’, if not to a resolution. Here, from the Sunday Times (5/11/ 72) is an extended example of a schematic ideology of crime parading as a ‘scientific’ explanation: (THE MAKING OF A MUGGER – by Peter Watson). Everything we know about ‘mugging’ suggests that what is at work here is a mind-blowing tissue of ideological inflexions and constructions. There is nothing new about mugging someone except the name – after all a few years ago the same sort of violence used to be called coshing. But the enquiry the Home Secretary set up into the phenomenon last week could well discover at least one new point about the gangs behind the attacks: the presence in them of hysterical impressionable ‘lieutenants’ dependent on the gangs’ leaders and who tip the gangs’ activities in a violent direction. Three types of youth appear to be involved in these muggings. First, at the centre of the gangs, is usually found a highly disturbed and unstable boy or girl. He or she invariably has a highly troubled background – a violent or alcoholic father is common – and shows early and predictable aggressive tendencies. Arrayed round the gang leader will be the ‘lieutenants’. Their backgrounds tend to be unhappy and deprived rather than violent. Finally, the third type, which makes up the outer ring of the gang, consists typically of fairly normal youths from backgrounds not generally thought of as disturbed or abnormal in any way. The ‘lieutenants’ relationship with the gang leaders is highly ambivalent – half admiration, half fear. But it means that there is now much more chance for the ‘disturbed factions’ in a gang six or seven strong to assume leadership. Probation officers and psychiatrists I spoke to were in no doubt that collective violence by youths has risen considerably in recent months, and that very young boys and
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Stuart Hall, et al. girls are concerned (down to 12 in some cases). And three probation officers told me quite independently that a possible explanation of this crucial relationship between the disturbed and the impressionable might lie in the wider availability of drugs in recent years. Drugs offered the opportunity for friendship between the different kinds of disturbed individuals who were attracted to their use. Both the seriously disturbed and the hysterical types, for example, are attracted to the ‘instant experience’ offered by drugs. On top of this, though, the more ‘exotic’ and exaggerated behaviour of some highly disturbed youths when under the influence may appeal to the dependent hysterical boys or girls who then, in a sense, become ‘addicted’ to the more disturbed youths. This, they agreed, might also account for the conflicting patterns of muggings – some of which seem to be carried out for kicks and some for gain. For the stolen money and watches may serve, in some cases, as funds with which to buy drugs in an increasingly expensive market. And mugging as a spill-over effect from the drug scene might also explain why girls’ gangs are now taking part in violence, something unknown in recent years. Drug use shows less difference between the sexes than to most other crimes. This three-part structure of the gangs, if it proves to be correct means, however, that the blanket administration of longish sentences by the courts tends to be counter productive in the case of the impressionable ‘lieutenants’ who would usually respond to probation. And the outer – mainly innocent – ring probably needs the minimum amount of attention from the authorities. Which function a youth fulfils in his or her gang can usually be gauged from the social reports which probation officers prepare on young offenders. Yet in mugging cases they are rarely used by the courts. It is ironic that the courts do not recognise this three-part structure since the special unit set up by the police in Brixton and by London Transport. Their aim is to get at the ‘lieutenants’ who will respond to an authority greater than that of the gang leader. By not discriminating between leaders and led, the probation officers feel that the courts may in this case be committing the prison and borstal impressionable youngsters who will only get worse after a spell alongside more independent characters.
The media provide the bridge or link between crime and the public anxiety or concern about crime. There is, of course, a widespread and growing anxiety about crime and its upward movement. But, over and above what we know of rising crime either from reported crime, or from the offered interpretations of the criminal statistics, there has been also the closely related phenomenon of a public ‘moral panic’ about rising crime: on the one hand panics about certain specific crimes which connect with troubling public issues (e.g. race, drugs, pornography, youth; or, on the other hand, panics about the highly generalised but nameless unspecified ‘tide’ or ‘epidemic’ of crime itself. These ‘panics’ have grown in intensity and number through the post-war years; they clearly reflect very deep-seated public anxieties and uncertainties; but, they are distinguished, above all, by 4 things: (1) the discrepancy between the scale of the known facts, and the depth, intensity and escalation of the public perception and response; (2) the focussing of these ‘panics’ around key social themes and social groups (e.g. blacks) or social categories (e.g. drugs offenders; (3) the way each ‘panic’ feeds off and spirals with other concerns which are mapped into it, or in some other way, identified with it; (4) the way in which ‘moral panics’ issues into control crusades and ‘law and order’ campaigns. Now, one important element in the construction of social panics is the use of
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powerful labels by the media. Labels have a powerful effect in shaping public perception of events which are, at one and the same time, both troubling, perplexing and not clear-cut or well-defined. They resolve unclear social phenomena into clear-cut identifiable and controllable categories. The use of a lable like, for example, ‘mugging’ can help to cluster into one category events which are not in any simple sense, the same. We have looked closely at examples of crimes which, one day in August 1972 were not labelled ‘a mugging’ and where a day or two later an almost identical event, having been so labelled, escalates rapidly in news visibility; and, of course, contributes to the orchestration of crime into distinct and threatening patterns or waves. Labels also attach whole types of people to crimes. Rightly or wrongly the mugging label has irreversibly attached black youth to a particular pattern of crime. Labels allow supplementary attributes to be ‘mapped into’ the criminal pattern. Thus, the use of the ‘mugging’ label in the Watson article, its associations with America, permitted him, quite unwarrantably in the known evidence, to add or ascribe the whole quite different connotations of drug-taking and drug pushing to the ‘mugging pattern’. Thus different crimes, different attributes, different types of people converge under the convenient roof of the lable. This convergence has the effect (a) of constructing disparate events into a crime wave – a whole movement of crime – where perhaps none exists; (b) of stimulating the public perception and fear of the upward drift of crime, in short, of escalating it; (c) of reinforcing the notion that different strands of crime are indeed coming together to produce one, massive, overwhelming but nameless and generalised ‘tide of crime’. As student protesters become thugs and hooligans, and muggers become drug-pushers, and pornography readers become sex murderers through the thin edge of the wedge principle, so a general panic with its accompanying calls for greater control, is triggered. These ‘panics’ clearly have their origin in much wider and deeper social and political issues: but they tend to be displaced from the difficult and problematic terrain on which they form up, into the better defined, and well controlled theatre of crime. The media have at times actively participated in the construction of such spirals. We do not know how the ‘mugger’ is made or how many of him there are: though we are convinced it has more to do, as I’ve suggested, with the situation of the young, unemployed and alienated black youth, their dislocated biographies and strategies for survival in the crippling conditions of life in the inner-ring colonies, than it does with the drama of the corrupted core and the corruptible lieutenants which passed itself off as an explanation in the Sunday Times article. We do know that the ‘mugging’ label was widely and vividly disseminated in the British press long before any single specific criminal act in Britain was labelled ‘a mugging’. We know that, though it has a history of several hundred years in Britain, its recent use was a transplant from the American experience; it came with all the power of its rich connotations and meanings: black crime, ghetto violence, the breakdown of the city, the collapse of law and order, in which at one point in time both a previous President and Vice-President invested so much of their political fortunes. The ‘mugging’ label was also used as a means of prophesying events in Britain following their American example, long before there was evidence of its actually doing so: cf the headline, ‘Must Harlem Come To Birmingham?’ over an article which contained little factual support for this ominous prediction cast in the form of a question. The ‘mugging’ label with its resonances, not only triggered fears and anxieties, especially about the black population and its increasingly militant and drifting youth; it led to a prior sensitisation of both the public and the police to ‘mugging’s’ possible emergence in Britain – an anticipation of trouble before it began. Indeed, so thick was the air with American ‘mugging’ reports in the year before August 1972, – that, had the black mugger not appeared in or around mid-1972, we would have been obliged to construct him. There is evidence of parallel sensitisation in the police,
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especially where the formation of the London Transport Police’s ‘Anti-Mugging squad’ was concerned: a vigorous focussing of police attention and resources in certain areas, especially of South London. You may recall, several early cases, – predating the ‘mugging panic’ of August 1972 and after – not, as it happened, at all reported in the overground media: where certain charges against black youths near tube stations were dismissed because of the lack of witnesses other than the arresting officers, and in circumstances showing some evidence of what might be called ‘anticipatory arrest’, e.g. the case of the ‘Oval 4’. The first specific use of the ‘mugging’ label to refer to an actual British crime, in August 1972, initiated a wave, not of actual mugging stories in the press, but of reports of cases now labelled mugging in the courts. Paradoxically the headline over this first report was based on a police quote – ‘a mugging gone wrong’ – presumably because the victim was seriously injured and subsequently died. Were these also ‘muggings’? All of them? Some of them? More of them in early 1972 than in 1971? The hard statistical evidence of this ‘wave’ is even harder to pin down than crime figures usually are, though they provided the headline and story bases for most of the press and TV coverage of ‘mugging’ in general. Since there cannot be an actual ‘mugging’ figure, (for there is, strictly speaking, no such crime), these publicly referred to figures were composed of selected proportions of the figures for other types of robbery. But how much of, which figures? The ‘hard evidence’ which one hopes and expects lay behind such headlines as ‘Mugging up 104%’ gets softer as one sees reports and the figures for ‘mugging’ retrospectively projected back to 1968, when, indeed, the label was hardly known or used, although no doubt some people at that time were being jostled and robbed on the street. Such considerations had no effect in cutting off the head of steam building up behind the massive coverage of the ‘mugging crime wave’ which lasted until mid-1973; nor of undermining the spiral in the scale of control which crested in March 1973 with the Paul Storey 20 year sentence; nor, indeed does it seem to have established the smallest danger signal for the future – for example, in 1974 and again, now, in 1975 – as we begin what looks very much like a second escalation in the ‘mugging’ spiral. The play and interplay between label, public perceptions about crime (cf: ‘Mugging and Law-and-Order’ Jefferson, et al CCCS Stencilled Paper No. 35). The media not only sometimes bring together under a single label unrelated things; they have sometimes also helped to amplify and extend the perceived levels of the threat. They may thus have contributed to the amplification of public anxiety about crime: sometimes by ‘reading’ event, in terms of their most sensational – and illegal – element: the ‘illegal’ aspect of ‘permissiveness’: the political aspect of ‘illegality’: the ‘violent’ aspect of political protest and so on. Events troubling to the traditionalist, though not necessarily illegal, can be made – depending on how they are treated in the press – to pass through a series of boundaries or thresholds. Permissiveness is wicked, but not a crime; crime may be illegal but not politically intended; political dissent, though going beyond the formal limits of institutional politics, is not necessarily violent. But it is easier to comprehend, and to enlist the lay public behind control unreservedly, once an action or practice has been ‘criminalised’, i.e. defined or abstracted in terms of its illegal or ‘criminal’ element alone). Not everyone will march under the banner against sexual liberation but who will not take-arms-against ‘violence’, especially when defined as a dagger pointed at the heart of the state itself ? We have in this paper deliberately focussed (in an inevitably summary and condensed form) on whose aspects of the relation between crime and the news which are least remarked, least understood and least studied – and, for that very reason, most troubling. By no means all the media share an equal responsibility in the processes we have been
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describing. Certainly, they cannot be ascribed to the ‘bad faith’ of individual editors, or newsmen. We have been talking about institutional processes, not personalities: about the role of the media in the complex equation of crime and control – not about a few ‘rotten journalistic apples’. We have put the case as sharply as we could because we think the situation is near danger point: but also because, in our experience, those in the media are sometimes very unwilling indeed to take anything but the most immediate, pragmatic view of their role and responsibility in this field. This defence mechanism among journalists has helped to preserve what at the beginning we called the ‘naive’ view of the crime/news equation, and kept it in place. The fact is that, in the present situation, the naive view is no longer good enough, if only because it has anything but ‘naive’ consequences for the lives of most people and of society as a whole.
20 The ‘unity’ of current affairs television Stuart Hall, Ian Connell and Lidia Curti
Introduction Since the General Election of 1959 (often referred to as the first ‘television election’), Television has been thought to play an increasingly crucial role in the provision of social knowledge about the issues and events which are pivotal to election campaigns. Three major interpretations have been made of its contributions, and of the relations of Television, as an informer, to its sources and audiences. The first of these is the conspiracy thesis. Various authors, especially critical and radical ones, have argued that what we may broadly call ‘political communication’ is founded on a conspiracy between the State and Television. News and Current Affairs programming is depicted as the public voice of a sectional, but dominant political ideology, which is reproduced in the media to the exclusion of any other; this area of programming is said to offer, fairly unambiguously, to the public ‘the ruling ideology of that class which holds State power’. To put this another way, the definitions and interpretations of political controversies provided by Television are thought to be determined directly by this ruling political ideology. In essence, the thesis assumes the absolute and undisputed sway of this political ideology over the whole social formation, including its ‘ideological apparatuses’. From this position, the broadcaster is conceived as nothing more than the ideological agent of his political masters; and the audience as a mass of isolated individuals deprived of any ways and means to question or resist the former’s ideological onslaught. There is also a consensual variant of this model. While its advocates hold to the same, or similar, premises, they have suggested that the sway of ruling political ideas – the consensus – is not as absolute as their more radical counterparts have imagined. As evidence they have pointed to differences in audiences’ responses to political messages, to such dysfunctions (breaks in the consensus) as the ‘escapist-effect’; and more recently to the ‘violence-effect’ of certain aspects of broadcasting in the field of News and Current Affairs. So, while they adhere to the general proposition that ‘society’ is based on, and held together by, a ‘central value system’ – a unitary order of political and moral meanings – they have pointed to and examined differences in the practical expression of this system. These differences have been conceived either as varying degrees in the intensity of practical expression of consensual values; or, in the case of oppositional political protests and their coverage by the media, inevitably cast as ‘meaningless acts’ requiring some form of repressive reaction for a return to stability. On the whole, however, Television has been conceived in this perspective as ultimately functional for the maintainance and continued expression of the consensus. The second interpretation, the displacement thesis, provides a somewhat different perspective on the part played by Television in the provision of knowledge about political affairs in so far
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as it transfers the powers, elsewhere ascribed to political forces, to the broadcasters, who are presented as the ‘new priesthood’. The image of Television offered here is that of an independent and prime mover in the social formation. Television is thought not to confer authority on definitions of political situations formulated outside the studio, but rather, of its own violition, to construct these definitions which it then proceeds to present as those of the society as a whole. The logic of this position can be most clearly seen in the recent study of the February 1974 General Election by Trevor Pateman (1974). His central thesis leads him to regard the phrase ‘television coverage of an election’ as more and more misleading. He argues that Television can only be said to ‘cover’ an election when the campaign has an existence independent of it. For him, the campaign no longer possesses this independence; ‘we do not have television coverage of an election: we have a television election’ (Pateman, 1974, p. 2). This study is very important, in that Pateman gives due weight to the specificity of Television’s mode of operation; its ‘inflexible formats and ritual repetitions’, the use of rapid camera changes, of more than one news reader, and of a variety of other ‘attention-holding devices’. It nevertheless glosses over certain vital distinctions. We would agree with Pateman that the devices he isolates and examines do indeed mediate political events such as General Elections. But if we accept that Television plays a mediating role, it follows that elections as political events, remain distinct from their presentation as television events. The two are related, in that the latter consists of stories and pictures about the former; but they are not immediately interchangeable. Unlike Pateman, we would argue that communication is not the only level on which political parties are formed and operate; that the formation and maintenance of political parties takes place primarily within the very real institutional framework of the State. This is not to deny that there are interconnections between the political system and the ideological apparatuses: but they must be grasped and studied as such, not assumed to be identical. As with the former thesis, Pateman does not sufficiently allows for breaks or discontinuities at the reception or decoding end of the communicative exchange between Television and its audiences. In this respect, he seems to commit the error of assuming that audiences are always bound to programming in a transparent relationship; and thus infers audience responses from the nature of the messages they receive. That the broadcaster will attempt to establish such a relation of transparency with the audience (what Pateman calls a ‘relationship of complicity’), and that in recent months broadcasters have become extremely sensitive to the need to evolve more effective strategies to accomplish this, is undoubtedly true. But, to assume the success of the strategies employed is to ignore the ‘crisis of credibility’ through which broadcasting is currently passing and thus the lived experiences and complexities of these exchanges. The third position may be referred to as the laissez-faire thesis, typically proposed by broadcasters themselves. In general terms, it is argued that the Elections command no special attention, beyond that which Television accords any other important moment in the life of the nation. Television does not attempt to shape or mould this event; it simply reflects, as accurately as it can, the development of the campaign as it happens. Nor is the coverage systematically ‘biased’ in favour of any one of the competing parties. Broadcasters and commentators have emphasised that great care is taken to ensure that all the major parties have equal access to the debate as it appears on Television. Programming is conceived, simply, as a ‘window on the campaign’; it reflects, and therefore, does not shape or mould, the political debate. In short, the objectives of Television are to provide objective information for the public so that they may make up their own minds in a ‘rational’ manner.
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In the course of this paper, which records some of the CCCS Media Group’s more recent work, we shall attempt to pin down more precisely what we see to be the inadequacies of each of these positions. It is our contention that each offers an inadequate explanation of the complex nature of the coverage and of the equally complex relations through which the State and Television are interconnected. Each points to some form of unity between the two; but this is conceptually grasped only at the expense of evidence suggesting certain oppositions between the two institutions. Each depicts the circuit of communication about political events as closed up around one ‘real’ and unambiguous meaning, which flows smoothly, without breaks, discontinuities or oppositions, to the majority of the audience. Our own thesis begins from an essentially different set of premises. In relation to the messages available through Television we shall suggest that they never deliver one meaning; they are, rather, the site of a plurality of meanings, in which one is preferred and offered to the viewers, over the others, as the most appropriate. This ‘preferring’ is the site of considerable ideological labour. Furthermore, we shall suggest that the relations between Television and the State have a dual character. Television is both autonomous and dependent, or to put this another way, it is relatively autonomous of the State. To demonstrate this relative autonomy, or the specificity of Television’s mode of operation in the context of General Elections, is the main objective in what follows.
The problematic practice: broadcasters vs. politicians The ‘Election Panorama’ which forms the basis of this study is an instance of Current Affairs programming in a particularly sensitive area of television journalism. News and Current Affairs have always been maintained as separate departments within the BBC; and though there is more co-operation and contact between them now than there was in Television’s early days, the distinction remains important. It is the institutional expression of the classic journalistic distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘comment’. Of course, Current Affairs, like News, is governed operationally by the same general criteria of impartiality, balance and objectivity; but, unlike News, which is predominantly concerned with establishing the ‘facts’ of a given situation, Current Affairs is predominantly concerned with exploring and probing situations, to establish the prevailing ‘attitudes’ and ‘opinions’ which frame problematic events. While the development of ‘news explanation’ carried out by established special correspondents has considerably eroded the sharper distinctions of the early days of television journalism, some specifiable differences of approach remain. The sensitivity of this area stems in part from this distinction. Current Affairs programmes, like Panorama, deal with, and invite, comment on controversial issues in the political domain, where broadcasters are most exposed to charges of bias and unfair practice, and where politicians are most alive to the danger of broadcasting’s usurping their right to address and represent the electorate directly without the broadcaster’s intervention and mediation. Election coverage is a sensitive area in its own right, since it occurs at the very moment which the electorate is ‘making up its mind’ – an extremely delicate moment in parliamentary democracies. For these reasons, the coverage of elections has always been strictly monitored and limited. During the period of an election campaign, questions of balance and impartiality are under constant scrutiny, both by broadcasting and political managers. The nature and extent of the coverage has been the subject, over the years, of quite formal negotiations between broadcasters and the political parties: the coverage is negotiated afresh on the occasion of each election, and is framed, not only by the 1969 Aide Memoire (the details of which are confidential) which governs all
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ministerial and party political broadcasts, but also by the Representation of the People Act, 1969. Furthermore, the companies of the IBA are expressly required to present the expression of political opinion in ‘properly balanced discussions or debates’ (cf. Television Act, 1964) while the BBC have adopted this as a self-imposed requirement. Nevertheless, throughout the history of the Television coverage of General Elections, both networks have been allowed the editorial autonomy to decide what, precisely, counts as ‘proper’. Formulating the agenda for discussion, comment and debate, the right of selecting the speakers and of chairing the debate, have been, as a consequence, in the hands of the broadcaster. Though the politician commands the right of refusal, and indeed the right to prohibit the transmission of particular programmes, the former has rarely been exercised, and the latter never. This should not suggest that the negotiations between broadcaster and politician have always been perceived by each of them as unproblematic. In this respect there is a lengthy history of very real antagonism between the broadcaster and the politician, which casts considerable doubt on the thesis that the latter exercises an absolute control over the former at all levels. Politicians, from each of the major parties, have publicly and privately attacked both networks, and particularly the BBC, for their handling of controversial issues, especially during the build-up period to General Elections. The precise character of this attack has shifted over time: the Labour Party, prior to 1966, was comparatively enthusiastic about the general role and performance of the BBC, a position which had changed dramatically by the late 60s with Richard Crossman’s public criticism of the BBC’s handling of civil rebellion, and the publication of Wedgwood Benn’s more extreme thesis that ‘broadcasting was too important to be left to the broadcaster’ (The Guardian, 19 October 1968). We cannot here engage in tracing these and other important points of conflict (such as the Conservative Party’s declaration of hostility to the BBC’s coverage of affairs in Northern Ireland) in any detail, except to outline certain of the basic and recurrent themes. These include the perennial charge of ‘bias’; the charge that in current affairs programmes there has been an over-concentration on ‘comment and analysis’ to the virtual exclusion of ‘straight reporting’ which has resulted in the cardinal sin of editorialising; that broadcasters have acted as a ‘pressure group’ for certain kinds of social and political change; that broadcasting has trivialised and personalised politics and thus contributed to the erosion of traditional political mores; and, in more recent times, that it has contributed to the crisis in established political structures by providing a public platform to the voices of political dissent and opposition. Taken together, these themes constitute the substance of the parliamentary attacks on the BBC, which are crucial in attempting to grasp this network’s own ‘crisis of credibility’ at the present time. The parliamentary critique hinges on the assumption that the broadcasting authorities, the BBC in particular, are too powerful, too monolithic and have acquired too great a degree of independence. Television is felt to place itself between the politician and the elector, in the absence of any formal responsibility to either. Nevertheless, established political forces have, in the main, stopped short of the suggestion that Television should be more directly managed and controlled by the State; even the suggestion that there should be some form of independent ‘Broadcasting Council’ has not won widespread support among them. While they have considered ways in which the broadcaster’s editorial power might be ‘devolved’ and rendered more ‘accountable’ (by way of stimulating regional contributions to the overall output, for example), politicians have for the most part been united behind the line that editorial power should remain in the hands of the professional. What they require is that this should be exercised differently and more circumspectly.
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The spokesmen for the BBC have been far from submissive in their replies to this critique. In response, they have eloquently constructed a defence which reverses the terms of the charges made against them. To the charge of trivialisation, for example, they have counterattacked with the suggestion that this stems from the conduct of politicians which appeals to, and nurtures, emotional commitment at the expense of commitment based on ‘rationality’. On the issue of responsibility, the present Director General, Sir Charles Curran, has argued that the BBC has, and fulfils, a responsibility . . . to provide a rationally based and balanced news service which will enable adult people to make basic judgements about public policy in their capacity as voting citizens of a democracy . . . We have to add to this basic supply of news a service of contextual comment which will give understandings as well as information. (Curran, 1971a) Recognising that it was in this latter area that the BBC’s fulfilment of its obligations and responsibilities was most problematic, he emphasised the importance of maintaining and re-affirming ‘reportorial freedom’ in the following terms: The BBC’s position is one of quasi-judicial impartiality. Just as most public law reflects the general will of the people, and just as some law reflects not simply that minimum standard which the public wishes to protect, but also what it would like to see as an ideal, so the BBC’s programme philosophy seeks to display what the world is like and what it might be. (Curran, 1971) Any interference with reportorial freedom, here attributed the authority of ‘public law’, is castigated as deterimental to the double role of broadcasting; what Sir Charles elsewhere referred to as ‘serious discussion on the basis of reality’ (Curran, 1974, p. 782). If the upshot of this work in the context of elections had led to ‘more fluid behaviour by the voters’, as has been suggested by Seymore-Ure (1974) and others, Sir Charles saw no cause for concern, in that he interpreted this evidence as a testimony to ‘a mature electorate, not bound by shibboleths and not open to traditional appeals to the faithful in the degree to which politicians have hitherto assumed was the case’ (Curran, 1974, p. 784). But, ‘the debate which must be the basis for any parliamentary democracy’ (ibid) was not exclusively staged by Television; it did not set out the agenda of issues which Sir Charles saw as properly originating from the ‘synthesis between the initiatives taken by the politicians and the questions which are present in the minds of the public’. Nor did Television attempt to pre-figure the outcome of the debate, which would be ‘to try to act as God to the electorate’. Thus the broadcasters’ aspirations to present a rational discussion and appraisal of the issues were said to be too often frustrated; the level of political argument was often lower than it should be, and reflected the ‘unwillingness of many politicians to face the reality that their claims are pitched too high’ (Curran, 1974, p. 782). Sir Charles did not deny either that Television could or should contribute to the debate; the nature of this contribution was indicated when he said of News and Current Affairs, the course of wisdom is for us to see ourselves as casting pearls before people who have been taught by us to appreciate their value. (Curran, 1971a.)
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He did deny, however, that broadcasting practices were the primary cause of the failure to realise the potential of this contribution, and quoted the ‘success’ of such programmes as The Money Programme and Panorama in achieving ‘effective illustration and argument’. The principal causes for failure were, for him, located in the limitation of the politicians’ approaches to the political controversies of the day. It seems to us correct that the antagonisms between the broadcaster and the politician are rooted in their respective approaches to the public. The divergences between them can be most clearly seen in the context of General Elections. While the politician is manifestly concerned to enlist support to a particular manifesto or Party position, the broadcaster manifestly aims to win the politician and the electors to what they consider a rational and intelligible presentation of the issues. Thus the antagonism may be summed up as a conflict between the dictates of ‘good television’ on the one hand, and the dictates of ‘good politics’ on the other. The history of the relations between Television and the State is not, however, characterised by conflict alone. Certain symptomatic instances of accommodation can also be isolated, such as the controversy over Yesterday’s Men, a programme considered by both managers of broadcasting and the managers of politics to have transgressed the underlying rules of good political communication. Commenting on the programme’s use of the ‘documentary method’, Sir Charles said, A method which is suitable for filming animals in the zoo or in the jungle clearly produces interesting questions when it is applied to the House of Commons. It may be that our manners in this matter may have to be different. (Curran, 1971b, p. 7.) This form of communicating about parliamentary issues or personalities has, since the transmission of this programme, rarely been used; and on those occasions when it has, with extreme editorial scrutiny and supervision. At the present time, the BBC is formulating a new policy on the regionalisation of its activities, under the supervision of Huw Wheldon, in an attempt to satisfy the Annan Committee with its good faith. These, and other activities, would suggest the existence of some common ideological ground between the two. Thus the relationship between the two is complex. This complexity – opposition and difference on the one hand, accommodation and unity on the other – is perhaps best demonstrated in relation to the question of ‘bias’. Television spokesmen have rightly insisted that, as a rule, they are not biased in favour of any one political faction. Yet they have not denied that they are indeed biased. Sir Charles has said, One of my senior editors said recently, in a phrase which I treasure: ‘Yes, we are biased – biased in favour of parliamentary democracy.’ I agree with him. It is our business to contribute to the debate by making available to the widest general public the opinions of those who are directly engaged in it. It is not our business to shape the end of the debate. That is for the electorate, guided by the politician. (Curran, 1974, p. 782.) So, it would appear that the broadcaster and the politician operate, broadly speaking, within the same ideological framework, though they frequently take different positions within it (cf. Fig. 1). While the broadcaster is not partisan in relation to the ‘legitimate’ transfer of power from one Party to another, he is partisan in terms of the maintenance of a certain
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mode and type of institutionalised power – namely the capitalist state as a parliamentary democracy. In this light, the difference and oppositions we have indicated are what have been called ‘secondary contradictions’ – in the last instance (but only then) ‘conflicts of mutual indifference’. While they are real, lived differences, they do not add up to fundamental contradictions – contradictions of the structure. The litmus test of such a proposition must, of course, be applied on the site of their public encounters – in relation to the programming itself. It is in this light that we shall examine, in some detail, an episode from the Panorama coverage of the last Election.
Figure 1 The television debate
Current Affairs Values The distinction between News and Current Affairs programming which we indicated in the previous section is reflected in the differential values which frame the skills and objectives of each sub-domain. To put this another way, what is received as ‘good television’ will vary as between those who are routinely employed in the field of news, and those who are regular contributors to one of the existing current affairs programmes. The criterion of ‘immediacy’, for example – one of the values which enable newsmen to organise the processes of ‘manufacturing news’ (cf. Cohen and Young, 1973) – has considerably less relevance for those Current Affairs broadcasters who take on the responsibility ‘to inform the audience not only about the immediate dramatic happening, but also about moments and incidents which could lead to tomorrow’s headlines’ (BBC, 1974, pp. 6–7). This does not suggest a complete disregard for the values of news. Indeed, there have been a series of developments throughout the last decade from which the mainstream Current Affairs programmes have emerged as more firmly bonded to News. At the present time News provides the baseline, in the sense that an event or issue must have already passed through the stage of being a ‘news-story’ before it can be passed on and constructed as a ‘current-affairs story’. Even though a programme such as Midweek does not draw all its items from the headlines on a given day, the majority of them usually take precedence over those with ‘lower news visibility’. Other items can be thought of as potential news stories – ‘tomorrow’s headlines’. Current Affairs is not wholly autonomous of News, they are not interchangeable or reducible to the other. What then is distinctive about Current Affairs programming?
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Typically, a news story or ‘report’ becomes a current affairs topic. It becomes a topic by being framed as a question, or set between seemingly alternative or antagonistic propositions. This is particularly true of Panorama. In the edition of this programme on the so-called ‘downfall’ of Vietnam, the question which established the perspective on the item was delivered after a brief situating introduction: The resignation of Thieu then is the end of a long chapter in the book of America’s involvement in Vietnam. It’s almost certainly the last chapter. We just await now the epilogue as the United States tries to withdraw their own people and some of their dependents and helpers. How than does the United States view the demise of the man they supported for so long. (Panorama, 21 April 1975.) In the second example, the introduction (a ‘piece’ to camera by the presenter) not only explores a question, but sets up a case for further examination in the course of the programme: Tonight in Panorama we are going to examine the case of the Luton Murder. We’ll look at the evidence which led to the conviction of the three men and the various revelations since the trial which have led many people to believe that a miscarriage of justice may have taken place. And in particular we’ll be explaining the Criminal Appeals procedure as it exists in England and Wales today, and asking whether it is an effective safeguard against wrongful conviction. (Panorama, 5 May 1975.) Though the murder itself was not ‘news’, professional legal doubts and the beliefs of ‘many people’ that a ‘miscarriage of justice may have taken place’ were; these licensed the retrospective investigation of the murder and the trials which the edition presented. Midweek differs from Panorama in several respects; in terms of topic it regularly handles more (on average three for each edition) in less time; and its lead items are frequently taken over from the main news stories on a particular day. The lead item on June 10 (1975) was in no way exceptional, either in terms of perceived appropriateness to fill this spot in the programme, or in terms of the way in which it was presented. The anchorman (Ludovic Kennedy) opened (piece to camera) ‘with the news of the Cabinet re-shuffle expected after the referendum’ that had ‘just been announced’, and a brief rundown as to who had been moved where. The item was then passed over to Robert McKenzie, who introduced ‘two prominent Labour back-benchers to react to the news’. In his capacity as chairman of the discussion between them, McKenzie opened by soliciting their general views to the probable headlines concerning Wedgwood Benn’s ‘demotion’ and then invited their views on the possible consequences for the Labour Party. In other words, the item as a whole moved from a reprise of an earlier news bulletin which established the topic, into an exploration of the ‘background’, and finally to speculation about consequences, licensed and grounded by the presence of ‘representative spokesmen’. From these examples it can be seen that these Current Affairs magazines provide a space in which the broadcaster can set about filling in the contexts to events which have been already acredited signficance by their appearance on news bulletins, or, as is frequently the case with Panorama, by press reports. They do not only register that an event has happened, but go on to probe the attitudes and opinions of the actors involved: to put questions to them which the
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‘average viewer’ would put, if he or she could; to test out the arguments held by ‘many people’ against those held by ‘many others’; and to invite ‘expert’ comment. As a whole, the field can be characterised as providing informed speculation about events, with the objective of promoting a ‘rational’ understanding of the issues involved. They summarise the ‘known facts’ and on this basis go on to provide some form of journalistic analysis, ranging from the spontaneous (Midweek or Nationwide) to the considered, detailed and extensive (Panorama). Not all the events which are selected and constructed as news-stories subsequently become current affairs stories. Nor do those news stories which pass into the keeping of Current Affairs receive attention from all the programmes in this field. Some stories trigger coverage across the full range (e.g. an announcement by the Government on its measures to ‘curb’ inflation, or on the question of devolution). Events such as these have a more or less guaranteed access to all the mainstream current affairs slots, in that they are instances of high controversy between those in authoritative positions; they are, in short, topics which stand high on the agenda of ‘legitimate cleavage’ in the political domain. Some topics, on the other hand – crime, for example – while receiving extensive routine surveillance in news, rarely set in motion the full Current Affairs apparatus (Hall, et al, 1975). Crime topics will, in the main, go only so far as Midweek, whose stock of items contains a higher proportion of ‘deviance’ topics – moral, political and sexual, as well as the strictly criminal. For such a topic to achieve the more intensely analytic coverage possible in Panorama (whose reputation as the ‘flagship of the BBC’ or the ‘solemn moment in the British television week’ (The Listener, 28 November, p. 784) is partly based on its specialisation in ‘heavier political issues’ and such ‘recurring problems as inflation, NATO and industrial relations’), it would have to have passed through certain other thresholds – a run of particularly violent crimes (i.e. a whole social pattern of events), or a more general crisis in the legal profession and apparatus (as was the case of the ‘Luton Murder trials’). These differential passages through the Current Affairs field reveal a process of selection similar to that operated by the newsman in his choice of items from the range of potential ‘newsworthy’ events in any one day. Just as events do not select themselves for news coverage, neither do they select themselves for current affairs coverage. The selection and placement of topics for current affairs programmes requires a process of assessment with its own discrete norms. ‘Current Affairs values’ is a more complex system of evaluative norms than the system of news values, given the existence of a range of stylistically differentiated programmes (cf. Panorama Casebook for a detailed exposition of the stylistic repertoire of current affairs). There are important differences of approach, of ‘making sense’ and of style, as between, for example, Nationwide and Panorama or Weekend World, which in recent months have once again been at the heart of a major internal debate those broadcasters who advocate a populist/ pragmatist approach and those who advocate a high/sacerdotal approach to current affairs. Panorama is solidly founded in the latter. A former editor of the programme stated that it never dealt with any subject matter simply because it was ‘interesting’, but only because it ‘mattered’; the programme never handled issues in a ‘trivial way’, but always in an ‘authoritative way, with people who carried authority’ (Bakewell and Garnham, 1970, p. 153). All television journalists are expected to possess such basic professional skills or competences as the ‘ability to write clear, simple and vivid passages of commentary’; an eye for apt and compelling visual material’; and a ‘speed of response to the challenge of fast moving events’ (in Blumler, 1969, p. 426). The forms of applying these ‘background’ skills to topics vary, however, depending upon the specific slot in which the broadcaster is regularly located. What passes for ‘clarity’ or ‘simplicity’ differs depending on whether the work of constructing a commentary, say, is related to the type of items handled by Nationwide or by Panorama.
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Thus Robin Day (1961) has emphasised that Panorama personnel are expected to possess a ‘sound grasp of the subject’, to enable them to ‘pick out the essential points with sureness and clarity’ (Day, 1961, p. 112) and has distinguished the ‘hard’ interview, designed to probe facts and opinions, from the ‘soft’ interview favoured by those ‘in conversation with’ the emminent. Distinctions are, then, also made in terms of ‘foreground’ or presentational skills. Panorama-men are not expected to come-on as pundits or experts, ‘but as men whom viewers get to know as their inquiring representatives in strange places, their persistent fact-finders in confused situations’ (Day, 1961, p. 176). In short they are expected to sign-post their knowledgeability of intensely problematic issues far more so than the journalists attached to Nationwide or Tonight. Even journalists attached to Midweek possess a markedly different perspective on presentation, having emphasised the programme’s ‘lively pace, its reliance on immediate viewer appeal, and its lack of solemnity and pontificating’. Though both share an underlying commitment to providing and promoting a ‘rational’ view, Midweek or Nationwide presenters would argue that Panorama’s strategy leads to ‘talking to the converted’, that it cuts across, or does not sufficiently allow for, what they assume to be the ‘common-sense’ views of their audiences. The distinctive stylistic practices and norms of these programmes derive less from direct attempts to win audiences over to a ‘rational’ view of a given situation, than from an immediate attempt to take up and reaffirm what they have identified as ‘common-sense’. Ultimately, they too are aiming at realising ‘rational-sense’, but recognise, from their image of the audience they think themselves to be addressing, the need to approach informed speculation in a more qualified and circumspect manner. These differences and oppositions are particularly clear in relation to the communicative role of anchorman/presenter. In general the occupants of this role are not expected to present themselves as especially knowledgeable. This point was emphasised by Day in his estimation of the late Richard Dimbleby’s contributions to developing and refining this role: Because he is not a keen student of politics or current affairs, he is presented as a sort of Plain Man, who like the viewer, is a bit puzzled by the problems on which these sharpwitted, indefatigable commentators report. The idea is that Dimbleby is ‘with’ the viewer speaking for millions . . . (Day, 1961, p. 183) Kumar (1974) underlined the importance of this role when he said, The people that matter, from the public’s point of view, the people who for it constitute ‘the BBC’ are the regular ‘personalities’ who increasingly are the familiar ‘link-men’, the ‘anchor-men’ of the regular programmes . . . It is these men who map out, for the public, the points of identification with the BBC. (p. 11) In short, the anchorman operates principally as a mediator and orchestrator, standing between the audience and its assumed puzzlement, and the reporters whom he ‘calls up’ or nominates to deliver that ‘rational-sense’ of the spheres of authority to which they are intimately attuned. Yet there is no single way in which this role is performed; the camerapresence of Michael Barratt (whose image has been described as that of a ‘no-nonsense man of the people . . . emphasised in the aggressive set of his shoulders’ (Listener, 1 May, 1975) is quite distinctive from David Dimbleby’s, in which the declared emphasis is in projecting himself as earnest and sincere. These forms of presenting the self vary, and do so according to
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the broadcaster’s sense of the audience and of the degree and nature of the problematicity of the topic, or topic domain handled by the programme. Thus, we would suggest that News and the different Current Affairs programmes do not constitute a simple unity, but rather a ‘complex unity in difference’. No one approach predominates to the exclusion of others; different styles co-exist in Current Affairs; and the programmes in this area are not a simple extension of the News. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental commitment to informed speculation which connects News and Current Affairs; and specifically for the coverage of elections, there are many shared ‘preferred forms’. Another reason for studying the edition of Panorama we have selected, is that it provides an example of these preferred forms in operation.
The political context Since Panorama, of all the current affairs programmes, is the one most sensitively tuned to the ‘great political issues’ of the moment, it is necessary to sketch in the immediate political context from which the theme of this particular programme – ‘What Kind of Unity?’ – was adopted. October was the second election of the year. The first, in February, occurred in the middle of the Heath ‘emergency’ crisis, and as a direct result of the confrontation between the Heath Government and the miners. The long background to this February Election was the sharpening conflict between the Government and the unions over the Industrial Relations Act, and Heath’s clear determination, after 1972, to take on and defeat the unions head-on. The February Election occurred in the middle of an unresolved miners’ strike. It was thus a ‘crisis’ election, called to obtain a vote of confidence for the Heath strategy, and announced under the single crisis-theme: ‘Who Rules Britain?’. The confrontation between Government and unions was, therefore, the great orchestrating theme of the election which, for most of the time, turned on the opposition between ‘Moderates’ and ‘Extremists’. The Heath strategy was to identify the Conservatives with the ‘National Interest’, the ‘common good’, against the sectionalism and ‘extremism’ of the unions, whom he attempted to present as a threat not just to orderly government under the Conservatives, but also, as he stated in his first election address on Television, to the system of parliamentary democracy itself. From the outset Heath presented the Tory Party as speaking for everyone, except the extremists – as the ‘trade union of the nation’. The Election was dominated, in its early stages, by the row over the miner’s leader, Mick McGahey, and the threat of a ‘Red conspiracy’. The Liberals, also seeking the ‘moderate’ middle ground, but at the same time anxious to maximise party advantage, floated the idea of a ‘Government of National Unity’. Labour, claiming to be the only party able to get a settlement with the miners’ also – but less overtly – jockeyed for a position within the ‘moderate’ spectrum. It counterposed its ‘new deal’ with the Unions (in the form of a new ‘Social Compact’) to the ‘conflict policies’ of the Tories. It was only at the very end of the pre-election period that prices and inflation intruded, pulling the election, finally, away from the ‘moderates/extremists’ argument towards the more traditional ground of the underlying economic issues. The result of the February election was crucial. Labour won, but with an extremely small majority. The Tories lost; but Heath clung to power for several days, attempting, through negotiations with the Liberals and proposals for a ‘Grand Coalition’ to salvage victory out of defeat. ‘Third parties’ – the Liberals, but also the new ‘fringe’ Nationalist Parties – won significant gains, leaving Parliament itself in a ‘hung’ and unresolved position. In the immediate aftermath, although the miners’ strike was settled, the talk of ‘national unity’, of ‘coalitions’ and Grand Coalitions, of compromises and deals, thus continued to command
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the political field. It became clear that Labour could not govern for long on a minority basis, and that another election, to resolve the stalemate, would shortly be called. In the period between the February and October elections, the economic and inflationary crisis took tangible form and came to dominate the whole economic and political scene. For our purposes, the significance of this was two-fold. First, in the conditions of a ‘hung Parliament’, the broad political issues – moderates vs. extremists, ‘who rules Britain?’, who can unite the nation? – becomes translated from its political to a narrower Parliamentary meaning: which Party will emerge from the second election with a majority? Can there be unity if there is no clear winner? Will another ‘hung result’ produce some version of a Parliamentary coalition? Will the two-party system survive the challenge from the third and fringe parties which, because of the narrow balance in Parliament, could exert a critical balancing influence (a constraining effect which was, of course, defined as forcing an ‘extreme’ Labour minority government to act more responsibly and ‘moderately’)? This narrower definition of the theme is clearly evident in the programme. Second, the content of ‘unity’ was redefined: less in direct relation to the confrontation between Government and unions, and more in relation to the economic crisis. Now it was the economic ‘crisis’, inflation and its divisive social consequences, which were seen as posing a threat to ‘democratic institutions themselves’ (with analogies drawn from the Weimar Republic, the collapse of Germany into Fascism and the example of the ‘banana republics’). This way of posing the issue of ‘unity’ and conflict thus led to a broader, more abstract polarisation between Order and Anarchy. This second theme, too, can be seen at work in our programme. In October, Labour decided to go to the country again to seek a mandate. It was armed, now, with a firmer ‘Social Contract’ agreement with the unions: and with a commitment to seek a national mandate, through referendum, to seal Britain’s entry into Europe. Labour thus appealed to the electorate on the basis of itself having the programme to tackle the crisis, of itself being able to ‘unify the nation’. The Tories, under Mr. Heath, trying to win back power from a weak base, offered, if elected, to rule ‘moderately’: specifically, to bring into government members of other parties so as to ensure a broad and unified administration, capable of guiding a united nation and Parliament through the crisis: a government of ‘National Unity’. The Liberals, hoping to exploit their small but pivotal role in an almost perfectly balanced situation, called for ‘moderation’ on all sides, the specific form of which, they suggested, ought to be a ‘national’ government, which would include them on some agreed basis or programme, in a form tighter than Mr. Heath’s rather loose conception: the form, in fact, of a ‘Grand Coalition’. The Nationalist parties and groupings – the Scot Nats. (advancing in Scotland at the expense of both major parties), Plaid Cymru in Wales (taking some seats in February, primarily from Labour) and the Ulster Unionists (with the formidable weight of Enoch Powell thrown in on their side) – all hoped to advance their electoral chances and emerge, in a Parliament similarly unresolved, with an enhanced position enabling them to use their votes, against whichever Party won a marginal majority, to advance their interests. It was in this political context that Panorama chose, for its third and final Election programme, to take up the theme of ‘What Kind of National Unity’. This background helps to explain, then, both why this was an issue which Panorama thought it could use to orchestrate a wide-ranging political debate between the principle Party contestants, and also why the theme of ‘unity’, as it was introduced in the opening sequences of the programme, hovers rather uneasily between its wider, political and its narrower, Parliamentary meaning.
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The Panorama case study Programme outline The edition of Panorama which is examined here was screened on Monday, 7 October 1974, three days prior to Polling Day. It was the third of three ‘Election Panoramas’. The first, screened on Monday, September 23 was billed as a ‘look at the economy in the world context’; balance of payments, inflation and recession were the key themes explored in the opening sequences and in the interviews with, and debate between Healey, Carr and Pardoe. The second, screened on Monday, September 30 also featured the economy, and was called ‘How we should pay ourselves’. Unlike the first, no political spokesmen were included; it was exclusively an ‘analysis’ in the keeping of the media men, assisted by economic ‘experts’. The following chart sets out the overall framework of the third programme, giving some idea of what was covered, and how, in each segment: PREFACE:
actuality clips of Smith Square with commentary over; actuality clip of Westminister with commentary over; actuality piece to camera by Michael Charlton. OPENING TITLES: graphics depicting the register of a ‘one-armed bandit’ on which the faces of the main party leaders, and their parties’ rosettes ‘rolled’ round. Closed with title ‘The Battle For Britain’. SEGMENT 1: Framing the Topic: piece to camera by Charlton on the theme ‘What Kind of Unity’ which opened with a reminder about the ‘huge economic difficulties’ facing the country; introduction of the ‘leading party spokesmen in the studio’ (shown); and next, the ‘nationalist challenge’: report to camera by Denis Tuohy which began with a summary of the February Election results, and with the aid of stills, the seats held by Liberals, Nationalist and Unionist Parties. Actuality clips of Oil Rig with commentary over on the ‘nationalist argument’; then into actuality interview with Gordon Wilson chairman of SNP on the theme that ‘North Sea Oil is Scotland’s Oil’, and another from Willie Ross for Labour’s estimation of the claim. Followed by a further interview clip with Wilson. This pattern is then repeated for Plaid Cymru. Back to studio: Tuohy to camera announcing the major parties’ proposals for devolution; presented with graphics and commentary over; comes back to Tuohy who moves the topic onto the failure of power sharing experiment in Northern Ireland which is handled by means of actuality clips and commentary; first interview with William Craig on the nature of his party’s position. The examination of the nationalist challenge concludes on the question of the possible accommodation the SNP and Ulster Unionists might attempt with the major parties. Back to studio, Charlton to camera on the major parties’ responses to the threat to unity, and their prescriptions; Charlton’s report interspersed with ‘actuality’ quotes from each of the three leaders of the major parties, Wilson, Heath, then Thorpe. SEGMENT 2: Reprise: to Robert McKenzie who summarises the main themes to be covered in the interview/debate with James Callaghan, William Whitelaw and David Steele, each second-in-command of their respective parties. SEGMENT 3: ‘Free’ Discussion and Debate: Opens with a round of questions to each of the participants on their policies for devolution; on their positions on Northern Ireland; on the ‘broader question of the kind of national unity this country’s going to have to develop’; which breaks into ‘open’ debate; then a question directed to Whitelaw on the
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Tory Party Leadership; and a final question to Callaghan on the proposed date of the EEC Referendurm, and what his party will recommend. Programme analysis: signifying systems and practices Though we cannot give a detailed résumé of the method employed to study this particular encounter between the broadcaster and the politician, we shall identify the overall approach, its main components and its conceptual premises. We do not conceive of News and Current Affairs programming simply as a series of ‘windows on the world’ which permit a faithful and comprehensive reflection of ‘the facts’. The facts must be gathered: hence the coverage of political topics will be constrained in part by the nature of the available sources. Broadcasters must select which facts seem most relevant and important for an intelligible coverage of the topic: hence the coverage they produce will be selective; and the selection process will be constrained in part by their ‘news and current affairs values’, and by their sense of audience. The facts must be arranged, in the course of programming, so as to present an intelligible ‘story’: hence the process of presentation will reflect the explanations and interpretations which appear most plausible, credible or adequate to the broadcaster, his editorial team and the expert commentators he consults. Above all, the known facts of a situation must be translated into intelligible audiovisual signs, organised as a discourse. TV cannot transmit ‘raw historical’ events, as such, to its audiences: it can only transmit pictures of, stories, informative talk or discussion about, the events it selectively treats. So, however a broadcasting organisation gathers, selects and pre-arranges its topics, programme transmission must ultimately assume the form of an audio-visual discourse; and this is a symbolic activity, requiring the intervention or mediation of visual and verbal codes, or what we call the use of systems of signification. Current Affairs topics, in short, must be encoded, if they are to carry any meanings and be intelligible to audiences. Any ‘reading’ of a TV programme is also a form of symbolic work which transforms already encoded materials back into the raw material of action and interpretation. TV messages may begin as events in the real historical world, which come up to the attention of TV news and current affairs journalists; and they may pass back, there, through the actions and interpretations of audiences. But, the exchange between the encoding and decoding moments in the communicative circuit is sustained and realised entirely on the terrain of symbolic structures and practices. That is what is specific to Television as a type of symbolic work, to the making and receiving of messages as a type of collective social practice through Television. ‘Meaning’ does not occur or appear ‘naturally’, but must be produced or made to appear through a particular kind of practice; the practice of signification. Several different codes are required to construct the meaning of a message; it is the product of several meaning-systems set to work in some form of combination. Each of these has its own ‘relatively autonomous’ level of organisation, which can be traced ‘horizontally’ for a given programme: there is always something to be seen on the screen: there is always sound to be heard – frequently, though not always, in Current Affairs, talk. These ‘systems’ are organised as a continuous (or discontinuous) structured discourse, each programme has, at least, an audio, or sound, and a visual discourse. Of course, the meaning of any moment of the discourse as a whole, consists of the ‘vertical’ combination of at least these two levels of signification – of the sound discourse and the visual discourse, operating together. Our programme has, thus, been principally analysed in terms of the organisation of the verbal and the visual discourse. By tracing through one of these levels – the verbal, say – it is
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possible to isolate and analyse what the code or communicative strategy is which allows different verbal elements to be organised together into a discourse-flow in order to produce what seems to the speaker appropriate ‘sound-sense’: why an opening ‘commentary’, which introduces a main protagonist, is followed by an ‘interview’ or an ‘actuality clip’ of the protagonist talking. Similarly, on the visual level, we can see why the picture of a ‘commentator’ against a ‘backing’ is followed by a ‘medium close-up’ of two men talking and then by a sequence alternating ‘close-ups’. Each level makes its own kind of sense; but each, in the Television discourse, is incomplete without the other. Thus the moment when the two are combined, is the moment when the sense of a particular part of the process is completed, by the overdetermination of one system on another (cf. Hall, 1974). The visual and the sound systems are the necessary conditions for a series of messages to be transmitted (this is so even if the sound level contains only ‘silence’ – that is, ‘background noises’). Any set of messages which is complete is always produced as the result of the combination of these two relatively autonomous channels of signification. By breaking the programme down in this way, we can examine more closely how the individual elements of each discourse are structured; we can both identify the elements and how they are combined amongst themselves. Then, by combining one level of signification with the other, we can see how sound and image have been organised together, and what the rules governing this organisation are. In this way, the analysed elements are gradually recomposed, and the meaning, or more precisely the meanings of the programme are reconstituted – but now, not as a heterogeneous ‘flow’ of random bits, but as a communicative structure (a ‘complex unity’). The method of analysis is consonant, at this broad level of description with the way in which any linguist or semiotician, analysing a particular corpus of spoken material, would go about analysing its structure as a discourse. Just as the linguist can distinguish different levels of structuration – the lexis, the syntax, the semantic, the rules for opening and ending, the rules of ‘turn-taking’ and succession, the different grammatical forms of different types of speech – questions, exclamations, identifications, etc. – so we try to examine the visual and verbal levels of signification of the TV programme in terms of the rules which govern the internal relation and succession between the parts. Though this method is rarely applied to the TV discourse, it is not – as some media practitioners sometimes suggest – a methodological mystery. It departs from traditional media ‘content analysis’; but the departure is, from the point of view of the study of language and communication, a classical one – indeed a ‘return’ to the classical forms for the study of communicative exchange. The mystery, if there is one, is why media specialists ever believed that the symbolic messages which form the basic contents and forms of what they study were amenable to any other type of analysis. Where the main component is that of a ‘debate’ between participants – as is true of the second half of our programme – there are other, more subordinate or intermediary, levels of message organisation at work which can be analysed in the same way. We have selected two of these levels which seemed to us to make important contributions to the overall meanings made available. The first is the level of non-linguistic or kinesic signification; the second, is the use of vocabulary – the lexical choices made by the speaking participants. Overall then, we have analysed the programme in terms of four signifying systems which combine to produce the programme’s range of meanings: the sound-verbal discourse; the lexical repertoires in play; the visual discourse; and the kinesic discourse. One further, and important point must be made about the nature of the ‘meaning’ which such an analysis of the message-forms studies. By meaning, we have in mind something more than the literal meaning of the different sounds and images which compose the programme:
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we use it to refer to both the literal meanings and the more associative or connotational meanings. As we tried to establish in the section on ‘Current Affairs Values’, programmes in this general area produce for their audiences constructed topics, which are subject, in the course of presentation, to the process we have called informed speculation. The aim of the producers of the message is to transmit a meaning which will be ‘read’ by the audience in much the same terms as those of the broadcasters: they want audiences to take, not only the literal meaning of the images and the talk, but to grasp and be able to decode the framing, the summarising, contextualisation, the debate about, and the ‘essential points’ which ground the topic in informed speculation – that is, ‘the topic’ or ‘the contents’ of the programme in the full sense. To put this another way, the broadcasters’ objective is to have the audience reconstruct the programme as it has been ideologically inflected and structured by them. Anything short of this, in the Current Affairs field, would be considered as unsuccessful or incomplete communication. We don’t mean by this that the broadcasters want their audiences to recognise and accept their particular biases: overt bias is only one, relatively unusual, form of ideological structuring. What the broadcaster wants to communicate is a whole way of structuring, framing and processing a topic which – depending on the format in which it appears (current affairs, magazine, documentary, studio debate, etc.) – has been fully contextualised and connoted. Connotational and ideological codes are therefore at work, organising the elements of the message, as well as those codes which enable the broadcaster, literally, to ‘get a meaning across’. The broadcasters’ encoding practices, therefore, aim at establishing a transparency between the presentation of the topic, as embodied in the programme, and the view which their audiences ‘take’ of it. The broadcaster tries, by all the technical and communicative competences at his command, to bring the encoding and decoding moments into alignment: it is an attempt to realise a certain kind of ideological closure, and thereby to establish a preferred reading of the topic. Participants, the organisation of elements in the programme, the orchestration of the sequence of the programme as a whole, are all designed to produce and enforce this ‘preferred reading’. However, it is in the nature of all linguistic systems which employ codes, that more than on reading can potentially be produced: that more than one message-structure can be constructed. It follows, in our view, that different audiences, depending on their socio-economic position, cultural position and ‘competences’, and the interconnections between them, can make more than one reading of what has been encoded. Audiences decode from within the framework of the preferred structures of meaning which have been encoded, but, we argue, in ways which are consonant with their own frameworks of interpretations and lived experiences. There is, we would suggest, no such thing as absolute closure in the construction or the reception of messages. (Hall, 1974; Morley, 1974) Thus, when we analyse a programme according to the scheme outlined above, what this produces is the way particular codes and their combinations work so as to produce and sustain, not the meaning (for there is no such unitary thing), but the preferred encoding of the topic. This is most clearly to be seen the moment we ask whether, hypothetically, the topic could have been encoded in a different way: the answer is always, ‘yes’. Though we do not, in this analysis, take the same procedure through to the decoding end, the same question, of ‘relative closure’, of the overdetermination of the ideological structures of messages over their literal denotation, occurs at the reception end. Could a programme about industrial relations, with a preferred structure, be decoded differently from the way it has been encoded in this instance? Again, the answer seems to be, yes. And the different possible and real ‘readings’ (e.g. along the grain of the preferred reading, ‘negotiating’ readings between the
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preferred and the decoded one, counter-readings, etc., cf. Hall, 1974; Morley, 1974) could be laid out and analysed to reveal structural differences depending on different ‘competences’, in exactly the same way as the ‘preferred reading’ can be shown to be a structured selection from the possible range of readings at the encoding end of the chain (Hall, Connell & Morley, 1976). Hence, though the TV programme-message is structured, and aims for a certain kind of ideological closure, it can only be relatively closed up around any one reading: and that partial closure is, precisely, the result of the work – the ideological work – to which the signifying systems and their preferred use in any one instance, contribute, and what, in effect, they sustain.
Appropriating and re-appropriating the topic How, then, is this programme ideologically structured? What is the nature of the ‘ideological closure’ towards which the programme moves? How closed or open-ended is this ‘closure’? And how is the structuring actually affected in the course of the programme? This involves, as we have suggested, looking closely at the interaction between what, for purposes of convenience, we distinguish at this point in the argument as contents and forms (subsequently, we will suggest why this analytic distinction is and should remain an analytic or operational distinction only). By ‘contents’ we mean the events and developments in the political world as they become thematised into the subject-matter, the topics, of the programme. By ‘forms’ we mean the combination of discourse elements which are employed, in different parts of the programme, to signify what in fact its content is. ‘The programme’ may then be defined as the appropriation of a topic and its selective development and passage through the forms of its signification. We shall take some examples from the two basic ‘halves’ of the programme – the first, where the topic is elaborated and thematised, principally, by the media men, employing such elementary signifying forms as commentary, scene-setting, compilation film. This part of the programme relies heavily on all those forms which allow the media men to gather up, summarise, select the principal points (themes) which define the topic, which appropriate it into the TV discourse of Current Affairs. This might be called the informational side of ‘informed speculation’. The second half is where the topic is ‘thrown open’ for further development in free discussion between participants, under the chairmanship of the broadcasters. This principally takes the form of the TV round-table debate: the ‘speculative’ side of ‘informed speculation’. The second half not only follows, chronologically, but depends, logically, on the first: the topic must be ‘established’ first – as much as possible through the use of actuality material, to avoid any charge of bias or partiality – in order that the participants can speculate on and around this established base. One must also remark that, if the first half ‘takes over’ the political subject-matter in the form of a topic and its themes on to the terrain of the media, the second half seems to ‘return’ the topic to its source – it gives back the constructed topic to the politicians for them to reconstruct and deconstruct as they will – under the controlled conditions, of course, of ‘reasonable and rational debate’. Thus different modes of control are present in the two halves. The first belongs, we might say, to the domain of the media, since broadcasters take the responsibility for thematising the topic and picking the material which establishes it. Of course, they do so by compiling together, commenting on and over actuality film, news clips and interviews with the politicians, who therefore remain both the source and the subject-matter of the first half. So the relationship is more accurately expressed as one where Television dominates over, without obliterating, politics. Thus, establishing and appropriating the topic = media structuring/over politicians. The second half belongs more clearly to the politicians (though, since they re-appropriate the topic
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under the chairmanship of the media, and on the basis of filmed commentaries prepared by the media, the relationship is more accurately expressed here as politicians re-structuring/ over media). This highlights the important point that Current Affairs TV is an extremely complex combination, making use of a great number of elements in the potential repertoire of communicative forms. It also highlights the key issue of control – in the sense of who has control at different stages over the way the topic is being developed and structured. This looks, at first, like a fairly simple matter for the first half of the programme, since the mediamen are fully in control of how the ‘Unity’ topic is set up: it’s largely presented by a compilation film which is pre-recorded, and only the opening and a few linking movements in the first half are ‘live’ in the studio. However, we must remember that what the broadcasters link together is often extracts from earlier, pre-recorded speeches of or interviews with the political figures involved. Here, undoubtedly, the broadcasters are taking over a topic which, in certain quite key ways, has been already to some extent pre-structured by what the politicians have said in the preceding weeks and months. So media control over the topic, in the first half, consists essentially of structuring (for the purpose of the programme, and the audience) or signifying a selective version of an already pre-structured topic. ‘Control over the topic’ in the first half, is therefore, a shared concern, between broadcasters and politicians, though the share is not equal. It can be represented thus:
First half: Media appropriation – (political pre-structuring) The question of control in the second half is more complicated. Here the politicians are free to shape and structure the topic as they see fit. However, they are constrained or controlled by three factors: (a) the broadcasters have ‘set the topic up for them’; (b) they have to compete with one other in open debate; (c) they compete for the topic under the chairmanship and ‘control’ of the broadcasting chairmen, and their ‘rules’, so the mode of control in the second half is more complex than it looks at first sight, and may be represented thus:
Second half: (Media control) – political appropriation in debate The posing of these questions about the nature of the control over the passage of the topic through the signifying forms of the programme brings out sharply the issue which we believe fundamentally underlies any discussion of the whole area of Current Affairs TV: namely, the nature of the relationship, the degrees of inter-dependence, over-determination, relative autonomy or absolute independence between the broadcasters and the political domain. What, precisely, is the relationship between broadcasting and the state, between broadcasting and the political system as signified in the programme? We want to pose this question, not at its institutional level, but in terms of the ideological structure of the programme, and to examine it as it actually appears on the screen. The following diagram will remind the reader of the basic structure of the programme: ‘Framing The Topic’ mainly consists of an introduction of the theme: then, there follows the establishing and probing of the nature of the challenge to ‘Unity’ presented by the various nationalist parties. This presentation of the nationalist challenge is realised through filmed news and actuality clips, plus selective diagrammatic representations (e.g. of the balance of the parties, or the nationalist gains in the February Parliament), plus extracts from recently filmed interviews with the respective nationalist leaders, all with commentaries. The ‘Framing’ ends
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with extracts from key statements on ‘Unity’ by the three major Parliamentary party leaders. Following a reprise of the main theme, the programme moves into the ‘Free Discussion and Debate’ half, where Whitelaw (Cons.), Steele (Lib.), and Callaghan (Lab.) debate the topic, under the chairmanship of Michael Charlton and Robert McKenzie.
Figure 2
Setting it up Charlton announces the ‘Unity’ theme in the prefatory film to the programme. This opens with a series of shots of Smith Square, headquarters of the two main Parties, described as ‘the heart if not the mind of British politics’. Cut to a close up of the Houses of Parliament from Parliament Square: Ch. On the whole Westminster has been accepted as the place and centre of decision and rule for all the United Kingdom. But not so today. Rule from Westminster is challenged in Ulster, in Scotland and in Wales. Next, Charlton against the background of Parliament, now viewed from across the river, speaking direct to camera: Ch. So how is Parliament to accommodate itself to all the rival dissents and discontents in Britain. Behind the campaign arguments we’ve been listening to about wealth and fairness and justice, stands the nation of Britain itself. Where is the nation going? All the parties call for unity, but what kind of unity do we need? Following the credits, the first main sequence opens with Charlton, seated at table to left of screen; behind him and to the right, a Union Jack with the question ‘What Kind of Unity?’ superimposed. Charlton, straight to camera: Shot 2-shot Charlton & caption
Dialogue What kind of Unity. Not for the first time in Britain’s history the politicians warn us that this country faces huge economic difficulties . . . and that the only way of fighting the battle is to fight it together. So each of the parties talks of unity and each has its own prescription for that unity. In a moment we shall be talking to the Cut to 3-shot of Wh. St., & Cal. ............ leading party spokesman on why they think they have the best means of achieving it. Calls Ch:
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Back to Ch.
for unity come at a time when the United Kingdom faces varying degrees of challenge to established rule from Westminster . . . Caption change to Nationalist Nationalists and Unionists have joined the posters .................................................... Liberals in forming a third force in British politics. There are really two parts to this ‘set up’. The first takes over and establishes certain key parameters to the topic for the purposes of Current Affairs exploration: the establishment depends on forging certain equations – to which both spoken and visual discourse contribute: (Commentary): Westminster – UK – Parliament – nation itself – Unity (Visual): Smith Square (Parties) – Parliament – Union Jack These established points of reference, the supports to the concept ‘Unity’, are then cross-cut by certain challenges: Nationalists – dissent and discontents – different prescriptions for unity The topic thus becomes an issue for current affairs, a problematic question, by contrasting ‘unities’ against ‘challenges’: the Union Jack, with ‘What Kind of Unity?’ superimposed, exactly visualises the topic as a theme for informed exploration, speculation and debate. The topic has passed through these forms into the keeping of the media. But this passage onto the terrain of the media is immediately followed by grounding it, so to speak, back in the terrain from which it originated: ‘politicians warn us . . .’, ‘each party talks of . . .’, ‘we shall be talking to the leading party spokesmen . . .’. This reminds the viewer that, though the parameters of ‘Unity’, offered by the broadcaster, will frame and organise the passage of the topic throughout the rest of the programme, the topic has its origin in the on-going political debate outside the media. It is politics which has set the theme for the media: and the media definition of the topic will be heavily dependent on the way the subject has already been pre-defined by the primary definers (the main Party spokesmen) in the primary circles of Party and Parliamentary activity. This is also a way of saying that television has not made the topic up for itself, but is here responding to and, in a sense, reflecting (while also reflecting on) what those who have the primary responsibility for political conduct of the nation have already said and done. Television’s ‘impartiality’ in relation to the topic is validated by substantiating that the topic already has a political life outside of television, on which television’s treatment ultimately (in the last instance) depends. This privileged and primary determination over the topic by the three major Parliamentary parties is realised visually and verbally, at several points throughout the first half of the programme. After exploring ‘the nationalist challenge’, the broadcasters summarise, by means of commentaryover-captions, the three Parties’ main policies on devolution. Later still, the first half is closed with direct quotes on ‘their prescription for Unity’ from Wilson, Heath and Thorpe. Note that, whereas the main Party definitions are both summed up by broadcasters, and allowed to come over in straight extracted quotes, the Nationalist challenges are not allowed to come over straight. They are not accorded the same degree of authority. Under the heading ‘What Kind of Unity’, four quite distinct questions are pulled together into a common theme (thematised) in the course of the first segment: the rise of the small
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nationalist parties; the possibilities of government by coalition; the problem of Northern Ireland; and the possibilities of Britain remaining in the Common Market. These choices are not, however, the product of an absolutely free or autonomous editorial decision aiming only at clarifying the significance of the major theme for the audience. In the interests of clarification, other sub-topics could have been chosen; for example, the editors could have gone for those topics considered important by electors rather than those highlighted by the manifestos of the parliamentary parties. The editorial work can, therefore, be seen to reflect or reproduce a certain political perspective on the ‘unity’ issue: one which identifies unity very firmly with two-party rule, a centralised, unitary kingdom under Parliament – ‘the place and centre of decision and rule for all the United Kingdom’. We may summarise the selection and pre-definition phase thus: (a) the topic ‘What Kind of Unity’ has already been subject to massive institutional definition in the political domain; (b) this is the main reason why the topic has been selected by this, the final edition of Panorama prior to the Election; (c) the selections made in the preliminary establishment of the topic, reveal the ‘natural’ orientation, by Television to the agenda and definitions of those in authority. Moreover the selections inflect how the topic is taken up and presented; (d) as a matter of course, Television must demonstrate its ‘neutrality’; hence the use of direct quotes from party leaders and the interviews with the representatives of the ‘nationalist’ parties to discover their position. It must demonstrate that the problem is ‘authentic’, to the political domain, not a construction by the media.
Filling it out But Television is by no means bound exclusively to any one of those perspectives. It too has the power to inflect and define the topic. This is accomplished in the sequencing of the selections made, moving to and placing a particular statement in relation to the others and by the broadcasters’ commentary: – what is called ‘topping and tailing the topic’. None of the filmed interviews with Nationalist leaders simply appears on the screen; each is introduced by the linkman, speaking directly to camera, and it is to him that the camera returns, to ‘round-off ’, summarise and connect one interview to the next. The interviews are anchored both verbally and visually; certain aspects are selectively highlighted by the voice-over and in-camera commentary; particular clips are edited and linked with others to form a connected chain of ‘messages’ which construct the theme and the topic. In this opening segment, because each part of the ‘background’ being assembled into the Television definition relies heavily on ‘actuality’ material, it may be difficult to observe just how much framing and focussing is in fact done by the broadcasters. The composition of this material through a combination of forms and roles (link-man, interviewer, commentator, thematiser, etc.) gives this part of the programme a grounding in the ‘real events, out there’, as it were. It sustains a ‘transparency-to-reality’ effect, which conceals the selectivity in setting up the topic and the perspective at the back of it. To give an example, the theme of ‘the nationalist threat to Parliamentary sovereignty and stable two-party government’, is set up and illustrated in the following way: Charlton’s preliminary commentary to camera ends by describing the nationalists as ‘voices demanding more than Westminster has in the past shown itself willing to give’.
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There is then a ‘perfect transition’ to Denis Tuohy, who picks up the narrative in terms of an analysis of the results of the February General Election: Shot Dialogue Cut to Tuohy talking direct to Tu: Britain went into the last Election with one party camera ............................................... having a clear majority. We came out with the first minority government in forty-five years. There follows a ‘cutaway’ to stills of each member of the new parties represented in Parliament after that election. This is combined with commentary-over from Tuohy, giving the overall disposition of the parties in terms of the number of seats each commands. Having thus ‘fleshed out’ Charlton’s earlier point about the shift in the balance of power in Parliament, Tuohy, as he crosses the studio to a position ‘backed’ by the graphics illustrating gains by the Welsh and Scottish nationalist parties, delivers a summarised account of its consequences: Shot Tuohy crossing studio
Dialogue It was a result that, according to the Labour Government, finally made effective government impossible. Cut to medium-close-up Hence the election. The Liberals and Unionists were of Tuohy .................................... not new to Westminster, but as a force, the nationalists were. The Scottish National Party – their vote doubled from 11% in 1970, to 22%, and a poll last week has put their support, in Scotland, at a record 28%, behind Labour, but above the Conservatives. Tu:
The programme now moves in on the SNP, with a series of filmed actuality shots of an oil rig, with the following commentary over: Tu: The new and priceless ingredient in the nationalist argument has been North Sea Oil, oil which, the Scottish Nationalist Party claims, belongs to Scotland, and which under the country’s independent control could transform its economy. In a vote winning combination age-old grievances against England have been linked with dreams of a new prosperity. A filmed quote (news actuality clip) from a speech made by Gordon Wilson, leader of the SNP, which authenticates the point made in the commentary, leads on (linking commentary) to ‘sharp criticisms to the claim’ – a filmed quote (news actuality) from Willie Ross, addressing the Scottish Labour Party Conference in which he attacks that ‘shoddy party (i.e. the SNP) with its cheapness of slogan which disgraces the name of Scotland’ (nothing is addressed directly against the claim that ‘North Sea Oil is Scotland’s Oil’). Then into an interview with Gordon Wilson (again filmed specially for Panorama). This begins by re-capping the evidence from the opinion poll; two questions are then put in this first interview: (a) How many seats does Gordon Wilson think they are going to win? (in commentary) (b) And, just to get it quite clear again, what you are talking about is full independence for Scotland and nothing short of it?
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It is through the assembly and combination of such elements as ‘actuality film’, filmed interviews’, ‘filmed quotes’, ‘graphics’ and ‘commentary’, that Television’s version of the SNP challenge to government at Westminster is delivered. This version sign-posts what are seen to be the essential aspects of the challenge, evidence which provides the ground for subsequent discussion/debate and which the audience is expected to ‘have in mind’ as the topic is passed around in that context. In short, the commenting and editorial work establishes the key framework of relevances for the topic. This framework can be read as inflecting the definition of the topic in the following way. The crisis is a crisis of Parliamentary government, of the established two-party rule from Westminster, and thus (therefore) of the nation itself. The ‘crisis of unity’ is therefore set mainly in terms of the break-up of established party positions and alliances, and the emergence of a new, third force in British politics. The ‘hung Parliament’ result of the February Election, the comparatively strong showing of the Liberals, the new nationalist parties and factions, and the interim moves by the major parties to counter them and restore or recapture unity, constitute the relevant dimensions – the terrain on which the ‘national unity’ theme is framed and discussed. The coverage of the nationalist parties documents that the threat exists (actuality clips), pin-points what they are about (‘what you are talking about . . .’) (Summary commentary, interview questions), and, later, looks for possible compromises in their positions (filmed interviews). The identification of ‘national unity’ with the two (three?) party-system is unquestioned. Though exposed to question by the representatives of the nationalist parties this premise is not itself placed under scrutiny by the broadcasters. On the contrary, it is assumed, taken for granted: it forms the backdrop against which the broadcaster ‘speculates’ (sets about exploring and probing the various positions in play). Thus the whole Parliamentary and Electoral framework of relevance is tacitly reproduced here without question, not as an explicit or conscious ‘bias’ but as the programme’s (and the topic’s) raison-d’etre. ‘Unity’ then becomes a question of how to re-affirm or re-establish the political status quo. The programme asks ‘what kind of unity’; but it does not question what is understood by unity, what its content is. On the underlying of Unity the broadcasters assume a consensus. What is problematic is a divergence at the level of strategy – the precise content which each major party gives to the question of unity. (Thus, see below, McKenzie: ‘. . . the broader question of the kind of national unity this country’s going to have’.)
Passing it around In the first section, the passage of the topic and its ideological construction as a theme is organised through a complex use of signifying forms. Though ‘politics’ and ‘actuality’ provide the essential raw materials of this discourse, the control over its ideological development and inflection is very much in the keeping of the broadcasters. The second segment is introduced by McKenzie, who recaps the main dimensions of the theme, and ‘passes the topic’ across to the political protagonists. Shot 2-shot McK & Ch
McK:
Dialogue . . . Could we move onto the broader question of the kind of national unity this country’s going to have to develop if its going to overcome what, we have all said, is the most difficult economic problems . . . Now we’ve got a
The ‘unity’ of current affairs television Cut to shot of whole table “”
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variety of suggestions as to how national unity can be achieved. Let’s start with the Tory proposals. We heard Mr. Heath saying a minute ago . . . Now could you put a little flesh on these bones, because a lot of people don’t think they know really what he is getting at.
What follows is a ‘free debate’. But how is the topic developed in an organised discussion, where the main participants are political opponents in the week before an Election, each seeking to make the most political advantage by appearing to ‘come out best’ in the debate, to win arguments, punch points home, better the other speakers? How is the control over the development of the topic managed in a ‘free debate’? In the first segment control is in the keeping of the broadcasters and the verbal and visual discourse are tightly bonded: each picture either (with its own actuality sound) conveying precisely the point the broadcaster wants made at that stage in the sequential development, or illustrating a point, which is then made or drawn attention to in the commentary or voiceover. The broadcasters construct the visual discourse parallel to, and complementary with, the verbal discourse by the work of editing, sequencing, compilation of extracts and assembly. But in the second segment, live in studio, whose precise point is its spontaneity, its unplanned nature, its ‘open-ended’ outcome, order, control and coherence (including a coherence between what is said and shown) are ensured by the ‘live’ combination of communicative forms and roles, operating under certain preferential rules. McKenzie and Charlton now occupy new communicative roles. They are no longer presenters, commentators, editors, etc. They have become chairmen of the discussion, and thus initiators of topics of debate, monitors of the course of the debate (its opening, development, smooth closing); above all, interrogators of the three main participants. They frame the whole discussion by ‘putting the question’. In fact, there are two parts to the discussion: in the first, the broadcasters get the topic ‘moving’ by putting two questions each, on the topic they have nominated, to each participant, before, second, ‘allowing’ free debate to range between them. At one level, then, the rules regulate control over sequencing. Broadcasters nominate speakers, often by name or verbal gesture, by this act signalling a move in the sequence to the cameras, who ‘follow him over’ to the person nominated, ready to catch his reply. McK:
‘Now, could you put a little flesh on these bones, because a lot of people don’t think Mr. Whitelaw . . .’ (Camera shift).
The chairmen frame questions in a polite interrogative form: ‘Could you . . .?’, ‘Now can I also suggest . . .’, ‘How would you define the essence of . . .?’ This is especially the case with the first question, which is intended to elicit a general reply, allowing the politician to ‘state his or his Party’s case’, succinctly, but on his own terms. The second question is more of a polite probe, pinning the speaker down on some more controversial or inconsistent aspect: ‘Now can I also suggest to you . . .?’; ‘Does that mean, does that mean that you . . .?’. Here the broadcaster-as-interrogator is either ‘impartially’ putting the questions he imagines his ‘informed layman’ viewer would like to put to the Party leaders; or clarifying what has already been said by a harder, or more searching probe. Since both parts of the questioning take the form of interrogation/reply, the visual sequence is thereby ordered: it, too, consists essentially of ‘two-shots’, alternating between the two roles, interrogator and responders.
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There are communicative roles for the responders, too. They occupy two roles, that of respondent to questions put (if directly, by the chairmen), and protagonists in the debate with their opposite Party spokesmen. The polite form of the response to a chairman’s question is to ‘take up’ or accept the question, and elaborate a reply on the basis of this acceptance. Probing questions may be more difficult; but the polite form of the transition is either to accept, and then modify – the ‘yes, but . . .’ formula – or politely to demur. Thus, examples of ‘straight acceptance’: McK: Cal: McK: White:
‘How would you define the essence of the Labour position?’ ‘Well, the essence of the Labour position is that . . .’ ‘Would you like to put a little flesh . . .?’ ‘Yes, I would like to start . . .’
Here are two examples of ‘acceptances’ which also include a demur, the respondent taking up the question, but putting his own, more favourable gloss on it: Shot Camera still on Wh:
McK:
Dialogue . . . But does that, does that mean you begin by inviting formally the other major parties to enter a national government in the pattern of say, the 1931
Cut to 2-sht McK and CH .................................................. Move into c-u McK ........................ national government Wh: What Ted Heath has said, eh very clearly is that Cut to m.c-u Wh ............................. he would wish to consult with the leaders of the other parties and see where that got
The pattern is repeated with the exchange between Charlton and Steele. Charlton begins his remarks to Steele with the promise that they will come back to Whitelaw on the question of the composition of his proposed ‘national coalition’, and then nominates Steele: Shot Cut to full shot of table Ch:
Dialogue Well before – we must obviously come back I think to ask you who these people might be – but David Steele first of all, your prescription for national unity, isn’t it Cut to c-u Ch .......................... essentially negative and destructive . . . has provided the political stability which Britain has had over the years Cut to m.c-u St ............ St: Yes but it hasn’t provided the national unity and the point I would make to both Mr. White-law and Mr. Callaghan, who are now attempting to don the mantle of national unity As with Whitelaw immediately before him, Steele accepts the opener (stronger than McKenzie’s to Whitelaw, with its suggestion that the Liberal prescription is ‘essentially negative and destructive’); and then immediately attempts to turn it to his advantage by scoring points off the other two. (The camera cuts on these strongly probing words, to catch Steele’s reaction to them – the politician under pressure is always a preferred visual moment in political television.) The second, more specifically probing question suggests to Steele that
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‘you haven’t got the time. If your proposals for national unity depend upon reform . . . Have you got the time for that’. Steele’s reply includes a demur, but nevertheless, also modifies or deflects (glosses) the point; and it’s this positive gloss which leads his response: Shot Camera on St
St:
Dialogue No, no. Of course you can have a long-term programme of reforms such as we outline in our manifesto, but you are right, the immediate crisis demands government control over price and income increases . . .
Both these sets of exchanges conform to the unwritten ‘rules of the game’. The media men have been able to probe and examine (interrogators) the claims made by the representatives of the Conservative and Liberal parties, without having their right to do so questioned. At the same time Steele and Whitelaw have been able to take up (respondents) and turn (protagonists) these questions onto favourable ground, without challenge from the chair or from the other protagonists. Callaghan does make a brief interruption (a break in the sequencing) when Whitelaw is holding the floor; but it is one which mainly questions Whitelaw’s presentation of Labour’s case, not Whitelaw’s right to speak, or elaborate his own point of view.
Following the rules These ‘rules of the game’ are nowhere written down or formalised, but they are commonly understood by all participants, and acknowledging or prescriptively following them ensures a degree of order, in the unscripted debate, and a degree of coherent development in the passage of the topic. Thus in the ‘interrogation’ part of the discussion, Chairmen are responsible for marking boundaries to exchanges, shifting the topic on so that its different aspects and frames of relevance (previously established) can be fully aired. These boundarymarkers and shifters are quite explicit in the verbal discourse, and also serve as indicators to the visual discourse that new topics and new respondents are about to be brought into play. The following are some of the boundary-markers used in the question-and-answer part: ‘Mmmmm fine. Could we move on . . .’; ‘Well, before this, we must obviously come back I think to ask you . . . but . . .’; ‘Now, could we turn to . . .’; ‘May I bring your mind to the fact . . .’; ‘Right. Could we move on?’ Note that the form of these sequence markers is an interrogative (‘Could we . . .?’), but what is intended is actually only a rhetorical question. It is a routine question-form, ensuring the continuing assent of the participants to the ‘fair management’ of the debate. (‘Now could we turn to . . .’ carries the metastatement, ‘I hope you think we have dealt with that fairly and adequately, that you’ve had a “fair crack of the whip” at it. Will you agree to passing on to another aspect, since we don’t have all night, and must cover the topic comprehensively, i.e. in all its hitherto signified aspects?’) Certain unwritten rules also govern the direct exchanges between participants – where the respondents change role and become protagonists for a Party position. Technically, a Party spokesman could ‘win’ an argument simply by speaking all the time, continually interrupting his opponent, never permitting him to put or develop his case. But this would be taken to be a breach of the etiquette of ‘fair debate’, and thus a break in the rules. In normal participant interchange, therefore, turns are taken; speakers try to develop the topic in a way which favours their own position, but do not ‘hog the channel’; if they interrupt, it is normally
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‘politely’, marked by a softener or modifier. Mr. Whitelaw’s interventions are laced with such modifiers: ‘If I might say so . . .’; ‘Could I ask one thing after that . . .?’; ‘Can I put this, Mr. Callaghan . . . Can I put this question to you’. Again, these are rhetorical forms, ritual moves, which go through the motion of seeking permission, either from ‘the chair’ or from the other participant, to put an opposing point of view, or to put a question direct to another participant (a move restricted, on the whole, to the chairman’s role, given over to a participant only ‘by the chairman’s tacit consent’).
Inflecting it By obeying the unwritten rules, responding to questions by acceptances, or polite demurs, taking up the aspect signalled by the chairman and developing a case in reply, glossing it favourably, the politicians follow the rules of good debate by formally putting themselves under the control of the broadcasting chairmen. They elaborate their Party-political points within this framework of impartial chairmanning and equal, reasonable exchange. Party partisanship here operates under the prescriptive rule of impartiality and a balanced exchange of views. However, Party spokesmen are also representatives of their Parties and opponents of one another. Their protagonist role must therefore be exercised through the mediation of their roles as respondents and discussants. We have noted the prevalence of the ‘yes but’ form of question-acceptance. This enables participants to take up and follow the broadcasters’ lead, but then to gloss and inflect the topic – to reappropriate it – in such a way as to make it reflect more favourably on their own Party position, less favourably on that of their opponents. Both Whitelaw and Steele, in accepting the media men’s questions, also accept the definition of the unity theme constructed in segment one. In doing so, they have also inflected this overall definition back onto more favourable terrain. Whitelaw re-appropriates the ‘unity’ topic in the direction of a ‘broad-based’ Conservative government which would include consultations with the other parties. This is how he interpets ‘national coalition government’. This interpretation is powerfully legitimated by appealing to the seriousness of the economic situation, and by the rhetorical use of the basic lexicon of ‘consensus’ and ‘unity’. To give one example: (Whitelaw, in response to McKenzie’s opener) For [our] purposes [we] believe (we) are facing, and I think all the parties agree (we) are facing considerable economic difficulties, and I believe there are: many: people in this country who say, right let:us:work together and why is it if: we: want to work together, unite together; why can’t/they/work together. In this instance, the favourable gloss works through the organisation and manipulation of the key nouns and pronouns. The opening ‘we’ (accepted from the chairman) means Conservatives, while the final ‘we’ (glossed) means the Nation. It is an effective piece of unity, or consensus/coalition building. We can follow the gloss in this way: [we, our] (we) :we, us, many:
= = =
/they, the politicians/
=
Parliamentary Conservatives the nation as a whole, all of us together Conservative voters; the middle ground; The People; the Nation Labour, Liberal, Parliamentary Opposition
In terms of definition, this passage works so as to position the Conservative Party on the side of the People; and then to set off the ‘us’ (the People and the Conservatives) against ‘them’ –
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Labour and Liberal politicians who are seeking to put Party before and above Nation. In other words, ‘Unity’ is here being glossed as if synonymous with an obvious and over-riding desire for cross-Class, cross-Party ‘National Unity’, under Conservative management. For Steele, the re-appropriation of the topic must also be accomplished in such a way as to provide a favourable gloss for the Liberals. He, too, explicitly touches on the Party-over-Nation mechanism when he says, somewhat later in the programme to Callaghan: Now, what you are really aiming for in this election is a majority which will enable you to go for the policies which are acceptable to the whole of the Labour Party, to that area of unity, if you like, the Left wing as well as the Right wing, and it is that you are putting above the national interest . . . Recognising that the Liberals, though they might again increase their proportion of the vote as they had done in February, were unlikely to be able to form an administration, Steele plays his hand very much in terms, not of ‘Party’ but of the ‘will of the People’ and the ‘will of Parliament’. While there is equivocation each time the mechanics of ‘coalition’ are touched, this is always covered by an appeal to Parliamentary authority. Thus, in his initial response to Charlton’s opener, he says: . . . and the only way you will get a sense of a government of national unity, whether it be formed by one party or more than one party, will be if you have a government that is susceptible to the will of Parliament. In coming third, Callaghan has the most work of re-definition to do, especially since his Party’s manifesto is opposed to the definitions of ‘unity’ as some form of coalition which have prevailed up to his entry into the debate. This positioning of Callaghan (lost in the sequence of speakers) reflects the rule that it is legitimate to hit the Party in office hardest, though balance is invariably maintained by ensuring that it always has the ‘right of reply’. From this position, Callaghan must take a longer, more qualified route to re-appropriating the topic. Thus, in defining the essence of Labour’s position, he begins by putting the ‘negative case first’; he makes several points against both his opponents. Only then does he move to align the topic to his party’s position: But you see it’s when you get down to the practical issues that you have got to make up your mind, and that is why we in our manifesto, in the point that Mr. Whitelaw picked up, said a coalition fudges the issues. It was in that context we said there is no meeting point. and later, more emphatically, when he says: The idea of national unity is not the supreme idea. The supreme idea is whether a government has the policies that is going to get the country out of the difficulties it is in, without fudging or compromising and that is the supreme idea, that is what the election is about. Here Callaghan inflects the unity theme into strong, authoritative government and pragmatic effectiveness (i.e. a Labour majority). Only that Party with specific clear-cut policies
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can set about solving the problems; the tendency to converge on coalition as the solution is redefined here as no solution at all; it is, for Callaghan, the road to ineffective management of the crisis and compromise.
Breaking the rules: winning the game Certain of the preferential rules, which sustain control and development of the topic throughout programmes, are broken in the course of this programme; and this infringement of the ‘rules of the game’ leads to a suspension of normal communicative roles, rolereversals (participants temporarily taking over the chair, chairmen relegated to silence) and a shift in the control over the topic. The moment occurs in the exchange of questions-andresponses between McKenzie and Callaghan. The opener and response flow smoothly and conform to the typical pattern: Shot Camera on St
Dialogue Could we turn to Mr. Callaghan, to Labours approach to the problem of Cut to Cal ....................... national unity. How would you define the essence of the Labour position Cal: Well, the essence of the Labour position is that, eh, putting the negative side first, that the Conservative and Liberal parties are offering the electors a pig in a poke. McK:
But the follow-up is refused completely by Callaghan: McK:
But may I bring your mind to the fact that almost every Cut to 3-shot Cal, Ch government in Europe is a coalition . . . Why is it part & Mck ........................................ of Labour party dogma . . . Cal: . . . This is not Labour party dogma. Cut to c-u Cal ............................ This has been the constitution of this country, and until the Conservative party fell into its present bedraggled state, Cut to Wh .................................. they had no interest in a coalition either . . . Now, now, now come on now don’t let you try to get me into a position Camera is back on Cal where you’re saying this is only Labour party dogma. The Conservative have argued this for years. The probe which McKenzie offers is extremely strong; one which is felt by Callaghan to go beyond the limits of impartiality and objectivity. This tactical mistake is also recognised by McKenzie himself, following Callaghan’s strong reprimand. The break consists of the too clear ‘bias’ on McKenzie’s part, signalled by his use of the provocative word, ‘dogma’, (McKenzie is well known in political circles for his liberal pro-coalition and anti-dogmatist line). The word ‘dogma’ also connotes the charge that Labour’s position stems less from a pragmatic concern with the crisis and more from a prior ‘ideological’ commitment. (It is
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possible that ‘McKenzie’s mistake’ arises from an ambiguity in his roles: for he is both media chairman, and independent political commentator and expert on the political system. The charge of ‘dogma’ would be acceptable from an expert commentator, speaking in his own right: but not from an ‘impartial chairman’.) This break in the rules, registered by the participants’ performance, is important in several ways. First, it suggests that although the media interrogator may probe hard with a follow-up question, he can only do so within certain unspoken but recognised limits. Above all else he must not reveal his personal perspective, his ‘prejudices’ nor must he suggest that the politician’s prescription is based on ‘prejudice’. Second, it allows Callaghan to come on hard and win unexpected ground. As we shall see, it enables him to move into a position where it is he, and not the media men, who manage and control the passage of the topic.
Debating it The debate component is the moment for the ‘free’ ebb and flow of discussion within the overall framework of the programme. Normally, media men would only intervene here if it is manifest that a particular protagonist is illegitimately hogging the floor – for example, by speaking too long; or by refusing to let others have their say (i.e. intervening to pressure balance, as realised by good turn-taking and ‘fair exchange’). This moment is, therefore, still governed by certain preferential conventions. Normally, direct exchange between protagonists would only occur after the completion of the introductory question and answer exchanges. The break we have noted above brings on this second phase of the sequence prematurely, however, with Callaghan appropriating control of the direction of the debate. The ‘chair’ has been both by-passed and expropriated. This is most clearly revealed when Callaghan now directly interrupts Whitelaw (still in his respondent role), and puts questions to him direct (i.e. treats him as a protagonist, Callaghan now in the role of chairman.) Shot
Dialogue Cal: What about the ballot on the Cut to shot of full table ................... EEC . . . Wh: Yes, well I think we are coming back to that (looks to McK and Ch) Cal: Would you have a ballot on the EEC McK:) We’re coming back to that later Ch: ) Cut back to Wh ............... Wh: We’re coming back to that later, and I would be very glad . . . Cal: What about food subsidies. Would you take off food subsidies. Wh: Well we have said very plainly on that, and I would make it perfectly clear . . . In this sequence we can see Whitelaw attempting to get back to the orderly flow in his appeal to the chair. But Callaghan, jumping in ahead of the chair’s support, fires another question at Whitelaw, who this time accepts. He could have again appealed to the chair, or simply refused to reply. In either case, however, this would have registered a collapse in the face of Callaghan’s extremely strong bids.
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At the close of this interchange, both of the ‘deposed’ chairman succeed in nominating Steele back into the floor (restoration of normal control), but Charlton’s attempt, following this, to put a direct question to Callaghan is again simply over-ridden. Despite the fact that Charlton is almost shouting, Callaghan presses on with his point (refuses to yield the floor in the normal turn-taking way) about ‘the supreme idea’. From this point, Callaghan goes on to confirm his command of the debate in two main ways. In the course of emphasising the importance of ‘the social contract in a free democratic society’, Callaghan takes time out to ‘play with’ Whitelaw, by undermining his much qualified attempts to be ‘rude’ (‘I find Mr. Callaghan’s assertions, if I may say so, very arrogant . . .’). Callaghan accomplishes this by explicitly signalling, and then openly playing with, the fact that two codes are at work – the political code (hard opposition and attack) and the ‘Parliamentary debate’ code (rudeness is a sort of polite game): Shot Camera on Cal
Dialogue the seriousness of this election to me (gestures to Wh) and I’m sure Mr. Whitelaw, however arrogant he may think – Cut to Wh ...................... he doesn’t really think I am, but however arrogant he may say I am, he will agree with Cut back to Cal .............. me that nobody is trying to disguise the seriousness of this. Now where does it lead to. In my judgement unless we can get the country to accept and see the facts . . . the alternative is either anarchy or fascism in this country. Cal:
This is one of Callaghan’s most powerful bids for the topic; for here the topic is not just being aligned to any one Party’s programme or even to the ‘nation as a whole’. Rather, the topic – problem is here being defined as a potential threat to the system of Parliamentary democracy as such. Against this threat, Callaghan has put up the social contract, aligned with a ‘free democratic society’, as ‘the best way of trying to achieve a real unity’. So, the power of the bid and the seizing of an opportunity to have a go at Whitelaw, when viewed together, emphasise Callaghan’s supreme command, his sense of the control he has secured. At the end of this statement Callaghan further consolidates this command by ‘permitting’ Whitelaw to put a question to Him: Wh: Could I ask one thing on this, after that Cal: (over Whitelaw) Certainly Here, Callaghan puts Whitelaw down by exploiting his formulation ‘could I ask’ – i.e. he takes the rhetorical question literally. (His own earlier interventions utilised none of these interrogative markers; he simply fired questions directly.) It is not just over the other protagonists that Callaghan senses and registers his command, but also in relation to the chairmen. Following Whitelaw’s attempted re-appropriation of the topic – which counterposes ‘nationalisation’ against ‘the social contract in a free democracy’ idea, the chairman once again attempt to wrest control back from Callaghan. This time he does not ignore them, but blocks the intervention in the name of a ‘higher duty’ – (a more powerful code); the responsibilities of the politician:
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Dialogue If I may say so Mr. Whitelaw . . . (over Cal) If I could put this question to Mr. Callaghan, Mr. Callaghan . . . Cal: Now, forgive me, because it is Mr. Wh and I Cut into Cal........................... who have to account for ourselves to the electors on this. Cal: Ch:
Charlton immediately backs down in the face of this rebuff, which reminds him of his proper place (broadcaster, chairman) as understood by the politician (protagonist). Callaghan thus retains the initiative by figuratively and explicitly setting ‘politicians’ roles against ‘media’ roles. Toward the end of this sequence on the ‘broader question of what kind of national unity’, the media chairmen do, tentatively, regain their position, control and composure. It is, however, a difficult re-entry – which Callaghan interrupts again and twists round to his own advantage: so that, by the time Charlton does manage to put the question, much of its strength has been dissipated: Ch: Cal: Ch: Cal: Ch: Cal: Ch: Cal: Ch: Cal: Ch: Cal:
But could I put to you the point about the social contract which you say is a means of unifying the nation . . . I’m not sure about unifying the nation . . . But because its part of the social contract . . . Mmm . . . I – – it is a divisive issue . . . Yes . . . . . . because 18 million people voted against it, judging by the last election Not against the social contract (firmly) Against nationalisation. (smiling) Oh, I see, nationalisation. Now, because nationalisation is part of the social contract, is the social contract, are we right in saying, socially divisive? (pause/silence) Because . . . Oh. Oh well, the Conservatives don’t accept it until they’ve got to do it
Turn-taking, we have noted, is usually marked by such polite pre-heads as, ‘Could I’, ‘If I may’ etc. This is a feature which is common to the speech of all the participants, though Whitelaw uses it more often than the other protagonists. While these are conventions which, if accepted by the other participants, enable a speaker to get onto the floor, there are others which are used to hold it. When Whitelaw attempted to counter with the point on nationalisation, his contribution opened with the phase: ‘Well, what I would certainly say first of all is’. This indicates not only readiness to answer, but also that there is the possibility of at least one other point to follow (i.e. it would be impolite to interrupt). This convention most often appears when participants know in advance that time will be limited or, as here, when there have already been several, successful interventions. Callaghan’s advantage is also registered and sustained by dispensing with these preferred conventions. Though he continues throughout to make use of them – ‘If I may say so to Mr. Whitelaw’ or ‘I must say I find it extraordinary’ – he uses them less frequently than the other two protagonists; and they are often absent altogether when he is making his strongest bids. In the latter instances, they are replaced with the briefer, stronger, straight, more abrupt interrogative markers: ‘Would you . . .’ or ‘What about . . .’. It is not just on the
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verbal level that Callaghan’s command is registered and sustained; he often gestures his way into a commanding position. As we have already observed, gestures can be used as a means of nominating a speaker; but they can also be used to attract a speaker’s attention, or to add emphasis to a point that is being made or to hold the floor, or to direct the camera’s attention. The accompanying photographs demonstrate Callaghan’s use of gesture to hold the floor and to direct the camera. To appreciate the importance of Callaghan’s gestural acts it must be pointed out that he and Whitelaw are afforded symmetrical visual space: throughout the programme, they are visually framed in exactly the same ways. But Callaghan always makes use of this space by moving himself into shot as he makes points, by stabbing home points with his finger, or by holding one speaker with a gesture in his direction, while he verbally addresses another. Whitelaw, in contrast, along with Steele, has a fairly limited gestural repertoire; they tend to hold the same body position throughout, and not to make use of hands and faces. Callaghan twice makes a facial gesture straight to camera. One of Callaghan’s most powerful gestures accompanies his intervention just at that moment when McKenzie is about to pass over to the next topic: McK: Right, could we move on . . . Cal: So, we don’t know who the leaders will be, we don’t know what the policies will be, all we know is there’s going to be a coalition. As he says this, he gives a dismissive ‘hands down’ gesture, and leans back into his chair, secure in the knowledge that he has had the last, the definitive, words on the topic. Game, set and match! This final counter-attack places Callaghan’s definition of the topic, and his prescription for unity, over all the others in play.
The ‘unity’ of current affairs On the basis of this analysis of a Panorama programme, we want to try to formulate certain tentative propositions about the ‘unity’ of Current Affairs TV, and the nature of the relationship between the media and politics which this example, at any rate, suggests. Let us start from the ‘break in the rules’ and ‘Callaghan’s win’ which has just been described. If Television is wholly autonomous and independent of the political domain, and must exert its control regardless of who infringes, and maintain a strict and formal impartiality when it handles politics, why is it that the media Chairmen don’t intervene more sharply on this occasion to restore the normal rules? There are certainly many other instances in Current Affairs Television when Chairmen do indeed intervene; though, to be fair, this is more often with less high-status participants in debate, or in studio ‘forums’ with ‘live’ representatives of particular ‘pressure groups One reason why the Chairmen struggle for control with Callaghan, but do not brusquely insist on it, does have to do with the high status of the accredited and accessed political personnel taking part. In each case, these are the ‘seconds-in-command’ of each of three major Parliamentary parties, the men who have chaired their Party press conferences throughout the Election campaign. It is also the week of the Poll itself, when broadcasters must be especially sensitive to the charge that they are intervening between the representatives of the People and the Electors. Another, related reason may have to do with the precise nature of the balance between the media and politics in Current Affairs television in general, and especially at election times. Each sphere has its own way of approaching and appropriating a topic. Each realises a different communicative aim – the media, to explain, inform, speculate intelligently about;
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the politicians, to score points, win arguments and votes, and mobilise support. Each sphere, however, also operates this difference on the basis of some shared or consensual framework: for only in this way can they continue to function and exchange in an orderly discourse on the same terrain. There is an underlying complementarity, as well as a number of well-marked differences and divergencies (even, as examplified by the Callaghan example, oppositions). To put this point another way – referring to our earlier diagram: politicians require the media in order to reach the widest audience: the media’s ‘audience’ is the politicians’ ‘electorate’. But since, in television, it is the media which mobilises the audience for the politicians, and provides the latter with a communicative channel to the audience, the politician is required to perform, and to realise his own goals, by operating, broadly, under media rules. He must abide by, for example, the operational rules which enable the media to function as a neutral instance, even in the highly divisive and contested moment of an election: that is, the rules, sanctioned in the last instance, by the State – of balance, impartiality, objectivity and neutrality. These ‘rules’ are actualised in the programme in the forms of the rules for reasonable debate, polite interchange, neutral chairmanning, equal turn-taking, etc. It is indirectly – through these ‘rules’ of neutrality and objectivity – and only in that way, that the politicians can achieve their own, highly partisan purposes. It must also be borne in mind, of course, that, something of the same kind – but in reverse – is true for the media. The media must realise its aim of promoting lively, informed speculation around the controversial topics of the day, and to do this without contravening the limits, it must ‘treat’ what is in fact a partisan and committed ‘electorate’ as a rational and objective audience. However, the media can only ‘bring the debate to the audience’ in a lively way, by providing the forum, the medium, the terrain on which the contending politicians are soon to meet and debate. What is more, broadcasters can only guard against the charge of selectivity and bias by, as far as they can, presenting the politicians ‘live’, or ‘in their own words’. This is the transparency effect (which, incidentally, is shown by this argument to be an ideological effect, not simply a technical one, stemming from the nature of television as a medium). But to do these tasks of transparent communication and achieve the effect of immediacy-to-reality, while preserving neutrality, balance and objectivity, the media must set and maintain the ‘rules’ of the interchange. Politicians positively (though often, grudgingly) submit to this equalising and neutral management of the debate by the media, since this ‘equal’ regulation, which ensures fair play, provides the most favourable long term conditions for the reproduction of the existing structure of political relations: not the relations which favour one party over another, but those which stem from the nature of the political system as a whole. This submission to the rules of the media, therefore, represents the necessary displacement of partisan politics onto the terrain of a more neutral sphere. Though this limits, in terms of the short-term advantages, what any one Party can win over another, this displacement also ensures the long-term viability of the whole political and political-communication system. But this ‘neutral and impartial space’ is itself granted to the media by the political sphere. It is determined in the long run, or last instance, by the political apparatus, operating through another level of the State. When, as here, particular politicians, in the heat of controversy, drive home their advantage, or are allowed to score points through a fortuitous opening (for example, through an error of judgement, like McKenzie’s ‘dogma’), the media can only stand aside and let politics ‘take command’. This determination of politics over the media, not immediately and from moment-to-moment, but rather, in the long run, in the ‘last instance’. That degree of over-determination is rarely visible, and only shows through at extraordinary moments, in a critical conjuncture. Some such interpretation would make the relationship of the media to the political remarkably homologous to the general relationship between politics and the State itself, in which
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politics (party practices) accords to the State (the institutions of power such as Parliament and the Courts) a certain measure of independence and neutrality, because this appearance is, ultimately, the most effective way in which politics can use or make itself effective through the State, without appearing directly to do so in the defence of narrow or short-term Class or Party advantage. It is clear that the State, in capitalist societies, is related in complex ways to the securing of the long-term interests of ruling class alliances. But we also know that, classically in the ‘liberal’ capitalist state, and even in its subsequent modifications, these interests and the class personnel do not appear directly and in their own person on the stage of the State. The State is required as a neutral and objective sphere, precisely in order that the long-term interests of capital can be ‘represented’ as a general interest. It is through the ‘relative neutrality’ of the State – not in spite of it – that conflicts are settled ‘to the profit of the ruling classes’, but in ways which, because they appear as neutral and general, command the assent of the nation as a whole. This is the sense in which both Gramsci and Poulantzas speak of the State as necessarily a ‘relatively independent’ structure. It is by the displacement of class power through the ‘neutral and independent’ structures of the State, that the State comes to provide the critical function, for the dominant classes, of securing power and interest at the same time as it wins legitimacy and consent. It is, in Gramsci’s terms, the ‘organizer of hegemony’. If, then, we consider the media in homologous terms, we can see that they, too, do some service to the maintenance of hegemony, precisely by providing a ‘relatively independent’ and neutral sphere. And when we ask what it is that, in its overall tendency, the media reproduces of the ideological field as a whole by its occupancy of this neutral sphere, we would argue that it is certainly not the giving of narrow party-advantage to this or that side: it is the whole neutral terrain of State power – the underlying idea of the general interest – which is the most significant part of the ideological field which the media reproduces. And this reproduction is accomplished, not in spite of its rules of objectivity (i.e. by ‘covert or overt bias’) but precisely by holding fast to the communicative forms of objectivity, neutrality, impartiality and balance. This is certainly one possible view of the nature of the complex relation between the media and politics. The consequences of adopting it, at least as a more useful starting point than that of ‘absolute independence’ (or the inverse ‘absolute determination’), would be to define more precisely than has been done so far what would be involved in trying to ‘think’ the position of the media as an ideological state apparatus – a term which, on any other ground, is rather confusing (cf. Althusser, 1971). In the light of this argument, what then is the precise nature of the ‘win’ which Callaghan accomplishes? First, of course, we cannot be sure that all viewers would ‘read’ this performance as a win. It is possible for Conservative supporters in the audience, for example, to fasten on how Callaghan has handled Mr. Whitelaw and to decode this performance as ‘bullying’, a display of ‘crude debating tactics’. Such negotiated decodings are fully in line with the theoretical position on alternative readings outlined in an earlier section. However, we think it can be established that, within the rules and codes of the programme, a ‘Callaghan win’ is the reading which this programme prefers. Any negotiated reading could not, therefore, ignore Callaghan’s accomplishment of control, though it would, in the course of decoding, inflect the meaning of it. But if, as we’ve said, Current Affairs Television is neutral and impartial, how is it possible that one Party spokesman can be permitted to win? This depends on what the nature of the ‘win’ is. It seems to us to be a ‘win’ which is secured by a ‘breach in the rules’. This ‘breach’ is probably first made by McKenzie over-stepping the mark: hence, Callaghan can be allowed to press home a ‘partisan’ advantage because the broadcasters
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have been caught out, so to speak, expressing a ‘bias’. Second, though it is a ‘win’ secured by way of this momentary break in the rules, it is also consolidated within the general rules of the game. Callaghan does not lose his temper, walk out, insult his colleagues, or commit libel. Instead, he makes himself master of the rules. He ‘plays’ the rules, to his advantage, and, eventually, returns control to the chair and resumes his role as respondent and interlocutor (e.g. in the Common Market section which follows on from the one we have examined in depth). Here, in a peculiarly important and poignant moment – the explosion of the whole table into uproarious laughter, about Mr. Callaghan’s use of the phrase ‘chacun a son gout’ – the game-nature of Callaghan’s whole ‘performance’ is explicitly recognised. In the laughter round the table, not only is the tension released, but, as is often the case, the humour restores the rules. For part of this programme, the rules are breached, permitting Callaghan to step in to a commanding position. This ripple in the otherwise even flow of the discourse, is permissible precisely because Callaghan maintains this command within the rules. A second argument, not contradictory with the first, is that what this episode does, in effect, is to give the viewer a perfect representation of the Parliamentary debating system at work. In Parliamentary debate, speakers certainly press the rules of debate to the limit, exploit tactical advantage, enter fully into the cut-and-thrust of debate at the Despatch box etc. This is sometimes interpreted as time-wasting, an example of political trivialisation, reducing politics and Parliament to a ‘talking shop’. However, more sophisticated defenders of the Parliamentary system would argue that this healthy and vigorous debate, framed by an overall consensus on ‘making the system as a whole work’, and necessarily involving tactical attempts to score points and win arguments, is precisely what the Parliamentary system is about. It may thus be argued that, in a programme about the ‘health’ of Parliament, where the continuation of the Parliamentary system has been equated with the unity of the whole nation and its stability, nothing could more firmly have demonstrated its continuing vigour and vitality than an actual display of ‘free debate’, live, for the viewer. In this sense, this programme is an instance of, as well as a discussion about, the way the Parliamentary system works. Its unpredictable outcome – the possibility of a ‘win’ – is part of its ‘demonstration-effect’. This second argument might then be complemented by the point that breaks in the rules, ruptures in the routines, unplanned advantages and ‘defeats’ may give the media men, and the other political participants, an uncomfortable half-hour; but they also considerably enliven an evening’s viewing, and make a positive contribution to ‘good television’. ‘Good television’ is, by definition, lively in exchange, has a degree of unpredictability about it, works near to, or around, the limits of the rules and on occasions, seems about to go overboard. The liveliness and openness of the result of this particular confrontation between protagonists may well have had the spectatorial effect of making a potentially sleepy and well-regulated exchange seem suddenly full of incident and unexpected drama. This line of argument leads us to formulate some tentative general propositions about the nature of the ‘unity’ between the media and politics as realised in Current Affairs TV. Current Affairs is regulated, in its surface orientation to politics, through the ‘separation of powers’ mechanism which, elsewhere, regulates the relationship between different branches of the State. The rules of this ‘relative independence’ or separation of spheres are, as the broadcasters have always maintained, ‘balance’, ‘impartiality’ and ‘objectivity’. Just as, at another level, the ‘equalising exchange’ form of wages is a necessary form, which obscures and conceals the exploitative nature of the real relation between Capital and Labour; and just as the ‘rule of law’ treats unequal class subjects as ‘equal individuals in the eyes of the
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law’, so the media do indeed do their utmost to represent and signify politics, and their relation to it, as a relation of equality and of mutual independence. This is no simple shamming. Politicians do indeed perform, when they are on the media’s terrain, as equals, equally balanced (one from ‘each side’), given equal time to develop a case, take equal turns in the debate and have equal advantage over the glossing of the topic. It is the media which ‘equalises’ them, which sets them up as political competitors of symmetrical status and power. The politicians are subject to, or place themselves beneath, the forms of equal communication, under the neutral chairmanship of the media. The ideological effect of media neutrality is to disguise, inflect and make us ‘mis-recognise’ the real relations – the relations, not as they are made to appear in programmes, but of the structures – between the media and politics, the media and the State. These unequal relations operate at a very different level from that of ‘balance’ and ‘impartiality’. The media do not intervene directly to tilt the balance towards one party or another. On the contrary, their interventions seem overwhelmingly to be ones which preserve and reinforce, wherever possible, their position of ‘relative autonomy’ from the play of narrow party interest. In so far as we can tell, each of the main protagonists in the programme was given symmetrical visual space in the visual discourse. Despite appearances, each speaks, overall, for roughly the same length of time. We are therefore obliged to say that, if by ‘bias’, is understood the way television, or individual television personnel, might intervene to ensure, unfairly the predominance of one Party speaker over another, this is an extremely rare, unusual occurrence, out of line with ‘normal practice’; it is precisely what the preferential rules are designed to prevent. We confess, therefore, that we are in no way surprised that Mr. Barker, who was invited to examine the Labour Party’s charge of a ‘bias’ against Labour, in the 1974 television Election coverage, was unable to discover any systematic bias, one way or the other. The only clear case of ‘bias’ in the programme we have analysed was McKenzie’s mistake, which may be defined best as a ‘bias in favour of the centre’, ‘towards consensus against dogmatism and Party extremism in any form’, rather than a ‘bias’ in favour of, say, the Conservative Party. We have to take into account the fact that the use of the word ‘dogma’ in this connection, is in TV’s own terms, a mistake, an error of judgement – that its use does indeed throw the programme temporarily out of joint, allows narrow party advantage to prevail for a time, leaves the media men clearly discomfited and out of control, and causes them to work extremely hard to restore the ‘normal flow’. It was a mistake which reminds us of the kind of bias which is continuously just out of play, just beyond the limits. But it should not be taken as either typical, routine or regular. Current Affairs broadcasting does not ‘work’ by pushing a narrow Party line. Thus we hope very much that the Blumler studies on TV and Elections, which are soon to appear, will consistently replace this wholly inadequate conception of bias with a more profound set of structural concepts. It is high time this attempt to cash the operation of ideological structures in terms of the narrow play of partisan class-interests – asking only, as Gramsci said, ‘who immediately profits?’ – is abandoned as the inadequate conceptualisation it so clearly is. ‘Bias’, however, does not exhaust in any way the relation of TV to the political and politics, and it cannot, on our evidence, be replaced by the equally ideological and inadequate concept of ‘absolute autonomy’. We have tried to show that, in its establishment and glossing of the topic of Unity, Television reproduces selectively not the ‘unity of any one Party, but the unity of the Parliamentary political system as a whole’. Panorama, above all other Current Affairs programmes, routinely takes the part of guardian of unity in this second sense. It reproduces, on the terrain of ideology, the political identification between the Parliamentary
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system and the Nation. As a consequence, the agenda of problems and ‘prescriptions’ which such a programme handles is limited to those which have registered with, or are offered up by, the established Parliamentary parties. It is these authoritative prescriptions, alone, which are probed to discover which appears most appropriate to the task of maintaining the system. The work of informed speculation is therefore critical precisely in raising the Parliamentary form of the State to the universal level – in generalising it for the whole social formation, signifying it as natural, as taken-for-granted, beyond the power of history and time to modify or dismantle. The effect of this active intervention on the part of Television follows the terms elaborated by the Marxist theory of the State and superstructures, as an ideological effect. This effect is realised, in part, in those aspects of the topic which are not overtly considered or treated as controversial, which are absented as beyond debate or as consensually agreed by all good men. The unity of Television and the State is realised, in part, by the way the topic is established in the first instance, defined and structured for the debate. It is also realised through the categories of participants which are preferred or allowed privileged access to the ‘power to define’; those whose definitions of the topic, in the programme period, form the basis of media summaries, whose words are quoted and faces shown; whose varying inflections of the topic are taken over; and who at the end of the programme are permitted to have the opportunity to re-define and re-appropriate the topic. They happen to be the same kinds of actors in both parts of the programme – the principal spokesmen of the three major Parliamentary Parties. It is they together who are signified by Television as the bearers of its systematic unity. The media are not biased in favour of any one Party: but they are biased in favour of the Party-system as such: the Parliamentary character, nature and orientation of the Parties: and thus, the identification of the continuation of ‘Parliamentary government’ with the continuation of ‘the unity of the nation as a whole’, and the setting off of both against their ‘enemies’ (whether of the electoral kind or other varieties). What has constituted the main difficulty with this way of thinking the media-politics-State relation is that most researchers, especially radical or critical ones, have looked for this relation in the hidden and concealed operations of bias and conspiracy: imagining that ideology is a media trick. But the structured orientation of the media in favour of the Parliamentary system, in favour of the Party system, in favour of the forms of the democratic Parliamentary state is not a hidden relation at all: it is perfectly patent and open, openly acknowledged by any experienced Current Affairs editor or producer, and already enshrined in the quite plainspoken words of the Director General himself: ‘Yes, we are biased – biased in favour of Parliamentary democracy’. In the same way, the ‘skewing’ of the access system towards the authoritative spokesmen of Parliamentary and Party politics is no well-kept secret. It is, in the minds of the broadcasters, precisely what a balanced coverage of politics is about. If you want, in the week before an election, to know ‘what counts’, where else, in the minds of the average broadcaster, could you possibly turn except to high-ranking Party spokesmen, responsible Parliamentary and Cabinet figures? In this sense, the media, in Current Affairs television, do not represent in a biased way (ideologically) the structure of political power and its dominant mode of operation: the media accurately reflect and represent the prevailing structure and a mode of power. It is in politics and the State, not in the media, that power is skewed. The purpose of impartiality, balance and neutrality in Current Affairs programming is to ensure that this whole ‘structure in dominance’ is reproduced, as the very foundation of the political discourse of Current Affairs television, in so far as this is possible. Media neutrality and independence are therefore quite ‘real’ in the sense that their
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function is essentially to try to hold the ring, to sustain an arena of ‘relative independence’, in order that this reproduction of the conditions of political, power can take place. As with all types of ‘social reproduction’ of this kind, no perfect harmony between the parts can be assured. Actual work – difficult, ideological, work – has to be done, in every programme, in every moment of signification, to effect what Althusser describes as a ‘sometimes teethgritting harmony’ between the different branches of the State, which prosper together only through the ‘separation of their spheres and powers’. So the antagonism, the surface ebb and flow of power and control, in programme and about programmes, between the broadcasters and the politicians, is not a ‘phoney war’, though it may not represent an antagonism or a contradiction of a principal kind. Similarly, since the reproduction of a ‘structure in dominance’ takes place on the much disputed terrain of politics and the State – that is, on the terrain where the political class struggle appears, ideological reproduction is always the result of the contradictory relations of class forces; some of those antagonisms cannot be reconciled or reduced by their projection on to more ‘neutral’ territory, and space can be gained, viewpoints expressed, contradictions emerge which are contradictory to the ones in dominance. Thus the media remains a ‘leaky system’, where ideological reproduction is sustained by ‘media work’ and where contradictory ideologies do in fact appear: it reproduces the existing field of the political class struggle in its contradictory state. This does not obscure the fact, however, that the closure towards which this ‘sometimes teeth-gritting harmony’ tends, overall, is one which, without favouring particular positions in the field of the political class struggle, favours the way the field of political class struggle is itself structured.
References L. Althusser, 1971. ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin & Philosophy and Other Essays, (New Left Books). J. Bakewell & N. Garnham, 1970. The New Priesthood (Allen Lane, Penguin Press). BBC, Tastes and Standards. J. Blumler, 1969, ‘ “Producers” Attitudes Towards TV Coverage of an Election Campaign’, Sociological Review Monograph, No. 13. C. Curran, 1971a. ‘The Problem of Balance’, in Smith, A. (ed.) British Broadcasting (David & Charles, 1974). C. Curran, 1971b. Our Proper Concern (BBC Publications). C. Curran, 1974, ‘Broadcasting and Public Opinion’, The Listener, 20.6.74. S. Cohen and J. Young, 1973. Manufacture of News (Constable). R. Day, 1961, Television: A Personal Report. A. Gramsci, 1969. Prison Notebooks (Lawrence & Wishart). S. Hall, 1974. ‘Encoding and Decoding in the TV Discourse’, Stencilled Papers No. 7 (CCCS, Birmingham). S. Hall, C. Critcher, J. Clarke, T. Jefferson, B. Roberts, 1975. ‘Newsmaking and Crime’. Stencilled Papers No. 27 (CCCS, Birmingham). S. Hall, I. Connell & D. Morley, 1976. SSRC Submission: ‘The Encoding and Decoding Moments in TV Coverage of Industrial Relations (CCCS, Birmingham). K. Kumar, 1974. ‘Holding the Middle Ground’, Sociology, vol.9, no. 1. D. Morley, ‘Reconceptualising the Media Audience. Stencilled Papers No. 9 (CCCS, Birmingham). T. Pateman, 1974. TV and the February 1974 General Election, Monograph 3 (British Film Institute). C. Seymour-Ure, 1974. The Political Impact of Mass Media (Constable). Our thanks to R. Rusher and R. Powell for their contributions.
21 The ‘structured communication’ of events Stuart Hall
I In this paper, I am dealing exclusively with the ‘public’ forms of social communication, more especially with the broadcasting systems (radio and television). In what sense can we speak of ‘obstacles to communication’ in the broadcasting media? Let us turn the question around: can we conceive of a publicly-organised mass media system in which there were no obstacles to communication? I suggest that, the moment we put the question in this form, we have to admit that the ideal of ‘perfectly transparent communication’ in broadcasting is, for the foreseeable future, an unattainable and impossible ambition. There are many reasons for this. Some have to do with the technical nature of the ‘media’ themselves which mediate public communication.1 Some have to do with the character of the internal and external or ‘framing’ institutions within which public communication is organized.2 Some, indeed, stem from the fact that we are not dealing with static communications systems, with fixed goals, which can be progressively realized along some linear continuum. Broadcasting systems are dynamic structures which breed their own, further, needs and uses even as they satisfy existing ones. So, even if broadcasters could now, technically, reach all the existing audiences they can identify, and transmit perfectly to them whatever information they desire, the very overcoming of present obstacles which such a development would signal would, in its turn, suggest new, further kinds of communication, new potential uses for the technical means, new types of content, and mobilize new, unrealized demands and needs for communication in the audiences. In the British situation it has certainly been the case that, as television has come into unchallenged dominance as the medium of public communications, and as many of the technical limitations of the medium have been ironed out, so new demands have been made on the broadcasting institutions, both from within their own professional ranks, and from the publics they serve, and from their political masters who put them to use within a context of legislation and practice. Each new, significant, development in British television – the growth of television documentary, the development of problem-centred current affairs journalism, the explorations in television satire, etc – has mobilized new, unexpected audiences, which have, in their turn, framed new demands on the broadcasters. In broadcasting, as in other areas of modern production, the satisfaction of existing communications ‘needs’ inevitably leads to the framing of new needs, and ‘this production of new needs is the first historical act’ (as Marx once observed) which initiates an unending dialectic, whose outcome cannot be predicted. Let us begin, then, from the opposite end. All public communication systems are subject to systematic constraints, systematic limitations. The overt censorship of media content is only one, limited case of such constraint – and, in our view, not characteristically the most
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significant obstacles to ‘freer communication’; though no system that we know of in the ‘Western’ liberal class-democracies is entirely free of censorship. All public-social communication is a form of ‘systematically distorted communication’. The distortions are not always the same: they are not fixed. So it is worth our while – as we attempt to do below – to examine some aspects of the structural constraints within which public communication operates, in order to see what changes can be effected which might eliminate or weaken some of the present obstacles. Communication systems in different societies certainly exhibit greater or lesser degrees of ‘distortion’, and can be shown to be moving towards or away from greater ‘communicative transparency’ in their practices. These tendencies are crucial. But the ideal-norm of ‘perfect transparency’ is an empirical impossibility. The reason is clear the moment we examine the social and historical foundations of these communications systems. Hans Dreitzel3 in a volume devoted to ‘Patterns of Communicative Behaviour’, has recently reminded us that, In fact communicative behaviour rests on work and power relations as well as on language; and if we comprehend the typification schemes of language as the most fundamental basic rules of everyday life, we also have to notice that even language is subject to distortions caused by the conditions of our life . . . the social world is not only structured by language but also by the modes and forces of material production and by the systems of domination. Of course, there must be some degree of reciprocity between the encoding and decoding ends of the communicative chain, or else, literally, audiences would not understand what the broadcasters were talking about, and social incomprehension would reign. This is clearly not the case. However, we have already advanced a little when we recognize that public communication between broadcasters and their audiences requires two linked but separate acts: the act of ‘encoding’ the television or radio message, and the act of ‘decoding’ and interpreting it.4 These are linked, but not ‘immediately identical’ moments in the communication process. The ‘encoding’ process is very largely performed by the professional broadcasting elites, with their own social formation, their own selective recruitment, their own social position, their own connections to and perspective on power, their own professional competences and routines, their own professional ideologies. The ‘decoding’ process is performed by the heterogeneous, complexly-structured ‘mass audiences’, standing in their own relation to the unequal distribution of social, economic and cultural power, with their own connections to and perspectives on the system of power as a whole. ‘Cultural power’, we will remember, includes the differential acquisition by the different strata of the population of the competence to speak, transmit, verbalize and comprehend – a form of ‘power’ directly relevant to the capacity to ‘communicate’, and fundamentally shaped and distributed, in our kinds of society, by the education system. The notion, then, that we are all ‘free and equal’ members of the communicative structures, with an equal competence of ‘speech’, and an equal ‘right of access’ is a mystification. Of course, in the liberal mass democracies, the structured gaps between those who dominate in the public communications systems, and those who receive are not as wide as they were in previous historical epochs. In the feudal period, the great majority exercised the right, acquired the competence and had the power to ‘speak’ almost exclusively to those small, intimate ‘publics’ which composed their immediate, face-to-face communities: ‘public’ communications, in our sense – whether in the form of royal proclamations, papal bulls, legislative enactments or sermons – were exclusively the preserve of very small elites. What
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has altered this situation is not simply a growth in the technology of communications. Fundamentally, wider and wider sections of the population have gradually, and through struggle, won their way into the framework of civil and political society: and thus, gradually, the new technical means have been adapted to this changed balance of power. The communicators, in a modern society, are more explicitly mediators than they were in feudal societies: they must draw their materials, their events, their concerns, in part from the audiences which they address – they ‘play back’ the experiences of the audiences to the audience, in addition to their other functions, such as bringing news about one audience to another, or providing the spectacle of entertainment for audiences as a whole. In this sense, as Phillip Elliott5 has recently demonstrated, the audience progressively plays the role, in modern communications, both of source and receiver. But this is still not the same thing as the audience ‘communicating’. The process must still pass through the mediating structures of broadcasting itself: the broadcasters must select (and reject), transform into ‘messages’ (encode), develop formats, shape contents for the communicative circuit to be completed from audience to audience. Thus, though the ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ of media content are linked, and each is required for the production of the other, they are linked, in the manner of mediations in a process. The opposite ends of the communicative process ‘require an intermediary in order to form a unity, and the effectiveness of this intermediary (and hence the maintenance of the whole) is dependent on certain conditions which may or may not be present’.6 It is in and through that mediation – crucially, for our purpose, the originating functions of the broadcasters in initiating the circle of communications – that systematic distortions enter the chain. Thus, when Habermas,7 in formulating certain criteria for ‘normal communication’, says that ‘Normal communication conforms to inter-subjectively recognizable rules’, we can agree. The television message conforms to the norms of ordinary language, which, as we know, is impossible without the operation of codes which are shared between those who produce and those who interpret messages. But when he adds that ‘The communicated meanings are identical for all members of the language community’, we must ask how the term, ‘identical’ is to be understood. It may refer, in a common-sense way, to the matter of most audiences, most of the time, ‘for all practical purposes’, sharing a set of codes with the communicators, which enable them, denotatively, to recognize and interpret the lexical and visual items which constitute the message. Even here, total identity does not exist. There is empirical evidence to suggest that audiences, literally, do not comprehend everything that is said or shown to them, even at the denotative level. And we should not be surprised by that finding. Recent work on the language of the classroom powerfully suggests the different types of coding and registration which operate, even in the intimate situation of the teaching situation, between teachers and pupils.8 We know that the ‘competence’ to speak is quite unequally distributed as between different classes and groups in the population. How much more so will this mis-match between ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ be the case in the situation of mass communications. What is more, it is clear that social communications almost never function at the ‘denotative’ level alone. In social communication, every act of literal identification is also an act of social identification. Radio or television communication cannot literally signify a theme, topic or event without at the same time, explicitly or implicitly, assigning it to its context, giving it a position within the range of social and cultural identifications which help us to ‘map out the world’ in comprehensible terms. ‘Once we name our object under some description, then in so denoting that we point to the qualities and properties which they have and which they may exemplify’. Cicourel9 has recently reminded us that,
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Stuart Hall The reciprocity of perspectives rule or interpretive procedure cannot operate unless additional rules or sub-routines accompany its use. One sub-routine consists of the actor’s ability to treat a given lexical item category or phrase as an index of larger networks of meaning, as in normative developments of disease categories, colour categories and kinship terms. The appearance of a particular lexical item presumes the speaker intended a larger set, and assumes the hearer ‘fills in’ the larger set when deciding its meaning.
At this level of contextual or ‘connotative’ interpretation, where the operation of what Cicourel has called ‘the et cetera rule’ is absolutely crucial, the ideal of ‘perfect reciprocity’ recedes even further. Indeed, it is masked, even in Cicourel’s formulation, by the deceptive use of the term ‘normative’. In what sense are the categories of disease, colour or kinship ‘normative’? We certainly know that they are subject to enormous cultural variation, as between one society and another. Within any one culture, the colour spectrum or (less certainly) kinship categories may command very wide, perhaps near-universal, consensus. A television play can identify two actors as representing ‘mother’ and ‘son’ with a fair degree of certainty that anyone watching will ‘understand’ what kinship system is here invoked. However, the viewer of a more specialist kind of television programme, say about a tribal society, in which the presenter uses the term ‘mother’s brother’ would be instantly at sea, unless further, contextual elaboration were provided. For this term ‘indexes’ kinship systems, which employ some of the same terms as those with which we are familiar, but where the terms have quite a different significance: and a whole specialized language and debate, in which only some ethnologists are at all ‘competent’, is required before the lay-audience can comprehend what is being said and shown. And this is a relatively simple example, where the boundary between what will be known and what is reasonably clear. News, documentary and current affairs programmes on television and radio, for example, which constantly signify complex political situations with which the audiences is not familiar in any detail, deal with far more shaded and ambiguous areas, where the line between ‘full comprehension’, ‘partial comprehension’ and ‘in-comprehension’ is extremely hard to draw. Even the categories of ‘disease’ are not as clear-cut or ‘normative’ as Cicourel supposes. In the skilled medical fraternity, the basic categories of disease may be fairly firmly established; but a very long apprenticeship is required before young internees acquire the ‘competence’ to assign medical symptoms to their proper category. Both the skilled practice of diagnosis, and the doctor-patient interview (the communicative foundation of general medical practice) consist of the ‘interpretive work’ required to assign the ‘incompetent’ patients groans, moans, pains and grimaces to their ‘normative category’: and what we might call ‘category mistakes’ are crucial! It has sometimes been said that docters present themselves to their patients in a gruff and professional manner, in order to set the patient’s mind at rest, while ‘covering’ for the inevitably hit-and-miss procedures of which a great deal of diagnosis consists. Goffman10 has remarked something similar of the ‘joking relationships’ and ironic distance which characteristically accompanies the work of the surgeon in the operating theatre. Alternatively, we may think of the enormous discrepancies which currently exist between the medically-defined categories of ‘cancer’, and the general audience’s understanding of (and deep fears about) the term. Or of the way the distorted syntactic structures of the speech of certain patients labelled ‘mentally ill’ have been assigned to the disease category, ‘schizophrenia’; and of the major controversies, within the psychotherapeutic community and the general public, which this normative assignment has stirred up. So, once
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we have brought the connative and contextualizing aspects of social communication into view, it becomes more and more difficult to assume any degree of ‘perfect reciprocity’ between the communicators and the audiences. Things, of course, can be clarified, explained: broadcasters themselves can take some responsibility for ‘de-contextualizing’ their own content on behalf of their publics. But then, this is precisely where some of the ‘systematic distortions’ we referred to earlier begin to arise. For television or radio’s ‘mode of identifying social reality’ is not and cannot be a wholly neutral and objective process. We have to decide what the sources are of the contextual interpretations and identifications which television or radio regularly employs (an analysis which leads us from language proper into structures, power and ideologies), and whether such contexts are indeed wholly symmetrical with those employed by their audiences, before communication without distortion can become an operational (rather than an ideological) concept. We must bear in mind that, in the sphere of political, social and current affairs broadcasting, the media are constantly and regularly dealing with ‘problematic situations’ whose ‘meaning’ is not at all clear-cut, even to the experts, and about which there is, rarely, if ever, one, clear, unequivocal and unproblematic context or explanation. The media do not, in their general programming, deal with categories and contexts as defined or wellbounded as those of the colour spectrum. It is one thing for a news broadcast to show pictures of a military coup against a constitutional government, including the bombing of, say, the House of Assembly. It is quite another question for the foreign affairs correspondent to assign that event, those pictures, to some contextual category of explanation, along the lines of ‘A strong government intervened today to correct the country’s inflationary spiral’. Yet, of course, once we have been offered the witnessed account of that day’s event, precisely what is at issue is: in what framework of understanding can these events be understood? What factors led up to them? What unseen forces prepared it? What logic of events produced the bombing-as-an-event? And what consequences lead from it? Does it affect the balance of political power in the continent? The future of constitutionally elected governments? The possibilities of peaceful as against armed revolutionary change in societies of this type? In fact, the brief, apparently ‘factual’, report in the tele-cast, indexes these further contexts, points to them as the necessary ‘deep-structure’ of the event. The ‘meaning’ of the event is not accessible to the viewer without that deep-structure. Indeed, not only will such questions appear naturally to ‘follow on’: some provisional, implicit answers to them will already be present, already embedded, in the limited signification which the event had achieved in the headline news. To note that one kind of regime has ended, and another replaced it, in the manner shown, is to signify a number of possible contexts in which such a sequence of events ‘makes sense’. It is precisely to signify the event, to identify it, to ‘make it mean’ something, socially and historically. Every news event is already, if incompletely, assigned to a context which ‘explains it’. The broadcaster, or his reporter and camera-man in the field, must already have such a context in mind in order to know what to film, which to select and send back to the editor, which to include in the broadcast. As more becomes known, such contexts may be expanded and refined: they may even be modified. But no primary signification can occur without them. In short, where social communication is concerned, it is impossible to proceed without ‘interpretive work’, without the operation of indexical or ‘et cetera’ rules. The very choice of one set of images over another to signify ‘what happened there yesterday’ involves the use of interpretive codes.11
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II News, current affairs and documentary broadcasting, on radio and television, represent, taken together, a massive area of public broadcasting. Together with the national press, these media, organized as public communications systems, crucially intersect, on the one side, with politics, government, power and the state, and on the other side, with what we might call the ‘public discourse’ amongst the audience at large about questions of national and international significance. Major broadcasting resources, in terms of personnel, economic and technical resources, programme production and transmission time are devoted to this broadcasting domain. In political terms, it represents the pivotal sector of social communications. It is the point at which the broadcasters and their institutions mediate – hold the pass, command the communicative channels – between the elites of power (social, economic, political, cultural) and the mass audience. This mediation is exercised in different ways, and in different formats. The news brings the audience the raw and truncated signification of ‘events’, at home and abroad: it is limited, largely, to foreground accounts, and to a very short time span. In current affairs broadcasting, the experts and the major personal and institutional participants in those events appear in more extended form: giving more detailed, expert, ‘background’ accounts, or arguing and contesting the meaning and significance of the events which the news has reported. In the documentary area, the broadcasting professionals take the responsibility for compiling accounts or ‘filmed investigations’ of events and problems which have either already surfaced in the news, or which are judged by them to be potential ‘news-events’, or edging into news visibility. Foreground accounts: background reports and investigations: organized controversy, and discussion: broadly speaking, these are the three structures to public broadcasting which sustain the domain of ‘political broadcasting’. (Particular formats, of course, differ and vary widely from channel to channel, programme to programme). Now in all these areas of social communication, a fundamental a-symmetry exists between those who shape events, participate actively in them, those who have skilled and expert knowledge about events, and those who have ‘priveleged access’ to events and participants in order to report on and communicate about them: and, on the other hand, the great majorities and minorities of the ‘mass audience’, who do not directly participate in events (even when they are directly affected by them), who have no expert knowledge about them, and who have no privileged right of access to information and personnel. In this domain, the broadcasters are responsible for initiating communication about events: they select the events on which they report or around which they organize discussion: they select the institutional persons and the experts who speak about or speak to an issue: they define the agenda of ‘significant issues’: they ‘encode’ those events in appropriate formats: they help to define the terms in which the events will be presented or debated: and they transmit. Now the events which constitute the ‘subject-matter’ of broadcasting in this domain are usually new, dramatic, often unexpected and unpredicted events, events of a ‘problematic’ kind, which breach or disturb our commonsense expectations about the social order, our ‘taken-for-granted’ sense of ‘how the world is’.12 In a sense, these are the categoryrequirements of the whole area of news, and its subordinate areas (current affairs, documentary, etc): it is news because it is new; because it fundamentally, dramatically, disturbs or has the potential to disturb the on-going social order (local, national or international). News can breach our ‘normal’ expectations about the world in different ways. It can represent an event in the world the like of which we have never seen before (the first moon landing): it can represent a new and unexpected turn in events (the sudden renewal of Israel-Arab
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hostilities): it can represent a slight modification or development in an on-going process of change (the latest phase in a government’s anti-inflation policy): it can bring us ‘news’ about everyday events in one part of the world which are, however, ‘news to us’ (reports of tribal life in New Guinea). What is common to all these kinds of events is the fact that they are to some degree ‘problematic’, and therefore their ‘meaning’ is not transparently given in them. No matter how much ‘coverage’ we are given, we always need more information if we are to understand ‘fully’ what is going on. If the event is shown or reported on at first hand, we also need to know whether it is an isolated or general development, whether its outcome has been resolved or is still in doubt. If the event is part of an unfolding chain of events, we need to know what that long-term process is, what are the deep-structures which have brought it about, what its indirect consequences, long-term, will be. If the event is wholly unexpected, we need to know why we were not led to expect it, what unforeseen and unpredicted or unreported factors had been, all the while, preparing its eventuality. If it is really new or really strange, we will need a great deal of contextual information before we can say we ‘really understand’ what is happening. And all news-events, of whatever kind, require to be ‘set in context’ (an event, like a term in a discourse, cannot signify on its own), and presume or entail ‘an explanation’. Of course, the hostilities in the Middle East are part of the larger, longer struggle between . . . Of course, the attack was made there, or then, because . . . The whole process of social communication, we would argue, implies an interpretive, contextualizing discourse. But this is especially true of the whole domain of news and ‘political communications’ in general. The discourses by means of which the broadcasters translate historical events in the ‘real world’ into ‘communicative events’ (messages of one kind or another) are, fundamentally, indexical discourses in Cicourel’s sense. They depend on the use of connotative codes, by means of which ‘larger networks of meaning’ are indexed; and on the interpretive work which broadcasters must do to resolve events which seem intrinsically ‘meaningless’ (or whose ‘meaning’ is incomplete), into categories, explanatory contexts which ‘make them mean something’ in more than a merely-literal sense. Likewise, the viewer must either already understand the context in which the event is being signified, or must be offered some ‘explanatory context’ so that he, too, can ‘resolve’ the event meaningfully. If the media can be said to shape the public debate, to mould popular consciousness about issues, it is not only because they have become the major, and most credible source, of literal information about the world. It is because they also exercise the function of connecting discrete events with one another: they build or ‘map’ events into larger, wider, frameworks of meaning, so that viewers come, not simply to ‘know what is happening’, but to construct from that knowledge ‘pictures of the world’, scenarios of action.13 The choice of frameworks and categories, the initial ‘definitions of the situation’, are, of course, principally initiated by, and rest with the broadcasters. The activity of comprehending and ‘decoding’ by the audience is conducted on terrain which the broadcasters first define and delimit. In so far as audiences do not question the framework of assumptions within which these primary significations are made, they ‘interpret’ within the hegemonic ‘definitions of the situation’ which the broadcasters provide. In other cases, they may relate the ‘global’ definitions which the media provide to their own, more situated position: or they may try to ‘make sense’ of the media significations, while recognizing that ‘things look somewhat different’ if one is an ordinary member of the public and not one of the experts or history-makers. In that case, they can be said to ‘negotiate meanings’, within the outer determinations of the hegemonic definitions they have been offered. It is also possible for audiences to fully comprehend how and why media professionals, experts and accredited witnesses see an event that way, but nevertheless, refuse that ‘reading’ of events, and resolve
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meanings in a contradictory way. In that case, they refuse or refute the ‘definitions of the situation’ with which they are provided, and bring their own de-coding codes into play. These we may call ‘oppositional’ readings.14 Because the ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ moments in the communicative chain are not identical, but differentiated moments in a complexly unified process, the ‘perfect transmission’ of meanings from broadcasting source to audience is, or can potentially be, subject to further systematic skewing. It would not be correct to conceive of these simply as ‘obstacles to communication’: kinks in the communication chain, which ought to be straightened out. For these differential ‘readings’ arise from the fact that events are interpretible in more than one framework or context: different groups and classes of people will bring different explanatory frameworks to bear, depending on their social position, their interests, place in the hierarchy of power, and so on. If we were to remove ‘obstacles to communication’ of this kind, all that this would ensure would be that the hegemonic definitions of events by the powerful and the privileged would reign tout court. And this would entail the premise that the views of the world provided by the powerful elites are always correct: that, in relation to events, all the different groups and classes in society have or ought to have only one viewpoint. It would mean, in short, that only the dominant ideology should prevail. If the military coup referred to above is interpreted by a friendly government as ‘legitimate and necessary’, and the media – taking the impress of elite opinion signifies the events of the coup in that way, then it is a positive virtue of the system (not a weakness or obstacle) that some groups, at least, should have the residual right to give those events an alternative, oppositional reading. Otherwise, the communications system would function in a unilateral and uncontested way, merely to reproduce the hegemonic ideology, as an instrument to pacify structural conflict. In such a situation, a ‘perfect communications system’ – one without obstacles – would itself become the greatest obstacle to communication. We know of no mass communications systems which are ‘perfectly transparent’ in this way. Mass media systems have to deal with a variety of topics and events, and have to reflect something more than the ‘dominant viewpoint’, so that they generally display characteristics of what Enzenberger has called ‘leaky systems’. Moreover, as we shall see below, there are few systems in which the definitions of the powerful pass, without any qualification or modification or challenge, straight into the media and are simply reproduced by its professionals. The connections which the media form with the elites of power are extremely complex, and contradictions – of interest, outlook and interpretation – frequently arise between them. Further, media professionals work within conflicting criteria: if, on the one side, they must be sensitive to the way the powerful are defining events, they also have, and recognize, a duty to ‘inform the public’, to try to get to the ‘truth’ about events, even when this conflicts with the official signification of them. Although there is rarely anything so simple as the ‘objective truth’ about a historical event, the requirement to be ‘objective’ is a useful ‘operational fiction’, which tends to open gaps between the accounts which the professionals offer and the interpretations which politicians or administrators hope will prevail. Further, the media systems we are describing operate within the political structure of a formal democracy. So the obligation to reflect, even within those limited terms, the viewpoint of critics or ‘the opposition’, as well as the viewpoint of those in power, is not merely at their discretion: it is usually formally enshrined in their terms of reference – the requirement that there should be ‘balance’ in the viewpoints expressed when a topic is controversial. There are, then, various structural features of these systems which prevent them from unilaterally reproducing, without contradiction, the hegemonic ideology. Perfectly transparent, unilateral, communication can only exist in the (extremely rare) limiting case of the perfectly censored medium.15
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It would be wrong, however, to interpret this as producing a state of perfect pluralism where the dominant mass media systems are concerned. If the hegemonic viewpoint does not, unilaterally, have its way at all times, this does not mean that the media serve all viewpoints equally: there is no ‘perfect competition’ in the market of public opinions, where each individual member of the audience has an equally open chance of structuring the public discourse. Despite the requirements of ‘objectivity’, ‘balance’, ‘impartiality’, etc, the media remain oriented within the framework of power: they are part of a political and social system which is ‘structured in dominance’. Objectivity, impartiality and balance are exercised within a framework; and that framework is one which, overall, the powerful, not the powerless – elites, not audiences – crucially define. The commitment of the media to the reflection of ‘more than one viewpoint’ does not in any way contradict the media’s overall tendency to ‘reproduce the hegemonic ideology, with all its contradictions.’16 For the hegemonic ideology, in the terms in which we are discussing it, is, precisely, the ideology of liberal class-societies: that is to say, one in which the ‘national interest’ is identified with, and is seen to proceed via, the structured ‘clash’ of opposing viewpoints. These opposing viewpoints are, of course, at another level, precisely united in their fundamental loyalty to the structures of constraint – the rule of law, constitutional legality, the two-party parliamentary structure, etc – which permit them to ‘oppose’. So that media systems which thrive on controversy, the clash of opposing viewpoints, ‘open discussion’, free debate, and so on, may nevertheless be said, at another level, to be substantiating and reproducing the ‘mode of reality’ of the State, without these two things standing in any kind of open contradiction. In the British broadcasting system, for example, the two television channels are required, both by practice and by their governing charters, to give ‘equal time’ to the viewpoints of the two major political parties on any topic which is controversial. But this clash of opposing opinions is framed by the two party-system itself, by the political structure of Her Majesty’s Government/Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, by the rule of law and constitutional precedent, as well as by a whole number of working definitions as to what does and what does not constitute ‘politics’. A point of view which arises outside the framework of discussion defined by the two major parliamentary parties has far less ‘right of access’ to time and to debate on the media: indeed, if such a point of view is one which challenges the very terms which Government and Opposition have agreed to operate, it has a difficult time getting the media to recognize its viewpoint as ‘political’ at all. The flow of communications in the society is thus structured, not only by the explanatory frameworks within which the media signify events, but at the previous stage: the stage at which events and topics become visible to the media at all, the stage at which an event is defined as ‘signifiable’. Indeed, the two types of structuring – the one when the message arises, and the one when the message is transmitted – are deeply interconnected, because the media will tend to take-over, from the political elites, a way of perceiving an event, as well as a way of explaining or contextualizing it.
III Let us try to draw together the points we have been making, and attempt to elaborate them in terms of a model and an example. The example chosen is the recent British legislation, in the form of an Industrial Relations Bill, which delimits the recourse to strike action in industrial disputes between employers and employees or unions, institutionalizes an enforced ‘cooling off ’ period in any dispute before industrial action can be taken, and brings into play for the first time in British industrial relations an Industrial Court with wide-ranging powers. The model developed below is based on a detailed study of the media coverage of the
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introduction and immediate consequences of this piece of controversial legislation, but no attempt has been made here to refer to particular programmes. Instead, the aim is to try to establish the various stages in the ‘public signification’ of this set of events, and thus to pin-point the characteristic manner in which ‘communication’ about an event of this order is structured. The passage of the Industrial Relations Bill was not, of course, a one-off event. It arose within a prolonged debate, which has racked and and divided the society for nearly ten years, about the need for some fundamental change in the structure of industrial relations in Britain: an argument which pin-pointed the so-called ‘uncontrolled’ level of wage-demands by the unions, and the number of working days lost through strikes as two of the principal factors producing an inflationary spiral in the economy, and generally weakening Britain’s economic position. The Labour Government itself proposed to legislate in a rather similar manner, and this plan was only abandoned at the last moment in return for a pledge by the unions to exercise their own ‘voluntary’ restraints: it provoked widespread debate in itself, and serious conflicts of opinion between the Labour Government and the unions, as well as in the country at large. We cannot deal with this ‘background’ in our model. But it is important to bear in mind that events of the kind we will try to take into account, stemming from the introduction of legislation by the Conservative Government, already have a complex pre-history: they enter a highly structured field of discourse, in which opinions, of both an expert and lay kind, have already been mobilized and polarized. We should note, however, that what forms the background to the process we shall attempt to detail, is in no sense a set of ‘neutral facts’, but a set of highly-contradictory interpretations. There may be ‘further facts’, constituting some neutral, informational ground, which the media – in their search for an ‘objective’ standpoint – could try to occupy; but, it would be virtually impossible to reconstruct the public debate about the issue around them, even if they could be found. Already, we are dealing with fundamentally contradictory explanatory frameworks. For example, is British post-war inflation due to a ‘wages-push’, or have wages simply allowed working people to keep up with inflation? Does Britain lose more days in strikes than other industrial nations, and, if so, is this a structural or an incidental factor in her post-war economic performance? The issue of the Government’s Industrial Relations Bill (IRB), then, does not arise ‘cold’. The debate has already been, to some degree, pre-structured. However, we can, for analytic purposes, bracket these for the moment, and consider the position once the preliminary stages are over and legislation is introduced. A. It is, of course, ‘decisions’ of this precise and clear-cut kind, which meet the first requirements of news. The topicality of the issue, its wide-ranging significance for the society, its short and long term consequences, the ‘drama’ connected with the event – these meet the criteria of ‘news worthiness’, and make the event visible, first, to the media via the structure of ‘news values’. That is to say, the decision clearly commands the attention of the newsmen and news editors, and thus time in the news bulletins, so to speak, from the outside. Its position in the day’s agenda of issues is determined by the political elites and governmental institutions who take the decision and act, in the first place. It passes straight into the media, and acquires there its first media visibility, not essentially because newsmen have views, one way or another, about industrial relations, but because newsmen do their work within the framework of the professional routines and values of ‘news making’: it is the professional criteria and practices of news-making, not the political beliefs of news-men, which frame the crucial passage of the event from the political to the broadcasting domains. The media take over and reproduce the ‘agenda of issues’ established by the political elites as
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a consequence of the structural nexus which binds broadcasting to politics and power, not as a consequence of the personal inclinations and biases of media personnel. The connections between broadcasting and the political elites are not all of this ‘extrinsic’ kind. The IRB has been promulgated in Parliament, by major political speeches, and by official Cabinet or Government announcements. These are, of course, the regular sources of political information and of unofficial ‘briefings’ for those media professionals and correspondents who regularly report on the political affairs of the nation. The ‘information’ thus becomes accessible to the media along ‘channels’ already well worn with use. But further, the Government will not propose legislation of this far-reaching and controversial a kind ‘neutrally’. Its spokesmen will marshall the case for legislation with all the skill at their command. For example, they will take up interpretations of the economic situation favourable to legislation (i.e. wages do cause inflation, strikes do weaken the economy), and build them into their ‘case’. So that, from the very moment that the decision is made and legislation introduced, the fact of legislation and the ‘definitions of the powerful’ are already in play. It is the fact of legislation, together with the favourable promulgation or interpretation of that fact, which constitutes the ‘event’ for the media newsmen. Typically, in the first television newscast, there will be a ‘report’ by the news reader prepared by the newsroom; a brief extract of an interview with the Prime Minister after the decision has been announced to the House; in which, inevitably, he will ‘present the bare bones of the case for’ the way the Government has acted. This will be ‘balanced’ by a brief extract from an interview with, say, the Leader of the Opposition, containing a resume of the terms in which the Opposition will oppose the legislation: and, probably, an ‘expert’ assessment of its immediate consequences by the media’s political correspondent. In short, the media reproduce the event, already presignified: and they do this because they obey the requirement on them to report ‘impartially’ what the decision-makers say and do, and because the structure of news values orient them, in certain predictable and practised ways, to these privileged sources of action and information. A persuasive account of this piece of legislation is now in the public domain: so are the dominant terms in which it is to be opposed within the framework of parliamentary opposition. This constitutes the delimited terrain, the first and primary signification of the event. All other, and further significations of the event, within and outside the media, will constitute reproductions of, modifications of, extensions of, attempts to change the terms-of-reference of, that primary signification. Let us note that, so far, the only function of the media in the process of public signification has been to be scrupulously ‘objective’, ‘impartial’, ‘balanced’, ‘neutral’ and ‘informed’. B. The event now has a ‘news life’ within the media. Later bulletins will amplify the event-as-news, and report on new developments. Given the extensive function of news coverage provided by the media, this continuing news coverage will form a continuing ground-base to the signification of the event so far as the public is concerned. It can only be displaced (a) if significant new developments in the same issue gradually change the terms of the coverage: or if (b) it is displaced by ‘other news’ of a different and more dramatic kind. But we must pass to the second stage. The media do not only report the event. They have the duty to organize the public debate about the issue. There are two sides to this, one passive or reflective, one more active. The new legislation is now actively debated in different political forums: in Parliament, in political circles, in the unions, and the employers organizations, and by academic and intellectual experts. In its reports, the media will continue to reflect the passage of the event within these defined circles. But the media have also become responsible for organizing their own debate about the issue. And here the IRB
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passes from the keeping of the newsroom and its attendant ‘news values’ into what is normally defined as ‘current affairs’. How will a ‘current affairs’ discussion on the media on this question be constructed? By law, practice and custom, the Government, which has taken the initiative in the matter, have a right to the debate: to put their point of view and marshall the argument. Here, we might say, the Government is absolutely accessed: it is unthinkable that a Government spokesman should not appear. He is, of course, also subject to be interviewed and questioned. Here the media professional – interviewers, chairmen of discussion, etc – are no longer performing the strictly neutral role of the ‘reporter’: he is the skilled questionner, with a right to put questions (i.e. initiative debate) and seek answers. His ‘right’ to do so rests fundamentally on the premise that all political decisions in this society are open to responsible question (he will be both questioning and responsible). But the role of ‘tough interviewer’ is, finally, legitimated because viewers – the general public – cannot, (given the restricted nature of the medium) put questions themselves; so that the professional interviewers must perform a role on behalf of the public. He invokes the lack of access by the public, and his role as mediator between power and ‘the people’, to legitimate his otherwise awkward role. He can only perform a really critical task vis-à-vis his interviewee, an official, spokesman, by tacitly invoking the ‘common sense’ viewpoint of the ‘ordinary viewer’. He puts to the Cabinet Minister questions he supposes the man-in-thestreet would have put to him, had he had the chance. This is indeed an active mediating role: and it is perhaps here that the media first, in any substantial way, begin to interpose their own definitions of the situation on those definitions which the political elites have already signified, and which the media have faithfully and accurately ‘reported’. But we must note that, in passing from the legitimate right to ‘report’ fully and accurately, to the legitimate right to ‘enter into a controlled debate’ with the politicians, the media interviewer is constrained in at least three different ways: (a) he must elicit the Minister’s view of the situation first, before he can probe it: to some degree, he too, operates from a base-line within the pre-definitions of the question; (b) he cannot roam too far outside the kinds of questions ‘everyone’ will clearly see to be those which ‘ordinary people’ would have wanted to put: otherwise, he will be accused of partisanship. Though the viewer is not actually present, a certain typification of the viewer – as an ‘ordinary bloke, with a lot of common sense questions, but not an extremist’ – serves to modulate the interviewers performance of his role; (c) he is governed by the ‘rules of conduct’ of polite and rational debate: he cannot lose his temper, employ debating tricks, take too much advantage of his interviewee’s discomfiture, etc. In short, the media now begin to amplify and expand the ‘definitions of the situation’ which structure the topic: but they do so by operating within the terrain largely defined by the dominant institutions, though they function ‘critically’ in relation to that terrain. The media interviewer will more frequently follow a point made by the Minister, by a question critical of that point, then he will initiate a line of questions altogether outside the limits in which his interviewee is operating. Indeed, his legitimacy to be ‘tough’ is regulated to some degree by the degree of toughness with which the Minister puts his point of view. The logics-in-use which govern interviews of this type appear to be wide open, but in fact they are very tightly constructed. They tend, overall, to push the interviewer towards what we might call the ‘test of pragmatic effectiveness’. His strongest criticism (without overstepping the boundaries of his role) can be mounted from the ‘common-sense’ position, ‘will it work’? Pragmatic reality of this order, naturally, operates within the framework of a higher rationality, which hardly ever surfaces. It produces an interviewing practice which is extremely ‘tough’, within its limits: and creates the strong impression that ‘the Minister was not allowed to get away with anything’. This crucial
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practice in media signification of public events is so little studied that it is worth illustrating, in syllogistic form: A. Q.
To have had to act against strikes in the national interest Yes, but are you sure this legislation won’t lead to even more strikes? (Premise: ‘everyone agrees it is right to halt strikes: the question is, ‘how’?) A. If we can control the rising level of wages, then we can begin to get prices down Q. But how long can you expect a virtual freeze on wages? or Q. But how can you ensure that retailers will hold prices at their current level? (Premise: price inflation is due to immoderate wage demands) (Premise: since we are all consumers, if you could control prices then everyone would support your policy) We must note that all these hypothetical exchanges, contain, as their necessary deepstructure, some pre-embedded definitions of the situation, quite apart from the specific ‘Premises’ we have indicated. Thus, for example, all of them assume that ‘we’ are united, in an equal way, as a nation and as consumers, and will judge the legislation from that position, in terms of its effectiveness in securing a ‘national interest’ whose content we all know and subscribe to, and have an equal share in. They tacitly rule out the alternative assumption: that we are divided, as a nation, between those who employ and those who sell their labour, and thus have a differential relation to ‘the national interest’, which tends to operate more in the interest of some than of others. The political spokesman will frame his case within the premise of ‘the national interest’, because it allows him to make the widest possible appeal for support, and to build coalitions of support across classes and parties. The interviewer has ‘taken over’ this ideological signification as the ‘operational’ premise of his conversation with power. The passage of the hegemonic definitions continues to operate, so to speak, via the structures and the logics, but ‘behind men’s backs’. C. But here a new criterion enters: that of ‘balance’. If the Minister has the ‘right of debate’ on the media, the criterion of ‘balance’ ensures that his Opposition Shadow Minister has the ‘right of reply’. Not only will ‘the two sides’ be represented, but they will tend to be represented by spokesman of more or less equal political weight. The Shadow Minister, too, may be subject to ‘questioning’ (see above), before the discussion becomes more open. The sequence here is not random but structured. ‘Debate’ in the media requires two sides and a ‘neutral’ chairman or interviewer: political debate of this order requires, at least, Government, Opposition and professional Chairman (who, apart from the professional tasks of ‘keeping the discussion moving’, ‘covering the topics’, ‘putting supplementary questions’, also has the formal role of holding the ring for the debate to unfold: the rules of rational argument, fair allocation of time to each side, the reasonableness of the exchanges, and the other tasks of studio management). In a debate of this importance, the operation of the criterion of ‘balance’ ensures the presence, not only of political spokesman from the Parties, but of ‘institutional spokesmen’, from the Trades Union Congress and the Confederation of British Industry. The representatives of these institutions have structured access here, as accredited spokesmen, not only because the specific issue of the IRB directly affects their position, but because, on a whole range of issues, the media consider that the public debate must be shared between the dominant major institutions in the national life. Outside of the formal political representatives of the majority, the media acknowledge that, in complex, class democracies, the major institutional organizations wield critical
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and massive social power, and shape decisions in ways not open to ‘ordinary people’. So, progressively, the institutional spokesmen have gained a ‘right to participate in the debate’ when the media organize the discussion, though this is largely by practice and custom rather than (as is the case with political matters) by law. The topic has now been structured: the ‘debate’ can begin. The major participants have been ‘produced’, so to speak, by the complex processes which link the media to the major sources of power in the society, and this link is mediated, specifically, by what we might call the legitimate structure of access. Access is not – as has sometimes seemed to be the case in recent debates – a matter of minority participation in broadcasting, or the extension of some right to participate to groups and individuals who do not regularly appear. It is, first and foremost, the existing, regular, systematic structure of access: the institutions, groups, personnel who regularly and of right appear and define, the groups who cannot be left out. It is only then, and more residually, a question of the subordinate ‘rights’ of those who have been ‘left out’, or of those who can ‘win their way, by consent or struggle’, into visibility. Thus we must know what the structure of access is and the ‘informal rules’ by which it is operated: and then, what this structure of access does to the structuring of the topic as a communicative event: before we can bring into view the limited efforts and successes of those outside the consensus of access to modify the structure in some way. The demands of those ‘without access’ must be understood, first, in terms of its ‘absent’ opposite: the systematic ‘over-accessing’ of certain groups in the society. Only then can the structuring of communications be adequately produced as an object of study, reflection and action. Let us observe certain features of the structuring of the topic as we have outlined it so far. The structures ensure that more than one viewpoint will be present in the public debate in the media. They also ensure what range of voices and viewpoints, what institutional weightings, will be present in the signification of any controversial topic. They ensure the terms in which the topic will be elaborated, and the terrain across which the ‘debate’ will range. No single set of terms will unilaterally prevail: but the dominantly defined terms and limits within which controversy is engendered are not infinite – they remain ‘structured in dominance’. By ensuring that certain positions must be visible, the media also tend to ensure that certain positions will remain basically invisible. For example, since the Labour Government also had their own plans for industrial legislation, they are unlikely to argue root and branch against any need for legislation whatsoever. The acceptance of some sort of legislation then becomes common ground between the two major opposing positions, in the initial signification of the topic. As the interviewer’s questions probe the pragmatic underpinnings of these two positions, so they become, between them, the two defined limiting positions in the ‘reasonable and realistic’ case for and against the Bill. This ground now forms the basis for any further discussion of the topic. Positions which fall outside this structured controversy not only have difficulty in winning a hearing: they quickly appear ‘unreasonable and unrealistic’ when set off against the ‘reasonable’ case for-and-against the Bill. Thus, new participants to the debate are also constrained by the manner in which it has been signified. For example, if the Unions, through their accredited spokesmen, make a case against the Bill within the existing ‘terms of reference’, they can be argued with or opposed, but they will be understood as acting ‘reasonably’ within the established rules of controversy and opposition. But if a Union spokesman were to introduce a new premise – such as, for example, the view that the ‘right to strike’ is a fundamental freedom, won after prolonged struggle, and should not be lightly cast aside – this immediately appears as an ‘extreme’ view: it does not require another participant to signify its proposer as ‘an extremist’ – simply by taking a position which runs counter to the on-going ‘terms of reference’, he will signify his own extremism.
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D. Two other kinds of groups may gain, at a later stage, a degree of ‘access’ to the debate. The first consists of ‘expert witnesses’ who are professionally knowledgeable about industrial relations. Experts are, of course, by definition, defined as speaking to a controversial issue in neutral, impartial, non-partisan terms. Individual experts may have loyalties to one or other side in a controversy, but their right to contribute to the definition of an issue depends on their expressing an informed, uncommitted view. Their contribution may thus consist of ‘filling out’ and amplifying the topic in terms of additional information, skilled or shrewd assessments. It is only very occasionally that an expert can so forcefully put a point of view in an already structured debate in such a way as to alter, fundamentally, the basic terms of its signification. The other ‘group’ is ‘the general public itself ’. But the ‘general public’ is not one of the active participants or principal actors in the event: they cannot speak as institutional spokesmen or as experts: they are not organised in ways which are visible to the medium. Their views, then, will enter the debate in a mediated and subordinate form. What ‘the general public thinks’ will be reported on by journalists or invoked by one side or the other in the controversy. Or reports on the passage of the topic will avail themselves of random items of ‘vox pop’ interviews – a sort of instant sampling of men and women-in-the-street, in brief snippets, where the point of the exercise is, precisely, that ‘there are many different views’, and that they are equally inexpert. Occasionally, some ‘current affairs discussion’ time will be given over to a studio discussion including (typically) large numbers of, say, rank-and-file trade unionists who, under the prod of a media chairman, stimulate a ‘lively exchange’ at a somewhat more grassroots level than in the more regular studio discussion of the issue. Here too the producer is required to ensure a degree of ‘balance’, at a lower level, between those who are ‘for’ and those who are ‘against’ legislation. Whereas accredited witnesses and institutional spokesmen appear, of right, in their representative person or, and are given time to develop an argument, the participants to ‘studio discussions’ always appear in large numbers, ‘impersonally’, have to make their points rapidly in the cut and thrust of debate. They clearly serve the function of a studio cross-section of the ‘general public’, given a brief chance to air their views, odd and cranky or unrepresentative as they may be. This is not a position from which a structured counter-argument or counter-definitions of the situation can be launched. In the passage of the structured topic through the media, the broadcasting institutions may take further opportunities to develop and amplify the topic as it has been constituted. This may take the form of a ‘documentary’ background treatment of the issue, for which the media themselves take editorial responsibility. Here, the facts relevant to the terms of the issue can be resumed: the professionals can make ‘pragmatic’ assessments of ‘how successful’ the Government or Opposition is in furthering/checking legislation. They cannot, however, express a point of view editorially which favours one side or the other. Instead, they must also resume the arguments of the main protagonists, giving the initial definers a second or third opportunity to express a point of view. The ‘common ground’ provides the basic terms in which the topic will be elaborated. But it also becomes, in real terms, the terrain on which bargains can be struck and compromises made. The media frequently play a role in, and have a vested interest in, this process of institutionalized bargaining. They shares, with the political and institutional elites, the notion that ‘politics is the art of the possible’, and that, to achieve the possible, each side must concede something so that conflict can be resolved. Part of the ‘impartial reporting’ by media newsmen is, then, to try to predict when bargains are imminent, and what their terms will be, even when the accredited spokesmen deny that negotiations are in fact in progress.
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Another part of their function is to preside over studio discussions, again between accessed spokesmen and experts, in which the possible terms of negotiations and compromise are hypothetically rehearsed, and each side to the controversy probed for its willingness to negotiate. The media thus develop a structured interest in the institutional resolution of conflict: a position which is ‘neutral’ so far as the two sides in the structured controversy is concerned, but not ‘neutral’ in relation to the political system as a whole. It makes the media the unwitting accomplices of conflict-revolution. E. The structuring of the topic is unlikely to be breached, either in media or in political terms, from within that structure. In the case of the IRB, there was little or no further movement until the terms of the debate were rudely shattered by militant, ‘unofficial’ action by groups with a more intransigent view of the legislation than had anywhere so far achieved visibility in the media. Once again, the structure of definitions is broken by events which occur outside the media, and to which the media must respond. Militant shop stewards bring sections of workers out on strike against a ruling of the Court: their action is made official by their Union: the Union is then summoned by the Court, is judged to be acting illegally (either for what it is doing, or for failing to recognize the Court), and sanctioned: there are clashes between pickets and police at the factory gates. At these levels, and in these events, new, potential ‘definitions of the situation’ come into play. The case against legislation which these events signify fall right outside the boundaries which the previous definitions have helped to erect. What they point to is a definition of the IRB as a kind of class legislation, an attack on basic working class institutions. It is unlikely, however, that this viewpoint will now enter the signification of the issue as a legitimate ground for opposition. The previous, pro/con signification of the event is already in operation: and the new, dramatic events will tend to be ‘mapped’ into that structure. They will be debated in terms of how they breach, extend, modify, affect that on-going definition. Thus, strikes, militant action, clashes between pickets and police are signified in terms of the consequences they have – making the Government (whose case we have heard) take a ‘tougher line’ by standing behind the Court: or forcing the Opposition and the Unions into a ‘more intransigent position’ (than that which they earlier expressed in reasoned debate). Strikers and pickets do not have the power to redefine an issue in the media. They can only be signified as ‘justified’ or ‘unjustified’, ‘illegal’ and therefore ‘illegitimate’, ‘unreasonable and irrational’ – against the background of legality, legitimacy, reasonableness and rationality which already commands the debate. It is, indeed, their ‘illegitimacy’, not their ‘definition of the situation’, which commands the news coverage. The original definers of the situation now have access again, to assist in the amplified definition of the strikes and the pickets. The latter are easily cast in the role of ‘folk devils’: they are ‘extremists’, a ‘handful of militants’, ‘agitators’: their leaders are ‘anxious to be martyrs’. The media do, of course, give these militant leaders a chance to ‘put their point of view’ – they gain a temporary and limited access (though, once the strikes die down, and the immediate confrontation is resolved, they will pass once again into invisibility, and their case with them). But they do not, and are not invited to, command the redefinition of the situation, or to extend the terms of the controversy. They must justify their actions and appearance, apologize, as it were, for appearing on the stage at all as participants, and explain the illegitimacy of their actions. If they enter, at length, an argument of a reasoned kind, they must come to terms with the pro-con structure of debate already established: they move on defined terrain, and are trapped by its terms. If they stand outside the ‘reasonable case’, for or against, they appear to be sloganizing, and their very militancy signifies their extremism. It is extremely difficult for them to evade their own stigmatization. They achieve access, then: but only on terms already pre-established. What is at issue is not their view
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of the IRB, but their militancy against it, their violence, their illegality, their marginality, their unrepresentativeness. They, too, will be ‘balanced’. Other shop floor workers will be found to say that their militant brothers have ‘gone too far’, ought to have kept their opposition within the framework of the law. It is difficult in these structured conditions to get a hearing for the view that it is precisely the question of whether there should be a law or not, which is at issue. It is even more difficult for spokesmen who, having never been legitimated participants in the regular distribution of access, have few of the ‘skills and competences’ of reasoned debate at their command. Thus, though they have fractured, temporarily, the structure of definitions of the situation, their intervention has simply served to shift the terms of the debate to another level: one where even deeper pre-suppositions are in play, and where the sacred nature of the social order itself can be mobilized against them. There may be many who oppose an IRB: there will be fewer who will defend actions which are signified as ‘illegal’ or ‘violent’, since illegality threatens the ‘rule of law’ which is part of the ‘common ground’ on which all reasonable parties take their stand, and ‘violence’ represents a threat to social order itself. If the Government cannot ‘win’ a debate about legislation, it can certainly command a debate which is signified as being about ‘law and order’. This displacement of the issue to a more primordial ideological level strengthens the existing terms of the issue. And the displacement occur at more than one level in the media. For the militant spokesmen have been preceded by pictures of pickets and police locked in struggle. And though these struggles are really instances of the structural conflict between Government and organized labour, they will have been signified in the news as belonging essentially to the ‘law and order’ category. In allowing the militants to appear and speak, the media, once again, demonstrate their flexibility, their balance and impartiality. The structure of access is temporarily broken. The underlying logic of the situation, however, is unbreakable.
IV There are more ‘obstacles to communication’ than are dreamt of in any conspiracy theory. We have not been discussing censorship – either editorial censorship by the media institutions, nor self-censorship by the media professionals, nor external censorship of the media institutions by government or State. All these do, also, exist: but they have not been the subject of our consideration. Nor have we been discussing the personal and overt biases of media personnel. What we have been pointing to is the manner in which the actions of individual men, with a plurality of viewpoints, are constrained by the structures in which they operate. What has commanded our attention is the defined way in which the structures of power and the structures of broadcasting are articulated with one another. In part, this is a matter of institutional connections. In part, these institutional links are framed by structures of understanding, by a ‘reciprocity of perspectives’, which is no less dominant in its final consequences because it is, also, complex. Let us now try to sum the argument up in terms rather different from those so far employed. Since the right of universal adult suffrage was won, formally, every adult is a member of ‘political society’. He votes at regular intervals for his parliamentary representative: he elects local representatives. In addition, he may belong to various kinds of voluntary or professional associations, which enable the citizen to voice an opinion or contribute something to the way the major decisions which affect our lives are defined and taken. This formal process of democratization was not given as a right but won in struggle. But, having been won, it has become enshrined in law, legislation and in institutions: it has also become the corner-stone of the dominant democratic ideology. In fact, however, this formal
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democratization has not led to a massive increase in the degree of participation by ordinary citizens in the pivotal decisions. Society has grown technically and socially more complex. More significantly, the major social decisions remain concentrated within the great institutional complexes – public and private – which compose the modern state. These are in no ‘direct’ sense subject to public scrutiny or accountability, and they do not in fact submit themselves to the public very often in more than a formal way. They have, in fact, become more ramified in their operations and structures, and function largely as closed or semiclosed bureaucracies. The growth in formal democracy has not been accompanied by a break-up of the great power centres of society. In fact, quite the opposite: as political society has grown, formally, more universal, so business, government, administration, technology, the legal system, welfare etc. have expanded their operations as semi-private institutions, in the manner of empires within the state. This is not the place to develop an account of the modern state. In general terms, the power of these semi-closed institutions is absolutely massive when set beside the power which ordinary citizens (including those who work for and service the great institutions, when acting in their capacity as ordinary citizens) can mobilize. Power, then, remains largely within this complex of institutions. Between them they define what passes for reality in the State as a whole. Those who have access to power are limited in number, and wield power via the institutions which form the complex of power. They are, however rich, educated, cultivated in individual terms, essentially powerful because they are institutional persons: they ‘personify’ the system of power. However, because these centres of power, and the powerful elites within them, function within a formal democracy, they must appear to operate in a manner which ‘wins the consent’ – even if that consent is passive – of the majority. So, in societies like ours, which remain societies of deep inequality, but where formal democracy prevails, the shaping and winning of consent, the exercise of social and cultural hegemony, is a necessary condition for the continuing exercise of power. The dominant classes cannot and do not rule by consent alone. All societies depend, ultimately, on the sanctions of coercion to reinforce and stabilize the giving and taking of consent. But stable societies can, in one sense, be defined by the degree to which, in them, open coercion gives way to the management of consent. Consent is the process by which the relatively powerless and un-organized grant to the powerful and organized the right, the legitimacy, to act on their behalf. In organized societies of our type, the management of legitimacy, the shaping of a favourable consensus, and the exercise of hegemony are the pivotal mechanisms, the ‘operators’, of the system. Many institutions contribute to the development and maintance of hegemonic domination: but, of these, the mass media systems are probably (along with the schools) the critical ones. Technically sophisticated systems of communication have developed everywhere, parallel to the growth of corporate class societies of the type I have been describing. Internally, these systems show a tendency to function rather like the other institutions of the state. But they also have an additional, external function, which the other institutions of the state perform only residually. They ‘connect’ the centres of power with the dispersed publics: they mediate the public discourse between elites and the governed. Thus they become, pivotally, the site and terrain on which the making and shaping of consent is exercised, and, to some degree, contested. They are key institutions in the operation of cultural hegemony.17 The dominant systems of power are paralleled by the dominant systems of public communication: for the power to rule and govern is paralleled by the power to shape the consensus in favour of the powerful. Political and economic power is shadowed by what we may call the unequal distribution of cultural, power. Cultural power consists, essentially, of the command over certain crucial processes: (a) the power to define which issues will enter
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the circuit of public communications; (b) the power to define the terms in which the issue will be debated; (c) the power to define who will speak to the issues and the terms; (d) the power to manage the debate itself in the media. The mass media systems are, then, differentially linked to the centres of power and authority in our society, and to the general public. They, too, operate in ‘formal democracies’, and they are required to serve wide publics in widely differeing ways. No such communications system can afford to ‘ignore’ the audience, the public. But the public, while occupying the mind of the broadcaster continuously as the ideal-typical recipient of his message, does not and cannot stand in the same position, where the exercise of cultural power is concerned, as the elites. The media therefore reproduce the structure of domination/ subordination which elsewhere characterizes the system as a whole. In addition, the communications institutions have their own complex articulation with power, their own ‘relative autonomy’. They have a great deal of day-to-day autonomy over programme production. They are not, except residually, directly in the day-to-day command of the political and economic power elites. Conflicts of interest clearly can, and do, arise between them. The less smooth is the exercise of hegemony, the less mutual will be the relations between, say, the politicians and the media professionals. Even at the best of times, the media are required to give the government in power, and other institutional spokesmen the privileged right of access, because the media must also reflect alternative viewpoints. Although the media have a right and duty to reflect the viewpoints of the dominant sectors, and are closely, regularly, and continuously dependent on them as sources, they also have some counter-vailing obligation to ‘seek out’ issues and ‘inform the public’ on issues which those in power would prefer to keep silent. Journalists and editors, who have a professional duty to be ‘well-informed’, also have a professional reputation to defend as ‘fearless’, ‘independent of power’. If, then, overall, the media serve to reproduce the hegemonic definitions, together with their contradictions, it is not because there is an open conspiracy or collusion to defraud the public, or to ‘sell’ the consent of the masses to the dominant classes. Nor, however, does it mean that the media stand outside the complex of power and hegemony, and are neutral in relation to it. They are both ‘relatively autonomous’ institutions of the power nexus, and yet also ‘articulated in dominance’ with those institutions. It is the complex articulation of structures which regulates this relation ‘in dominance’. The shaping and making of consent functions, not in spite of, but via those structures. And, as the messages and programmes which the media systems produce negotiate and pass through those structured, so, inevitably, they cease to be random messages about the social world, given and taken in some ‘free market of the word’, and become instead elements in a structured communication process. An institution like the BBC is famous for its ‘relative independence of power’, its balance and impartiality. The alternative commercial television channel though privately owned, is hedged about with conditions which impose many of the same requirements on it. One of the moments at which that ‘independence’ was most severely tested was in the General Strike of 1926. There was a strong section of the Cabinet which wanted to commandeer the BBC for the Government, once the strike had begun. Lord Reith, the Director-General, argued powerfully and persuasively that it should and must remain independent. His reasoning is worth recapitulating. Once the strike had been declared illegal in the Courts (a ‘reading of the situation since contested’), Reith argued that ‘there could be no question about our (the BBC) supporting the Government in general’.18 Anything ‘contrary to the spirit of the judgement’, and which might prolong the strike, was unacceptable. Official communiques ‘would have been expected and demanded irrespective of its political complexion’. On the other hand, Reith’s view was that, once the Government directly commandeered the BBC,
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the BBC would lose its reputation for impartiality, its credibility, its ‘considerable measure of independence’, and thus its position as ‘a national institution and a national asset’. It is important to remember that this ‘battle for the independence of the BBC was something more than a battle for the neutrality of the medium’. As Professor Asa Briggs19 has remarked, Reith ‘had a standpoint of his own’: He had no sympathy with the coal owners, but he had little sympathy with organized labour either and disliked the very idea of a general strike. He preferred mediation to showdown. Reith, then, laid a double injunction on the BBC in its moment of crisis. To be ‘for the Government in the crisis’, and to ‘be allowed to define its position in the country’. It is summed up in one of the most delicate of formulations ever put on paper by a broadcaster: But, on the other hand, since the BBC was a national institution, and since the Government in this crisis were acting for the people, the BBC was for the Government in the crisis too. When the relationship of communications to power is framed by so subtle and complex a negotiation, it seems crude and vulgar to speak of ‘Obstacles’.
Notes and references 1 Cf: Stuart Hall, Innovation & Decline In Cultural Programming Part IV, for a discussion of the role of the ‘technology’. Report to UNESCO. Centre for Cultural Studies (Stencilled). Birmingham: 1971. 2 Cf: Stuart Hall, ‘The External/Internal Dialectic in Broadcasting’. In Fourth Symposium On Broadcasting, Dept. of Extra-Mural Studies, University of Manchester. Proceedings. Manchester: 1972, p. 93–105. 3 Hans Dreitzel, ‘Introduction’, to Recent Sociology 2. Ed, Dreitzel. Collier-Macmillan. London: 1970. 4 Cf: Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding and Decoding in The Television Discourse’. Paper for the Council of Europe Colloquy, held at the Centre for Mass Communication Research (Stencilled). Leicester: 1973. See, also, Umberto Eco, ‘Towards a Semiotic Enquiry into the Television Message’. Working Papers In Cultural Studies, 3. University of Birmingham: 1972, pp. 89–102. 5 In The Making Of A Television Programme. Constable. London: 1972. 6 Martin Nicolaus, ‘Introduction’ to K. Mark, Grundrisse. Penguin. London: 1973. 7 Jurgen Habermas, ‘Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence’, in Dreitzel, op.cit. 8 I am thinking particularly here of work, inspired by Basil Bernstein: Cf, inter alia, Class, Codes and Control, vols. I, II. Routledge & Kegan Paul. London: 1971, 1973. And William Labov, ‘The Logic of Non-Standard English’, in Tinker, Tailor: The Myth Of Cultural Deprivation, ed. Nell Keddie. Penguin Education. Harmondsworth: 1973. 9 Asron Cicourel, ‘Basic and Normative Rules in the Negotiation of Status and Role’. In, Dreitzel, op.cit. 10 Erving Goffman, Encounters. Bobbs-Merril. Indianapolis: 1961. 11 Cf: Stuart Hall, ‘Determinations of the News Photograph’. In Working Papers In Cultural Studies 3. Centre for Cultural Studies. Birmingham: 1972. pp. 53–88. 12 For the relation of the ‘problematic’, the ‘taken-for-granted’, and news, Cf: Stuart Hall, ibid., and ‘Deviance, Politics and the Media’, in Deviance and Social Control, ed McIntosh and Rock. Tavistock (forthcoming). 13 Cf: James Halloran, ‘The Social Effects of Television’, in The Effects Of Television, ed Halloran. Panther. London: 1970. 14 Cf: Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’, op.cit. The scheme applies to the decoding of television messages a typology of class ‘meaning systems’ developed in Frank Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order. McGibbon & Kee. London: 1971.
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15 Cf: Louis Althusser, ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. New Left Books. London: 1971. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, New Left Books. London: 1973. 16 Cf: ‘External/Internal Dialectic in Broadcasting’, Stuart Hall: op.cit. 17 The concept of ‘hegemonic domination’ here is adapted from Gramsci: Cf: Selections From the Prison Notebooks. Lawrence & Wishart, London: 1971. 18 Lord Reith, quoted in Briggs, The Birth of Broadcasting: History of Broadcasting in the UK, vol. I. Oxford University Press. London: 1961. 19 Asa Briggs, ibid.
22 Encoding and decoding in the television discourse Stuart Hall
Two themes have been cited for this Colloquy: the highly focussed theme concerning the nature of the ‘televisual language’, and the very general and diffused concern with ‘cultural policies and programmes’. At first sight, these concerns seem to lead in opposite directions: the first towards formal, the second towards societal and policy questions. My aim, however, is to try to hold both concerns within a single framework. My purpose is to suggest that, in the analysis of culture, the inter-connection between societal structures and processes and formal or symbolic structures is absolutely pivotal. I propose to organize my reflections around the question of the encoding/decoding moments in the communicative process: and, from this base, to argue that, in societies like ours, communication between the production elites in broadcasting and their audiences is necessarily a form of ‘systematically distorted communication’. This argument then has a direct bearing on ‘cultural policies’, especially those policies of education, etc which might be directed towards ‘helping the audience to receive the television communication better, more effectively’. I therefore want, for the moment, to retain a base in the semiotic/linguistic approach to ‘televisual language’: to suggest, however, that this perspective properly intersects, on one side, with social and economic structures, on the other side with what Umberto Eco has recently called ‘the logic of cultures’.1 This means that, though I shall adopt a semiotic perspective, I do not regard this as indexing a closed formal concern with the immanent organization of the television discourse alone. It must also include a concern with the ‘social relations’ of the communicative process, and especially with the various kinds of ‘competences’ (at the production and receiving end) in the use of that language.2 In his paper3 Professor Halloran has properly raised the question of studying ‘the whole mass communication process’, from the structure of the production of the message at one end to audience perception and ‘use’ at the other. This emphasis on ‘the whole communicative process’ is a comprehensive, proper and timely one. However, it is worth reminding ourselves that there is something distinctive about the product, and the practices of production and circulation in communications which distinguishes this from other types of production. The ‘object’ of production practices and structures in television is the production of a message: that is, a sign-vehicle, or rather sign-vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any other form of communication or language, through the operation of codes, within the syntagmatic chains of a discourse. The apparatus and structures of production issue, at a certain moment, in the form of a symbolic vehicle constituted within the rules of ‘language’. It is in this ‘phenomenal form’ that the circulation of the ‘product’ takes place. Of course, even the transmission of this symbolic vehicle requires its material substratum – video-tape, film, the transmitting and receiving apparatus, etc. It is also in this symbolic form that the reception of the ‘product’, and its distribution between different segments of the audience,
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takes place. Once accomplished, the translation of that message into societal structures must be made again for the circuit to be completed. Thus, whilst in no way wanting to limit research ‘to following only those leads which emerge from content analysis’,4 we must recognize that the symbolic form of the message has a priveleged position in the communicative exchange: and that the moments of ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’, though only ‘relatively autonomous’ in relation to the communicative process as a whole, are determinate moments. The raw historical event cannot in that form be transmitted by, say, a television news-cast. It can only be signified within the aural-visual forms of the televisual language. In the moment when the historical event passes under the sign of language, it is subject to all the complex formal ‘rules’ by which language signifies. To put it paradoxically, the event must become a ‘story’ before it can become a communicative event. In that moment, the formal sub-rules of language are ‘in dominance’, without, of course, subordinating out of existence the historical event so signified, or the historical consequences of the event having been signified in this way. The ‘message-form’ is the necessary form of the appearance of the event in its passage from source to receiver. Thus the transposition into and out of the ‘message-form’ or the meaning-dimension (or mode of exchange of the message) is not a random ‘moment’, which we can take up or ignore for the sake of convenience or simplicity. The ‘message-form’ is a determinate moment, though, at another level, it comprises the surface-movements of the communications system only, and requires, at another stage, to be integrated into the essential relations of communication of which it forms only a part. From this general perspective, we may crudely characterize the communicative exchange as follows. The institutional structures of broadcasting, with their institutional structures and networks of production, their organized routines and technical infrastructures, are required to produce the programme. Production, here, initiates the message: in one sense, then, the circuit begins here. Of course, the production process is framed throughout by meanings and ideas: knowledge-in-use concerning the routines of production, technical skills, professional ideologies, institutional knowledge, definitions and assumptions, assumptions about the audience, etc frame the passage of the programme through this production structure. However, though the production structures of television originate the television message, they do not constitute a closed system. They draw topics, treatments, agendas, events, personnel, images of the audience, ‘definitions of the situation’ from the wider socio-cultural and political system of which they are only a differentiated part. Philip Elliott has expressed this point succinctly in his discussion of the way in which the audience is both the source and the receiver of the television message. Thus circulation and reception are, indeed, ‘moments’ of the production process in television, and are incorporated, via a number of skewed and structured ‘feed-backs’, back into the production process itself. The consumption or reception of the television message is thus itself a ‘moment’ of the production process, though the latter is ‘predominant’ because it is the ‘point of departure for the realization’ of the message. Production and reception of the television message are, not, therefore, identical, but they are related: they are differentiated moments within the totality formed by the communicative process as a whole. At a certain point, however, the broadcasting structures must yield an encoded message in the form of a meaningful discourse. The institution-societal relations of production must pass into and through the modes of a language for its product to be ‘realized’. This initiates a further differentiated moment, in which the formal rules of discourse and language operate. Before this message can have an ‘effect’ (however defined), or satisfy a ‘need’ or be put to a ‘use’, it must first be perceived as a meaningful discourse and meaningfully de-coded. It is this set of de-coded meanings which ‘have an effect’, influence, entertain, instruct or
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persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological or behavioural consequences. In a determinate moment, the structure employs a code and yields a ‘message’: at another determinate moment, the ‘message’, via its decodings, issues into a structure. We are now fully aware that this re-entry into the structures of audience reception and ‘use’ cannot be understood in simple behavioural terms. Effects, uses, ‘gratifications’ are themselves framed by structures of understanding, as well as social and economic structures which shape its ‘realization’ at the reception end of the chain, and which permit the meanings signified in language to be transposed into conduct or consciousness.
Clearly, what we have called Meanings I and Meanings II may not be the same. They do not constitute an ‘immediate identity’. The codes of encoding and decoding may not be perfectly symmetrical. The degrees of symmetry – that is, the degrees of ‘understanding’ and ‘misunderstanding’ in the communicative exchange depend both on the degrees of symmetry/a-symmetry between the position of encoder-producer and that of the decoderreceiver: and also on the degrees of identity/non-identity between the codes which perfectly or imperfectly transmit, interrupt or systematically distort what has been transmitted. The lack of ‘fit’ between the codes has a great deal to do with the structural differences between broadcasters and audiences, but it also has something to do with the a-symmetry between source and receiver at the moment of transformation into and out of the ‘message-form’. What is called ‘distortion’ or ‘misunderstandings’ arise precisely from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange. Once again, this defines the ‘relative autonomy’ but ‘determinateness’ of the entry and exit of the message in its linguistic/ meaning form. The application of this rudimentary paradigm has already begun to transform our understanding of television ‘content’: and we are just beginning to see how it might also transform our understanding of audience reception and response as well. Beginnings and endings have been announced in communications research before, so we must be cautious. But there seems some ground for thinking that a new and exciting phase in audience research, of a quite
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new kind, may be opening up. At either end of the communicative chain, the use of the semiotic paradigm promises to dispel the lingering behaviourism which has dogged mass media research for so long. Though we know the television programme is not a behavioural input, like a tap on the knee-cap, it seems to have been almost impossible for researchers to conceptualize the communicative process without lapsing back into one or other variant of low-flying behaviourism. We know, as Gerbner has remarked, that representations of violence on the TV screen ‘are not violence but messages about violence:5 but we have continued to research the question of violence as if we were unable to comprehend the epistemological distinction. Let us take an example from the drama-entertainment area in television and try to show how the recognition that television is a discourse, a communicative not simply a behavioural event, has an effect on one traditional research area, the television/violence relation.6 Take the simple-structure, early (and now children’s) TV Western, modelled on the early Hollywood B-feature genre Western: with its clear-cut, good/bad Manichean moral universe, its clear social and moral designation of villain and hero, the clarity of its narrative line and development, its iconographical features, its clearly-registered climax in the violent shoot-out, chase, personal show-down, street or bar-room duel, etc. For long, on both British and American TV, this form constituted the predominant drama-entertainment genre. In quantitative terms, such films/programmes contained a high ratio of violent incidents, deaths, woundings, etc. Whole gangs of men, whole troops of Indians, went down, nightly, to their deaths. Researchers – Himmelweit among others – have, however, suggested that the structure of the early TV/B-feature Western was so clear-cut, its action so conventionalized, stylized, that most children (boys rather earlier than girls, an interesting finding in itself) soon learned to recognize and ‘read’ it like a ‘game’: a ‘cowboys-and-Injuns’ game. It was therefore further hypothesized that Westerns with this clarified a structure were less likely to trigger the aggressive imitation of violent behaviour or other types of aggressive ‘acting-out’ than other types of programmes with a high violence ratio which were not so stylized. But it is worth asking what this recognition of the Western as a ‘symbolic game’ means or implies. It means that a set of extremely tightly-coded ‘rules’ exist whereby stories of a certain recognizable type, content and structure can be easily encoded within the Western form. What is more, these ‘rules of encoding’ were so diffused, so symmetrically shared as between producer and audience, that the ‘message’ was likely to be decoded in a manner highly symmetrical to that in which it had been encoded. This reciprocity of codes is, indeed, precisely what is entailed in the notion of stylization or ‘conventionalization’, and the presence of such reciprocal codes is, of course, what defines or makes possible the existence of a genre. Such an account, then, takes the encoding/decoding moments properly into account, and the case appears an unproblematic one. But let us take the argument a little further. Why and how do areas of conventionalization arise (and disappear)? The Western tale, of course, arose out of – though it quickly ceased to conform to – the real historical circumstances of the opening up of the American West. In part, what the production of the Western genre-codes achieved was the transformation of a real historical West, selectively, into the symbolic or mythical ‘West’. But why did this transformation of history into myth, by the intervention of a stylized set of codes, occur, for our societies and times, in relation to just this historical situation. This process, whereby the rules of language and discourse intervene, at a certain moment, to transform and ‘naturalize’ a specific set of historical circumstances, is one of the most important test-cases for any semiology which seeks to ground itself in historical realities. We know, and can begin to sketch, the elements which defined the operation of codes on history. This is the archetypal
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American story, America of the frontier, of the expanding and unsettled West, the ‘virgin land’ before law and society fully settle in, still closer to Nature than to Law and order. It is the land of men, of independent men, isolated in their confrontations with Nature or Evil: and thus stories of masculine prowess, skill power and destiny: of men ‘in the open air’, driven to their destinies by inner compulsion and by external necessity – by Fate, or by ‘the things a man just has to do’: and thus a land where morality is inner-centered, and clarified – i.e. fully objectivated not in speech but in the facticities of gesture, gait, dress, ‘gear’, appearance. A land where women are either subordinate (whether as ‘little homebodies’ or ladies from ‘back East’): or, if somewhat more liberated – e.g. good/bad saloon girls – destined to be inadvertently and conveniently shot or otherwise disposed of in the penultimate reel: and so on. If we wanted to make a strict semiological analysis, we could trace the specific codes which were used to signify these elements within the surface-structures of particular films, plots, programmes. What is clear is that, from this deep-structured set of codes, extremely limited in its elements, a great number of surface strings and transformations were accomplished: for a time, in film and television, this deep-structure provided the taken-for-granted story-of-all-stories, the paradigm action-narrative, the perfect myth. In the semiotic perspective, of course, it is just this surface variety on the basis of limited transformations which would define the Western as an object of study. Nor would the transformations which we have witnessed since the early days be at all surprising. We can see, and follow at least the basic methods which would be required for us to account for the transformation of this simple-structure Western into the psychological Western, the baroque Western (Left Handed Gun?), the ‘end-of-the-West’ Western, the comic Western, the ‘spaghetti’ Western, even the Japanese and Hong-Kong Western, the ‘parody’ Western (Butch Cassidy?), paradoxically, the return-of-violence Western (The Wild Bunch), or the domestic, soap-opera Western (the TV Virginian series) or the Latin-American revolution Western. The opening sequence of a film like Hud – one of the moment when the ‘heroic’ West begins to pass into the ‘decline of the West’, in which the ‘hero’ appears driving through that familiar landscape in a Cadillac, or where the horse appears in the back of an Oldsmobile truck, far from indexing the break-up of the code, shows precisely how an opposite meaning can be achieved by the reversal of a limited number of ‘lexical items’ in the code, in order to achieve a transformation in the meaning. From this perspective, the prolonged preoccupation of mass media researchers with the issue of violence in relation to the Western film appears more and more arbitrary, bizarre. If we refuse, for a moment, to bracket and isolate the issue of violence, or the violent episode from its matrix in the complex codes governing the genre, how many other, crucial kinds of meaning were in fact transmitted whilst researchers were busy counting the bodies. This is not to say that violence was not an element in the TV Western, nor to suggest that there were not quite complex codes regulating the ways in which violence could be signified. It is to insist that what audiences were receiving was not ‘violence’ but messages about violence. Once this intervening term has been applied, certain consequences for research and analysis follow: ones which irrevocably break up the smooth line of continuity offering itself as a sort of ‘natural logic’, whereby connections could be traced between shoot-outs at the OK Corral, and delinquents knocking over old ladies in the street in Scunthorpe. The violent element or string in the narrative structure of the simple-structure Western – shoot-out, brawl, ambush, bank-raid, fist-fight, wounding, duel or massacre, like any other semantic unit in a structured discourse cannot signify anything on its own. It can only signify in terms of the structured meanings of the message as a whole. Further, its signification depends on its relation – or the sum of the relations of similarity and difference – with other
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7
elements or units. Burgelin has long ago, and definitively, reminded us that the violent or wicked acts of a villain only mean something in relation to the presence/absence of good acts. we clearly cannot draw any valid inferences from a simple enumeration of his vicious acts (it makes no difference whether there are ten or twenty of them) for the crux of the matter obviously is: what meaning is conferred on the vicious acts by the fact of their juxtaposition with the single good action . . . one could say that the meaning of what is frequent is only revealed by opposition to what is rare . . . The whole problem is therefore to identify this rare or missing item. Structural analysis provides a way of approaching this problem which traditional content analysis does not. Indeed, so tightly constructed was the rule-governed moral economy of the simple-structure Western, that one good act by a ‘villain’ not only could, but apparently had to lead to some modification or transformation of his end. Thus, presence of numerous bad-violent acts (marked)/absence of any good-redeeming act (unmarked) = unrepentant villain: can be shot down, without excuse, in the final episode and makes a brief and ‘bad’ or undistinguished death (provided the hero does not shoot the villain in the back, or unawares, and does not draw first). But, presence of bad-violent acts (marked) presence of single good-redeeming act (marked) = possible salvation or regeneration of the villain, death-bed reconciliation with hero or former cronies, restitution to wronged community, at the very least, lingering and ‘good’ death. What, we may now ask, is the meaning of ‘violence’ when it only appears and signifies anything within the tightly-organized moral economy of the Western? We have been arguing (a) the violent act or episode in a Western cannot signify in isolation, outside the structured field of meanings which is the film or programme; (b) it signifies only in relation to the other elements, and in terms of the rules and conventions which govern their combination. We must now add (c) that the meaning of such a violent act or episode cannot be fixed, single and unalterable, but must be capable of signifying different values depending on how and with what it is articulated. As the signifying element, among other elements, in a discourse, it remains polysemic. Indeed, the way it is structured in its combination with other elements serves to delimit its meanings within that specified field, and effects a ‘closure’, so that a preferred meaning is suggested. There can never be only one, single, univocal and determined meaning for such a lexical item, but, depending on how its integration within the code has been accomplished, its possible meanings will be organized within a scale which runs from dominant to subordinate. And this of course has consequences for the other – the reception – end of the communicative chain: there can be no law to ensure that the receiver will take the preferred or dominant meaning of an episode of violence in precisely the way in which it has been encoded by the producer. Typically, the isolation of the ‘violent’ elements from the Western by researchers was made on the presumption that all the other elements – setting, action, characters, iconography, movement, conduct and appearance, moral structure, etc – were present as so many inert supports for the violence: in order to warrant or endorse the violent act. It is now perfectly clear that the violence might be present only in order to warrant or endorse the character. We can thus sketch out more than one possible path of meaning through the way in which the so-called ‘content’ is organized by the codes. Take that ubiquitous semantic item of the simple Western: hero draws his gun, faster than anyone else (he seems always to have known how), and shoots the villain with bull’s-eye aim. To use Gerbner’s term,8 what norm, proposition or cultural signification is here signified? It is possible to decode this item thus: ‘The hero figure
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knows how to draw his gun faster, and shoot better than his enemy: when confronted by the villain, he shoots him dead with a single shot’. This might be called a ‘behavioural’ or ‘instrumental’ interpretation. But – research suggests – this directly behavioural ‘message’ has been stylized and conventionalized by the intervention of a highly organized set of codes and genre-conventions (a code-of-codes, or meta-code). The intervention of the codes appear to have the effect of neutralizing one set of meanings, while setting another in motion. Or, to put it better, the codes effect a transformation and displacement of the same denotative content-unit from one reference-code to another, thereby effecting a transformation in the signification. Berger and Luckmann9 have argued that ‘habitualization’ or ‘sedimentation’ serves to routinize certain actions or meanings, so as to free the foreground for new, innovative meanings. Turner10 and others have shown how ritual conventions redistribute the focus of ritual performances from one domain (e.g. the emotional or personal) to another (e.g. the cognitive, cosmological or social) domain. Freud,11 both in his analysis of ritualization in symptom-formation and in the dream-work, has shown the pivotal position of condensation and displacement in the encoding of latent materials and meanings through manifest symbolizations. Bearing this in mind, we may speculatively formulate an alternative connotative ‘reading’ for the item. ‘To be a certain kind of man (hero) means the ability to master all contingencies by the demonstration of a practised and professional “cool” ’. This reading transposes the same (denotative) content from its instrumental-behavioural connotative reference to that of decorum, conduct, the idiom and style of (masculine) action. The ‘message’ or the ‘proposition’, now, would be understood, not as a message about ‘violence’ but as a message about conduct, or even about professionalism, or perhaps even about the relation of professionalism to character. And here we recall Robert Warshow’s intuitive observation that, fundamentally, the Western is not ‘about’ violence but about codes of conduct.
I have been trying to suggest – without being able to take the example very far – how an attention to the symbolic/linguistic/coded nature of communications, far from boxing us into the closed and formal universe of signs, precisely opens out into the area where cultural content, of the most resonant but ‘latent’ kind, is transmitted: and especially the manner in which the interplay of codes and content serve to displace meanings from one frame to another, and thus to bring to the surface in ‘disguised’ forms the repressed content of a culture. It is worth, in this connection, bearing in mind Eco’s observation that12 ‘Semiology
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shows us the universe of ideologies arranged in codes and sub-codes within the universe of signs’. My own view is that, if the insights won by the advances in a semiotic perspective are not to be lost within a new kind of formalism, it is increasingly in this direction that it must be pushed.13 Let us turn, now, to a different area of programming, and a different aspect of the operation of codes. The televisual sign is a peculiarly complex one, as we know. It is a visual sign with strong, supplementary aural-verbal support. It is one of the iconic signs, in Peirce’s sense, that, whereas the form of the written sign is arbitrary in relation to its signified, the iconic sign reproduces certain elements of the signified in the form of the signifier. As Peirce says, it ‘possesses some of the properties of the thing or object represented’.14 Actually, since the iconic sign translates a three dimensional world into two representational planes, its ‘naturalism’ with respect to the referent lies not so much at the encoding side of the chain, but rather in terms of the learned perceptions with which the viewer decodes the sign. Thus, as Eco has convincingly argued, iconic signs ‘look like objects in the real world’, to put it crudely (e.g. the photograph or drawing of a /cow/, and the animal /cow/), because they ‘reproduce the conditions of perception in the receiver’.15 These conditions of ‘recognition’ in the viewer constitute some of the most fundamental perceptual codes which all culturemembers share. How, because these perceptual codes are so widely shared, denotative visual signs probably give rise to less ‘misunderstandings’ than linguistic ones. A lexical inventory of the English language would throw up thousands of words which the ordinary speaker could not denotatively comprehend: but provided enough ‘information’ is given, culturemembers would be able or competent to decode, denotatively, a much wider range of visual signifiers. In this sense, and at the denotative level, the visual sign is probably a more universal one than the linguistic sign. Whereas, in societies like ours, linguistic competence is very unequally distributed as between different classes and segments of the population (predominantly, by the family and the education system), what we might call ‘visual competence’, at the denotative level, is more universally diffused. (It is worth reminding ourselves, of course, that it is not, in fact, ‘universal’, and that we are dealing with a spectrum: there are kinds of visual representation, short of the ‘purely abstract’, which create all kinds of visual puzzles for ordinary viewers: e.g. cartoons, certain kinds of diagrammatic representation, representations which employ unfamiliar conventions, types of hotegraphic or cinematic cutting and editing, etc). It is also true that the iconic sign may support ‘mis-readings’ simply because it is so ‘natural’, so ‘transparent’. Mistakes may arise here, not because we as viewers cannot literally decode the sign (it is perfectly obvious what it is a picture of), but because we are tempted, by its very ‘naturalisation’ to ‘misread’ the image for the thing it signifies.16 With this important proviso, however, we would be surprised to find that the majority of the television audience had much difficulty in literally or denotatively identifying what the visual signs they see on the screen refer to or signify. Whereas most people require a lengthy process of education in order to become relatively competent users of the language of their speech community, they seem to pick up its visual-perceptual codes at a very early age, without formal training, and are quickly competent in its use. The visual sign is, however, also a connotative sign. And it is so pre-eminently within the discourses of modern mass communication. The level of connotation of the visual sign, of its contextual reference, of its position in the various associative fields of meanings, is precisely the point where the denoted sign intersects with the deep semantic structures of a culture, and takes on an ideological dimension. In the advertising discourse, for example, we might say that there is almost no ‘purely denotative’ communication. Every visual sign in advertising ‘connotes’ a quality, situation, value or inference which is present as an
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implication or implied meaning, depending on the connotational reference. We are all probably familiar with Barthes’ example of the /sweater/, which, in the rhetoric of advertising and fashion, always connotes, at least, ‘a warm garment’ or ‘keeping warm’, and thus by further elaboration, ‘the coming of winter’ or ‘a cold day’ In the specialized sub-codes of fashion, /sweater/ may connote ‘a fashionable style of haute couture’, or, alternatively, ‘an informal style of dress’. But, set against the right background, and positioned in the romantic sub-code, it may connote ‘long autumn walk in the woods’.17 Connotational codes of this order are, clearly, structured enough to signify, but they are more ‘open’ or ‘open-ended’ than denotative codes. What is more, they clearly contract relations with the universe of ideologies in a culture, and with history and ethnography. These connotative codes are the ‘linguistic’ means by which the domains of social life, the segmentations of culture, power and ideology are made to signify. They refer to the ‘maps of meaning’ into which any culture is organized, and those ‘maps of social reality’ have the whole range of social meanings, practices and usages, power and interest ‘written in’ to them. Connoted signifiers, Barthes has reminded us, ‘have a close communication with culture, knowledge, history, and it is through them, so to speak, that the environmental world invades the linguistic and semantic system. They are, if you like, the fragments of ideology’.18 The denotative level of the televisual sign may be bounded within certain, very complex but limited or ‘closed’ codes. But its connotative level, though bounded, remains open, subject to the formation, transformation and decay of history, and fundamentally polysemic: any such sign is potentially mappable into more than one connotative configuration. ‘Polysemy’ must not, however, be confused with pluralism. Connotative codes are not equal among themselves. Any society/culture tends, with varying degrees of closure, to impose its segmentations, its classifications of the social and cultural and political world, upon its members. There remains a dominant cultural order, though it is neither univocal nor uncontested. This question of the ‘structure of dominance’ in a culture is an absolutely crucial point. We may say, then, that the different areas of social life appear to be mapped out into connotative domains of dominant or preferred meanings. New, problematic or troubling things and events, which breach our expectancies and run counter to our ‘common-sense constructs’, to our ‘taken-for-granted’ knowledge of social structures, must be assigned to their connotational domains before they can be said to ‘make sense’: and the most common way of ‘mapping them’ is to assign the new within some domain or other of the existing ‘maps of problematic social reality’. We say dominant, not ‘determined’, because it is always possible to order, classify, assign and decode an event within more than one ‘mapping’. But we say ‘dominant’ because there exist a pattern of ‘preferred readings’, and these mappings both have the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted in them, and have themselves become institutionalized.19 The domains of ‘preferred mappings’ have the whole social order embedded in them as a set of meanings: practices and beliefs, the everyday knowledge of social structures, of ‘how things work for all practical purposes in this culture’, the rank order of power and interest, and a structure of legitimations and sanctions. Thus, to clarify a ‘misunderstanding’ at the denotative level, we need primarily to refer to the immanent world of the sign and its codes. But to clarify and resolve ‘misunderstandings’ at the level of connotation, we must refer, through the codes, to the rules of social life, of history and life-situation, of economic and political power, and, ultimately, of ideology. Further, since these connotational mappings are ‘structured in dominance’ but not closed, the communicative process consists, not in the unproblematic assignment of every visual item to its position within a set of prearranged codes, but of performative rules – rules of competence and use, of logics-in-use – which seek to enforce or prefer one semantic domain over another, and rule
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items into and out of their appropriate meaning-sets. Formal semiology has too often neglected this level of interpretive work, though this forms in fact the deep-structure of a great deal of broadcast time in television, especially in the political and other ‘sensitive areas’ of programming. In speaking of dominant meanings, then, we are not simply talking about a one-sided process, which governs how any event will be signified (we might think, for example, of the recent coup in Chile): it also consists of the ‘work’ required to enforce, win plausibility for and command as legitimate a de-coding of the event within the dominant definition in which it has been connotatively signified. Dr Terni remarked, in his paper20 that, ‘By the word reading we mean not only the capacity to identify and decode a certain number of signs, but also the subjective capacity to put them into a creative relation between themselves and with other signs: a capacity which is, by itself, the condition for a complete awareness of one’s total environment’. Our only quarrel here is with the notion of ‘subjective capacity’, as if the denotative reference of the televisual sign is an objective process, but the connotational and connective level is an individualized and private matter. Quite the opposite seems to us to be the case. The televisual process takes ‘objective’ (i.e. systemic) responsibility precisely for the relations which disparate signs contract with one another, and thus continually delimits and prescribes into what ‘awareness of ones total environment’ these items are arranged. This brings us, then, to the key question of ‘misunderstandings’ between the encoders and decoders of the television message: and thus, by a long but necessary detour, to the matter of ‘cultural policies’ designed to ‘facilitate better communication’, to ‘make communication more effective’. Television producers or ‘encoders’, who find their message failing to ‘get across’ are frequently concerned to straighten out the kinks in the communicative chain, and thus to facilitate the ‘effectiveness’ of their messages. A great deal of research has been devoted to trying to discover how much of the message the audience retains or recalls. At the denotative level (if we can make the analytic distinction for the moment), there is no doubt that some ‘misunderstandings’ exist, though we have no real idea how widespread this is. And we can see possible explanations for it. The viewer does not ‘speak the language’, figuratively if not literally: he or she cannot follow the complex logic of argument or exposition: or the concepts are too alien: or the editing (which arranges items within an expository logic or ‘narrative’, and thus in itself proposes connections between discrete things) is too swift, truncated, sophisticated, etc. At another level, encoders also mean that their audience has ‘made sense’ of the message in a way different from that intended. What they really mean is that viewers are not operating within the dominant or preferred code. Two ideally is the perfectly transparent communication. Instead, what they have to confront is the fact of ‘systematically distorted communication’. In recent years, discrepancies of this kind are usually accounted for in terms of individually ‘aberrant’ readings, attributed to ‘selective perception’. ‘Selective perception’ is the door via which, in recent research, a residual pluralism is reserved within the sphere of a highly structured, a-symmetrical cultural operation. Of course, there will always be individual, private, variant readings. But my own tentative view is that ‘selective perception’ is almost never as selective, random, or privatized, as the concept suggests. The patterns exhibit more structuring and clustering than is normally assumed. Any new approach to audience studies, via the concept of ‘de-coding’ would have to begin with a critique of ‘selective perception’ theory. Eco has recently pointed to another, intermediary, level of structuration, between competence in the dominant code, and ‘aberrant’ individual readings: that level provided by sub-cultural formations. But, since sub-cultures are, by definition, differentiated articulations
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within a culture, it is more useful to specify this mediation within a somewhat different framework.21 The very general typology sketched below is an attempt to reinterpret the notion of ‘misunderstandings’ (which we find inadequate) in terms of certain broadly-defined societal perspectives which audiences might adopt towards the televisual message. It attempts to apply Gramsci’s work on ‘hegemonic’ and ‘corporate’ ideological formations22 and Parkin’s recent work on types of meaning systems. I should like now (adapting Parkin’s schema) to put into discussion four ‘ideal-type’ positions from which decodings of mass communications by the audience can be made: and thus to re-present the common-sense notion of ‘misunderstandings’ in terms of a theory of ‘systematically distorted communications’.23 Literal or denotative ‘errors’ are relatively unproblematic. They represent a kind of noise in the channel. But ‘misreadings’ of a message at the connotative or contextual level are a different matter. They have, fundamentally, a societal, not a communicative, basis. They signify, at the ‘message’ level the structural conflicts, contradictions and negotiations of economic, political and cultural life. The first position we want to identify is that of the dominant or hegemonic code. (There are, of course, many different codes and sub-codes required to produce an event within the dominant code). When the viewer takes the connoted meaning from, say, a television newscast or current affairs programme, full and straight, and decodes the message in terms of the reference-code in which it has been coded, we might say that the viewer is operating inside the dominant code. This is the ideal-typical case of ‘perfectly transparent communication’, or as close as we are likely to come to it ‘for all practical purposes’. Next (here we are amplifying Parkin’s model), we would want to identify the professional code. This is the code (or set of codes, for we are here dealing with what might be better called meta-codes) which the professional broadcasters employ when transmitting a message which has already been signified in a hegemonic manner. The professional code is ‘relatively independent’ of the dominant code, in that it applies criteria and operations of its own, especially those of a technico-practical nature. The professional code, however, operates within the ‘hegemony’ of the dominant code. Indeed, it serves to reproduce the dominant definitions precisely by bracketting the hegemonic quality, and operating with professional codings which relate to such questions as visual quality, news and presentational values, televisual quality, ‘professionalism’, etc. The hegemonic interpretation of the politics of Northern Ireland, or the Chilean coup or the Industrial Relations Bill are given by political elites: the particular choice of presentational occasions and formats, the selection of personnel, the choice of images, the ‘staging’ of debates, etc are selected by the operation of the professional code.24 How the broadcasting professionals are able both to operate with ‘relatively autonomous’ codes of their own, while acting in such a way as to reproduce (not without contradiction) the hegemonic signification of events is a complex matter which cannot be further spelled out here. It must suffice to say that the professionals are linked with the defining elites not only by the institutional position of broadcasting itself as an ‘ideological apparatus’,25 but more intimately by the structure of access (i.e. the systematic ‘over-accessing’ of elite personnel and ‘definitions of the situation’ in television). It may even be said that the professional codes serve to reproduce hegemonic definitions specifically by not overtly biassing their operations in their direction: ideological reproduction therefore takes place here inadvertently, unconsciously, ‘behind men’s backs’. Of course, conflicts, contradictions and even ‘misunderstandings’ regularly take place between the dominant and the professional significations and their signifying agencies. The third position we would identify is that of the negotiated code or position. Majority audiences probably understand quite adequately what has been dominantly defined and professionally signified. The
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dominant definitions, however, are hegemonic precisely because they represent definitions of situations and events which are ‘in dominance’, and which are global. Dominant definitions connect events, implicitly or explicitly, to grand totalizations, to the great syntagmatic views-of-the-world: they take ‘large views’ of issues: they relate events to ‘the national interest’ or to the level of geo-politics, even if they make these connections in truncated, inverted or mystified ways. The definition of a ‘hegemonic’ viewpoint is (a) that it defines within its terms the mental horizon, the universe of possible meanings of a whole society or culture; and (b) that it carries with it the stamp of legitimacy – it appears coterminous with what is ‘natural’, ‘inevitable’, ‘taken for granted’ about the social order. Decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements: it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations, while, at a more restricted, situational level, it makes its own ground-rules, it operates with ‘exceptions’ to the rule. It accords the priveleged position to the dominant definition of events, whilst reserving the right to make a more negotiated application to ‘local conditions’, to its own more corporate positions. This negotiated version of the dominant ideology is thus shot through with contradictions, though these are only on certain occasions brought to full visibility. Negotiated codes operate through what we might call particular or situated logics: and these logics arise from the differential position of those who occupy this position in the spectrum, and from their differential and unequal relation to power. The simplest example of a negotiated code is that which governs the response of a worker to the notion of an Industrial Relations Bill limiting the right to strike, or to arguments for a wages-freeze. At the level of the national-interest economic debate, he may adopt the hegemonic definition, agreeing that ‘we must all pay ourselves less in order to combat inflation’, etc. This, however, may have little or no relation to his willingness to go on strike for better pay and conditions, or to oppose the Industrial Relations Bill at the level of his shop-floor or union organization. We suspect that the great majority of so-called ‘misunderstandings’ arise from the disjunctures between hegemonic-dominant encodings and negotiated-corporate decodings. It is just these mis-matches in the levels which most provoke defining elites and professionals to identify a ‘failure in communications’. Finally, it is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and connotative inflection given to an event, but to determine to decode the message in a globally contrary way. He detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference. This is the case of the viewer who listens to a debate on the need to limit wages, but who ‘reads’ every mention of ‘the national interest’ as ‘class interest’. He is operating with what we must call an oppositional code. One of the most significant political moments (they also coincide with crisispoints within the broadcasting organizations themselves for obvious reasons) is the point when events which are normally signified and decoded in a negotiated way begin to be given an oppositional reading. The question of cultural policies now falls, awkwardly, into place. When dealing with social communications, it is extremely difficult to identify as a neutral, educational goal, the task of ‘improving communications’ or of ‘making communications more effective’, at any rate once one has passed beyond the strictly denotative level of the message. The educator or cultural policy-maker is performing one of his most partisan acts when he colludes with the re-signification of real conflicts and contradictions as if they were simply kinks in the communicative chain. Denotative mistakes are not structurally significant. But connotative and contextual ‘misunderstandings’ are, or can be, of the highest significance. To interpret what are in fact essential elements in the systematic distortions of a socio-communications system as if they are technical faults in transmission is to misread a deep-structure process for a
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surface phenomenon. The decision to intervene in order to make the hegemonic codes of dominant elites more effective and transparent for the majority audience is not a technically neutral, but a political one. To ‘misread’ a political choice as a technical one represents a type of unconscious collusion with the dominant interests, a form of collusion to which social science researchers are all too prone. Though the sources of such mystification are both social and structural, the actual process is greatly facilitated by the operation of discrepant codes. It would not be the first time that scientific researchers had ‘unconsciously’ played a part in the reproduction of hegemony, not by openly submitting to it, but simply by operating the ‘professional bracket’.
Notes 1 Umberto Eco, ‘Does the Public Harm Television?’ Cyclostyled paper for Italia Prize Seminar, Venice (1973) 2 Cf: Dell Hymes’ critique of transformational approaches to language, via concepts of ‘performance’ and ‘competence’ in ‘On Communicative Competence’, in Sociolinguistics, ed. Pride & Holmes Penguin Education (1972) 3 J.D. Halloran, ‘Understanding Television’. Paper for Council of Europe Colloquy. Leicester (1973) 4 Halloran, ibid 5 Gerbner, et al, Violence in TV Drama: A Study of Trends & Symbolic Functions. Annenberg School, Univ. of Pennsylvania. (1970) 6 This example is more fully discussed in Part II, ‘New Approaches to Content’, Violence In The TV Drama-Series. CCS Report to Home Office Inquiry Into TV/Violence, Centre for Mass Comm. Research. Shuttleworth, Carmargo, Lloyd and Hall. Birmingham University. (Forthcoming) 7 O. Burgelin, ‘Structural Analysis & Mass Communications’. Studies in Broadcasting, No. 6. Nippon Hoso Kyokai (1968) 8 For ‘proposition-analysis’, see Gerbner, ‘Ideological Perspectives & Political Tendencies in News Reporting’, Journalism Quarterly 41 (1964) and E. Sullerot, ‘Use Etude De Presse . . .’ Temps Modernes vol.XX No. 226 (1965). For ‘norm-analysis’, Cf: Gerbner, in Violence & The Mass Media, Task Force Report to Eisenhower Commission on Causes & Prevention of Violence, US Printing Office (1969) 9 Berger & Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality. Penguin (1971) 10 V.W. Turber, The Ritual Process. Routledge & Kegan Paul (1969) 11 Especially in Interpretation of Dreams 12 U. Eco, ‘Articulations of Cinematic Code’, Cinemantics 1. 13 Cf: developments of this argument in S. Hall, ‘Determinations of The News Photograph’, WPCS 3 (CCCS, 1972), and ‘Open & Closed Uses of Structuralism’ (stencilled: CCCS 1973) 14 C. S. Peirce, Speculative Grammar 15 Eco. op.cit 16 Cf: S. Hall, ‘Determinations . . .’. op.cit 17 R. Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of The Image’, IN WPCS 1. CCCS, B’ham (1971) 18 R. Barthes, Elements of Semiology. Cape (1967) 19 Cf: the section on ‘Codes of Connotation’, in S. Hall, op.cit., and more generally, in ‘Deviance, Politics & The Media’, in Deviance & Social Control, ed. McIntosh & Rock, Tavistock (Forthcoming) 20 P. Terni. Memorandum. Council of Europe Colloquy, Leicester (1973) 21 Eco, ‘Does The Public Harm Television?, op.cit 22 Antonio Gramsci, Selections From Prison Notebooks, Lawrence & Wishart (1971): F. Parkin, Class Inequality & Political Order, McGibbon & Kee (1971) 23 Cf: J. Habermas, ‘Systematically Distorted Communications’. In Recent Sociology 2, ed P. Dretzel, Collier-McMillan (1970) 24 Cf: S. Hall, ‘External/Internal Dialectic In Broadcasting’, In Fourth Symposium on Broadcasting, Dept of Extra Mural Studies University of Manchester (1972) 25 Cf: L. Althusser, ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin & Philosophy, And Other Essays, New Left Books (1971)
23 Reconceptualising the media audience Towards an ethnography of audience David Morley What I am going to deal with in this paper are some of the implications of the realisation, within mass media research, that one cannot approach the problem of the ‘effects’ of the media on the audience as if the contents of the media impinged directly on to passive minds. The realisation that people in fact assimilate, select from and reject ‘communications’ from the media has led to the development of the ‘uses and gratifications’ model of the media, Halloran advising us that ‘we must get away from the habit of thinking in terms of what the media do to people and substitute for it the idea of what people do with the media.’ This approach highlights the important fact that different members of the media audience may ‘use’ and interpret any particular programme in a quite different way from how the communicator intended it, and in quite different ways from other members of the audience. As Stuart Hall argues in ‘Encoding and decoding in the television discourse’1 this entails a recognition of the fundamentally polysemic nature of the message – by the sheer fact that the message can be interpreted in a number of different ways, by ‘mapping it into different connotative configurations or maps of meaning. But, as he goes on to argue: ‘Polysemy must not be confused with pluralism. Connotative codes are not equal among themselves. Any society/culture tends, with varying degrees of closure, to impose its segmentations, its classifications of the social and cultural and political world, upon its members. There remains a dominant cultural order, though it is neither univocal or uncontested’ (p. 13). These ‘closures’ of the message are the means by which the audience is ‘directed towards’ a reading of the message in terms of the preferred or dominant meanings – for example, the way in which the spoken commentary in a news broadcast directs us towards a particular interpretation of the visual images on the screen: ‘although there can be no law to ensure that the receiver will take the preferred or dominant meaning of an episode . . . in precisely the way in which it has been encoded by the producer’ (Stuart Hall op.cit.). We need to break fundamentally with the ‘uses and gratifications’ approach, with its psychologistic problematic and its emphasis on individual differences of interpretation. Of course, there will always be individual ‘private’ readings; but we need to see the way in which these readings are patterned into cultural structures and clusters. What is needed here is an approach which links differential interpretations back to the socio-economic structure of society – showing how members of different groups and classes, sharing different ‘cultural codes’ will interpret a given message differently, not just at the level of idiosyncratic personal differences of interpretation, but in a way systematically related to their socio-economic position. In short we need to see how the different sub-cultural structures and formations within the audience, and the sharing of different cultural codes and competencies amongst
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different groups and classes, determines the decoding of the message for different sections of the audinece. We can usefully begin an analysis of the situation of the media audience in relation to the message by looking at the role of the education system, since the education system is a key determinant of the levels and kinds of cultural codes and competencies acquired by the audience. No other ideological apparatus of the state has the obligatory audience of the totality of the children in a capitalist social formation 7 hours a day for 5 days a week, during the most vulnerable years of their development. As Baudelot and Establet2 argue in their book, ‘L’école Capitaliste en France’ (trans. John Downing): ‘The other ideological apparatuses (bourgeois parties, TV, advertising, the church, etc.) which operate either simultaneously or later on, are only enabled to fulfill their function of ideological domination on the basis of the primary conditioning realised by the educational apparatus. The educational apparatus therefore occupies a privileged position in the superstructure of the capitalist mode of production, since it is the only one out of all the ideological apparatuses to inculcate the dominant ideology on the basis of the formation of labour power’. The education system structures the audiences of the different sections of the media. There is a close correlation between degrees of education and choices of media material: the audience of the ‘quality press’ and their TV equivalents (in the form of documentaries, etc.) is largely coextensive with that group of people who have been educated beyond the minimum age. Thus, the media reflect and reinforce the levels of public discussion institutionalised by the education system. The fact that only an educated minority possess the cultural competencies necessary to appropriate the products of those sections of the media which provide more detailed and explanatory accounts of developments in society has a clear parallel with the aspect of the situation pointed to by Pierre Bourdieu3 in his essay on ‘Cultural Reproduction & Social Reproduction’: ‘The inheritance of cultural wealth which has been accumulated and bequeathed by previous generations only really belongs (though it is theoretically offered to everyone) to those endowed with the means of appropriating it for themselves . . . the apprehension and possession of cultural goods as symbolic goods are only possible for those who hold the code making it possible to decipher them . . .’ (p. 73) Indeed, Bourdieu points to the existence of ‘an extremely pronounced relationship’ (p. 76) between the level of education and participation in all forms of prestigious cultural activities. Thus he sees the education system as the prime agent of distribution of the cultural competencies necessary for these activities. However, he goes on to argue that the determination of educational achievement lies in the prior process of primary socialisation in the family – he argues that what is necessary for educational success is ‘linguistic and cultural competency and that relationship of familiarity with culture which can only be produced by family upbringing when it transmits the dominant culture.’ (p. 80). This argument is obviously similar to that of Basil Bernstein, and it will now be necessary for us to attempt to come to grips with his approach to education and the transmission of culture. Bernstein’s concern is with the distribution of cultural competencies throughout society; he distinguishes between two basic forms of competency: restricted code and elaborated code ‘these codes can be seen as different kinds of communicative competence . . .’4 (Class, Codes and Control, Paladin, 1973, p. 168), which he says are characteristic, in the main, of the working class and middle class respectively, and he locates the origin of these different codes in the different family styles of socialisation of these classes. Bernstein’s basic thesis can be represented schematically thus:
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CLASS
FAMILY TYPE
STYLE OF SOCIALISATION
CODE
MODE OF UNDERSTANDING
working class
positional role system
closed mode of communication and control
restricted
rigid particularistic context-bound implicit
middle class
personal role system
open mode of communication and control
elaborated
flexible universalistic context-free explicit
Bernstein himself offers a summary of (one variant of) his thesis in ‘A sociolinguistic approach to socialisation . . .’ (Bernstein op.cit. pp. 188/9): ‘We started with the view that the social organisation and sub-culture of the lower working class would be likely to generate a distinctive form of communication through which the genes of social class would be transmitted. Secondly, two general types of linguistic codes were postulated and their social origins and regulative consequences were analysed. Thirdly, it was suggested that the subculture of the lower working class would be transmitted through a restricted code while that of the middle class would realise both elaborated and restricted codes. This causal link was considered to be very imprecise and omitted the dynamics of the process . . . (So) . . . the fourth step entailed the construction of two types of family role system, positional and personal, their causally related “open” and “closed” communications systems and their procedures of social control. The fifth step made the causal link between restricted and elaborated codes and their two modes with positional-and person-oriented family role system . . .’ Thus Bernstein introduces family type as the crucial intermediary variable between class and code. He says, (op.cit. p. 176): ‘I shall now look at the relationships between role systems and linguistic codes, as the connection between social class and linguistic codes is too imprecise. Such a relationship omits the dynamics of the causal relationship. In order to examine, these dynamics it is necessary to look at the nature of the role system and its procedures of social control’. However, the link between class and code is at times almost qualified out of existence, as the link between class and family type is qualified (see pp. 186 and 270) so that positional and personal family types may be found in both middle class and working class, while the link between family type and mode of control is qualified so that ‘in any one family, or even in any one context of control, all 3 modes of control may be used.’ Thus, at most, the working class tends to be characterised by a positional type of family which tends to use a closed mode of communication and control. Further, of course, the restricted code is to be found among the middle class too, so the codes are not exclusive to the two classes, although it is exceptional, in this schema, to find the elaborated code among the working class. As against the emphasis of Bernstein’s argument, I would claim that if we notice that working class children have a set of negative predispositions towards the school – such as selfdepreciation, devaluation of the school and its sanctions, a resigned attitude to failure – and that they are the carriers of certain cultural traditions which make them hostile to the school and result in their virtual self-elimination from the education system – then the problem is to determine out of what past and present experience these cultural traditions and predispositions arise and maintain themselves. ‘Cultural values do not descend from heaven to influence the course of history. They are abstractions by an observer, based on the observation of certain similarities in the way groups of people behave, either in different situations or, over
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time or both. Even though one can often make accurate predictions about the way groups and individuals will behave over short periods of time on the basis of such abstractions, as such they do not explain the behaviour. To explain behaviour in terms of cultural values is to engage in circular reasoning . . .’ (Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, p. 436)5 Thus, the negative predispositions of working class children towards the school must be understood, as Bourdieu says (op.cit. p. 83): as an anticipation, based upon the unconscious estimation of the objective probabilities of success possessed by the whole category, of the sanctions objectively reserved by the school for those classes . . . deprived of cultural capital. . . . (Thus) the functionalist sociologists who announce the brave new world when, at the conclusion of a longitudinal survey of academic and social careers, they discover that, as though by a preestablished harmony individuals had hoped for nothing that they had not achieved, and obtained nothing that they have not hoped for, are simply the least forgivable victims of the ideological effect which is produced by the school when it cuts off from their social conditions of production all predispositions regarding the school such as ‘expectations’ ‘aspirations’ . . . and thus tends to cover up the fact that objective conditions – and in the individual case, the laws of the academic market – determine aspirations by determining the extent to which they can be satisfied. John Downing, in his paper ‘Recent Marxist theories of Ideology’ remarks that Baudelot and Establet, in their study of ‘The Capitalist School in France’, conclude in a familiar vein that there is a virtual segregation in the French school apparatus between the 25% of achievers and the 75% of non-achievers. But, he goes on, so far from arguing in the usual circular fashion of many educational sociologists . . . that the reason for this segregation of achievement is that bourgeois and petit-bourgeois families have a cultural inheritance mechanism in their style of primary socialisation, they insist that the primary origin of this schism in the growing generation is the division in the capitalist labour market. Thus the structure of the education system is seen as being determined by the structure of the division of labour in society; the educational apparatus is seen as being geared to the reproduction of the conditions of production, which includes the need for manual workers, together with professionals and administrators, and the need for the right orientation to one’s place in production. The structure of the education system is thus organised in such a way as to reproduce the entire range of categories of workers, and this takes place via the definition and demarcation of ‘types of child’; but the fact that there is an inheritance factor is derived from the primary reality of the schism in the capitalist labour market, and not the other way round. Baudelot and Establet point to the fact that at the top end of the educational apparatus, in those sections that cater for the future holders of authority positions in bourgois society, the curricula encourage pupils to ‘think bourgeois’ for themselves, to be able independently to articulate and if necessary justify bourgeois perspectives, procedures and problematics. In the lower sections of the apparatus, catering for the majority destined to be ordinary workers, the curricula tend rather to teach ‘bourgeois ideas’ as a given set, without encouraging pupils to arrive at any independent understanding of the principles on which the ideas are
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based. Now the difference pointed to here is obviously close to an important dimension of Bernstein’s distinction between ‘elaborated code’ (in which principles are made explicit and individuals are thus given access to the grounds of their experience – experience – grounds which they can then develop and change) and ‘restricted code’ (in which principles are never made explicit and therefore are not made available to inspection and change). But the crucial difference here is that Baudelot and Establet locate the origin if this difference in different styles of teaching in the school, not in primary styles of family socialisation, and propose that the origin of the different styles of teaching lies in the structure of the capitalist labour market.6
Hegemony and educability As Althusser7 has pointed out ‘It is in the forms and under the forms of ideological subjection that provision is made for the reproduction of the skills of labour power.’ This is a dimension of analysis which Bernstein simply does not fit into his system; indeed, the concept of hegemony nowhere figures in his analysis. Rosen remarks (Language and Class, p. 6):8 . . . strangest of all in this system, the ruling class do not figure at all. When Bernstein talks of social control he is not talking about the ways in which one class controls or is controlled by another, but only of the ways in which members of the same class control each other. In his 1973 Postscript to Vol. 1 of Class, Codes and Control, Bernstein says that he has been ‘trying to do research into . . . education as an agency of social control’ (p. 257). In his introduction to that volume he has lamented the fact that, in the end: The left wing . . . saw the work as . . . an attempt at the ideological level at reducing the value of ‘natural’ forms of communication, and aimed at breaking these in order to impose middle class values and meaning more successfully in the schools. (p. 37) His argument is that: ‘The school is necessarily concerned with the transmission and development of universalistic orders of meaning’ (p. 221) and against some interpretations of his thesis he claims that: The introduction of the child to the universalistic meanings of public forms of thought is not compensatory education – it is education. It is not in itself making children middle class . . . (Though) . . . The implicit values underlying the form and contents of the educational environment might. (p. 225) Of course, as he concedes: It is also the case that the school is implicitly and explicitly transmitting values and their attendant morality . . . Further, these values and morals affect the content of educational knowledge . . . Thus the working class child may be placed at a considerable disadvantage in relation to the total culture of the school. (p. 222)
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For: ‘Many of the contexts of our schools are unwittingly drawn from aspects of the symbolic world of the middle class’ (p. 225). Yet, he maintains, crucially: Elaborated codes are not necessarily middle class communication procedures; they are not necessarily instruments for the alienation of the working class; neither does it follow that they function as reproducers of a particular class structure . . . (p. 262) Thus Bernstein holds that: Educational institutions are faced with the problem of encouraging children to change and extend the way they naturally use language . . . (In terms of this paper) . . . this becomes a switch from restricted to elaborated codes. (p. 189) The question is, what kind of a problem this is: whether it is a technical problem, to be situated in the problematic of ‘educability’, or a political problem to be situated in the problematic of ‘hegemony’. I would suggest that there is a clear parallel with the situation pointed to by Stuart Hall (op.cit. pp. 18–19): ‘When dealing with social communications it is extremely difficult to identify as a neutral, educational goal, the task of “improving communications” or of “making communications more effective”, at any rate once one has passed beyond the strictly denotative level of the message . . . Denotative mistakes [in decoding – DM] are not structurally significant. But connotative and contextual “misunderstandings” are, or can be, of the highest significance. To interpret what are in fact essential elements in the systematic distortions of a socio-communications system as if they were technical faults in transmission is to misread a deep-structure process for a surface phenomenon. The decision to intervene in order to make the hegemonic codes of dominant elites more effective and transparent for the majority audience is not a technically neutral, but a political one.’ Similarly, Eco remarks, in his notes on the possibilities of a ‘semiotic guerrilla warfare’, that: ‘The gap between the transmitted and the received messages is not only an aberration, which needs to be reduced – it can also be developed so as to broaden the receivers’ freedom.9 In political activity, it is not indispensable to change a given message: it would be enough (or perhaps better) to change the attitude of the audience so as to introduce a different decoding of the message – or in order to isolate the intentions of the transmitter and thus to criticise them.’ (Eco in WPCS no. 3, p. 121) I would propose that Bernstein’s position is not tenable when he claims that ‘An elaborated code does not entail any specific value system’ (p. 212) – that, in short, the elaborated code is simply a superior cognitive technique. He does qualify this by saying that ‘The value system of the middle class does penetrate the texture of the very learning context itself ’ (p. 212) – but this is seen as a contingent, and therefore in principle, separable ‘contamination’. While I would not want to ‘collapse’ the notion of education into that of ideological indoctrination, and while I would align myself with Rosen’s proviso that ‘there are many aspects of language usually acquired through education which, given favourable conditions, give access to more powerful ways of thinking’ (Language and Class, p. 19), I would yet maintain that it is in the conceptual forms of the dominant ideology that the elaborated code is transmitted in the education system and that its ideological aspect is neither contingent, nor readily separable.
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Bernstein’s attempted disavowal (in ‘A Critique of the concept of compensatory education’) of some interpretations of his work in terms of the cultural/linguistic deprivation of working class children is, as Rosen argues, less than convincing – for Bernstein’s theory claims that there is something lacking in working class language – elaborated code. Moreover, Rosen goes on, the ‘respect’ Bernstein accords to the restricted code has a hollow ring to it when ‘rationality’ is excluded from it: ‘restricted codes draw upon metaphor, whereas elaborated codes draw upon rationality’ (Language and Class, p. 14). Bernstein’s claim (Class, Codes and Control, op.cit. p. 211) that despite the difficulties involved, he is attempting ‘to avoid implicit value judgements about the relative worth of speech systems and the cultures which they symbolise’ is indicative of his failure to grasp the fact that questions of the ‘relative worth’ of cultures are inevitably political questions that must be related to the structure of power in society. Thus Parkin notes (Class Inequality and Political Order, p. 83):10 ‘Those groups in society which occupy positions of the greatest power and privilege will also tend to have the greatest access to the means of legitimation . . . the social/political definitions of those in dominant positions tend to become objectified and enshrined in the major institutional orders, so providing the moral framework of the entire social system . . . dominant values tend to set the standards for what is considered to be objectively “right” . . . In the sphere of culture . . . the tastes of the dominant classes are accorded positive evaluation, while the typical cultural tastes and pursuits of the subordinate classes are negatively evaluated . . . the characteristic speech patterns and linguistic usages of the dominant class are generally regarded as “correct”, or what counts as the grammer of the language . . . and the usages of the subordinate class are often said to be incorrect or ungrammatical where they differ from the former, even though such usages represent the statistical norm’. As Nell Keddie argues in her introduction to ‘The Myth of Cultural Deprivation’, our very notions of ‘rationality’, ‘intelligence’ and ‘educability’ are themselves socially constructed: ‘Logics are socially constructed and socially situated among the group to whom they are the logical (or rational) way of thinking and doing’. She argues that the formal logic of western culture, far from being absolute, is no different in this respect from the logic of any other social group. This dominant culture provides us with our primary definitions of ‘rationality’, etc. and it is in terms of these definitions that other cultures are then evaluated. Thus in our society, children from class and ethnic sub-cultures are defined as being ‘culturally deprived’ – in the sense of not being participants in the dominant culture – and as such are assumed to lack the linguistic and cognitive means to carry out abstract thought. It can at least be argued that all cultures – class and ethnic – may have their own logics which are capable of grappling with abstract thought. Indeed Labov has shown that black non-standard English is perfectly capable of sophisticated argument, logic and conceptualisation. Keddie therefore argues that ‘we in Britain should reconsider the notion that working class speech is unable to cope with what are felt to be high level abstractions and consider whether, like black non-standard English, it is better seen as a dialectical variation of standard English rather than a different kind of speech from that required for formal and logical thinking.’ (Keddie p. 13) While, as Rosen says, it would be extremely foolhardy to claim that working class language was ‘as fine a tool as could be devised for communications and thinking’, it does have its own strengths, in terms of which middle class language can be said to be lacking, and does, as Bernstein himself points out ‘give access to a vast potential of meanings’, which have not been explored by researchers.
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The structure of the audiences Bernstein concludes his paper on ‘Social Class, Language and Socialisation’ with the claim that he has ‘Tried to show how the class system acts upon the deep structure of communication in the process of socialisation.’ Rosen remarks: Whatever else he has done, he has not done that – for the simple reason that he never examines the class system. By implication only, we are provided with a system consisting of two classes, called the working class and the middle class. No further attempt is made at differentiation, whether in terms of history, traditions, job experience, ethnic origins, residential patterns, level of organisation and class consciousness. (Language and Class, p. 6) He asks: How does the writer know about these features of working class life? Do his ideas derive from a study of workers in industry? Which industry? Where? Or are we being offered a stereotype of the unskilled worker assembled from the descriptive literature of sociology? (Language and Class, p. 8) Rosen points out that Bernstein’s theory makes no differentiations for the different sectors of the working class – ignoring the fact that although all members of this class share a ‘common occupational function and social status’ – in the sense of having to sell their labour power – the different sections of this class differ in very important secondary characteristics, which will in turn affect how they use language. Thus he suggests that the kind of question we need to ask is: What distinguishes the language of Liverpool dockers from that of Durham miners or Clydeside shipbuilders or London railwaymen or Coventry car-workers? Or for that matter, what distinguishes the language of Liverpool dockers from that of London dockers? If questions of this kind are not asked, then we take away from people their history, be they working class or middle class . . . We have no right to assume a linguistic uniformity based on general ‘occupational function and status’. (Language and Class, p. 9) He goes on to suggest that: . . . The most articulate workers are those who have actively participated in the creation and maintenance of their own organisations, and amongst these the most articulate will be those who in that process have encountered and helped to formulate theories about society and how to change it. (Language and Class, p. 9) As he has earlier pointed out (p. 7), in Bernstein’s theory: ‘No attention is paid to that vast area of critical working class experience, the encounter with exploitation at the place of work and the response to it . . .’ Nor is attention paid to the socialising influence of:
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. . . the organisations created by and maintained by the working class themselves . . . everything from political parties. Trade Unions and non-conformist chapels to brass bands and pigeon-racing clubs. The crucial relevance and influence of working class organisation can be seen most clearly in the strike situation (cf. Benyon: ‘Working for Ford’ p. 277 and pp. 302–6) – where for employers hoping to influence workers’ decisions on a pay deal the hope must be that the decision will be taken by each worker in isolation. Thus, during the 1969 strike at Ford’s Halewood, the employers sent a letter to the homes of all employees, saying that ‘it seems a sensible idea to set out for you once again – so that you can read it in the calm of your own home – what the company regards as the really crucial issues affecting all of us at this time’ – (my emphasis). Following this a secret ballot produced acceptance of the pay offer, but the result of the ballot was overturned at a series of mass meetings. The media ‘explained’ this by pointing to the ‘emotional’ nature of mass meetings, and claimed that the men were afraid to oppose their leadership in such a situation, and were intimidated. As Benyon remarks: In finishing a strike, workers have decided to go back into a plant and work on an assembly line on a vast shop floor, alongside hundreds of other men. Their survival in that situation is tied up with relationship with those other men. On the basis of this real interdependence, these workers will tend towards the development of a ‘collectivist’ mode of thought, in terms of which the secret ballot is divisive – for it denies them access in the decision-making situation to the collectivity and thereby to themselves. The above kind of example could be fitted into a generalised model of the media audience where ‘group affiliation’ is seen as filtering or mediating the message to the individual and influencing his understanding of and response to it. But what is actually needed is a much more highly differentiated model of the audience which distinguishes A. Between the different dimensions of ‘group affiliation’ which may be relevant to an individual and on the basis of which he will be a participant in different codes and cultures, and also B. Between the specific contents of the shared codes and sub-cultures: primarily between situations where ‘group affiliation’ does act as a ‘filter’ between the message and the individual, in the sense that the shared culture of the group is dissonant with that of the media, and situations where ‘group affiliation’ reinforces the message – where the group’s culture is in line with that of the media. We must not see the audience as an undifferentiated mass but as a complex structure, made up of a number of overlapping subgroups, each with its own history and cultural traditions. While we must steer clear of the dangers of a ‘substantialist’ mode of analysis which would see ‘culture’ as automatically determined or generated by social position, we must investigate the sociological basis of socio-linguistic codes, sub cultures and ideologies. In this connection, the primary factors we need to analyse are: Position in the class structure + Occupational differences (As Labov says, our knowledge of the relationship between language and work is meagre.) Regional situation (Dialects) + Differential residential patterns: urban/rural, etc. Ethnic origin (Ethnic sub-cultures) Age (Notions of ‘youth culture’ etc.)
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Then we need to look at the way in which the influence of all these factors is refracted through their influence on the level of education ‘achieved’ by individuals, and then in turn, the specific influence of education in ‘distributing’ cultural codes and competencies throughout the society. Beyond this we need to analyse the autonomous influence of historical, cultural and religious traditions, and the influence of an individual’s membership of different groups and organisations which are the institutional bases of these traditions. These factors, I would suggest, will be relevant to the analysis (in terms of Saussure’s distinction) at the level of language.11 Gigliol points out that: ‘The relation between languages (and, by implication, socio-linguistic codes, sub-cultures and ideologies) and social groups cannot be taken for granted, but is a problem which must be ethnographically investigated’.12 As we move from this level of analysis to an ‘ethnography of speaking’ – i.e. a comparative analysis of speech events, of their elements and of the functions fulfilled by speech in particular settings – we begin to deal with the complications of the influence of specific social contexts on the ‘realisation’ in speech of basic language codes. Here the problems become enormously complicated, in terms for instance, of the existence of a plurality of codes or code varieties within the same linguistic community, and the existence of rules by means of which a speaker selects one or another code as suitable for a particular social context, and the ongoing negotiations of these rules by participants in a social situation. But what is crucial is that we should map all these complications into a notion of a dominant cultural order. The plurality of cultural and sociolinguistic codes must not blind us to the fact that these codes are structured in dominance within the hegemony of the map of social reality drawn by the dominant/preferred meaning system. As Parkin argues: ‘The major problem raised by the class differentiated view of the normative order is that of social control. If the subordinate class were to subscribe to a value system sharply distinguished from that of the dominant class, then the latter’s normative control over the former would be seriously diminished. In this situation the dominant class would have to rely on physical coercion as a substitute for moral suasion . . . Thus, in societies where the use or threatened use of force does not appear to be the prevailing strategy of social control, we are bound to have reservations about the validity of a class differential model of the moral order.’ It is here that Parkin’s formulation of the problem13 provides us with a useful framework, although his formulation of the maps of meaning in our society – in terms of a dominant value system, a subordinate or negotiated value system, and a radical or oppositional value system – constitutes a logical, rather than a sociological statement of the problem – transferred to the situation of the media audience, his schema provides us with the notion that a given section of the audience either shares, partly shares, or does not share the dominant code in which the message has been transmitted. Obviously, empirical work is needed to establish which sections of the audience actually do share which codes and meaning systems – but this work can most usefully be developed within the framework Parkin has set out.
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The structuration of access to different codes and meaning systems Parkin’s notion of the ‘negotiated’ code can be seen to illuminate both Baudelot and Establet’s work on the position of working class children in school and Michael Mann’s work on the position of industrial workers, in relation to the dominant ideology. In both cases, the objective position of members of these groups in the social structure, which Baudelot and Establet phrase in terms of ‘class instinct’, is seen as inclining them away from an ‘acceptance’ of the dominant meaning system and towards a spontaneous, but anarchistically expressed and fragmented, sense of exploitation and opposition to this meaning system. It is in this context, Baudelot and Establet suggest, that we should understand the ‘truancy problem’ and the ‘discipline problem’ in schools – as expressions of resentment and opposition towards education as such14 – as instinctive forms of resistance to the dominant ideology transmitted by the education system. Michael Mann points out that:15 working class compliance is based on pragmatic acceptance of specific roles (because the individual concerned sees no realistic alternative) rather than on any positive normative commitment to society whereby the working class might internalise the moral expectations of the ruling class and view their inferior position as ‘legitimate’ . . . And he goes on to argue that: there is little truth in the claims of some Marxists that the working class is systematically and successfully indoctrinated with ruling class values . . . It is not value consensus which keeps the working class experiences (of conflict and exploitation) and vague populism (widespread notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’) might be translated into radical politics . . . Thus as Stuart Hall argues:16 Decoding within the negotiated meaning system contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements: it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations, while, at a more restricted, situational level, it makes its own ground rules, and operates with ‘exceptions’ to the rule. It accords the privileged position to the dominant definitions of events, whilst reserving the right to make a more negotiated application to ‘local conditions’, to its own more corporate positions. This is well illustrated in Parkin’s examples of industrial workers who may be willing, in the abstract, to endorse middle class criticisms of Trade Unions as having too much power, etc. – but who are perfectly willing to use what power they have as organised Trade Unionists in furtherance of their own particular demands. Likewise, Mann points out that while an industrial worker is likely to be cynical about his chances for ‘getting on’, he is likely to be much more optimistic about the possibilities for working class people to ‘get on’ in Capitalist society in general. The question is why the ‘syndrome of grumbling dissent’ among the working class only produces oppositional views on concrete issues, and is not translated into a systematic sense of opposition to the established social order. The answer would seem to be best given in
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terms of (a) the restriced mode of understanding of society that the working class is able to gain from the dominant meaning system made available through the education system and the media and (b) the lack of access to any radical ideology which might enable the different sections of the working class to generalise their specific demands and grievances into a distinct form of class consciousness. with reference to (a) Mueller17 argues that: ‘Adequate concepts and paradigms that are necessary for the understanding of politics are excluded from the public language’ which is made available through the education and media systems and that ‘on the class level the language used results in an incapacity to locate oneself in history and society’. Thus, he argues, the subordinate class is unable ‘to generate from its own bases symbols and ideas contrary to the dominant ones’ and that while ‘they may or may not agree with a given message . . . they have no alternative interpretation at their disposal, if they have no code representing their own interests.’ In the education system, for the majority of kids, the transmission of the dominant ideology takes place by not referring to anything with which they are familiar – the school apparatus officially puts working class feelings, experience and ideology off the map. In this way workers’ children are presented with a vacuum at precisely the point at which they ought to be able to learn to interpret and understand their own class experience: in school the social order is presented generally as benevolent; politics is presented as a set of technical processes, rather than as a class struggle over power and resources – no means is provided of understanding the real conflicts in society. Thus the dominant meaning system does not provide the concepts that might enable the working class to interpret the reality it actually experiences.18 Society is presented in a reified way, and no sense is given of any overall alternative possible set of social arrangements. This can be seen clearly in the media’s dehistoricised presentation of the news as a series of ‘events’ – which are not related to underlying structural processes. (b) can best be reformulated as a question of ‘which groups have access to which codes?’ MacIntyre argues, in Causality and Social Science, that: ‘The limits of what I can do intentionally are set by the limits of the descriptions available to me; and the descriptions available to me are those current in the social group to which I belong . . . If the limits of action are the limits of description, then to analyse the ideas current in a society (or subgroup of that society), is also to discern the limits within which rational, intended action necessarily moves in that society.’ A person’s conception of what he should do, whether as a matter of explicit choice, or more commonly as a pattern of habitual action, will be largely determined by his selfconception or identity, which will be largely provided by the meaning system to which the individual in question adheres. (Although one need not assume that members of a social group only have access to one code – they may have access to several codes or meaning systems which they can choose to ‘operate’ in different situations, and indeed, members of different groups may have access to the same code.) Berger19 and Luckman speak of the emergence in our society of the ‘individualist’ as a social type, who ‘has at least the possibility of migration between a number of available worlds and who has deliberately and awarely constructed a ‘self ’ cut out of the material provided by a number of available identities’. ‘For such a person,’ they argue, ‘alternative realities and identities (as offered by different meaning systems) appear as subjective options.’ However, for most members of our society, the options available are severely limited by their social context – Parkin argues that:20 Clearly, values are not imposed on men in some mechanistic way. Man also impose
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their will be selecting, as it were, from the range of values that any complex society generates. At the same time individuals do not construct their social worlds in terms of a wholly personal vision, and without drawing heavily on the organised concepts which are part of a public meaning system . . . Variations in the structure of attitudes of groups or individuals . . . are this to some extent dependent on differences in access to these meaning systems. The question of the extent to which a different or wider range of meaning systems is available to different social groups or classes can perhaps fruitfully be seen as a reformulation of the problem investigated by Mannheim of the extent to which social groups differ in their capacity to transcend the limitations imposed on their viewpoints by their social position – for most members of the subordinate classes the meaning systems publicly available to them are probably all within a fairly narrow range. The question also relates to Parsons (sic) concern with ‘badly socialised’ individuals – i.e. those who for some reason or another do not act in accordance with the tenets of the dominant meaning system – who Parsons sees as a possible source of social change. For Parsons these persons are likely to be distributed randomly throughout the social order, but Marcuse attempts a more systematic explanation of how persons in certain defined social positions (in his explanation those marginal to the process of production) are more likely both to come into contact with radical alternative meaning systems and to provide a social base from which an oppositional counter ideology might begin to be generated. MacIntyre points out that:21 ‘Becoming class conscious is like learning a foreign language: learning a whole new way of conceptualising one’s social situation and giving entirely different meanings to one’s actions.’ In this connection Parkin states:22 ‘Political deviance is manifested in electoral support for socialism on the part of members of any social stratum . . . Socialist voting can be regarded as a symbolic act of deviance from the dominant values of British Capitalist society whilst Conservative voting may be thought of as a symbolic re-affirmation of such values.’ Moreover he argues that ‘electoral support for socialism will occur predominantly where individuals are involved in normative sub-systems which serve as “barriers” to the dominant values of society . . . The political and social values of Conservatism are more successfully resisted by those who have access to an alternative normative system such as is typically created in working class communities’ – Political deviance is then, ‘not a function simply of class position, but of the availability of normative sub-systems which deviate from the overall value system in politically significant ways.
Conclusion Placing the problem of the situation of the audience in relation to the message in the context of the problem of hegemony, I would argue that what is needed is the development of a ‘cultural map’ of the audience so that we can begin to see which classes, sections of classes and subgroups share which cultural codes and meaning systems, to what extent – so that we can then see: how these codes determine the decoding of the messages of the media, what degree of ‘distance’ different sections of the audience have from the dominant meanings encoded in the messages, and moreover which sections of the audience have access to any alternative or oppositional codes or meaning-systems.
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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11
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15 16
Stencilled Occasional paper, C.C.C.S., University of Birmingham. Pub. Francois Maspero – partial translation by John Downing of Thames Poly. In R. Brown (ed) Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change. All references to Bernstein are to this edition, abbreviated as ‘CCC’. Pub. Allen Lane, 1967. It must be noted that Bernstein himself remarks that: (CCC, p. 199) ‘The class system has affected the distribution of knowledge . . . only a tiny % of the population have been socialised into knowledge at the level of the metalanguages of control and innovation, whereas the mass of the population has been socialised into knowledge at the level of context-tied operations . . . A tiny % of the population have been given access to the principles of intellectual change, whereas the rest have been denied such access. Indeed, in his essay on the ‘Classification and Framing of Educational Knowledge’ Bernstein develops these remarks in a way that fits well with the emphasis given by Baudelot & Establet. Bernstein remarks on the relative ‘openness’ of higher education (on the clear assumption that the pupils of the higher reaches of the education system will be predominantly drawn from the ranks of the middle class): ‘The ultimate mystery of the subject . . . not coherence, but incoherence: not order, but disorder, not the known but the unknown . . . is revealed very late in the educational life – and then only to a select few who have shown the signs of successful socialisation – only the few experience in their bones the notion that knowledge is permeable, that the dialectic of knowledge is closure and openness. For the many, socialisation into knowledge is socialisation into order, the existing order, into the experience that the world’s educational knowledge is impermeable . . . Do we have here another version of alienation? . . .’ In Ideology and the State. Falling Wall Press, 1972. Umberto Eco: ‘Towards a Semiotic Enquiry into the TV Message’. Parkin, 1971. Bernstein himself persistently claims that his analysis is not dealing with the level of Competence (language) but specifically with that of speech (performance). Thus (CCC, p. 263): ‘At no time did I ever consider that I was concerned with differences between social groups at the level of competency; that is differences between social groups which had their origin in their basic tacit understanding of the linguistic rule system. I was fundamentally concerned with performance . . . I was interested in the sociological controls on the use to which this common understanding was put. In the same way I never believed that there was any difference between social groups in their tacit understanding of logical rules. The difference that concerned me was the usage to which this common understanding was put.’ I would argue that sociological determinations operate at the level of competency too – that it is not at all a question only of sociological controls on the ‘uses’ to which a ‘common understanding’ is put but that, indeed there is no such ‘common understanding’ shared by all the members of a society except at the most basic level of linguistic ability. As soon as one introduces the notion of cultural or communicative competency rather than linguistic competency (see Hymes ‘On Communicative Competence’ in Pride & Holmes (eds) Sociolinguistics, esp. p. 277) then one must allow that these competencies are themselves differentially shared among members of different subcultures and groups. As Hymes argues (p. 274) ‘Social life has affected not merely outward performance, but inner competence itself. ‘Thus, sociocultural factors play a constitutive and not just a regulative role, and are relevant at the level of language as well as that of speech’. Giglioli: introduction to ‘Language & Social Context’. The ‘meaning systems’ chapter of ‘CI & PO’. cf. Chanie Rosenberg ‘Education & Society’ (Rank & File pamphlet) p. 17: ‘The status symbol was failure . . . The teachers drummed it into our heads that we were too thick to learn. We decided to get even by proving they couldn’t teach. So some of us tried to get nought for exams. When the marks were read out we waited in excitement as they got lower and lower, and when the teacher reached the noughts we beamed proudly at all our friends, and all our friends beamed back their congratulations. We’d won! We’d proved they couldn’t teach!’ (Frank, a London building worker). In ‘The Social Cohesion of Liberal Democracy’. In ‘Encoding/Decoding’, op.cit.
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17 Mueller: ‘Notes on the repression of communicative behaviour’ in Dreitzel (ed) Recent Sociology 2. 18 If it can be argued that some explanatory frameworks for understanding society are provided in other sections of the media than news – e.g. documentaries, the ‘quality press’, etc. – it must be remembered that the audience for these sections of the media is largely exclusive of the working class – because, as Bourdieu argues, they have not in general been able to acquire the cultural competencies necessary to decode these messages. 19 In The Social Construction of Reality. 20 CI & PO. 21 In Causality & Social Science. 22 In his article on working class Conservatives.
Section 4
Women’s studies and feminism
Introduction Janice Winship
THE DIFFICULTY OF ‘BETWEEN’ – ‘A POSITION THAT ALMOST ISN’T THERE’ Monday 25 September 1972 Up early Apprehensive 10.30–5.30 in seminar room Marx predominated Head spinning. Monday 2 October A long day Ups and downs of Centre – internal politics. Monday 9 October Exhausting A lot out of my reach Finished about 6.00 8.00 Relief of pub with A and friend. Monday 23 October Really boring seminar Afternoon pleasant atmosphere Able to speak Women’s lib meeting. Monday 13 November Beautiful day Seminar quite interesting Review session Media group highly critical of Althusser It seemed all right to me when I read it.
Tantalisingly cryptic yet revealing, these diary entries mark my first weeks as a postgrad at CCCS. Monday was ‘theory seminar’ day, the one point in the week when Centre members met together. As cigarette smoke thickened, debate heightened, tempers frayed and discussion dissolved into male point scoring, these could be exhilarating but also uncomfortable and intimidating occasions. Indeed the diary notes ‘headache’ with worrying regularity. If
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non-smokers were a minority, so too women – two or three attending – whilst current research topics on women were even scarcer – just mine on British women’s magazines.1 Yet a feminist literature, and particularly a Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) magazine and pamphlet literature, was burgeoning.2 Besides the theory seminar were the sub-groups. I was involved, not altogether successfully, with the activities of ‘Media’ and ‘Sub-cultures’. Whilst the former was shifting onto the terrain of TV current affairs – not gripping viewing for my younger self – the latter, as I recall, provided a ‘sub-culture’ within the Centre, i.e. those of us who were ill at ease in the ‘grown-up’ groups gravitated there.3 My diary bestows the description ‘chatty’ so presumably I felt emboldened enough to contribute, unlike in the media group. However, in autumn 1974, with more women working on feminist issues, we established the Women’s Studies Group. Acting also as a ‘women’s group’, for me at least, it provided a more supportive context notwithstanding the inevitable differences.4 The articles included in this section date from then, signalling the moment of public visibility for feminist research at CCCS. Thirty years on and in line with the current profile of academic work, my diary entries tend to feature only times, very precise times, of teaching squeezed by meetings and more meetings. (Not that CCCS in the 1970s was short on meetings but a relaxed attitude prevailed, with prompt starts anathema and finish times elastic.) But if I were still penning comments, ‘Apprehensive’ might again appear, this time on the day I agreed to write this piece. Just an introduction to a number of old articles maybe, but as the collective and individual outpourings – our first publications as (mostly) young (mostly funded) postgraduates – they were invested in and laboured over in a CCCS context where women and feminism were marginalised. And as feminist articles they were also written when such an approach to research evoked the author’s political identity: in the usually disparaging newspeak of the time, a ‘women’s libber’. So to coin a much-used Althusserian, if Freudianderived, term from the 1970s, these articles were richly ‘overdetermined’; a lot was at stake in their writing and, as importantly, in their reception. The articles have moved offices and homes with me, been lent out to others but largely been neglected, a sign perhaps that whatever their significance at the time, I was never sure of a worth beyond that moment. Re-visiting them is like approaching a forgotten cache of photos to reflect on a formative relationship whose attractions, difficulties and hurt one would prefer not to dwell on. In these circumstances is it possible, as the editors request, to adopt ‘a more personal tone’ and offer a ‘critical discussion’ of the importance and limitation of these articles? Dear Reader, you shall be the judge. However, there has been other ‘critical discussion’ of particular articles and the intellectual and political environment in which women at CCCS were working. Four narratives, as well as my own recollections, influence what follows. The first is the contemporary account ‘Trying to do feminist intellectual work’ – the introduction to the CCCS volume Women Take Issue (WTI ) by the Women’s Studies Group (WSG 1978). (Though memories are hazy, I must have contributed to this.) The second is a reflective account by Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘A thief in the night: stories of feminism in the 1970s at Birmingham’ (1996; see also Brunsdon 2000). The third, Sue Thornham’s Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies: Stories of unsettled relations (2000) is an outsider’s ‘symptomatic’ account (Althusser 1968: 28) in which feminist scholarship, including WTI, is read against the ‘masculinised’ narratives of cultural studies. And the fourth is one such narrative by Stuart Hall. For I can’t skirt around the fact that both Charlotte and Sue critically engage with Stuart’s metaphorical but ‘profoundly shocking description’ (Brunsdon 1996: 278) of feminism at CCCS: ‘As the thief in the night,
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it broke in; interrupted, made an unseemly noise, seized the time, crapped on the table of cultural studies’ (Hall 1996: 269).5 It would, of course, have been impossible to offer this ‘self-ironic narrative’ at the time (Thornham 2000: 185). Much emotion did simmer under the surface and swirl around the seminar room, but even anger and upset were done relatively politely, not least because on the whole people did like each other. But to turn the emphasis around from men’s experience of this challenge to their identity as housekeepers (or is it more captains?) of cultural studies, how did feminists feel? If not thief-like, I think there was a felt need to seize time and place tactically, when and where we could (cf. de Certeau 1984). ‘Crapping’ I associate only with the odd pigeon sneaking into the Muirhead tower, yet as metaphor it does resonate. An old jotting on seminar dynamics suggests: ‘If we do have something to say, we cannot always find the words that ‘they’ [men] use to say it in. When words are somehow forced out, they are likely to be emotional, perhaps disconnected, trying to say not just one thing but everything at once’.6 We were acutely aware that the ‘gifts’ we placed on the table of cultural studies were sometimes less than graciously received or met with personal hurt and occasional aggressive critique; a threat to defend against. Doubtless too we were ambivalent: wanting and not wanting patriarchal approval.7 The point here is to indicate the dis-location for women and an associated uncertainty about intellectual accomplishments, also compounded by other factors. In the final paragraph of ‘A thief in the night’ Charlotte comments on the seeming contradictions in her line of argument: ‘maybe’ she says, ‘this attempt to occupy a position that almost isn’t there is something that I learnt in Birmingham’ (1996: 284, emphasis added). This ‘position’ and the intellectual practice it elegantly conjures up can usefully be mobilised to reflect on the articles included here. Reading them after such an interval I am struck by their attempt to occupy multiple positions that almost aren’t there. As I’ve less elegantly phrased it in the title of this introduction, ‘The difficulty of “between” ’ perhaps accounts for the anguish with which some of the articles were crafted and their mostly cool reception;8 it suggests their scope and their limitations. The first such difficulty concerns, who speaks? Who is addressed? As Sue Thornham observes of the introduction to WTI: ‘its speaking voice’ is caught ‘in the contradictory identities – “woman”, “feminist”, “intellectual”; its tone is ‘uncertain” (2000: 1), and Charlotte Brunsdon indicates more generally of the volume: ‘The book is . . . characterised by a profoundly unstable address – it’s not clear – I don’t think we were clear – to whom it was addressed. To CCCS? To the Women’s Liberation Movement? To the left? To “ordinary women?” ’ (1996: 284). These different possibilities were certainly the subject of debate (WSG 1978), they weighed heavily and stymied fluency. But looking back now I’d argue that the slippages of identity and address were perhaps necessary and not something we could have sorted out. They were a sign of ‘unsettled relations’, a sign of theoretical, methodological and political ‘betweens’, at which uncertain crossroads (what would later be called) feminist cultural studies emerged (Lovell 1995a and b). The articles are caught, sometimes productively, sometimes problematically, between marxism and feminism; between the theory of cultural studies and the politics of the WLM; between theory and experience or theory and the ‘concrete’ study. A subject constituted through language rubs up against a unified humanist subject, psychoanalysis chafes against marxism. The difficulty of the speaking voice – ‘I’ the academic, ‘we’ women or the ‘sisterhood’ of feminists – points to other ‘betweens’: feminism and femininity; ideology and pleasure; agency and the passivity of oppression; and being both researcher and the object of research.
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Ranging over a nine-year period, 1974 to 1982, these articles mark what Charlotte Brunsdon refers to as the first phase of the ‘encounter between feminism and CCCS’ (1996: 279).9 The early output from the Women’s Studies Group – ‘Images of Women’ and ‘Relations of Production, Relations of Re-production’ – reveal the rough edges of work-inprogress, trying out conflicting ideas and methods. The articles from WTI – Charlotte Brunsdon; Dorothy Hobson; Janice Winship; Steve Burniston, Frank Mort and Chris Weedon – are more finished, have a surer sense of their object of study and the practice of feminist research, but are particularly defined by their engagement with various ‘betweens’. The final paper by Chris Griffin is able to build on earlier CCCS feminist research, and productively works across intellectual fields, but is less caught by other ‘betweens’. For these and other reasons, it rests on the cusp of a second phase. Contributing then to an emerging field, these articles share common reference points, whether in the use of, or departure from, particular language, authors, or themes of study. ‘Women’s oppression/subordination’, the ‘Women’s Liberation Movement’, ‘women’s experience’, ‘the personal is political’, ‘relations of production’, ‘relations of reproduction’, ‘patriarchy’, ‘capitalism’, ‘economic, political and ideological levels’, ‘domestic labour’, ‘the housewife’, ‘the family’, ‘femininity’, ‘everyday life’, personal life’, ‘lived experience’, ‘contradictions’, ‘sexuality’, ‘ideology’, ‘image, ‘representation’, ‘subjectivity’ ‘determination(s)’. These terms run through the various articles. So too, whilst each article carries a specific bibliography, they share a litany of names: Mitchell, Rowbotham, Zaretsky, Marx, Althusser, and to a lesser extent Barthes, Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. The cultural constructions of a gendered ‘work/leisure’ divide, of ‘family/mother/housewife’, of ‘sexuality’, ‘femininity’ and ‘the personal’, are constantly returned to, usually in their articulation with capitalist relations. If these articles can be clustered together ‘the (un)happy marriage of Althusser and feminism’ (to misquote Heidi Hartmann 1979), with ideology as Louis Althusser’s ‘wedding gift’, offers one hook (Althusser 1971).10
Determining ideology ‘Images of women in the media’ was the first project of the newly-formed Women’s Studies Group (WSG). Hastily written for a British Sociological Association event,11 my most vivid memory is, I’m afraid, only of the journey. Squeezed into Rae’s (Rachel Harrison) less than comfortable Mini van (a regular feature in the life of the WSG), a busy M6 blighted our outward journey and at the car park afterwards we were confronted with a flat tyre. Before we could discover whether anyone’s feminist credentials extended to car mechanics, men materialised from nowhere, clearly galvanised into action by the allure of femininity and our evident helplessness. We let them do the chivalry bit and chuckled afterwards at the contradictions of feminism. More successful as a lively, illustrated talk than as a written paper (after Manchester we went on to address other, not always academic, groups), it is difficult now to appreciate the politicising impact of de-naturalising everyday media texts.12 Concentrating primarily on print media, its individually authored sections adopt different methods and theoretically diverge;13 its glimpses of a 1970s ‘sexist’ culture are now both familiar and strange: the demonising of working class ‘unmarried’ mothers (the term ‘single’ still too progressive), the belittling of feminists, and the particular sexualisation of women on page three of The Sun newspaper (already an institution) and in advertising. Some of the material – on sexuality, advertising and women’s magazines – was to be worked up later (Coward 1978, 1982, 1984, Winship 1980, 1987 and this volume). But the focus on a gendering of news/values (echoing
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Gaye Tuchman’s ‘symbolic annihilation’ 1978: 10) and how a (masculine) public domain is protected from the threat of femininity (p. 8) is particularly striking, highlighting avenues which early feminism began to explore but from which it largely retreated.14 However, the article is perhaps best characterised by its implicit, if not wholly consistent, engagement with what became known, and criticised, as an ‘images of women’ approach’ (Pollock 1977, Cowie 1978, Hollows 2000: 21–24). Assuming two separate elements – the real entity woman and the unreal image – and the socialising role of the media, the problem becomes one of misrepresentation as shown in the title question of one volume, Is This Your Life? (Answer: no.) (King and Stott 1977).15 The ‘Images’ article distances itself by an alertness to the specificity of media practices, the ‘complexly structured’ image and the processes or work of representation.16 Nevertheless in its attempts to emphasise the contribution of social practices to women’s oppression and to highlight the relation between media images and social relations, or between text and context, a ‘real’/’unreal’ distinction is arguably replaced by a ‘social’/’media’ distinction where the former is prior to and to some extent determines the latter. Yet this understanding, probably partly mine, and suggesting one’s politics, is countered by an early though as yet incomplete formulation, via Althusser and Lacan, of language, the symbolic order, and ideology, producing ‘woman as subject’, ‘woman . . . as an empty signifier of the laws of patriarchal culture’ (p. 31). Doing away with the determination of ‘real relations’ on ‘phenomenal forms’ it points to a different politics; this theorisation was Ros Coward’s.17 A comparable tension is evident in our second multi-authored rather than collectively written paper, ‘Relations of Production: Relations of Re-Production’. The introduction suggests that the purpose of the article (to rephrase in relation to the distinctions offered above) was to examine the social relations, especially the family, which determined or ‘underpinned’ media imagery. However, our turn to domestic labour was also influenced by other debates inside and outside CCCS. In particular, a Women and Socialism conference in Birmingham in September 1974, and a series of pamphlets and feminist contributions to an ongoing discussion in the heavyweight journal New Left Review, signalled that ‘domestic labour’ involved more than the everyday sexual politics of housework and motherhood: all of a sudden it was at the heart of marxist political economy. However, within the WLM, ‘theory’ was a thorny issue on account of its elitist (patriarchal) associations. Calls for more ‘theory’, in order to make sense of the ‘eclectic and largely descriptive nature’ of the writings produced by feminists (Kuhn and Wolpe 1978: 3) were countered by the need to justify it. The opening paper from a controversially theoretical ‘Patriarchy’ conference in London in May 1976 was called ‘Why theory?’ (Himmelweit et al 1976). Such tensions were also experienced by the CCCS WSG and were to resurface in the production of WTI; hence, I think, the noting of ‘the problem . . . of producing politically directed academic work’ (p. 96). Inside CCCS where marxist approaches produced most noise, and the study of women was a girlzone (though of course ‘girl’ was outlawed from our lexicon), one motivation in the turn to the domestic labour debate was to nudge ‘the woman question’ onto an intellectual agenda recognised in the boyzone and to make it evident that analyses of capitalism were incomplete and inadequate if they simply ignored women and the family.18 Labouring in the article to explain the so-called ‘orthodox’ or ‘unorthodox’ marxist positions in this debate – differences crudely hinging on whether women’s housework did or did not contribute to surplus value and could or could not be understood through the economic categories of a class analysis and politics – we also attempted to move beyond these narrow parameters.19 As in the ‘Images’ paper, two awkwardly abutting critical vectors are in play,
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suggesting perhaps the relatively unformed nature of the intellectual field, which even by WTI had split into more discrete theoretical domains (cf. Bland, Brunsdon et al 1978, and Burniston et al 1978). The first, to which I and others were party, builds on an economic analysis. The second, initiated by Ros Coward and Parveen Adams, roundly criticises ‘mechanical materialism’ (p. 113) and bravely starts elsewhere – positing the possibility of the ‘reproduction of the species . . . as a specific determinant’ of women’s oppression (p. 114). But the two coalesce in highlighting ideology. The view of ‘domestic labour as the focus for the relation between production and reproduction’ (emphasis added p. 113) envisages that relation as a multiple ‘intermeshing’ of economic and ideological dynamics (p. 105). In Section 4 a key concern is the ‘ideological lag which can negate political and economic advance’ for women (p. 115). Ros and Parveen, drawing on Lacan, Mitchell and Kristeva, venture that attention to the role of the unconscious in the formation of the sexed subject assists understanding of that lag.20 To be noted too is the article’s attention to women and the family’s contingent relation to capital, and to capital’s ‘need’ for the ‘bourgeois individual’ mediated through wage form and consumption. Since the 1970s, with the demise of a ‘family wage’, women’s increasing participation in paid employment, the rise of global labour markets, the intensification of consumption and an associated individualised culture, these aspects have become more significant.21
The feminist, the housewife and the personal A patriarchal ‘outside’ – the site of ‘the intimate oppression of women’ (Rowbotham 1973: xi) – is taken up, given detail and substance, made visible and public, but in distinctively different ways by Charlotte Brunsdon and Dorothy Hobson. If in ‘Relations of production’ we struggled with theory, these two articles foreground the ‘struggle’, as Sheila Rowbotham put it, ‘between the language of experience and the language of theory’ (cited in Thornham 2000: 64, my emphasis). In ‘It is well known that by nature women are inclined to be rather personal’ Charlotte maps out a critical understanding of the relation between ‘arguments from nature’, and the WLM’s political challenge. In an ‘ethnographic’ study, Dorothy’s ‘Housewives: isolation as oppression’ aims to give voice to women’s consciousness, or to the ‘sense of oppression’ (Rowbotham cited in Hobson p. 79) experienced by young working class women living in high-rise tower blocks in the city of Birmingham. Charlotte poses, first, that ‘arguments from nature have an ideological centrality in the subordination of women, precisely because their reference point is always biological and anatomical – natural difference’ (p. 19). Second, and echoing discussion in other articles in this section, this ‘ideological matrix which finds women’s subordination natural’ simultaneously absents them from production and public life, places them ‘outside history’, and ambiguously in relation to culture – ‘both central . . . and absent’ (p. 20). Women are defined through their ‘destinies as wives and mothers – to be somebody else’s private life . . . in the “personal sphere” of the family’ (p. 23). Thirdly, and importantly, she argues that early WLM practices engage with those definitions by discovering and taking up a ‘politics of personal experience’ (p. 23). In this way, Charlotte suggests, the WLM ‘began to piece together a way of understanding the world from the point of view of women, which necessarily drew on individual experience’ (p. 26 emphasis in original). So far this is a story about, and recognisably from, the WLM. But the argument then turns around to critique the WLM. Drawing on Gramsci (1971) Charlotte highlights the potential limitations of ‘thinking only through direct experience and common sense’ (p. 4). The latter
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‘does not allow the construction of a coherent oppositional world view, although it may provide the basis for limited political action . . . It produces an understanding of events as episodic and random’ (p. 4). In conclusion she writes: ‘To avoid interrogating the personal is to miss the specificity of women’s oppression as lived, but to remain within this interrogation is to remain where our subordination places us. There is no easy fit between theoretical knowledge and consciousness which does not tend to dismiss or reduce one or the other’ (p. 31) The achievement of the article is indeed to try and work across these two but at the cost of moving uncomfortably between identities: there was no easy fit either between ‘movement feminist’ and ‘feminist intellectual’ (cf Brunsdon 1997b). In Dorothy’s account individual women’s consciousness of personal life, their ‘lived experience’ in all its contradictions, resonates from the page. Indeed it is worth noting the impact when Dorothy played audiotapes of her interviews at a WSG end of year presentation at CCCS. These ‘authentic’ Brummy voices broke into the seminar room: here on the table of cultural studies were raw accounts of working class women’s oppression, culture as the feminine ordinary. Rather more effectively than our accompanying theoretical and more ‘structuralist’ expositions, this ethnographic ‘evidence’ validated a feminist approach and the political purpose of such work (Women’s Studies Group 1978: 15). The antecedents to Dorothy’s exploration of ‘isolation as oppression’ were twofold. Betty Friedan’s influential The Feminine Mystique (1963), Hannah Gavron’s protofeminist work The Captive Wife (1966) and Ann Oakley’s Sociology of Housework and The Housewife (1974a, 1974b) had all explored aspects of the ‘housewife’s’ oppression – Friedan’s ‘problem without a name’; Gavron’s ‘captive wife’; Oakley’s ‘compulsive circle’. But Dorothy’s concern was also to explore the relation between the women’s perception of their current home-based lives and their lives when engaged in paid work. In this respect Dorothy’s research picked up on other research at CCCS, i.e. Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour (1977), following the transition of working class boys from school into work.22 If Charlotte was at pains to give due credit to other feminist writings: ‘I have tried to quote from other women as much as possible . . . at times the quotations carry the weight of my argument’ (p. 18), so Dorothy also desires that her interviewees speak for themselves. Both writers are scrupulously fair not to set themselves apart, nor to set up a hierarchical relationship between themselves as feminist intellectuals and the subjects of their study. If in Charlotte’s case the dilemma is that she is both like them, aligning herself with a WLM politics, and unlike many of them – an academic – for Dorothy the home-tied woman represents what Charlotte has referred to elsewhere as ‘the woman she (the researcher) had not become’ (and maybe also escaped from) (2000: 114). Dorothy’s resolution of the tension is to place herself ‘near’ her women: ‘I do not think they see me as too far removed from themselves’ (p. 81). Of the laughter that at moments they both enjoy Dorothy points to a ‘shared understanding between the women and myself ’ (p. 82, emphasis in original). However, the consequence of these efforts is that Dorothy also backs away from an overt theorising that might differentiate her from the women. As Sue Thornham comments: ‘we find almost a refusal of analysis as the researcher refuses to speak for her interviewees in the language of theory’ (p. 64). Yet in her selection and interpretation of quotes, feminist frames of thought and her identity as feminist researcher are, of course, apparent.23
Problematic (of ) femininity ‘A woman’s world: Woman – an ideology of femininity’ was my first ‘proper’ publication on women’s magazines. At the time, I was pleased to have completed it – after all this was six
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years after I’d first started the research – but over time, with the rise of ethnographic approaches to magazine readers and more poststructuralist accounts (Ballaster et al 1991, Hermes 1995), I’d taken to heart the criticism of its textual and Althusserian approach to ideology (Beezer et al 1986). So re-reading the piece I find myself mildly surprised: whatever its limitations it is also quite interesting as a ‘concrete’ study of one magazine title.24 As in other articles the address and speaking voice slips between a ‘we’ who are women (readers) and ‘we’ who are feminists. This was partly intentional. At the time I was uneasy that the WLM seemed to dismiss magazines as ‘make-believe and trivial’ thus discounting and disregarding women readers, whilst loftily setting feminists apart (p. 135). So the article takes issue in proposing a shared ground: on the one hand feminists also read, enjoy women’s magazines and ‘live within [their modes of femininity], having to find our place within the parameters they set’ (p. 134); on the other, feminist political struggle ‘embraces’, builds on and ‘transforms’ aspects of . . . femininity – including ‘child-care’ and ‘personal life’ (p. 134). Further, in trying to respect women readers and evoke a less clear line between feminist action and an allegedly passive femininity, it deploys the ambiguous term ‘active subordination’ – suggesting ‘the processes by which femininity “manoeuvres” within and against masculine hegemony’ (p. 134–135).25 This dual pull, setting up, as Sue Thornham outlines, ‘researcher as both ‘the “present” feminist (researcher)’ and ‘the “absent” feminine (object)’ is also manifest in the narrative structure of the article. I engage in an analysis which holds to the form of the magazine as known by readers – moving down the content list, turning over the pages – but unpicks the title’s ‘contradictory representations of femininity’ (p. 135) as they are worked through ‘the means’ and ‘constraints of media production’ (p. 139) and the magazine’s different formats. It dips into psychoanalytic work on dreams and fantasy, veers towards a notion of subjectivity as precarious, but re-constitutes the magazine as a ‘complexly structured unity’ (p. 139) emphasis added) via a turn to a dominant ideology of motherhood and a unified subject: ‘The reader is trapped within the specious coherence of femininity’ (Beezer et al 1986: 103). But perhaps looking back now the too-neat narrative resolution is less significant than the mode of analysis and unfolding narrative on the substance and seduction of ideological work. The article ‘Psychoanalysis and the cultural acquisition of sexuality and subjectivity’ clearly adopts a linguistic approach to subjectivity and sexual difference, but constantly returns to a materialist analysis. The authors, Steve Burniston, Frank Mort and Christine Weedon, were members of the ‘Language and ideology’ sub-group (Chris and Frank were also involved in the WTI editorial group). Formed in 1975 to address ‘the marginalization’ of the study of language at CCCS’ (Weedon et al 1980: 178), it took as its object ‘theories of language since Saussure’ (p. 182). However, the sympathies of this group were somewhat at odds with those of the Media group, who were engaged in a trenchant critique of ‘Screen theory’ (Hall 1980b, Morley 1980). Stuart Hall’s reference in 1980 to ‘a certain theoretical “pluralism” ’ and the groups having ‘learned much from each other’ (1980a: 37) perhaps belies the strength of feeling and power relations at stake over this.26 So whilst the arguments in ‘Psychoanalysis’ might seem to address (marxist) feminists, in staking out a position between a (universalising) psychoanalysis and a (historically specific) marxist analysis, the piece also intervenes in other debates within CCCS. Their exposition develops through a series of (re-)alignments. They acknowledge the feminist reading of Sigmund Freud as ‘the first theorist to show that sexual identity is socially constituted rather than biologically innate’ (p. 109) and go on to engage with the ‘symbolic readings’ of Freud offered by Jacques Lacan, Juliet Mitchell and Julia Kristeva. But they
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insist on the continuing duality in Freud’s thought. They accept Lacan’s ‘linguistic construction of the psyche’ and of the subject (p. 113) and his challenge to the unified and transcendent subject, but on feminist grounds reject his claim that the phallus is a ‘neutral signifier’ (p. 117). They acknowledge Mitchell’s project, via Claude Levi-Strauss, ‘to ground Lacanian concepts more explicitly within material and social practices’ of kinship (p. 121), but criticise her consequent formulation of an autonomous patriarchal sphere and its implied separatist politics independent of class struggle (p. 123).27 They welcome Kristeva’s notion of ‘the subject as constituted through . . . the mode of sign production’ in order to fill out Althusser’s ‘always-already given subject’ of ideology (p. 123), and her recognition that the constitution of subjectivity ‘involves other levels of the social formation’. But they argue that ‘she does not satisfactorily theorize’ the relation between ‘the mode of “socio-economic” production and the mode of sign production’ (p. 123). The authors contend they are not arguing for ‘a merger between Marxism and psychoanalytic theories of the constitution of the subject’ (p. 127) yet I’m not sure all readers will agree. The re-alignments above nudge towards a merger, one made clearer in the conclusion. Drawing on Althusser they advise: ‘We should ask not only the question, “How is the reproduction of the relations of production secured?” but also, “How is the reproduction of the relations of (biological) reproduction secured?” ’ (p. 129 emphasis in the original).28 They insist on the historical specificity of both these processes, which they broadly represent in terms of Althusser’s ‘levels’ (p. 128). Thus the political task ‘to transform existing sexual ideologies and practices’ (p. 130) requires tracing, ‘concretely, the relationship between historically specific forms of sex/gender identity (including their unconscious representation), the material practices which structure the acquisition of that identity (the media, the educational system, the labour process and primarily the mode of kinship/familial organisation), and the organisation of economic and social relations which constitute the mode of production’ (p. 128, emphases added). Insistent then about the significance of the unconscious but only in its articulations with other aspects of the social formation, this is a call to the ‘massive empirical task of a precise historical and conjunctural analysis’ (p. 129); a tall order.29
Articulating difference From ‘Images of women in the media’ to ‘Images of women in the labour market’, Chris Griffin’s 1982 paper ‘The good, the bad and the ugly’ demonstrates its affinity with earlier feminist work at CCCS.30 It too explores contradictory ideologies of femininity across the different domains of school, work and leisure. But it focuses especially on dominant discourses of (problematic) female sexuality signalled by the ‘fearsome ideological triad’ (p. 14) of the title.31 As already indicated, the article also marks the beginning of a new phase in ‘the encounter between feminism and CCCS’, aligning in some respects with Angela McRobbie and Trisha McCabe’s edited collection Feminism for Girls: An adventure story (1981), which Charlotte Brunsdon marks out as the ‘final text’ of the first phase (1996: 279). Chris’s own appointment in 1979 as the postdoctoral researcher on the Social Science Research Council funded project, ‘Young women and work: With special reference to gender and the family’32 together with the appointment of Maureen McNeil to a new faculty post in autumn 1980 point to the inroads feminism had made at CCCS, and to the changed context for engaging in feminist research. In addition, from 1978 the Work subgroup, now including a high proportion of women, took women’s paid work as its object of study. I recall us focusing on secretarial work – the subject of Hazel Downing’s PhD33 (1981), addressing the gendering of skill, and some of us giving a paper at a Harry Braverman34
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conference in Windsor Great Park (I think) on a wonderful frosty winter morning. In fact a clutch of studies engaging with paid work, mainly women’s, emerged from CCCS in the late 1970s.35 The signs of a new phase of feminism in Chris’s paper are several. Unlike the other papers which have feminism as their springboard, Chris explicitly places her work in a cultural studies context – the paper proclaims its culturalist, not structuralist, approach: ‘I have started from young working class women’s experiences’ (p. 1). Chris is concerned that young women are not regarded as passive consumers of dominant ideology but as ‘resisting, negotiating and affecting those discourses’ (p. 2) (cf work on ‘sub-cultures). In this respect, the article also builds on, and departs from, earlier feminist work at CCCS i.e. the more textually oriented studies of McRobbie on Jackie magazine (1978), and Winship on advertising and magazines (1980, 1981). In addition, Chris is more assured in her role as a researcher of young women addressing the academy (and possibly those working with girls). Perhaps most importantly, her analysis works against the grain of a unified womanhood. Chris integrates issues of difference into her conceptualisation via the linking of ‘sexual’ and ‘labour’ markets and attention to the value of different bodies: ‘women’s potential “goingprice” . . . is class, age and race specific with young, white and apparently middle class women at a premium’ (p. 6). This foregrounding of differences, the beginning of a challenge to ethnocentrism and, with the attention paid to the potentially unruly female body (symbolised by the term ‘Ugly’), also to heterosexism, arguably differentiates the article.36 * * * The tenth anniversary of WTI provided impetus for the 1991 volume Off-Centre: Feminism and cultural studies. Born of the Women Thesis Writers’ Group, its opening sentence reads: ‘This book is concerned with forms of knowledge, power and politics’ (Franklin, Lury, Stacey 1991: 1). Foregrounding the PhD, which alongside future professional identities was somewhat neglected in the 1970s (Brunsdon 1996: 276, McRobbie 2000: 215), and invoking a Foucauldian not Althusserian intellectual formation, the book ‘marks something more than the second’ phase of the encounter between feminism and CCCS (Brunsdon 1996: 285). Indeed the ‘marriage of Althusser and feminism’ – always one of convenience – broke down as marxism waned and the influence of the ‘posts’ – poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism – strengthened. Politically, with the last of the national WLM conferences held in Birmingham in 1978, the year of publication of WTI – the Women’s Liberation Movement also dissolved, fracturing around the impossibility and inappropriateness of its unified ‘we’ to be replaced by competing feminisms, postfeminism and ‘third wave feminism’ (Siegel 1997). Further, whilst this isn’t the place to discuss it, in all manner of ways some women’s lives – in particular those of the well off, middle class and ethnically white – have changed significantly. ‘Taking issue’, ‘unsettled’, ‘off-centre’, ‘awkwardly placed’ (Shiach 1991: 3) might still characterise the dynamic of feminism and cultural studies but feminist cultural studies, characterised by Terry Lovell and Carol Wolkowitz as ‘variously locat[ing] itself in Britain between the CCCS and what became known as Screen theory’ (2000: 49)37 is now a broad and international church. There are lots of feminist books, plus a fair number of feminist scholars occupy senior positions in the academy, notwithstanding that women’s pay and promotion prospects are still poorer than men’s. In this transformed conjuncture, do these articles still have a legacy other than demonstrating, through themes, approaches and methods, some beginnings for a feminist cultural studies? Can we still learn from them? In the face of the ‘posts’, the changed political context, and the institutionalisation of the
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feminist academic, what I have referred to as ‘the difficulty of between’ has diminished.38 Nevertheless, it is something of the field represented by those ‘betweens’ in relation to the ‘problematic of femininity’ that I would argue is worth reflecting upon. Our biggest ‘gift’ to CCCS was probably just that – as Morag Shiach puts it, ideas of resistance, of class identity, gave way to a focus on reproduction, on consumption, and on the problematic of ‘femininity’ (1991: 42) which has also become a badge of feminist scholarship continuing into the present. As Charlotte Brunsdon wryly comments in relation to film and TV studies: ‘I have some doubt about whether work by feminists . . . that does not embrace the point of difference . . . the feminine, is in fact recognized as feminist scholarship’; ‘I turn out to have been working in a girlzone, a subordinate field’ (1997b: 170, 169).39 But I don’t think our intention was just to serve up another dish at the table of cultural studies, simply widening the domain of culture. After all, the marriage of Althusser and feminism engendered a grand projet: encouraging not only attention to the ideological contradictions of femininity, including its unconscious representations, but also contradictions between the economic, political and ideological levels; inspiring the effort to hold onto the bigger economic and political picture even when analysing a modest fragment of culture. The attempt to think through the interactions and power relations between an ‘absent’ femininity and ‘present’ masculinity, reproduction and production, patriarchal and capitalist relations – ‘holding on to both ends of the chain’ (Althusser cited by Hall 1977: 29) – involved, whether it was recognised or not, an attempt to reconfigure the field. The problematic of femininity was also produced within and marked by the uneasy triangle of ‘woman’, ‘feminist’, ‘intellectual’. I am mindful here of Charlotte Brunsdon’s review essay on ‘Identity in feminist television criticism’ in which she argues that ‘feminist critical discourse constructs and produces, rather than simply analyses, a series of positions for “women” ’(1997b: 192). But whilst the articles discussed here can perhaps be thought through her category of the ‘transparent’ and maybe the ‘recruitist’ I’m inclined to think that her framework perhaps sets up a two- rather than three-way relation – between ‘feminist intellectual’ and ‘woman’ as her other, not between ‘feminist’, ‘intellectual’ and ‘woman’. Differentiating between ‘feminist’ and ‘intellectual’ is to hold to a possible difference between (feminist) politics, with its demand for change, and the work of scholarship – of some concern in the 1970s (WSG 1978) but perhaps less so later. On re-reading, the articles now seem to me to be rather complex in their admittedly sometimes unselfconscious negotiation between and across those three ‘positions’, even if the positions themselves are not sufficiently fractured or crossed by other dynamics. They raise important questions of methodology, epistemology, and of the relation of intellectual work to political change. How could a feminist scholar acknowledge the strengths of the WLM, align herself with it but also engage in an intellectual critique of feminist political practice? How could she do research with and about working class women in a way that gives witness to the particularity of their oppression but without setting up another hierarchy between women (researched) and feminist (researcher)? What knowledge was produced when a feminist scholar critiqued a magazine in which, like other women readers, she was implicated? The relevance of these points – playing between ‘femininity’ and a bigger picture, playing between the identities of ‘woman’, ‘feminist’, ‘intellectual’ – is highlighted for me by Angela McRobbie’s recent argument in an essay engaging with scholarship on girls’ magazines and TV series such as Sex and the City. Angela expresses concern about what she describes as a ‘complicitous critique’ by feminist scholars which celebrates ‘popular feminism’, often attenuates critique in favour of ‘fandom’ (the feminist intellectual and other women viewers alike), suspends ‘critical engagement with the wider political and economic conditions which
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shape the very existence . . . of these forms’ and implies that ‘the politics of feminist struggles are no longer needed’ (forthcoming). Perhaps those of us who were feminists at CCCS in the 1970s are simply out of touch. But just maybe those old articles still have something useful to say about the need to work ‘between’ and occupy positions that ‘almost aren’t there’. Janice Winship teaches in the Department of Media and Film, University of Sussex, and has written on women’s magazines, advertising and consumption. Author of Inside Women’s Magazines (1987), her published articles include ‘New disciplines for women and the rise of the chain store in the 1930s’ in Maggie Andrews and Mary Talbot (eds) (2000) All the World and Her Husband: Women in Twentieth-Century Consumer Culture, Cassell; ‘Women’s magazines: Times of war and the management of self ’ in Christine Gledhill and Gillian Swanson (eds) (1996) Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and Cinema in Britain in World War II, Manchester University Press and ‘Women outdoors: advertising, controversy and disputing feminism in the 1990s’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, April 2000.
Notes 1 But see the earlier study of magazine fiction, and Trevor Millum’s PhD (1975) on advertising (Hall 1980c: 119). 2 Books published around then include Comer, de Beauvoir, Figes, Friedan, Gornick and Moran, Greer, Millet, Mitchell, Nochlin and Hess, Oakley, Rosen, Tanner, Wandor. See Rowbotham 1973 for a pertinent list of magazines and pamphlets. Pamphlets on my shelf include: Pamela Allen (1970) Free Space: a perspective on the small group women’s liberation, New York, Times Change Press; Lee Comer (1971) The Myth of Motherhood, Spokesman Pamphlet No.21, Nottingham, Russell Press; Maria Dalla Costa and Selma James (1972) The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Bristol, Falling Wall Press; Sheila Rowbotham (1971) Women’s Liberation and the New Politics, Spokesman Pamphlet No.17, Nottingham, Russell Press; Screen Pamphlet 2 (1973) Notes on Women’s Cinema London, SEFT. 3 Interestingly, since later outsider perceptions place ‘sub-cultures’ centre stage at CCCS. 4 Initial members were authors of ‘Images of Women in the Media’. See WSG1978 for further discussion. 5 I am reminded of seminars when Stuart succinctly refocused a discussion that was going nowhere fast. Perhaps this ‘shocking description’ told fifteen years on marks another such instance – provoking the long overdue public discussion about feminism at CCCS. 6 From an incomplete ‘stencil’ written in 1979 after a fraught meeting about sexual politics at CCCS. Highlighting difficulties I also pointed to improvements, at least in my experience, and greater recognition of feminist work since my arrival. 7 ‘We’ is loosely used: in perception and engagement with the gender dynamic at CCCS there were significant differences between feminists which the ‘crisis’ moment (fn 6) foregrounded. 8 WTI was in print for a relatively short time compared to the seminal CCCS successes – Resistance Through Rituals (1976, first published as WPCS no 7/8, Hall and Jefferson 1975) and The Empire Strikes Back (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1982). 9 If they didn’t already feature elsewhere in these volumes, other articles plus the volume WTI as a whole would constitute this ‘first phase’. 10 Althusser’s essay ‘Ideology and ideology state apparatuses’ was particularly influential (1971). Key to the various articles were: his understanding of ideology as a ‘relatively autonomous’ level articulating with political and economic levels (the economic determining in ‘the last instance’) to constitute the complexly structured social formation; his understanding that the reproduction of ‘the existing relations of production’ involved an ideological reproduction via the ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses) and that ideology operated through material practices. So too his differentiation, and dovetailing, of specific historical ideologies, and the processes by which they operated – the hailing or interpellation of subjects (ideology in general ) – was important to our exploration of
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representations of femininity and efforts to bridge marxism and feminism, cultural studies and pyschoanalysis, and the social and the unconscious. The ‘Women in media’ event took place in Manchester, Autumn 1974. Rowe’s introduction to ‘Images’ in the Spare Rib Reader (1982: 25) indicates the importance of such engagement for the early WLM. See WSG for discussion of the difficulties of disagreeing (1978: 13). See Corner 1991: 268, van Zoonen 1994: 125, for discussion of the ‘popular culture’, ‘public knowledge’ projects as having become respectively female and male preserves. See Carter et al (1998) for a more recent feminist-inspired volume returning to a critical engagement of news/ values, and Adcock (2003) for how complex and deep that gendering still is. One of its editors, Mary Stott, was renowned for her editing of the Guardian’s women’s page 1957–71, providing an invaluable mainstream forum as the WLM was forming. Though not cited it is likely that Stuart Hall’s ‘Encoding and decoding’ article (1973) informed our approach. See Betterton for a useful summary of the shift in approach from ‘images of women’ to ‘the work of representation’ (1987: 19–24). Ros’s theoretical approach was advanced in Language and Materialism (Coward and Ellis 1977), with its feminist implications explored in the pages of the feminist journal m/f, which Ros, Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie edited. Their founding editorial declared: ‘women are produced as a category; it is this which determines the subordinate position of women’ (Adams, Coward, Cowie 1978: 5, emphasis in original). See also the journal Screen in the 1970s. On one memorable occasion at CCCS ‘the woman question’ was explicitly described as a ‘bourgeois deviation’. In WPCS 6 Cultural Studies and Theory feminism is acknowledged but singularly absent in nine male-authored theory articles (1974: 5). See Barratt 1980 and Malos 1980 for broader engagements with domestic labour. In Our Treacherous Hearts (1992) Ros Coward arguably again pursues this theme, investigating how women collude with patriarchal relations. The arguments in ‘Relations of production’ are developed with more attention to historical specificity in ‘Women “inside and outside” the relations of production’ (Bland, Brunsdon et al 1978). From this research on women’s home-based lives developed Dorothy’s ethnographic engagement with women’s media consumption (this volume, Hobson 1980, 1982). Retrospectively, Dorothy shows an acute self-awareness of her difference from those she was interviewing (Brunsdon 2000: 118). It can usefully be read alongside Angela McRobbie’s more Gramscian-inflected article on Jackie magazine (McRobbie 1978a). Cf. McRobbie’s comment about working class girls: ‘both saved by and locked within the culture of femininity’ (McRobbie 1978b: 108). One commentator describes Screen’s theoretical position as an ‘extreme textual determinism’, ‘vigorously’ foregrounding ‘the role of representation and thus of the text, in constructing the subject’ (Turner 1996: 86). Contributing to heightened feelings, Ros Coward had challenged two key CCCS projects – WPCS 7/8 (Resistance through Rituals) and ‘The “Unity” of current affairs programmes’ in WPCS 9 (1976) from a Lacanian position, with a CCCS response also published in Screen (Coward 1977, Chambers et al 1977/8). See also another CCCS article, McDonough and Harrison 1978, which makes a similar critique of Juliet Mitchell, and also straddles marxism and psychoanalysis. In its comparable but non-psychoanalytic focus, ‘Relations of reproduction: approaches through anthropology’ (Bland, Harrison et al 1978: 173) should be seen as a companion article. Frank Mort, though adopting a Foucauldian framework, did go on to pursue a historical approach (Mort 1987). This paper was also presented at a BSA event – a ‘women’s caucus seminar’. See also McRobbie 1978 on the disruptive body of the teenage girl. CCCS struggled to gain legitimacy in terms of research funding. With the success of Paul Willis’s research, Learning to Labour (1980), the SSRC looked more favourably on the qualitative research carried out at CCCS and committed to funding the ‘young women’ study. As Charlotte Brunsdon recounts (1996: 285), at the time women in CCCS believed Hazel was the first woman to successfully complete her PhD. In fact Margaret Marshment had been awarded hers in 1977, but was not in attendance by the time I arrived in 1972.
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34 Harry Braverman (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital: The degradation of work in the 20th century New York, Monthly Review Press. 35 In addition to Paul, Hazel and Dorothy’s contributions, other projects on women’s paid work included Amos (1977), Parmer (1982), Taylor (1976 in this volume), Winship (1978), plus contributions to McRobbie and McCabe (1981). 36 See Griffin 1985 for a more sustained development of her argument. 37 In my view the work of art historians and historians, for example Griselda Pollock, Rozsika Parker, Sally Alexander, Leonora Davidoff and Catherine Hall provided a third hub. 38 It was perhaps the diminishing of some of the ‘betweens’ by the 1980s that enabled a slew of ‘second phase’ books to be published by those involved in and around the articles discussed here: Brunsdon 1986, Coward 1984, Griffin 1985, Hobson 1982, McRobbie 1991, Mort 1987, Weedon 1987, Winship 1987. 39 See Brunsdon 1997a, Thornham 2000 and Hollows 2000 for feminist work on the feminine.
Bibliography Adams, P., Coward, R. and Cowie, E. (1978) ‘m/f ’ [editorial] in m/f No.1, pp. 3–5 Adcock, C. (2003) Rethinking Feminism, Representation and Contemporary Journalism: The politician, the wife, the citizen and her newspaper, DPhil, University of Sussex Althusser, L. (1968) For Marx, transl. Ben Brewster, Harmondsworth, Penguin Althusser, L. (1971) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation)’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, transl. Ben Brewster, London, New Left Books, pp. 121–173 Amos, V. (1977) Black Women in Employment, MA, University of Birmingham Andermahr, S., Lovell, T. and Wolkowitz, C. (2000) A Glossary of Feminist Theory, London, Arnold Ballaster, R. Beetham, M., Frazer, E. and Hebron, S. (1991) Women’s Worlds: Ideology, femininity and the woman’s magazine, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Macmillan Barrett, M. (1980) Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in marxist feminist analysis, London, Verso Barthes, R. (1967) Elements of Semiology, London, Cape Barthes, R. (1972) Mythologies, London, Cape Beezer, A., Grimshaw, J. and Barker, M. (1986) ‘Methods for cultural studies students’ in David Punter (ed), Introduction to Contemporary Cultural Studies, Burnt Mill, Harlow, Longman, pp. 95–118 Betterton, R. (ed) (1987) Looking On: Images of femininity in the visual arts and media, London, Pandora Bland, L., Harrison, R., Mort, F. and Weedon, C. (1978) ‘Relations of reproduction: approaches through anthropology’ in Women’s Studies Group (eds) Women Take Issue: Aspects of women’s subordination, London, Hutchinson, pp. 155–175 Bland, L., Brunsdon, C., Hobson, D. and Winship, J. (1978) ‘Women “inside and outside” the relations of production’ in Women’s Studies Group (eds) Women Take Issue: Aspects of women’s subordination, London, Hutchinson, pp. 35–78 Braverman, H. (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century, New York, Monthly Review Press Brunsdon, C. (1996) A Thief in the Night: stories of feminism in the 1970s at CCCS in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies, London, Routledge, pp. 276–286 Brunsdon, C. (1997a) ‘Pedagogies of the feminine’ in Charlotte Brunsdon Screen Tastes: From soap opera to satellite dishes, London, Routledge, pp. 172–188 Brunsdon, C. (1997b) ‘Identity in feminist television criticism’ in Charlotte Brunsdon Screen Tastes: From soap opera to satellite dishes, London, Routledge, pp. 189–198 Brunsdon, C. (2000) The Feminist, the Housewife and the Soap Opera, Oxford, Oxford University Press Brunsdon, C. (ed) (1986) Films for Women, London, British Film Institute Carter, C., Branston, G. and Allan S. (eds) (1998) News, Gender and Power, London, Routledge Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (ed) The Empire Strikes Back: Race and racism in 70s Britain, London, Hutchinson Chambers, I., Connell, I., Curti, L., Hall, S., Jefferson, T. (1978) ‘Marxism and culture: Response to Rosalind Coward’, Screen, Vol.18, No.4, pp.109–119
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Comer, L. (1971) Wedlocked Women, Leeds, Feminist Books Corner, J. (1991) ‘Meaning, genre and context’ in James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (eds) Mass Media and Society, London, Edward Arnold, pp. 267–284 Coward, R. and Ellis, J. (1977) Language and Materialism: Developments in semiology and the theory of the subject, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul Coward, R. (1977) ‘Class, “culture” and the social formation’, Screen, Vol.18, No.1, pp. 75–105 Coward, R. (1978) ‘ “Sexual liberation” and the family’, m/f, No.1, pp. 7–24 Coward, R. (1982) ‘Sexual violence and sexuality’, Feminist Review No.11, pp. 9–22 Coward, R. (1984) Female Desire: Women’s sexuality today, London, Paladin Coward, R. (1992) Our Treacherous Hearts, London, Faber Cowie, E. (1978) ‘Woman as sign’, m/f, No.1, pp. 49–63 Dalla Costa, M. and James, S. (1972) The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Bristol, Falling Wall Press De Beauvoir, S. (1972, English edn first published 1953) The Second Sex, transl. H. M. Parshley, Harmondsworth, Penguin De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, transl. Stephen Randall, London, University of California Press Downing, H. (1981) Secretarial Work and Technological Change: Patriarchal relations in the office, PhD thesis, University of Birmingham Figes, E. (1970) Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in society, London, Faber Firestone, S. (1972) The Dialectic of Sex: The case for feminist revolution, London, Paladin Franklin, S., Lury, C. and Stacey, J. (eds) (1991) Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies, London, Harper Collins Friedan, B. (1965) The Feminine Mystique, London, Victor Gollancz Gavron, H. (1966) The Captive Wife, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul Gornick, V. and Moran, B. (eds) (1971) Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, New York, Basic Books Greer, G. (1971) The Female Eunuch, London, Paladin Gramsci, A. (1971) Prison Notebooks, London, Lawrence and Wishart Griffin, C. (1985) Typical Girls? Young women from school to the job market, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul Hall, S. (1973) ‘Encoding and decoding in the TV discourse’ Stencilled Paper, CCCS, University of Birmingham (published as ‘Encoding and Decoding’, in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrewe Lowe and Paul Willis (eds) (1980) Culture, Media, Language, London, Hutchinson, pp. 128–138) Hall, S. (1977) ‘The hinterland of science: ideology and the “Sociology of knowledge” ’, WPCS 10 On Ideology, CCCS, University of Birmingham, pp. 9–32 Hall, S. (1980a) ‘Cultural Studies and the Centre: some problematics and problems’ in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrewe Lowe and Paul Willis (eds) Culture, Media, Language, London, Hutchinson, pp. 15–47 Hall, S. (1980b) ‘Recent developments in theories of language and ideology: a critical note’ in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrewe Lowe and Paul Willis (eds) Culture, Media, Language, London, Hutchinson, pp. 157–162 Hall, S. (1980c) ‘Introduction to Media Studies at the Centre’ in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrewe Lowe and Paul Willis (eds) Culture, Media, Language, London, Hutchinson, pp. 117–121 Hall, S. (1996) ‘Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies’ in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies, London, Routledge, pp. 262–275 Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds) (1976) Resistance Through Rituals: Youth sub-cultures in post-war Britain, London, Hutchinson Hartmann, H. (1979) ‘The unhappy marriage of marxism and feminism: towards a more progressive union’ Capital and Class, No.8, pp. 1–33 Hermes, J. (1995) Reading Women’s Magazines, Polity, Cambridge Himmelweit, S., McKenzie, M. and Tomlin, A. (1976) ‘Why theory?’, Papers on Patriarchy Conference London 76, Lewes, Women’s Publishing Collective
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Hobson, D. (1978) A study of working class women at home: femininity, domesticity and maternity, MA thesis, University of Birmingham Hobson, D. (1980) ‘Housewives and the mass media’ in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrewe Lowe and Paul Willis (eds) Culture, Media, Language, London, Hutchinson, pp. 105–114 Hobson, D. (1982) Crossroads: The drama of a soap opera, London, Methuen Hollows, J. (2000) Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture, Manchester, Manchester University Press King, J. and Stott, M. (eds) (1977) Is This Your Life? Images of women in the media, London, Virago Kuhn, A. and Wolpe, A.-M. (eds) (1978) Feminism and Materialism: Women and modes of production, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul Lovell, T. (ed) (1995a) Feminist Cultural Studies Volume 1, Aldershot, Edward Elgar Lovell, T. (ed) (1995b) Feminist Cultural Studies Volume 2, Aldershot, Edward Elgar McDonough, R. and Harrison, R. (1978) ‘Patriarchy and relations of production’ in Annette Kuhn and Ann-Marie Wolpe (eds) Feminism and Materialism: Women and modes of production, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 11–41 McRobbie, A. (1977) Working Class Girls and the Culture of Femininity, MA thesis, University of Birmingham McRobbie, A. (1978a) ‘Jackie: An ideology of adolescent femininity’ CCCS Stencilled Paper, University of Birmingham McRobbie, A. (1978b) ‘Working class girls and the culture of femininity’ in WSG (eds) Women Take Issue, London, Hutchinson, pp. 96–108 McRobbie, A. (2000) ‘Stuart Hall: The universities and the “hurly burly” ’ in Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg and Angela McRobbie (eds) Without Guarantees: In honour of Stuart Hall, London, Verso McRobbie, A. (forthcoming) ‘Reflections on young women and consumer culture’ Journal of Consumer Culture McRobbie, A. and McCabe, T. (eds) (1981) Feminism for Girls: An adventure story, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul Malos, E. (1980) The Politics of Housework, London, Allison and Busby Millett, K. (1970) Sexual Politics, New York, Doubleday Millum, T. (1975) Images of Women: Advertising in women’s magazines, London, Chatto and Windus Mitchell, J. (1971) Woman’s Estate, Harmondsworth, Penguin Morley, D. (1980) ‘Texts, readers, subjects’ in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (eds) Culture, Media, Language, London, Hutchinson, pp. 163–173 Mort, F. (1987) Dangerous Sexualities, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul Nochlin, L. and Hess, T.B. (eds) (1972) Women as Sex Objects: Studies in erotic art 1730–1970, New York, Art News Annual Oakley, A. (1972) Sex, Gender and Society, London, Temple Smith Oakley, A. (1974a) The Sociology of Housework, London, Martin Robertson Oakley, A. (1974b) Housewife, Harmondsworth, Allen Lane Parmar, P. (1982) ‘Gender, race and class: Asian women in resistance’ in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (eds) The Empire Strikes Back: Race and racism in 70s Britain, London, Hutchinson, pp. 213–235 Pollock, G. (1977) ‘What’s wrong with images of women?’, Screen Education, No. 24, pp. 25–33 Rosen, M. (1973) Popcorn Venus, New York, Avon Books Rowe, M. (ed) (1982) Spare Rib Reader, Harmondsworth, Penguin Rowbotham, S. (1973a) Woman’s Consciousness, Mans’ World, Harmondsworth, Penguin Rowbotham, S. (1973b) Hidden from History, London, Pluto Press Shiach, M. (1991) ‘Feminism and popular culture’, Critical Quarterly, Vol.33, No.2, pp. 37–46 Shiach, M. (1999) Feminism and Cultural Studies, Oxford, Oxford University Press Siegel, D. (1997) ‘The legacy of the personal: generating theory in feminism’s third wave’, Hypatia, Vol.12, No.3, Summer, pp. 46–75 Tanner, L. B. (ed) (1970) Voices from Women’s Liberation, New York, New American Library Taylor, P. (1979) ‘Daughters and mothers – maids and mistresses: domestic service between the wars’ in
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John Clarke, Chas Critcher and Richard Johnson (eds) Working Class Culture: Studies in history and theory, London, Hutchinson, pp. 121–139 Thornham, S. (2000) Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies: Stories of unsettled relations, London, Arnold Tuchman, G. (1978) ‘The symbolic annihilation of women by the mass media’ in Gaye Tuchman, Arlene Daniels and James W. Benét (eds) Hearth and Home: Images of women in the mass media, New York, Oxford University Press, pp. 3–38 Turner, G. (ed) (3rd edn 2003) British Cultural Studies: An introduction, London, Routledge Van Zoonen, L. (1994) Feminist Media Studies, London, Sage Wandor, M. (ed) (1972) The Body Politic: Women’s liberation in Britain 1969–72, London, Stage 1 Weedon, C. (1987) (2nd edn 1997) Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist theory, Oxford, Blackwell Weedon, C., Tolson, A. and Mort, F. (1980) ‘Introduction to Language Studies at the Centre’ in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrewe Lowe and Paul Willis (eds) Culture, Media, Language, London, Hutchinson, pp. 177–185 Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour: How working-class kids get working-class jobs, London, Saxon House Winship, J. (1978) ‘Women and work bibliography’ CCCS Stencilled Paper, University of Birmingham Winship, J. (1980) ‘Advertising in women’s magazines 1956–74’ CCCS Stencilled Paper, University of Birmingham Winship, J. (1980) ‘Sexuality for sale’ in Stuart Hall et al (eds) Culture, Media, Language, London, Hutchinson, pp. 217–223 Winship, J. (1981) ‘Woman becomes an individual: Femininity and consumption in women’s magazines 1954–69’ CCCS Stencilled Paper, University of Birmingham Winship, J. (1987) Inside Women’s Magazines, London, Pandora Women’s Studies Group/Editorial Group (1978) ‘Women’s studies Group: trying to do feminist intellectual work’ in WSG (ed) Women Take Issue: Aspects of women’s subordination, London, Hutchinson, pp. 7–17 Zaretsky, E. (1976) Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life, London, Pluto
24 Images of women in the media Helen Butcher, Ros Coward, Marcella Evaristi, Jenny Garber, Rachel Harrison, Janice Winship
I’m going to fly you to Miami like you’ve never been flown before. I’m Leslie Next time you want to see what you’ve been missing, fly my wide-bodied, non-stop jet from London to sunny Miami. National Airlines ad. Guardian 13/11/74 p. 10
Of course ‘Leslie’ is also the name of a National plane, but how secondary that knowledge is when a smiling woman’s face beams down on the reader. An ad. selling National flights? An ad. selling woman’s sexuality as if she were a prostitute for sale. An ad. which demands from us a more complex understanding than this. An ad. from which we can move in order to begin to talk about images of women in the media. And in this paper we do no more than suggest such a beginning. It points to the way in which images are produced images: adverts are so contrived we can see vividly that they are not representing reality but re-presenting it (giving us it again) in a transformed way. It points to a hidden history. Why has woman’s sexuality come to be used in this way? Could it not be a man’s? It hints at the contradiction that images of women always betray. They are rarely there as active, living individuals, but yet it is one woman who is standing for what women are, whether it is sexual objects, mothers or housewives. It suggests the connotative value of women’s images: one simple image, a smiling, pretty face and we are already into the realm of sex or fantasy, happiness or sunshine (She’ll fly you to Miami), excitement or power – for men. It persuades us too of equality between men and women: ‘I’m going to fly you . . .’ balanced by ‘you . . . fly my widebodied . . .’ Every day on T.V. and in newspapers, in magazines and at the cinema, in the street and the underground, we see and hear many similar verbal and visual images of women. Usually we take them for granted. They are part of our everyday lives. They appear ‘natural’. They appear inert not just because we are accustomed to the various media and do not see their processes of production, but because those are the images we are socialised into categorising women in terms of. And although it may be predominantly the media presenting those images to us from our earliest days, it is the social relations predominantly outside the media, in the family and at work which give rise to these categories. In looking at the media we are moving from the specificity in which each media projects its images to the generalities concerning woman’s position in society. So though the media have their own structures and processes, their own codes which translate women into those contexts in specific ways, the level of sexist ideology and its practice arises from a wider base. That sexist ideology, which is
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lived by us, is the primary determination on the signification of the images of women created in the media. For this reason we feel we are, in this paper, justified in comparing images which are taken from different media. For instance T.V.’s presentation of the ‘Miss World’ competition appears because it is a world event and hence newsworthy, because it is entertainment the Misses of the world are allowed a measure of individuality, if not in terms of their bodily proportions, they do speak about themselves. But are those women that different from the anonymous sexual Leslie of the National planes as the most perfect plane. Or the housewife. Jeremy Thorpe’s election appeal to the ‘housewives’ – ‘the women who will decide’ – is not produced through the same practices, nor for the same ends as the image we receive from a letter by a ‘housewife’ who describes when, after a busy and interesting day, an old school friend rings her only to comment: ‘You poor thing you must be bored as a housewife’ (the Sun 24/10/74). Jeremy Thorpe’s appeal requires that there are such ‘housewife’ images around. We have said that images of women are the end product of media and social practices. But the contribution of media practices: to do with the techniques of camera and lighting, the representation of three dimensions in two, as well as the kind of programme or article – news, documentary, fiction, adverts – structure images in such a way that there is a preferred signification. For when all is said and done the purpose of the media is to signify. There is a transparency in the media images which no individual, individuals who are primarily living out a history and only secondarily signifying what their actions are about, can ever have. The media image is complexly structured, but whether verbal or visual is still more ‘simple’ than ‘real life’: we have to understand and read it in a particular way. However, although we can interpret ‘simplification’ in relation to women as a ‘reduction’ of women, it focuses for us their fragmentation. That, real as it is, is usually disguised. Because no woman is just sex object, mother, housewife, whore, she manages to unify these contradictory images of herself. She is, on the surface, a woman, underneath, those parts. To illustrate the point, the removal of all obnoxious ads. like National airlines would not necessarily change how men see and treat women. The empty, waiting, sexual vessel is how many women are treated by men, but the fact is less obvious when the woman is also a mother and housewife than when she makes a ‘simple’ appearance in the context of an advert. This fragmentation is readily evident in the differential distribution of images. On T.V. and radio, if you look and listen long enough, to all programmes, you’ll not only see most of the stereotypical images emerging, though in different programmes, and weighted heavily towards some, but also hear individual women doing their best to negotiate out of the images they are being persuaded into. In porn there is only the ‘lascivious bitch’ or ‘passive whore’. In women’s magazines no elderly, poor or ugly – and so on. Not only do women appear fragmented, but each of those fragmented images is condensed. The images are familiar and conventional immediately ripe with connotations, as ‘Leslie’ is. That simple image which denotes just a pretty woman brings together all those associations: she is a symbol for sexuality, excitement, exotic places etc. We will see later that it is adverts which most obviously use woman’s image to symbolise. It is however a symbol which is iconic. That is part of the signified remains woman. Theoretically something else could signify those areas, but neither something nor man does: it is woman, and it will be important later to understand why. That it is not woman as such that is important in ads is clear from the use of parts of her body only, her body distorted, a focus on breast or lips, to signify sexuality.
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But she is also a symbol or metaphor in a different way. Disguised within her appearance is perhaps the most repressed content of our culture, that which men can only cope with in a displaced way. Latently the image of woman often refers not just to women’s relation in and to the world, but not surprisingly since most of these images are constructed and read by men, to men’s being in the world. As Anthony Wilden suggests: The male myth of ‘insatiable’ female sexuality is in effect a metaphor of the insatiable demands the socioeconomic system makes on men as human beings. It is not the women that men cannot satisfy; what men cannot satisfy are the machines: technique, technology, production and performance. System and Structure p. 290 Or to hint at an area we shall elaborate in detail later, cartoons in the working class press – the Sunday Mirror and Sun – ridicule women to an abominable degree: they appear in all their worst attributes, they are stupid, they nag, they are subservient . . . However does it not make sense that cartoons about man’s successful power in the home may also be a displaced way of coping with his lack of power at work? He laughs at women’s weakness, not just with scorn, but as a way of distancing himself, defining himself against a state of being he is not allowed to adopt. He cannot be ‘just a pretty face’, simple and loving; he has to fight in an aggressive competitive world. Michael Crawford as Frank in ‘Some Mothers do ’Ave ’em’ (BBC 1 Mondays) is funny because he behaves like a woman. Our analysis of images of women in the media does not pretend to be a thorough and exhaustive enquiry. Our study of the different media and their constituent parts has unfortunately been extremely uneven. Nevertheless with the available material most, but by no means all, taken from the week of October 20–26th, we have been able to analyse and understand in a preliminary way not just that women are oppressed and exploited through the media, but the processes by which that occurs, and the context in which it has to occur. The distinct areas of the media we look at are: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Woman as news– mainly newspapers Woman as sex– papers, films, magazines Woman as humour– papers Woman’s self-presentation– mainly women’s magazines Woman in ads.– mainly women’s magazines and colour supplements Women in fiction– T.V. and women’s magazines
1. Woman as news Looking first at the Guardian, the Observer and the Birmingham Post in the middle class range, and the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Birmingham Evening Mail in the working class range we asked: i ii iii
What do women look like when they’ve made the news – what categories do they fall into? What criteria have put them there? Are those the same as for men? How are they treated?
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(i) The material for this section is taken almost entirely from the week October 20th to 26th. Category 1 Women as official politicians and professional women The politicians were invited to give their opinions on specified topics Barbara Castle points to Sir Keith Joseph’s distorted statistics Guardian Oct. 25th Mary Whitehouse and Jill Knight achieve visibility by virtue of their past opinions This week delivered no professional women, but surely they do appear? Category 2 As sportswomen women were almost invisible, except for a straight report of Virginia Wade playing in the Wightman Cup. (Guardian) Category 3 Women achieve visibility as criminals with crimes ranging from the personal criminal act of passion: Georgina Howard, in Romeo and Juliet suicide pact Daily Mail 21st or despair: Mrs Wise, cousin of the Queen, kills her mentally retarded son Guardian 23rd to the overtly political: Pat Arrowsmith appeals against punishment in Holloway Guardian 24th Judith Ward, on trial for the M62 coach bomb murders Daily Mail 25th Category 4 Women who achieve visibility because of an unusual occupation for a woman: First women engineer at Rolls Royce Daily Mail 22nd
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Category 5 Women who become newsworthy by virtue of elite status: This may be inherited status – royalty, or daughters of famous people; or achieved status – ‘starts’, personalities etc. The newsworthy action can be traditional: Princess Anne takes the salute Daily Mail 23rd or unusual: Chris Everett, top tennis star decides not to marry because of Billy Jean King’s Women’s Lib influence. News of the World 20th or a combination of the two: Georgia Brown marries (traditional) the father of her 8 year old son (unusual) Sun 22nd 77 year old American multi-millionairess to marry 29 year old mineworker’s son Daily Mail 23rd The most common action is thus to marry, and the next most common is to have an interesting love affair: Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia and superstar Richard Burton Sunday Mirror 20th Category 6 Women who become visible by virtue of borrowed status. They are seen to be supporting famous sons or husbands i.e. they are mothers or wives: Margaret Troudeau at Orly Airport Guardian 21st
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Mrs Odessa Clay, mother of Mohammed Ali Sun 25th Category 7 Women become visible by virtue of being physically/sexually attractive. There is a wide range of coverage in this category, as well as an enormous quantity of examples: Pages of pin-ups in the working class (conservative) press Fashion models The sexuality theme in advertisements The mentioning of physical attributes of women whatever they are doing e.g. Mrs Anne Sargent, Chairman of Cash’s Name Tapes, ‘Looks are only one of her assets’ Birmingham Post 9th Although there weren’t any this week the category poses the problem of how we would place prostitutes. On some counts here perhaps; on others (remember ‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’?) in category 1. Any way it points to an active and passive sexual image. Category 8 Women in humour. Since we deal with that in detail later we will do no more than mention it here. Category 9 Women become visible in the news because they typify a social problem. Involuntarily, through no effort of their own, they come to represent a position over which they had no control. They were victims of circumstances. Some became visible as individuals: Mrs Juggins and her son, the victims of high rise flats Observer 20th Betty Ford and Happy Rockerfeller, the victims of breast cancer Mary Rider, old age pensioner, victim of inflation Guardian 22nd Others became visible as a social group: Adolescent mothers in social classes 4 & 5 gained massive coverage as one focal point in Sir Keith Joseph’s attack on the declining moral standards of Britain ‘Britain: a decadent new Utopia’ Guardian 21st (ii) What criteria have put them there? Are those the same as for men? For categories 1–5 the criteria on which women appear in the papers have to do with news values which are independent of women. Men become visible on the same criteria. Though we can say for example that sometimes a political speech by a woman may have additional
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Comparative model of categories of visibility Categories of visibility WOMEN
MEN
Degree of control over image for women
Stereotyped image
Passivity/dependence on men
1. Politicians professionals
large coverage
high
rarely capable
active independent
2. Sportswomen
massive
medium
rarely shown physically active
active independent
3. Criminals
similar
low/medium
ruled by heart easily misled
active independent
4. Unusual occupation
rare
medium
defined against ‘usual’
active independent
5. Elite status
similar
medium
glamorous loving and marrying
(active) dependent
6. Borrowed status
rare
low
supportive mothers and wives
(active) dependent
7. Sex object
absent
low
Prostitute?
absent
physically sexually attractive witch-like?
passive dependent men dependent on them
8. In humour
less
none
trivial, silly, frivolous, gentle
dependent
9. Victims of social circumstances
rare
none
fatalist pathetic weak
passive dependent
news value because it is delivered by a woman. What might appear as a woman’s exclusive right of appearance – the ‘unusual occupation’ – has its equivalent for men in unusual activity of any kind: climbing a mountain, sailing round the world – the extraordinary. Women appear less than men on all these counts, first because they are not taken so seriously (their activities in the same sphere are always secondary), second because there are fewer women politicians, sportswomen and women criminals. We would surmise too that fewer women are seen to do ‘extraordinary things’; fewer too are probably recognised as ‘elite’. The criterion for 6 & 7 is being a woman as society defines that. These women appear newsworthy as women, a womanhood reduced to ‘sexuality’ for men, and ‘supporting’ or ‘serving’ men. For 6, whatever action the woman is carrying out – and she may not be acting: he acts and she is just there – has to relate through her husband, children, boyfriend or father. Even the ‘housewife’s’ views on prices are expressed in terms of how they will affect her family’s Sunday lunch. The only men who appear in a similar category are the husbands of women who are high up in categories 5–8 e.g. Prince Philip – sometimes. Category 7 is solely, in newspapers, a woman’s province. Men however do appear as sex objects in magazines like Viva, Playgirl and Cosmopolitan. They are too beginning to appear as ‘objects’ in some men’s fashion ads. in the colour supplements. The criterion has little to do with news values, all to do with ‘light relief ’, as pleasing photographic scenes, cartoons, the crosswords in ‘fun’, away from the ‘serious’ business of
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the news. In this respect they do not have to be women, but as sexual objects symbolising that ‘fun’ they do. The victims of Category 9 appear as much for their emotive character, their capacity to induce guilt in the reader. Women here are standing for all those groups who are weak and vulnerable, unable to look after themselves. In other contexts it is the old, the poor or starving Ethiopians. What they have in common, their inability (or prevention) to speak for themselves is exploited to blame them in an asymmetrical way. They are not wholly victims. In this particular case ‘the unmarried girls in classes 4 & 5’ (a phrase containing two negative connotations already) were irresponsible receptacles of wrong morals filtering down through the education system; morals however that were actively propounded by the ‘bully boys of the Left’. Sir Keith leaves the ‘bully boys’ however to make emotive references to the girls’ total inability: to keep a man (‘deserted or divorced’) to think (‘of low intelligence’) to absorb formal education (‘of low educational attainment’) to love their children (‘to provide emotional stability’) to rear them (‘future delinquents’) The particular forcefulness of this passivity and inability to act is rarely attached to men. Negative references to men generally concern the nature of the action – the ‘bully boys’. The categories of course do merge into each other all the time. Our separation of them only makes their specificity clearer. Thus, Pat Arrowsmith’s ‘elite’ status makes her visibility as a ‘criminal’ more newsworthy. Similarly in some areas women achieve more visibility than men performing similar actions, simply because they are women acting in a situation where they are grossly outnumbered by men e.g. the category of ‘unusual occupation’ for women spreads into the category of ‘women as politicians’. (iii) How are they treated? From the way in which woman is reported it seems that the ‘natural’ categories within which she appears are 6 and 7. All other categories in their images attempt to call on notions of ‘motherhood’, her role as wife or girlfriend, her sexuality and physical attractiveness. A series of Guardian photos consciously illustrate the contradictions that such a categorisation implies, but in true liberal style shows them and leaves them – abruptly, for us to draw our own conclusions. The caption is ‘Three working women’. The photos one above another show a bikini-clad model posing round a car, a cleaning woman with vacuum cleaner standing ordinarily by a car, and third a woman traffic-warden probably booking a car. Yes, all working, but all achieving an identity through their relation to the prime object or subject of the news – the car, the Earls Court Motor Show – an all-male symbol. Politicians, and professional women when they appear, are sometimes not differentiated from men in their actions. This may have to do with a genuine liberal policy by parts of the media to treat women equally where the occasion merits it and to respect the validity of the Women’s Movements’ political action. However the media’s approach is by no means consistent or far reaching: dismissive humour is the order of the day, albeit a way of coping when they’re unsure about the validity of such topics as news. The whole area of sexual relationships and of socialisation into sex roles – about which women not men are concerned
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– is regarded as less serious, more private than other public issues such as economic inflation, politics and word affairs in general. To make a detour from the press, Brian Redhead in ‘A Word in Edgeways’ introduced Juliet Mitchell as the author of Psychoanalysis and Feminism (the stumbled over the word ‘feminism’) ‘but’ (relieved laugh) ‘We’re not going to talk about that tonight.’ (The subject was indeed wide-ranging and ‘public’: on Epochs and Ages.) (Radio 4 10 p.m. 16/11/74). However we can suggest other reasons than the magnanimity of the media towards woman’s equality, for the seriousness with which they take women in high office. To be other than serious would not only be making a mockery of women, but of the important arena of public life – a male sphere. However that arena can be protected in other ways when the woman in question does not hold high office. The threat of femininity on that arena is dissolved by classifying woman out of that arena and into femininity, (or out of that too – she’s abnormal) thereby establishing male precedence once more. Norman Shrapnel, writing about Una Kroll the women’s rights candidate during the October election, does just that in a necessarily ‘humourous’ and to us jarring style. In one swoop he makes her into a freak for not subscribing to femininity (‘she’s the least frivolous practitioner ever to run a surgery’) (‘in her sensible white sweater she lies in wait for mums’), dismisses the seriousness of her cause in relation to men, gets in a jab at women’s liberation and brutally asserts men’s superiority by dismissing women in a libellous way to give men the final word. To illustrate, he writes: ‘she’s getting as many voters as she can lay hands on, mainly women of course’ ‘They get set in their nervy ways in these dormitory areas’ (Could be he’s talking about men as well but the ‘of course’ suggests otherwise) ‘She’s not the sort of woman’s libber who goes in for bra-burning . . . she sets out to ignite the damp mums waiting for their (on the whole) brighter children’ ‘. . . the mums seem less bright than their clothes and far from militant. Any complaints, worries, problems? Nothing special thanks all the same.’ ‘they’re just pre-occupied with mum-matters’ ‘You soon realise it’s not women she’s really talking about but people’ (You can almost hear him sigh with relief as he shifts the emphasis onto men in a way which we think trivialises the relevance of Una Kroll’s policies for men: they’re so unlikely ever to be implemented that they’re not worth making). There’s a display board in the hall entitled ‘Learning to be a man’ which seems to take equality to impressive lengths. And there are quite a few dads in the audience. Can they be some of those exhausted husbands of commuter land . . . now ripe for a spot of domestic job-swapping? If so one of the things they learn from Dr. Kroll in a world worthy of Jonathan Swift, (the gesture to her of some respect on a male scale) is that it costs £3.25 to run a baby for a week (our emphasis throughout) For comparison bear this item in mind when we turn to cartoons. The most common description of women in any of the categories 1–4 is not in terms of their actions but in terms of their ‘being’ as ‘mother’ or ‘wife’. Una Kroll, Britain’s first women’s rights candidate canvassing her constituency of Sutton and Cheam between morning surgery and looking after her four children (Observer 29/9/74): ‘We see her talking to a woman with pram and baby.’ Mrs Thatcher was reported to have ‘attended a political meeting and prepared the Sunday lunch’.
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Sportswomen too find themselves in a similar double-bind situation in which they cannot be successful. To win as an athlete say, she has to symbolically become a man – be competitive, aggressive etc. – but she’s only allowed to win as a ‘weaker’ man. However to ‘succeed’ in that way means to fail profoundly as a woman: to be labelled a freak. It is a ‘win’ in isolation from men and women. Alternatively she can connive with the media to be sporty and sexy or sporty and a mother, in which case her sport is seen second to her femininity. In both ways the worlds of men and women are kept apart and intact. While a man’s sporting activities confirm and strengthen his identity as a man, a woman’s identity is challenged. In category 3 we find that women because they are criminals first, women second are treated in the same way as men: Judith Ward is referred to by her surname in some papers. However whether or not the crime is a ‘woman’s crime’ a mother murdering her mentally retarded son – the specific emphases in the reporting are on feminine attributes. Thus in the Judith Ward case, she is pointedly asked what she thinks about the children’s death: ‘There was a long pause in court before she wept on almost a whisper, “I told him I thought it was horrible.” ’ Having turned against her ‘natural’ role in killing children she is reaffirmed in her femininity by that remark, also by a great deal of crying which the papers lap up eagerly: ‘Judith Ward . . . broke down and wept. She began sobbing as . . . Dabbing at her eyes . . . She choked back more tears . . .’ (Sun 24/10/74 p. 7) Category 5 Elite persons and stars of both sexes have to retain their media visibility by acting in an appropriately star like fashion. But more often than not it seems that though their access to media visibility is via ‘eliteness’ their presentation is, for the benefit of the readers (women readers only?) again in terms of ‘love’, ‘marriage’ and ‘family’. Similarly we shall see that these are the foci of women’s magazines’ features on ‘stars’. The romance of the week, between ‘superstar and princess’, a hot combination between two different styles of ‘star’, was that of Richard Burton ‘madly in love with a new Liz – Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia’. They are pictured in the romantic setting of a first weekend together in Paris. Then Liz is pictured alone, modelling her fabulous dresses which at a modest £150 or so each are ‘less expensive for Richard than diamonds’ (Sunday Mirror and News of the World 20/10). ‘Lord Lichfield with a heartless disregard for the enterprise of journalism was attempting to keep his love life with Lady Leonora a secret’ (News of the World 20/10). A rumour that David Frost had stolen Lady Jane from Prince Charles was said to be unfounded. In contrast to these fairy-tales of princes and beautiful princesses, descriptions of actual married life are very rare and totally unglamorous: ‘A Midlands couple make a pledge to have “no babies for five years” in order to get a mortgage on a terrace house’ (Birmingham Evening Mail 24th). Here we have the beginnings of ‘displacement’. ‘Love’, ‘marriage’ and the ‘family’ are ‘real’ issues for women, but here they are transformed into a fantasy context where everything is beautiful. The fantasy world offered to the woman reader is distanced from her by
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class distinctions, but brought close to her by her emotional identification with the women in their relationships to men. The identification at that level reaffirms her in her roles as ‘mother’, ‘wife’, ‘lover’, makes them seem positive whatever their shortcomings in the everyday world. At the same time however the fantast disavows the lack she has, i.e. she is not a star, she’s only a mother and wife. She is made to feel, at the least, that there is a possibility of success in those feminine roles. It is not the institutions of marriage and family which bring failures: through their affirmation the only weakness can be at a personal level. We might perhaps, using Marcuse’s concepts, describe this not as fantasy but repressive sublimation, for while the former can be cherished for its own sake – think of childhood fantasies, and Lord of the Rings, about other worlds – repressive sublimation must be a function of the tedium and problems of the real world.
2. Woman as sex Every day the Sun prints a picture of a female nude on page 3. On Sunday, one or two of the papers have one of these glamorous photographs on almost every page. These are not the papers aiming at a specifically male audience, i.e. those magazines designated pornographic, and what is shown is not as explicit as in those magazines. Yet, even the most graphic of these are under the same regime of representation as the nude-pictures, accepted by both sexes as part of the ‘natural language’, of the media. These photographs of the female body in papers such as the Sun, Sunday Mirror, the News of the World; the presence of the glamorised body in advertising; the exposure of the female in soft-core porn and even in films generally accepted as ‘erotic’ as opposed to pornographic, here the female body is posing, usually, with emphasis on the breasts and exclusion of the genitals. The body is framed-in-the-beautiful photograph, illuminated presented in smooth, glowing, perfect nudity. John Berger (Ways of Seeing, BBC, 1972) began to point to the ideological assumptions in this form of representation: nudity opposed to nakedness, which in Western media connoted misery and poverty; brutal nakedness as opposed to glamorous and perfect nudity. ‘To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude . . . Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.’ (Ways of Seeing). This distinction is one of importance. ‘Nudity’ is something represented for the viewer. It belongs to the realm of ‘beauty’, ‘art’ and ‘glamour’, and is emptied of the signs of the relationship between subject and object – i.e. the ideological connotations of glamour fix the view in a representation which excludes recognition of the debasement of identity of women in their role as sexobject. It results from a certain fetishistic mode of photography where the viewer can see ‘the signs of obvious labour’ (Barthes), i.e. the technical perfection of lighting, framing and arranging. Benjamin in ‘The Author as Producer’ (trans in New Left Review) points to the way in which this new objectivity of technical expertise puts the photograph in the position of a fetish; ‘It is the political function of photography to renew the world as it actually is from within, that is, according to the fashion’. As a fetish, ‘it describes a structure of representation and exchange, and the ceaseless confirmation of the subject in that perspective’ (Stephen Heath, ‘Screen’, Summer 1974 p. 108). The viewer is set up as a passive spectator of subject and object – the contradiction of woman whose only identity is as a BODY, as SEX, in a society which confers its greatest rewards on persons who succeeded as individuals in their own right. The body is represented as pure exchange – sex as commodity – object.
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What is interesting about the presentation of nudity in the media, and in pornography, is the movement towards a reconciliation of the problem of women’s sexuality. One can almost recognise what Barthes describes in ‘Le Plaisir du Texte’ (Paris 1971), where he talks of ideology becoming a fiction, i.e. reaching a degree of consistency, captivating everything under one hegemonic language, where there ceases to be conflict. The emphasis on women’s sexuality in magazines such as ‘Cosmopolitan’ and ‘Viva’, and in pornographic films (take for example ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’, exploring the contemporary image of the nymphomaniac housewife), seems to point to a reconciliation of conflect. Women’s body as pure pleasure, both for men and for women. The articles and photographs in ‘Viva’ are the reconciliation of nudity – women represented as ‘the sex’ in a masculine perspective (conventional nude poses) – with the women’s subjective realisation of sexual pleasure. The cover of the October Issue, advertising its contents with ‘Woman Power Now! It’s the Real Thing/Nancy Friday: Liberated Mothers and Daughters/Viginal Exercises: Easy! Erotic! Exclusive!’ shows the increasing the coming together of the nude as repository of patriarchal-capitalist ideological sexual pleasure with the woman’s own pleasure in sexuality. The change-over from women as repository of moral values (the same fetishistic structure) as seen in the writing of the heroine in the nineteenth century novel, to woman as the repository of pleasure can be seen in the conflicts of representation in the early cinema: the vamp or the sweet innocent; and in certain awkward compromises like the ‘Confession film’ where the woman admitted her sexuality and confessed it. For the Victorian heroine, the beauty spoke the language of moral intention e.g. Caroline Helstone in Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Shirley’: ‘Her face expressive and gentle; her eyes were handsome, gifted at times with a winning beam that stole into the heart with a language that spoke softly to the affections.’ The same disavowal of identity is quite clearly seen in eroticism, particularly in Hollywood cinema. Through lack of space I can only generalise, but it is fair to say that the star represents all things to all men. Take for example D.W. Griffith: When I consider a young woman as a stellar possibility, I always ask myself, does she come near to suggesting the idealised heroine of life . . . The girl to have the real germ of stardom must suggest – at least in a sketchy way – the vaguely conscious ideals of every man. Again she must suggest – and this time equally important – the attributes that most women desire. Star quality is constantly referred to, expressed in such generalities as ‘glamour’, ‘sexappeal’ etc, and the same language of ‘essence’ and mystification is used for the contemporary pin-up, or nude picture, masking the structures which support the woman in this position of pure representation. Mailer, writing about Marilyn Monroe, provides a good example. She emanated sex, a sweet simple girl on still another back street, emanated sex like few girls ever did . . . libido seemed to ooze through her, and ooze out of her like dew through the cracks in a vase . . . She was already without character. So she gave off a skin glow of sex. The contemporary stereotype becomes the archetype of woman through her sexuality. Also Barthes on Garbo: ‘Now the temptation of the absolute mask (the mask of antiquity for instance) perhaps implies less the theme of the secret . . . than that of the archetype’ (Essays, Fontana).
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It is for this reason that Julia Kristeva writes ‘La Femme, ce n’est jamais ça’ (Tel Quel magazine, Paris 1974) i.e. ‘Women, that’s never the point’, you can’t BE a Woman. The practice of women can only be negative: ‘it’s not that, and it’s not that either’. Kristeva: ‘I understand by woman that which isn’t represented, that which isn’t spoken, that which stands outside nominations and ideologies’. In other words what exists now is woman represented as subject for an ideology which denies the exploration of identity on the same terms of men.
3. Woman as humour Women, the cartoon and the popular press ‘Woman’ as a stereotype of media production is nowhere so clearly portrayed as in the cartoon of the popular press. This is for reasons indigenous both to the type of humour and to the nature of the method of communication. Firstly, the essence of cartooning lies in caricature; in exaggeration of characteristics in order to enable quick and easy recognition (think of the length of Edward Heath’s nose in any cartoon!). In the same way, ‘woman’ becomes very tightly defined by her most easily recognised functions. Secondly, (in the examples that have been chosen) the cartoon is static, it has to make its point in a single statement, (short conversation at most) or in a single action, which allows for no subtlety of representation. The cartoon must also be seen in relation to the audience for which it is intended. Therefore the images which the cartoonist chooses to present will be those which have relevance for the greatest number of his readers. We have all experienced the alienation engendered by lack of understanding of an ‘in’ joke. The popular press has a distinct, vested, economic interest in avoiding any such alienation of its reading public. Therefore, as Richard Hoggart says ‘the massive popular press must restrict itself to the appeals and attitudes which are most popular. . . . There must be no significant disturbing of assumptions.’ Therefore, ‘woman’ as seen in the cartoons of the Sunday Mirror, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and the Sun is always seen at the level of her highest common factor, at her most stereotyped and paradoxically in her saddest form. (N.B. In order to try to produce an analysis related specifically to the most defined image of women and humour, I have chosen to ignore both the strip cartoon and certain cartoons of the middle class press – notably Varoomshka! However, it would be interesting to see this brought up in discussion).
Woman as an object of humour In order to analyse ‘woman’ as portrayed in humour, we must look both at the reasons why people laugh, that is the processes involved in producing the physical act and also at the reasons why such a form of humour exists. In all the examples I have chosen (from 20th – 26th October) the essence of the humour in the cartoon is ridicule. That is, laughter at somebody, having a joke at somebody else’s expense. In all the cases mentioned below, the laughter engendered is at the expense of woman. The major emotion that is produced in the reader is one of scorn, and to be scornful it is necessary to convince oneself of one’s own superiority. (This superiority can
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be experienced by both men and women.) When an idea of humour is added to that of scorn, then the object of that humour is reduced to a state of debasement. Max Eastmann, in The Sense of Humour, says, ‘And the reason why we hate to be laughed at, is that we experience a feeling of inferiority on such occasions . . . For no matter how truly the laughers assures us that they are not hostile, but only happy – they feel no scorn but rather a delighted love of our natural blunder – still there remains the fact that we are inferior.’ If this kind of woman-objectified humour is produced from reducing woman to a state of inferiority, to a state of debasement, it is important to look behind to the mechanisms which result in this kind of action. Hobbes, in his famous opinion about laughter, said that the passion that aroused laughter was ‘sudden glory’, which was produced either by some sudden act of their own that pleaseth them: or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison thereof, they suddenly applaud themselves. And it is incident most to them, that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves: who are forced to keep themselves in their own favour, by observing the imperfections of other men. In twentieth century terms it is therefore possible to see the cartoons of the popular press as a male-contrived, male-produced, male-supporting ego trip, generating laughter which can be seen as the outward expression of an inner-contentment which this real or imaginary superiority inspires! To be more serious, I would like to suggest that the humour of the cartoons is not just an incidental phenomena which entertains, but that it embodies distinct social mechanisms. These social mechanisms are exactly those which are at work in other form of the media; those mechanisms by which men maintain their position of social dominance both consciously and unconsciously. I do not think that at this stage it is necessary to debate the reality of our male-orientated society. That is, the ideology which tells us that male action, thoughts and words are the reality, the norm, and that women are deviant from that norm. However, that very deviancy has a norm in itself and it is this norm of women which produces the stereotype. As Sheila Rowbotham says ‘The media have considerable power to throw back to us a version of ourselves which is presented as the “norm” ’. If we take the male-production orientated norm as given, we begin to see how it is possible that women (as in the examples below) are only defined as related to men. There are two sides to the humour which binds women to this male norm: two ways in which the mechanism of social dominance controls the image of women in the media. Firstly, there is the exclusive aspect of cartoon humour. This is the aspect which says that masculine and feminine are mutually exclusive and that it is never possible for one sex to do a job which is socially prescribed for the other. This places women completely outside the male norm and then scorns those activities which are traditionally ‘feminine’, not admitting women to any aspect of the ‘real’ world. That is, dominance is maintained by not admitting to any comparison of value between the two activities, since there is no common scale of values. Secondly, there is an inclusive, ‘social corrective’ aspect of humour, by which women are still deviating from the male norm, but in which she is encouraged to attempt to attain the male world and take on male-based characteristics. The humour is engendered when the woman fails to reach the male norm. That is, maintaining dominance by encouraging women for which she has not been culturally raised and is therefore likely to remain ‘inferior’. Thus, we return to the old dual concept on which women’s theory constantly comes unstuck: the fact that women are both inside and outside the system, that they are both ‘fundamental and marginal at the same time’.
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This duality of women’s position produces another, less obvious idea within the humour of women generally; that there is within the idea of derision a sneaking suspicion of envy by the male responsible for the humour. This means that while the supervicial cartoon develops the idea of the small minded housewife, woman as consumer, emotional, illogical, there is an argument that the male cartoonist might well desire to be able to show those qualities of emotion, of frivolity, of concern for family over ‘job’, which he is forbidden to show because of his own binding to his own male stereotype. Specific examples I would like to look at four cartoons in detail, to see how woman adheres and deviates from the male norm, adheres and deviates from the female norm, on what aspect of superiority she is always found wanting, whether the humour is exclusive or inclusive and the results of such controlling mechanisms.
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No.
Male norm
Female norm
Aspect of superiority
Inclusive/exclusive
1
Serious logical thought (woman deviant)
Illogical, frivolous thought (woman adherent)
Reason over emotion
Inclusive
2
Innate mechanical skill (woman adherent)
Innate domestic skill (woman deviant)
Inability of woman to cope with her specified domain
Exclusive
3
Power violence, lack of emotion (woman adherent)
Gentle emotional (woman deviant)
Power over powerlessness
Inclusive
4
Importance of sexuality (woman deviant)
Importance of domesticity-non importance of sexuality (woman adherent) modern importance of sexuality (woman deviant)
Broadmindedness over smallmindedness
Exclusive
Notes 1. Derisive humour. Woman in male-dominated occupation unable to cope. Child-like misunderstanding of rule of the game. 2. Mutual exclusiveness of roles. Woman must excel at both, in order to excel as a woman. 3. Woman adhering to male norm half applauded for recognition of male power sphere, half derided because incapable of adhering to female. 4. Two female norms – domestic woman and new idea of sexual woman. Even if adhering to former, woman derided for not adhering to latter.
Conclusion There are no claims to originality in the delineation in the above stereotypes. The importance of the images lies in the cultural context in which they exist and are continually reinforced. The importance is in the extent of the stereotyping within certain forms of media presentation. The importance is in the social mechanisms which produce and control these stereotypes on a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ formula, by creating both inclusive and exclusive humour without giving women a position of integrity in either. So far, from the newspapers and our more extended coverage of ‘woman as sex’ and ‘woman as humour’, we find that woman’s re-presentation in the media is orientated round the images of ‘mother’, ‘housewife’, ‘wife’, and ‘sexual object’. These are the ‘norms’ within which women are pushed to conform, which individual women have to negotiate. They all represent woman as negativity, woman as oppressed: she only exists through her relationships to men, she can only be consumed by men. But we have begun to see that what is denoted about women is only the first level. Her sexuality, ‘a skin glow of sex’, however much contained in the commodity form, shifts us to the arena both of ‘primitive’, more ‘natural’, more ‘animal’ and to that idealised simple existence that technological man has lost and relinquished only nostalgically. The image points both backwards to a savage past and forwards to an imagined resolution of man’s conflicts in the world. Woman can only be the symbol for all that while she is not part of the present – while she remains oppressed. That sexual image is a condensed one: it holds much inside it. In humour we have seen the fragmentation of woman’s different images; the displacement onto her of man’s alienation from
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work and from home. Now we turn to the image of woman which does not define her against men, but begins to describe her on her own terms, in a more positive way.
4. Woman’s self-presentation Women’s magazines It would seem plausible that the images of women in women’s magazines should bear more relation to how women ‘really’ are than in media which are not only controlled by, but chiefly directed at men. However as John Berger says: ‘Women see themselves as men do, desire themselves to be as men would like them to be’. And Eva Figes: ‘Woman, presented with an image in a mirror has danced to that image in a hypnotic trance. And because she thought the image was herself it became just that.’ So part of the magazine does that. It gives us woman as man has defined her, ideally as the mother, wife and yes (even here) sex object to, or for him. There’s an absence of the non ideal images: no old women, no fat ones – only those trying to get thin, no spotty or miserable ones – unless they are trying to undo their ‘abnormal’ fat or spotty condition. At the visual level Women’s Own 16/10/74 delivered the following images: 4 ‘ordinary’ looking older women (if we can count actress Barbara Mullen) 5 enigmatic / narcissistic / sensuous 22 models (objects – not particularly sexual) 2 mothers 2 frightened women (sketches for fiction) 1 bride 1 ‘distortion’ (part of a woman’s face blown up for an ad) 6 workers (all showing clothes or advertising commodities) One graphic cartoon drawing for a bank advert shows two women gossiping at a shop door – both looking like Ena Sharples, one woman in turban and overall, and one extremely short mini-skirted, bottom-out-pertinently, wheeling-a-pram young woman. Any housewives in this issue were disguised as ‘models’. Of course this representation is slightly uncharitable in that the ‘less attractive’ images do tend to appear more frequently in the text – housewives are there. A similar breakdown for Honey Nov. 1974 delivers the following: 13 narcissistic (not ads) 28 ads } these merge slightly – 25 models (not ads) 35 ads status as sex objects? 1 mother (only in an ad for a skin product – baby shown too ‘soft as a baby’) 4 ‘distorted’ ie. just hips, legs etc. (ads) 3 workers (showing clothes and make up) 14 in ads (some working, some ‘just pretty’) Immediately this superficial categorisation presents us with images of women we have not seen in the newspapers. It also directs us to a disparity between Woman’s Own, the more traditional older woman’s magazine and Honey for the ‘more liberated’ young woman. We have the ‘model’, the ‘narcissistic’ woman and the ‘distorted’ woman all of which appear more frequently in Honey. What does not immediately reveal itself is the contradictions embodied in the images. The models we can see as woman presenting herself to a man; the
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narcissitic image we can interpret as woman loving herself in order than man will love her. But that, we suggest, is only part of the signification. The magazine covers begin to direct us to another side, to the other side, that is. These images of women’s faces on the covers are so refined, so bright and sparkling, disgustingly so, they’re more like Christmas trimmings, shiny things than women. Yet here they are as things supremely shouting ‘women’, pointing us inside to a world of women. It’s easy to be invidious about them. They’re saying: this is how you ought to look: this is how your man wants you: you’re a failure because you don’t look like that however many layers of cream you daub on (and off). Be that as it may, and it is quite likely for some women that that is their relationship to the image, something else is signified. There is a strong focus, not only on ‘the face’, that most personally revealing part of a human body, but on the eyes, looking directly and intimately at the gazer, on the mouth, smiling friendship. That that potential friendship, talking between women about personal relationships, is contained within its capitalist form of ‘thing’ – woman as commodity – does not negate it. Rather it poses the problem, non-linguistically, that there is a problem about the relation between ‘things’ and ‘people’ in our society. And indeed inside the magazines we find that the image of women we receive is both as ‘things’ and people. The positive side of it – woman’s belief in herself as a woman does have to do with personal relationships and those tasks which only women carry out. They believe firmly in the goodness of people, they are happy about small, trivial events as well as big ones; their humour, often about their children, is grounded in love. Such attributes reveal themselves vividly on the ‘Letter Page’. ‘The accident that was a blessing in disguise’, in which a woman describes how when she was forced to walk instead of cycle she met her neighbours for the first time. ‘We meet and chat and they show their kindness in many ways . . . now I no longer just live in my community – I am part of it.’ Another asks ‘Who said we’re getting lazy and only watch TV? I’ve seen so many hand knitted sweaters being worn recently that there must still be lots of women interested in using their hands and not just their eyes.’ In a feature entitled ‘The real Mrs. Bond stands up’ the contradiction hits us – when we’re looking for it. First is ‘Mrs. Bond’ in all her evening glamour, posing, model like for her man. Over the page though we read her diary while on location with her husband, that diary is woman talking to woman; it focuses on her family. I must say that whatever my feelings about this picture and the location, they are coloured by the fact that for the first time we are separated from our children, in all these years together, and whenever Roger has had to work, we’ve never allowed the family to split up. The beauty and importance to her lie are not the clothes she wears or the way she makes-up, but her relationship with her husband and children. Finally she has to leave husband and location and go home to the children. It is a life like any other woman’s life. The image then of mother and housewife as it appears in women’s magazines is not just as ‘borrowed status’. Women if not men feel and talk about their status in their own right; theirs is important ‘work’. But it is a letter from the Sun which of recent material most clearly illustrates this. ‘Housewife’ had enjoyed another busy day, but a peaceful one compared with the days when my children were too young to go to school. In addition to the usual chores of
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She is living and enjoying proudly (agreed she may have no alternative to being a housewife) a style of life that neither men nor working women can or usually want to live. Jacky Gillott in the Sunday Times explores ‘The case for the feminine woman. She calls ‘feminine’ those qualities bound up with ‘childbearing and rearing-gentleness, patience, selfishness, a narrow, family centred range of vision!’. Feminine processes are ‘those functions which are practical, organic, cyclical tending towards a maintenance of continuity.’ It is these qualities and processes she maintains which our technological society has in general lost, which ought to be brought back in. Of course they have not been ‘lost’, merely downgraded, hidden from sight at home while the man is out at work, to be ridiculed in humour, and not respected by the only means our society recognises – it is unpaid. Only women respect it and it is that image which Woman and Woman’s Own portray, not without the contradictions which being labelled ‘secondary’, ‘outside work’, give rise to. We shall see later in the fiction how these dilemmas are resolved. This feminine image is explored in a different way in Honey and Cosmopolitan. As in the more traditional magazines it is the woman who is the subject. Whatever pretence there might have been about Cosmo being the female equivalent of Playboy is blatantly untrue. In both Playboy and Cosmopolitan it is woman who is important to the extent that in Cosmopolitan she uses him. Strikingly since we can assume that most women who read Cosmopolitan are working women the fact does not seriously hit us. Both magazines portray women as ‘more liberated’, but they also portray them as more materialistic. It is they who buy and take advantage of all the trivial that capitalist society has successfully delivered to us. But it is they also who are concerned about their sexuality in a living way. We see that the independent female image still wears her capitalist dress, like the Honey Nov. cover: the plastic woman, not smiling, but sullenly aggressive and independent. That almost aggressive Honey cover does not point us to femininity as we recognised it in Woman’s Own – we do not see housewives and mothers – but the putting together of that hat, at that tilt, calculatingly with casual scarves, do lead us to look at fashion. Fashion and make-up are supremely run according to capitalist practice – obsolescence built into their definitions, but as we see the re-presentation of women and their fashion in the magazine context at one level makes a mockery of the world – that world embodied by men – which produces it. So often on the fashion pages in Honey the models pose together against a background of men at work, or not working because the models are impeding their progress. The work arena is trivialised by having fashion shown in it; men and their tasks are made fun of; it is created into a fantasy world which is constantly changing. In this particular Honey we have ‘The Gang Show’. A brightly dressed group of young women together with plump white-overalled decoraters perform a ‘Gang Show’ on their trestle bench. The stars? The women of course, ‘ganging up’ on men. We have also ‘Under surveillance’. Here models pose with dim looking men, mostly unattractive (or is that just our subjective view) amid various pieces of ‘spy-like’ equipment. It is the women who have their arms around the men’s shoulders. Simone de Beauvoir has written ‘nothing is less natural than to dress in feminine fashion’, though it may seem to be. ‘To be decorated’ she goes on ‘is to be offered’, and ‘elegance is a
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weapon, a flag, a defence and a bondage’. The dagger is that fashion becomes a form of narcissism for women because they come to identify with their image. But the image this magazine puts across is a multifaced and dressed one so that no woman could identify with one image. Rather she has to make an image – or so the message has it. Besides the two fashions we’ve already described (and the clothes on display, hair and make-up are very different) we were also offered a return to nostalgia – to look romantic in second hand clothes, ‘the dress that never died’, and to ‘Feel Free’. The models here are without men, they only have each other as they play with, lean against flexibly, a tarpaulin (perhaps the absent male). We do not deny that we are overemphasising the level at which fashion is asserting woman’s independence of men and capitalism, their challenge to that world, but it is . . . easy to overlook that strand altogether. We have to agree that though there is not one image for woman to be bonded by, the several can just as well be bondage. She still must perform the delicate task of presenting to the world an image that conforms to the images of the moment, and yet also expresses individual ‘taste’. In one article the magazine suggests just that. On ‘Style’: It is a sense, a touch – nothing more. Something between a talent and a commitment. It is nothing more than a way of expressing yourself – your style. It shows itself in the way you choose clothes and the way you put them together, in the way you interpret yourself through make-up and your hair, the way you decorate the place you live in. More than anything else style comes out of conviction in expressing your personal tastes, fantasies, wishes and your self. Three young women and one young man are helped by the magazine to find their ‘style’. They emerge at the end of the day as plastic people – lifeless. Yet still in the same magazine this notion of ‘style’ with commodity aids is completely negated. ‘Could it be that you’re a slut?’ reassuringly supports those of us who can live quite happily without being, ‘eminently virtuous’ about housework, without ‘the requisite guilt about fluff in corners to feel instantly impelled to remove it’. We’re encouraged, if that’s the way we like it, to live in a mess; we’re encouraged importantly, as women to feel strong about our position for ‘no-one ever calls a man a slut’. ‘Sluttishness is essentially female’. The man is excused, she scornfully adds. ‘Of course he probably has more spiritual things on the brain, like having a drink or watching T.V.’. Here we don’t have the affirmation of ‘feminine’ qualities that Jacky Gillott discusses but we do have an affirmation of women in the things it is difficult for them to do alone as women. It is easier to be ‘stylish’ than it is to be a slut: men like the first; they don’t like the second. In a Cosmopolitan (May 1974) we similarly find an image of woman finding out about herself, by examining the image she gives to men. Carol Dix explores in ‘Who’s afraid of the female sex drive?’ why men are afraid: ‘Could the male refusal to acknowledge our sexual desires be a cover up for their own insecurity and resentment?’ She starts from the assumption, as the ‘slut’ article does, that being ‘sexy’ (or being a slut) is fine. It’s how those men see and treat you that’s the problem. The woman’s right; the man’s wrong. She bolsters woman’s own sense of herself: ‘respect your own desires . . . realise you are not just a “temple over a sewer” ’ bolsters her by putting men’s own weakness on display. (This is in relation to Norma Levy the prostitute whose case ‘rocked a government’). Prostitution is a whole sphere of life in which men are out of control. They probably hate all prostitutes for mocking them. And outside that profession any of us can come in for the insult of creating a similar ‘prostitution’ situation . . .
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It isn’t the sex they are frightened of, it’s their lack of control over it. The image in Cosmopolitan and Honey is of woman crucially bound up in the material world of commodities, but not bound by it; she does not and would not want to speak out against it, but non-verbally comments on it. She uses it and makes of it – fun. Even the one male pin-up that Cosmopolitan sometimes shows – man with the tables turned on him – man as a sexual object – looks, amid a magazine full of women, faintly ludicrous. He’s fun too, in a way no female pin-up could be. It is of woman together with other women finding out about herself e.g. earlier pages (and men) usually at the level of interpersonal relationships. Of course she’s out to get her man, but so that she is in control of the situation, not him. It is woman searching for a self-respect which is outside the cosiness of home – being a wife and mother – and independent of men, though not without men. But that image is too rosy for over half the magazines are devoted to adverts in which woman as ‘object’, on every page stares us boldly in the face. Is it possible, indeed desirable to give such a ‘liberal’ interpretation of them? We find that, more clearly than elsewhere, in the magazines woman’s fragmentation is illustrated. She does appear as a sexual object, frequently, but also too as the narcissistic woman or the worker. Because the images are so ‘simple’, so ‘condensed’, the complexity of woman’s contradictory images is there on the surface for us to explore.
5. Women in advertisements Advertising is an area where in a disguised way production and consumption come together. There, in all its glory, is the commodity, yet its production, from which it emerged, is completely hidden. To sell the commodity the ad. has to appeal to the success it will be outside that production. Not surprisingly since it is women who literally and symbolically stand ‘outside’ that arena they feature widely in ads. to men as representation of ‘pure’ exchange. That same symbolic role functions in the ads. directed at themselves, and it is as consumers first that they appear to themselves: Marx, in speaking of man’s subjective powers as ‘objective’ . . . pointed to the way in which needs are the products of an historical development, not the trans-historical subjective property of individuals, developing in and through a constant reciprocal appropriation of the objective world subjectively . . . If consumption of the object produces the subjective impulse to produce anew, the production of the object creates, in the consumer, specific, historically distinct and developed modes of apprehension ‘perception’ – and, simultaneously, develops the ‘needs’ which the object satisfies. ‘Music alone awakens in man the sense of music’, he said in 1844. Thus the ‘forming of the senses’ is the subjective side of objective labour, the product of the entire history of the world down to the present. Stuart Hall (Introduction to the Grundrisse) Particularly in ads. we are forced, in order to make sense of them, to look not only at their denotative aspect but at their connotations. We take first ads. from women’s magazines, chiefly from those magazines we have already used, then ads. from supplements and newspapers particularly those directed at men.
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Images denoted
Connotations
Location
worker housewife/mother
independent equal to men loving
wife/hostess girlfriend model narcissistic ‘distorted’ attractive girl ‘distorted’ commodity described in feminine terms
organized beauty sex sensuousness natural romantic
daytime active ‘real world’ (daytime) active in relation to men and children (evening) ‘out of this world’ ‘being’
sex fun effect object fantasy sex (ever present) romance beauty fun happiness nature to be served she’s serving admiring extravagance success
‘fantasy’ ‘being’ N.B. We cannot attach these connotations to particular kinds of denoted image as we can with the magazine advertisements
Women’s magazines Worker These necessarily are daytime images, woman as active-independent, ‘equal’ to men. Needless to say they tend to be adverts for nurses, secretaries, work in banks and the Forces. The contradiction of the ‘freedom’ of a job but it being a woman’s job is sometimes blatant: WRAC ‘A worthwhile job means a secure future. If you’re looking for a job that isn’t trivial and boring, the Woman’s Royal Army corps could be just right for you’. The illustration is of a young girl in white turban basting a joint as a male chef supervises her. Often jobs are advertised showing a ‘pretty’ woman, when prettiness is no significant attribute for the job. It is the ads. which directly address themselves to working women i.e. middle class working women, chiefly in the supplements and newspapers which place woman in a more ‘equal’ role to men: Midland Bank ‘An account with the Midland gives you the confidence that helps you plan your life the way you want’ The photos are of a very middle class woman, a graphic designer at home, at work, with her husband, alone. Housewife/mother The adverts in magazines tend now to denote women in these roles in a much less direct way. No longer do we often see bright young mums with aprons serving cheese on toast to beaming children and husband. However the images are there in their visual absence: the ads. are directed to you the mother in their prescriptions to love. These are everyday, down to earth images:
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Helen Butcher, et al. Nestles Growing Up Foods ‘What do you give him when he prefers calories to protein?’ Babettes nappies ‘The more absorbent the nappy you put on your baby . . .’
Here the mother is hinted at: we’re shown her hand on his bottom. The ‘wife’ sometimes appears in company with her husband with the implications of ‘equality’. These are mainly in bank and housing association ads.: Access ‘Paying with Access is the simplest part of shopping’ A middle-aged-couple, smiling, are coming out of a shop. Negating the ‘equality’ is the fact that his arm is around her to help her out the door, but it also tells us that he paid for the item. Wife/hostess Here the image is of wife without her apron, dressed in evening wear, serving food in fairly glamorous surroundings. There is all the association of romance and magic. These tend not to be the images of Woman and Woman’s Own: Creda Cooker ‘Carefree entertaining’ Photo of young woman serving dinner to man. Girlfriend model Images of girlfriend, model, narcissistic woman merge into one another. They are distinctive in terms of where each casts her gaze: the girlfriend on her man, the model outwards at us, and the narcissistic woman towards herself. They are similar in terms of passivity: they represent woman as merely being. They appear in scenes of fantasy and romance, in exotic, unlikely places. The narcissistic women are often nude. The models usually smile. They are all young and beautiful: Girlfriend New Citrus Musk perfume ‘share it with a friend’ There’s a photo of a girl in a man’s arms as they sit on the grass clothed with autumn colours and light, the impression of fallen leaves around them – contemplative. Citrus musk is the cool, clean freshness of lemons blended with the warm excitement of musk. It’s so perfectly balanced, so fresh and yet so mellow that it has to be shared – like good-wine, music and love! Connotations of sex and excitement but also of love romance and peace.
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Model These are very much the image of woman as a man sees her. Though no man is actually shown looking at her we can imagine him, outside looking on – yet it is women who are reading these ads. They’re pretty, bright and cheerful, or sultry and pensive: Shaders (hair colour) ‘Blonde goes wild’ 4 shades of blonde women pose for the camera. They point to a new, freer life: ‘It’s wild, life will never be the same again’ Courtauld’s Lirelle Clothes ‘Lirelle. More than just good looks . . . comfortable, cool and crease defying’ There are photos of 2 women getting ready, looking at themselves, posing – ready to meet their men. But though the ad. is directed at how you as a woman can make yourself beautiful for a man, it is imbued with fun for yourself, fun with other women, enjoying your own looks, the feel of your own body. This is carried over strongly into the narcissistic image. Narcissistic Here the woman is often nude, often when the emphasis is on the face, the photo is misty – cutting us off from her. Sensuousness, privacy woman into herself, enigmatic – not just to gain her man: Freezemint Creme de Menthe ‘Only drink it if you get up when you want to, not when you have to. Green and cool and slightly wicked’. A hazy photo of blonde woman in white bathrobe – drinking. Boots ‘Fragrance at Boots. We have the famous names but we make you feel at home’ Again a misty photo of pensive blonde in long white robe, green ferns in the background. The natural woman, virgin, frail. Three Wishes (deodorant) ‘Now . . . a beautiful morning-fresh feeling to last your whole day through. Grant yourself three wishes! A small photo of naked woman using spray. ‘Distorted woman’ Surprisingly perhaps it is women’s magazines, particularly the younger more ‘liberated’ ones which carry this kind of ad. They do appear in ads. directed to men but not in quite the same unorthodox way. Here the woman’s body is dissected, parts blown up in size, focussed upon, juxtaposed with objects – real size or magnified, with herself normal size. At one level the purpose is ‘effect’. At another it is play with sexuality, highlighting of sensuousness and drama. It depersonalises woman, makes her into a thing, makes things alive:
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Without doubt these ads. are using sexual imagery, but it seems important to be masturbatory – woman arousing herself. In the supplement ads. the distortions cannot be of the same order – the body is to be erotic for men not for women: Leica (camera) ‘We’ve now produced a Leica that suits a few more pockets’ Accompanying the caption if a photo of a woman’s body which we can only recognize as such by the hands on the hips. The significant image of women that appears in women’s magazines is, we think, not so much the conventional one we all know about – mother and housewife, but the narcissistic image. It is that which the more sexual ‘distorted’ image of women seems to support. Advertisements in colour supplements and papers – mainly for men Despite the visual image always being pretty and young the image is used in complex ways. The woman denotes more than her body, and a sexuality which is available for men to control. National Airlines A smiling girl is a symbol of happiness, fun as well as the sexual category of ‘serving’ that the copy puts her into. Courvoisier ‘The brandy of Napoleon’ While two men in old French army uniforms play cards in the foreground a woman, clad in a white nightgown, sits in bed – provocatively, the tempting Eve. The white gown (again!) and hints of virginity – the pure female. There are suggestions of romance, of another world as well as her as a sex object – drink brandy and that’s what you get.
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After Eight Mints ‘Life begins after eight’. In the foreground lies a box of open mints on a silver platter, in the background two couples play croquet on the lawn. The setting sun casts its glow on the face and blonde hair of one of the women. Again she stands for beauty, the unusual, the extravagant. Mateus Rosé ‘Remember with Mateus Rosé the light refreshing wine from the people of Portugal’ Through a romantic nostalgic haze we can see only the face of one pretty woman, young, innocent, in peasant clothes. A man looks at her. Woman near to nature, the simple life. There are ads. which play on other aspects of femininity. In the Guardian we see a ‘working’ working class woman appearing in a typical role of ‘server’: Rank Xerox duplicator In turban and overall a woman is seen pushing a tea-trolley. ‘This gave Rank Xerox an idea’ ‘Like the tea-trolley it’s a convenient and practical way of saving time and money. You don’t queue for copies, it comes round to you. And you can move it where the work is . . .’ Indeed, like the tea-lady, at their beck and call. Increasingly there are ads. in which man as the ‘dressed up object’ is featured. Him in his finery with woman there in the background to admire his manliness. At a stretch we could label these as a reversal of roles. Women’s qualities are sometimes used to describe objects, like the National advert. One ambiguous one since it seems to be directed at men and women is the Volvo. While the car is described in terms of its female body, the ad. is also in a complicated way attracting women – a woman is seen gazing over her shoulder at it. The women’s magazine ads. delivered us another expression of women recognizing themselves in terms of male-defined femininity. The ads. in the supplements give us woman as symbol – of all things good (and bad) – the beautiful temptress. Usually the ads. in magazines and supplements alike present what we called in the introduction condensed images of women. The images are loaded. A woman cannot appear completely as mother, wife, lover and worker. Particularly can she not appear as mother and lover, or worker and lover. She’s a fragmented image. Usually one advert can hold only one of those images, a woman is just a mother, a ‘pure’ mother. Occasionally two are brought together but they are brought together in two women, not one: Hygena In an ultra modern kitchen a young blonde woman, tall and slim, dressed in white, is talking to a white-overalled, plump and short middle aged woman. They are both holding cooking utensils. They are united in ‘serving’, playing a wife’s role of cooking. They are separated: the beauty, virgin, sex-object, night-time woman of leisure and fantasy from the everyday, ‘motherly’, working day-time figure. The ads. pose for us then, discretely, the different fragments of a woman’s life. The ads. keep them apart; in ‘real’ life women have to negotiate their contradictions. The worker,
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independent and free, against the mother and wife who serves dependently. The virgin, sexual object against seducer and temptress. Mother against any sexual image. Woman’s own self when labelled by men. It is these contradictions which T.V. fiction and women’s magazines try to work out, though the contradictions prove so great that ‘real’ problems are frequently resolved at the level of fantasy.
6. Women in fiction The fiction tends to focus on the arenas of work and family, and although our examples were only few three images of women emerged as ‘resolutions’: 1 2 3
the image of the dependent woman, domestic, soft emotional and vulnerable to the hard world of men the independent feminine image of a career, hard, glamorous, articulate woman, in control – like men the combination – vulnerable career woman: Marked Personal (BBC 2 p.m. Wednesday) written by Christopher Bond. Though it focuses on the stereotypical area of middle-class women’s careers, the ‘soft’ or caring institution (in this case the personnel section of a firm) it does portray the women (all single I think) as capable of making responsible decisions within this role. A contrast is made between a despairing, dependent young mother, and the career woman, who is capable both in her work, and in the area of sexual relationships. General Hospital (ATV 2 p.m. Thurs & Fri) written by Donald James. Again takes the ‘soft institution’ to weave an intricate web of working and personal relationships inside a Midland Hospital. The ‘fifties’ formula of a handsome doctor and beautiful nurse romance, has shifted to the more intriguing relationships of working ‘equals’. This reflects the actual rise in the number of women doctors now at work. Although they are similarly placed in the career hierachy there is still the problem of the peculiar phased life history of women in connection with their ultimate domesticity. Though this is not made explicit, and underlying awareness of the potentially disrupting nature of affairs of the heart on a woman’s career adds the necessary tension to those attachments. While the man’s career progresses as before, the problem for women remains that of choosing between work and marriage, head and heart, even though there is economic equality in the work sphere. She is vulnerable because emotional life and work potential contradict each other, and will continue to do so while equality of responsibility for children within marriage is unavailable. The opening up of educational opportunities for middle-class women, followed by the closing of occupational opportunities on marriage, creates an expectations bottle-neck, a useful dramatic theme, but not one to which any solution became apparent. Intimate Strangers (ATV 9 p.m. Friday) written by Alick Rowe, is the last present-day serial considered in this brief survey. As in ‘Marked Personal’, it distinguishes between the capable career woman, who takes on all the characteristic toughness associated with career men (while at the same time preserving a glamorous appearance i.e. they are NOT the unmarriageable dowdy spinsters of earlier fiction) and the vulnerable, dependent wife. She represents the values of a past age, in which faithfulness and service to one man are compensated for by the security of a beautiful home and garden. The career girls (the daughter and the girl-friend who rejects Harry) represent values of
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the future in which a lack of emotional ties or ‘roots’ are compensated for by economic independence and success in terms of masculine career goals. The primary direction of interest is, can Joan (the wife) achieve anything for herself after 25 years of total dependence? In Cosmopolitan woman’s sexuality is explored much more. In ‘Beautiful’ by Rachel Billington, dependent as she is on her men – to say how beautiful she is – the heroine uses her sexuality to entice men. She is their ruin: one man destroys his reputation by making the schoolfriend of her daughter pregnant; because of her this same man is later killed by her husband whom she drives to the act. She is a mother, she’s clever and has an extremely successful job, she’s beautiful and sexy; she needs men. In one woman are all the problems of being a woman, but the story can only deal with them in a displaced way through fantasy. But whether it is fantasy or not we are made acutely aware of woman’s complex relation to the world. One image of woman not in that story is that of the mother figure as repository of moral values but it is still there in the fiction of Woman and Woman’s Own. ‘Close to him’ by Brenda Lowery (Woman’s Own Oct. 26 1974) is concerned again in a displaced way, with the vulnerable, moral woman’s relation to the hard world of men. She does work but as a teacher and then a secretary – in a ‘motherly’ way, but nevertheless she claims a moral victory. It is she who helps some lost children back home, comforting them sympathetically despite their naughtiness. It is a man – the boss – who is first outraged by such ‘tolerance’ and then grudgingly begins to respect her treatment of them she ‘wins’ through this kindness: she captivates her man. This section has been very cursory, but we hope it has at least hinted at how fiction creates its own combined images of women, i.e. it puts together different hits of the fragmentation, in order to pose the real problems which women face.
Conclusion We have attempted to describe in this paper the ideological modes of subjectivity available for women in the media under capitalism, and it is indicative of the complexity of the ‘images’ that we can in no way claim to have reached a collective theoretical agreement. Nor are we agreed on how to understand the interlocking mesh of determinations, a complex of technical, ideological, economic and political factors, which make the media, despite individual negotiations with the imposed hegemony, an image-producing system (the difference of treatment of the sexes is immediately exposed when one considers the untenability of the term ‘images of men in the media’). This sort of study of women can only be a negative one, a process of de-naturalisation, of understanding the ‘structuring absences’ of the apparently ‘natural’ language of the media. The ‘transparency’ of the media is not a simple matter of ‘a lie’, an imposition of an oppressive and exploitative ideology on women by imposing certain previously-agreed images. It is rather, the presentation of the ‘natural attitude in which a particular reality is taken for granted, regarded as, in some sense, immediate and absolute’ (S. Heath, Signs of The Times, Cambridge 1970). In other words, the effective role of ideology, to produce the category of ‘subject’ for the reproduction of the relations of production, has a dual structure: 1
the individual’s self-recognition in the structure (STRUCTURE here defined as ‘that which puts in place an experience for the subject that it includes’)
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i.e. ‘Self ’ constructed in a state of necessary alienation until the child appropriates the ‘language of the other’ (the language and law of culture; pre-existent modes of subjectivity): The child’s release from the alienating image will occur through the discovery of subjectivity by his appropriation of language from the other, which is his means of entry into the symbolic order in the capacity of subject. Wilden (Lacan, The Language of the Self ) In this limited space, we are unable to discuss this question. This is the question which Freudian analysis has posed of the construction of the individual as subject in the ‘symbolic’ i.e. the individual in its establishment as subject for ideological formation. This is the question of how women appropriate modes of negatively-defined subjectivity from a maledominated culture, which, in general, excludes them from the relations of production, and thus enter into a culture of difference. It is these relations of production which to some extent define ‘identity’ in bourgeois culture. The category ‘Woman’ is thus a negative definition – apparently divorced from the values of the system of production, but validating them in the reproduction of ideological formations as moral centre of the home, or repository of sexual pleasure. In this paper we have only been able to describe the ideological modes of subjectivity available to women: housewife and mother, sex-object the ‘insatiable’ female, the careerwoman. We have described these in their most aggressive forms and also where women have begun to negotiate with these images. The historical presence of Women’s Liberation has been a significant factor for the emergence of woman as signifier of woman, not as an empty signifier of the laws of patriarchal culture, but the group is divided about the implications of the emergence of a space for women to discuss femininity for themselves in the media; that is, whether this is progressive on balance or not. One member of the group writes: The family must serve and be seen to be dependent on capitalist production. And it is the woman through the family who is that role. The worker is fed and rested so he can resume work each day; the family reproduces the next generation of workers, physically and in socialising them to step into their parents’ roles; the family spends the money he’s earned; they consume in order to keep themselves and the economy growing; the woman’s body is consumed in the advertising necessary for this growth. It is woman who reproduces, consumes and is consumed. But women do more than this. They also stand symbolically for all that cannot happen or be along a production line. And in that capacity she stands for more than the opposite of man. Marcuse in ‘Eros and Civilisation’ maintains that it is behind art that lies the ‘repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason – the eternal protest against the organisation of life by the logic of domination’ It is in woman too that this lies. At one level it is their sexuality which is the symbol for that which is not work; it is that which you buy for your play. At another, in their everyday lives which support capitalism they do simultaneously live according to different set of values which focus on bringing up children, and on a life which has all the qualities of emotion, feeling and irrationality – the non-progressive world.
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So women reproduce capitalism, they serve it at every point, but they can only do so from a vantage point which has its base partly outside. It is they who inhabit the arena which we strive to buy through work; the area which must be controlled by work. Housewife, mother, nurse or teacher are images of women who reproduce physically and socially. Yet we have seen in woman’s magazines these same images struggling to say something positive about the way they do that. However, especially with the examination of woman as a sex-object in the media, some of us are inclined to see women’s discussions of themselves, their sexuality and ‘femininity’ (terms already defined by male culture) as the final success of capitalist ideology. It is reaching a degree of consistency where there ceases to be conflict. It has already been said that some of us deny altogether the idea of the realm of the home as potentially outside patriarchal, capitalist ideology: women’s sexuality, however, has been potentially disruptive for the central unit – the family – by which the circulation of capital and the social relations of production are sustained. Nevertheless the fetishistic structure by which women’s sexuality is re-presented in the media, as we have discussed in the section ‘Woman as SEX’ illustrates quite clearly how woman is maintained in a position of pure exchange. This re-presentation of woman from the male perspective as the SEX, repository of sexual pleasure, contained in the fetishistic visual image ‘describes a structure of representation and exchange, and the ceaseless confirmation of the subject in that perspective’ (S. Heath ‘Lessons from Brecht’ Screen, Summer 1974). In other words, despite women’s discussion of their own sexual pleasure, the presentation of the woman’s body as this pleasure, maintains woman as commodity-object and as a negative sign in a male-dominated culture. The fact that it is no longer simple exploitation in that now woman is enjoying her body, is potentially the final compromise to capitalism (that is recognising herself and finding pleasure in the modes of subjectivity available in capitalist ideology). But this pleasure is potentially disruptive and an examination of the contemporary images in the media show us the struggle to contain contradiction and impose a hegemonic language.
Bibliography Barthes, R. Systeme de la Mode Barthes, R. Writing Degree Zero Barthes, R. Elements of Semiology de Beauvoir, S. The Second Sex Benjamin, W. Author as Producer Berger, J. Ways of Seeing Eastmann, M. The Sense of Humour Figes, E. Patriarchal Attitudes Hall, H. ‘A “Reading” of Marx’s 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse’ (C.C.C.S. Stencilled Paper) Hall, S. ‘The Determinations of News-photographs’ W.P.C.S. 3 Hoggart, R. Uses of Literacy Mitchell, J. Woman’s Estate Mitchell, J. Psychoanalysis and Feminism Marcuse, H. Eros and Civilization Marcuse, H. One Dimensional Man Rowbotham, S. Woman’s Consciousness Man’s World Wilden, A. System and Structure Willis, P. and Critcher, C. ‘Women in Sport’ W.P.C.S. 5
25 Relations of production Relations of re-production Women’s Studies Group
Introduction The Women’s Studies Group is a new sub-group at the Centre. It was first formed in October 1974 and none of us had worked together before. Institutionally, then, our convergence as a group was an academic rather than a political convergence, despite our individual political involvement elsewhere. As such we must be typical of many of the women’s study groups and courses that have been appearing in universities and polytechnics all over the country – typical in that, despite its institutionalisation, our work must be overtly political. Unless this is the case, women’s studies can only be a fashionable academic fetish. The problem for us of producing politically directed academic work, has to some extent been resolved for us in the reception of our writing, rather than by anything intrinsically radical in our form of work. In autumn 1974 we were asked to present a paper on images of women in the media for the ‘Women in Media’ conference, organised by the British Sociological Association, and it is following from our work there that we have been asked to talk to several groups in a more directly political role. The paper we gave was the first piece of work we had done collectively, and hence there was no coherent theoretical framework or approach in the work. It was therefore only descriptive. However, what we did find from that descriptive work was the reinforcement of the division between the relations of production and the relations of reproduction, the former the concerns of men, the latter the concerns of women. So we decided to examine more closely the sexual division of labour which underlies these images. As it is the family in which these and the division between public and private spheres are central, we decided to start with the question of domestic labour, to ask: What is domestic labour’s economic function? In what way does it serve capitalism? Is it vital to capitalism? And is this direct economic formulation the only reason for the sexual division of labour? In other words, we are beginning to ask what are the levels of determination on the ideological formations. Within such an enormous and difficult question, we can only claim to be making tentative beginnings.
1 Domestic labour in relation to the production of surplus value There has recently been a heated debate in the Women’s Movement over the issue of whether the housewife, in her role as domestic labourer reproducing and maintaining labour power, does or does not contribute to the value of that labour power, and hence to surplus value.
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During the Women and Socialism Conference held in Birmingham in September 1974, the papers given clustered round two positions, both situated in terms of Marx, but based on differing interpretations of certain crucial and perhaps potentially ambivalent passages (for example, what exactly is meant by socially necessary labour time or the average labour of society?). One point of view that became known as the orthodox position regarded the writings of Marx and Engels in Capital and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State as an adequate analysis of domestic labour. They stressed that Marx and Engels did not leave women and domestic labour out of their analysis, they simply did not include domestic labour in the Labour Theory of Value for the very good reason that they believed domestic labour did not create value in the strict sense in which they defined it – a sense specific to capitalist production. The second view, the Unorthodox position, attempted to extend Marx’s Theory of Value to include domestic labour and to argue that women do produce surplus value indirectly. For the purpose of this section, and keeping the argument simple, I will assume the family unit to be one in which the husband is a productive labourer and the woman a housewife.* I will look at what is meant by the following inter-related terms – productive labour, the means of subsistence and labour power, and the distinction between exploitation and oppression. Then I will indicate how the orthodox and unorthodox analyses and solutions vary, and end by summarising these differences in a diagram. 1. Firstly, Productive Labour. Ian Gough in NLR 76 in an article called ‘On Marx and Productive Labour’, that Marx distinguished between productive labour in general (which can be termed useful labour), and productive labour under capitalism. Productive labour in general or useful labour, is the production of use values. This is a necessary condition of human existence in any form of society including capitalism. Productive labour under capitalism refers to the historically specific social relationship of production under capitalism in which . . . only labour which is directly transformed into (productive) capital is productive. When wage labour is exchanged for the variable part of capital it reproduces the value of its own labour power and in addition surplus value for the capitalist.1 Unproductive labour is also historically specific. It refers to labour exchanged for revenue (i.e. wages or income). When a capitalist buys labour, it is productive because it creates more value. When a consumer buys labour it is productive – creating only use values. This means that the same kind of labour can be productive or unproductive. For example, a woman working for a cleaning agency employer. On the other hand a woman cleaning State offices or a domestic servant is not a productive worker; her wages are paid out of revenue. It seems clear from this that if these strict definitions are to be adhered to, *
I am confining the analysis of domestic labour to the working-class family for the moment, only in order to establish the distinction between domestic labour and labour producing surplus value. However, if, as I go on to suggest, domestic labour does not produce surplus value even when maintaining a productive labourer, then it is no longer crucial to distinguish between whether a husband is a productive worker or not (from the point of view of an analysis of domestic labour). The distinctive aspect of domestic labour is then that it is a specific relationship between ‘free’ private labour reproducing labour power and waged labour. (The fact that the domestic labour of a middle class housewife may be ameliorated by gadgets and ‘help’ in various forms does not alter the nature of the underlying relationship.)
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the housewife is unproductive because she is ‘paid’ with part of her husbands wages. Furthermore, Only labour which produces commodities, exchange values, is social labour. Only this social labour can be considered in abstraction from the particular actions and skills involved, and from which the average level of productivity in a society at any given time can be worked out.2 2. Secondly, exploitation and oppression. Exploitation occurs only in productive labour under capitalism, when a worker creates surplus value which is appropriated not by the worker himself, but by the owner of the means of production. Surplus value is what the worker produces over and above the values which he receives from the capitalist for the subsistence of himself and his family.* Exploitation therefore does not mean doing work from which others benefit, nor does it mean creating use values, or working long hours. It means working directly for a capitalist producer. The orthodox view suggests that housewives are not exploited, though this does not mean to say that they are not oppressed, and oppressed solely in the interests of capitalism.3 But they are exploited neither by their husbands, nor by their husbands’ employers, because they have produced no exchange values, which alone are capable of appropriation by the capitalist. The products of their labour – for example cakes – could be sold, but the whole point is that they are not, they are consumed; they are not commodities. ‘Any work performed by the various members of the family in the course of consuming commodities, is individual and not social labour and does not affect the value of the labour power of the husband in the slightest’.4 He may dig the garden all evening or watch television, and his wife may be super-efficient or a slut, his wage remains the same! The productive consumption of labour power is the motive power of capital and benefits the capitalist. The labourer’s individual consumption belongs to himself – as do the use values produced in the family. Nobody denies that those use values are necessary for the commodity labour power, but the worker is not exploited by virtue of his individual consumption.5 The orthodox view goes on to maintain that the wife’s labour power, like that of the labourer, is not really paid for by the capitalist, but comes entirely from a fund of exchange values which have been created by the wage labourer, because as we have seen, the labourer replaces the fund with which his own labour is paid.6 In the sense that the wife receives her subsistence from her husband’s wages, and that she is tied to him through the marriage contract, then the real relationship between them is one of master and domestic slave (i.e. the means of subsistence is exchanged for useful labour). 3. The means of subsistence. What exactly is meant by this term, and in what way does domestic labour contribute to it? Neither the orthodox nor the unorthodox analyses dispute that domestic labour is a necessary part of the means of subsistence of the labourer and his family, or that the level of subsistence varies with climatic, historical or productive conditions, or the strength of the Trade Unions or any other factors. What is at issue arises purely over whether domestic labour contributes to the means of subsistence and hence labour power in terms of value. Marx states that the value of labour power is equivalent to the value
*
An assumption about the family as a unit, to be preserved in most wage bargaining and later welfare legislation.
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of the means of subsistence for the maintenance of the labourer, and because he is mortal, the maintenance of his successors too. The value of labour power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this special article. So far as it has value, it represents no more than a definite quantity of the average labour of society incorporated in it.7 It seems fairly clear from this and other passages of Marx, that when he was referring to the value of labour power, he meant the socially necessary labour time involved in the production of commodities, and that he regarded the wife’s labour as ‘free’ labour, adding use-values to the commodities, and therefore not increasing the value of labour power. The orthodox analysis goes on to show that labour power, like any other commodity, exchanges for its value in the market, and that the sole source of surplus value arises from surplus labour time expended in social production, over and above the necessary labour time required to produce the subsistence of the worker and his family. Labour power is unlike other commodities in that it also creates value. ‘When other commodities are consumed they are used up, but when labour power is consumed more value is created.’8 Though domestic labour does not produce surplus value it does benefit capitalism in the following ways: (a) Women in the home provide free, the socially necessary tasks of catering, cleaning and childcare. Provision of social facilities would reduce profits. (b) So long as women rely mainly on their husbands for their keep, they are content to work for very low wages – again aiding profits. (c) Housewives provide a reserve army of unemployed. They can also be laid off without being regarded as unemployed. (d) Their isolation from collective life tends to make them unsympathetic to their husbands’ collective struggles. Taking Engels’ account of the ‘origin of the family’ as unproblematic, the orthodox analysis asserts that because women’s oppression was caused by the institution of private property, which confined them to the home, women’s emancipation depends on their re-entry into social production. Though capitalism allows increasing opportunity for this re-entry, it can only be achieved on equal terms with men, and without exploitation, as an integral part of the private means of production becoming social property, i.e. of a socialist revolution. The suggestion is made, that by socialising domestic labour, the economic and property burdens on the family will be removed, leaving a higher form of the family in which affection and commitment are freely given. What is wrong with marriage, they claim, is firstly, the subordination of women and secondly, the indissolubility of the contract, not that a family lives together and cares for each other. They argue against those who suggest that the solution to women’s oppression is to abolish the family and abandon motherhood: this, they claim, would be equivalent to saying that ending the bourgeois relations of production is done by destroying production.9 They also argue against those who say that the family should be abolished because it reproduces in ideology, the relations of production. Of course bourgeois ideology is transmitted in the family because bourgeois ideology is everywhere. Of course ideology also plays an important part in the way that the relations of production lag behind the means of production. Of
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course a struggle must be conducted against bourgeois ideology and male chauvinism, but the social relations of production vary according to the character of the means of production and not vice versa. Even a revolutionary has to sell his labour power to a capitalist in order to live. The argument is therefore that there is only one way of abolishing bourgeois relations of production, and that is to abolish not mothers but the bourgeois character of the means of production. The important contradiction, they claim, is the antagonistic contradiction between capital and labour. The contradiction between husband and wife is a non-antagonistic contradiction in the sense that it is capable of solution when domestic slavery is ended. The orthodox article that I have just referred to, attacks almost every other contributor to the subject as ‘bourgeois revisionists’, ‘so-called Marxists’ etc. Nevertheless it is a very useful article for its references to Capital and The Origin of the Family, for only by returning to Marx’s original definitions can we see where Wally Seccombe diverges from them. I had better just point out that Wally Seccombe does not claim, as Mariosa dalla Costa does in Women and the Subversion of the Community,10 that housewives, in reproducing labour power are in fact producing surplus value. Following directly from this dalla Costa advocates that, as the only way to avoid the double exploitation of domestic labour and productive work, housewives must organise outside both these institutions of capitalist appropriation (i.e. in the community). Briefly, Wally Seccombe as a representative of the unorthodox position, in ‘The Housewife and her Labour under Capitalism’11 applies Marx’s labour theory of value to the reproduction of labour power itself. He asserts that all labour produces value when it produces any part of a commodity that achieves equivalence in the market place. It does not matter, he suggests, that the concrete conditions of domestic labour are privatised. Confusingly, Wally Seccombe does acknowledge the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, that only when labour is exchanged directly with capital is surplus value produced and the labourer exploited, but he argues at the same time that domestic labour does create value indirectly. He tries to do this by suggesting that the contribution of domestic labour to labour power can be measured. Firstly he divides the wage into two parts, part A which sustains the man and his substitutes, and part B which sustains the wife and her substitutes. He then asserts that domestic labour creates value equivalent to part B (the housewife’s own means of subsistence).12 Now Marx did state that the value of labour power of unproductive workers could be determined by their production costs in the same way as productive workers. He did not say that the value they create is determined by the value of the means of subsistence. Wally Seccombe ends up with an unbalanced equation composed of two statements, one true: labour power exchanges at its value; and one false: a domestic labourer adds to the value of labour power an amount equivalent to the means of her own subsistence. This implies that there is a second source of value benefiting capital – that of the labour of the wife. Marx however, showed that surplus value is produced after labour power is purchased at its value by the capitalist. Wally Seccombe argues that the wage form obscures appropriation of value at both domestic and industrial levels. To make the equation balance Wally Seccombe would have to argue that labour power is exchanged for less than its value, for less than the means of subsistence of the labourer and his family. He never states clearly, though, what kind of value it is that the domestic labourer creates. He concludes that what he calls the structural split between domestic and industrial labour, that banishes the housewife from sight, and divides the working class by gender role, is an ‘appearance’ that belies the underlying connectedness.
(2) Orthodox position. Labour power sells at its value in the labour market. Only after necessary labour time has been performed is surplus value created. Unorthodox position. Labour power sells at less than its value in the market. There is a second source of value appropriated by the capitalist – that of the housewife’s unpaid labour.
(1) Orthodox position. Domestic labour is outside the labour theory of value. Domestic labour is ‘free’ labour adding use-value to commodities. Unorthodox position. Domestic labour is part of the labour theory of value. Domestic labour adds value to commodities.
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Women’s Studies Group By asserting that the housewife’s labour creates and transfers value, we are taking an initiative, on the theoretical plane, towards its deprivatisation.13
He goes on, if the housewife can be made to see the (economic) relation between her oppression and her husband’s exploitation, she will not oppose him, but support him in collective struggle. This supportive role will never provide the motive force of women’s struggle, he thinks; this will be done by wage workers and students. Wally Seccombe is attacked as an advocate of wages for housework, and though this would be a logical outcome of his economic analysis, he never in fact proposes this. To summarise: The orthodox view asserts that the free labour of the housewife benefits capital without creating value. The unorthodox view asserts that the housewife benefits capital because she is creating value for which she is unpaid. This overview of the two positions has not allowed for detailed criticisms, but I hope it has indicated some of the competing themes and issues. Though we feel that the orthodox position is correct in asserting that domestic labour does not create surplus value we also feel that all the other articles, even though they take a different line, add important new dimensions to the original, ‘classical’ labour theory of value. We think that having looked at the specific relation of domestic labour to capital, it leads into an examination of the relationship to capital of those aspects of the family which have been socialised – education, the welfare state, the media, etc.
2 Surplus value and the wage Wally Seccombe, as the previous analysis has shown, argues that domestic labour does create value indirectly. In order to do this he posits a direct connection between the wage and the domestic labourer, which he says is not the same as having a direct relation with capital. We now shift the emphasis of analysis to the wage as a phenomenal form, believing that as a manifest form of latent relations, this will give us our most productive understanding of the role of the domestic labourer, in the same way that it gives us some of our most productive understanding in the realm of the industrial labourer. Seccombe’s model, as drawn below, puts the wage at the centre of our understanding.
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According to the above analysis, the labour of the housewife is part of the total labour embodied in the worker, which puts it outside a strict Marxist definition, which says that domestic labour cannot create more value than it itself possesses. Following this analysis of domestic labour, Jean Gardiner in NLR. 8914 produced some very telling criticisms of Seccombe’s position. She points to the strange contradiction in his analysis which allows him to say that domestic labour achieves value in the selling of the husband’s labour power, while at the same time domestic labour remains outside the law of value. In other words, Seccombe claims that domestic labour contributes directly to the creation of commodity labour power, while having no direct relation to capital. The logical extension of the achievement of value for domestic labour within the wage should mean that the value of domestic labour should increase with the value of labour power, which it obviously does not. That is, as has been pointed out before, the amount of work the housewife puts in at home, makes absolutely no difference to the wage that her husband receives. If Seccombe is right, then there should be some ‘mechanism for the terms of the sale of labour power to be determined by the domestic labour performed in its maintenance and reproduction.’15 Jean Gardiner then sets up her own model as below – a model of unequal exchange.
In this model she argues that surplus value is produced by the housewife, i.e. that domestic labour does directly benefit capitalism, by enabling capitalism to pay workers a wage which is less than the level of subsistence. However, it remains an unequal model, because there is no relation in the opposite direction – Capitalism does not function on domestic labour: it is in no way concerned about the productivity of the domestic labourer. The above analysis presented many theoretical problems and was rejected in a later paper by the Political Economy of Women Group (of which Jean Gardiner was a member).16 The PEWG argue firstly, that in order to say that domestic labour benefits capital by actually producing surplus value, there has to be some way of comparing domestic labour with wage labour. This they say cannot be done as there is no comparison of like with like. Specifically, they argue that there is no way in which domestic labour can be theorised as abstract in the way this can be done with wage labour. Marx states very clearly that only labour which produces commodities, exchange values, is social labour. Only this
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social labour can be considered in abstraction from the particular action and skills involved and from which the average level of productivity in a society at any given time can be worked out. The above analyses have shown that, at an economic level, women have an indirect and mediated relation to Marx’s central contradiction, that ‘between the forces of production and the relations of production, essentially embodied in the contradiction between two antagonistic classes’.17 Should we then say that the logical line of argument from this is that all women must become wage labourers in order to be brought to the forefront of this contradiction? This line of thought exposes a whole area of activity which has not been covered by the above analyses. What must now be looked at is where the woman’s oppression diverges from her class oppression; what is the exact nature of the oppression which she inherits and reproduces by reason of her obscure relation to capital. There is a need for feminist socialists to distinguish the specific oppression of women from the general oppression of the working class and to point out new levels of analysis in the realm of ideology (it seems that this level has to a certain extent been ignored by the economic theorist, although it’s reasonable to suppose that lack of time and space prevent them from expanding on the specificity of oppression to which some refer in passing), so that we can see why such tactics as withdrawal of labour are mechanisms which are neither available nor appropriate for the housewife. However, we must also avoid falling too far the other side, and having seen the connection with capital, even if it is indirect, we must reject any interpretation of the family as a purely subjective phenomenon. How does domestic labour function to sustain capitalism? If capitalism is not concerned with the proficiency of domestic labour and yet we believe that domestic labour does function to help capitalism, what functions exactly does it perform? What we must look at especially are those functions which are outside the boundaries of economic analysis. Domestic labour satisfies those needs of workers which are not provided for by the purchase of commodities, i.e. those very necessary emotional needs without which they could not be sustained and reproduced for capital. Domestic labour within the family also functions to provide at least the illusion of freedom in the personal side of life to give an outlet for that which is denied in the sphere of alienated labour. Consequently the role of domestic labour comes to be seen as one of necessity, in order that women can present the refuge of spiritual and emotional life against the increasing dehumanisation of capitalist society. Consequently, women’s role within the family is not just that of maintaining consumer needs, nor just that of ‘socialisation’, but a complicated intermeshing of economic functions with social functions which must take account of a level of ideology as is elaborated later on. There is a whole area of analysis which must see why such potentially liberating concepts as the ‘freedom’ of the family have in fact been appropriated by capitalism for its own purposes, instead of being used by women. Relationship of employer/employee and husband/wife In placing the wage as central to the understanding of the role of the domestic labourer, we must realise that the relationship on the one side of the wage involving employer/employee is very different from the other side involving husband/wife and the creation of use values. We have already said, in arguing against Jean Gardiner’s model, that wage labour and
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domestic labour cannot be compared like with like, but there is a danger in ‘pure’ economic analysis not to realise the power element in the husband/wife transactions. The sexual division of labour within the home cannot be analysed in the same way as the class division within industry. Seccombe, in particular, fails to show the importance of the inequality of the economic relationship within the family. The contract by which husband and wife are bound is not the same as that binding employer to employee. The wife is not free to withdraw her labour, nor to ‘down tools’ every evening or at week-ends. The domestic labourer is dependent on her husband in a way in which the employee can never be. The giving of the wage to the employee obscures the accumulation of surplus value by purporting to be exact recompense for labour. There is no pretence made to the housewife that her ‘wage’ is anything to do with her labour as such; it is money given for the purchase of commodities. The money given is never seen as belonging to the domestic labourer. The wages are paid to the wage labourer and as such they are seen to be the individual property of that individual. So that where men can often separate two areas of expenditure (personal and family), women, for ideological reasons, tend to merge their interests with those of the family and hence we can see that the division of wages within the family very often works against women in favour of men. The circularity of the argument runs that housework is not valued because it is not paid for and that because of this state of the undervaluing of housework, the family’s wage are not seen as being earned equally by husband and wife, but as belonging to the husband. This idea is of course continued within the sphere of paid women’s work. Firstly, the undervaluing of housework implies that it is accomplished without effort out of an ideological belief in the ideals of marriage. Hence when a woman becomes a wage labourer, it is not seen as necessary to lessen the burden of housework either by the State or by her husband. Secondly, it influences the idea that women are supported by their husbands and hence have no right to demand a living wage as an individual. Thirdly, at a different level, lack of power (economic and otherwise) in the role of the housewife plus the socialisation forces at work on that role reinforce the woman’s own belief in her subordination at work. It seems then that our economic analysis does not provide us with anything like all the answers. Although beginning to show us where women might fit into a class analysis, it also shows very clearly that the indirect relation to the central analysis leaves room for a great deal of discussion about the exact nature of this mediated relation and the area of ideology beyond the discussion of ‘socialisation’ processes, which has not yet been systematically analysed. There is a great need to look at deeper structures which underlie the whole being of woman. Secondly, they reject any analysis which suggests that domestic labour can be transferred to capital as profit, since this would mean that capital should be actively concerned about the specific variations of domestic labour, which, as we have said before, it is not. However, although rejecting the idea that capital can benefit directly from domestic labour, they definitely do not reject the idea that husbands may benefit from the work of their wives. So in the end they produce their own model, which in fact seems to come much nearer Seccombe again, although without his confusing division of the wage. So, in their final analysis, they agree that women act on the commodities to create use values, but this does not increase the value of labour power sold to capital. So that while agreeing that domestic labour is essential for the capitalist system, in the sense that it allows capital to give a wage lower in terms of use values than the actual subsistence level of the working class, there is no actual production of surplus value. Hence, their ultimate conclusion is that although domestic labour benefits the production of surplus value, even taking their analysis to the point of believing that without such labour
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the production of surplus value itself would not be possible, domestic labour does not actually produce surplus value itself. Having reached a theoretical conclusion which points to the peripheral position of women’s domestic labour under capitalism in terms of strict Marxist economic definitions (while not agreeing that capitalism would necessarily collapse if domestic labour were removed – it would merely find other ways of providing the servicing function), we are now faced with the problem of deciding how this relates to the more general problem of women’s oppression. In other words, is the whole question of women’s relation to surplus value important to the women’s struggle in general?
3 The wage form and its relation to the ideological role of the family Domestic labour’s relation to capital is mediated by the wage on one side and the commodities it purchases on the other. As has already been spelled out, our interest in domestic labour as labour is primarily a concern about domestic labour’s relation to the phenomenal form of the wage as part of the process of circulation, not with consumption (except as it too is part of circulation), nor with production. However this relation of domestic labour to capital mediated through the wage form is at two levels: first it appears in the presuppositions for a wage form to be present, and second it features in the hidden relations of the wage form itself. It is these two aspects which I shall consider here. How then does domestic labour feature in the necessary conditions of wage labour? Wage labour presupposes first: the separation of both means of subsistence and means of production from the labourer as producer, and from the labourer as the ‘free’ subject able repeatedly to enter the labour market and sell his labour power to capital; second: the forces of production sufficiently developed to absorb surplus as well as necessary labour; third: exchange of commodities; fourth: exchange not for use values alone, but for the positing of value itself as the ultimate purposes. As Marx describes these conditions: . . . various conditions appear which have to have arisen, or been given historically, for money to become capital and labour to become capital-positing, capital-creating labour, wage labour . . . (1) on the one side the presence of living labour capacity as a merely subjective existence, separated from the conditions of living labour as well as from the means of existence, the necessary goods, the means of self-preservation of living labour capacity; the living possibility of labour, on the one side, in this complete abstraction (2); the value, or objectified labour, found on the other side, must be an accumulation of use values
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sufficiently large to furnish the objective conditions not only for the production of the products or values required to reproduce or maintain living labour capacity, but also for the absorption of surplus labour – to supply the objective material for the latter (3); a free exchange relation – money circulation – between both sides; between the extremes a relation founded on exchange values – not on the master-servant relation – i.e., hence, production which does not directly furnish the producer with his necessaries, but which is mediated through exchange, and which cannot therefore usurp alien labour directly, but must buy it, exchange it, from the worker himself; finally (4) one side – the side representing the objective conditions of labour in the form of independent values for-themselves – must present itself as value, and must regard the positing of value, self-realization, money making, as the ultimate purpose – not direct consumption or the creation of use value.18 Here then Marx is positing two sides. How he conceives the experience for the work of these two sides remains a mystery since Marx himself was only concerned with capital production and its development. However it does not seem unfeasible to suggest that with that development the two sides have come to be family in which ‘living labour capacity as a merely subjective existence’ is found, and capital production. Although women’s domestic labour as such is not pointed to, its arena of implementation as a necessary pre-requisite for capital, is. Furthermore, through the act of exchange this arena is endowed with certain necessary qualities, namely the labourer comes to experience ‘freedom’, ‘privacy’, ‘individuality’ and ‘equality’ as they are formally given him in exchange. Marx describes how, in the exchange of commodities, of which the sale of labour power for the wage is only a special example, ‘equality’ and ‘freedom’ arise. As far as the formal character is concerned, there is absolutely no distinction between them [the exchangers], and this is the economic character, the aspect in which they stand towards one another in the exchange relation; it is the indicator of their social function or social relation towards one another. Each of the subjects is exchanger; i.e. each has the same social relation towards the other that the other has towards him. As subjects of exchange their relation is therefore that of equality.19 The content of the exchange, which lies altogether outside its economic character, far from endangering the social equality of individuals rather makes their natural difference into the basis of their social equality.20 . . . there enters, in addition to the quality of equality, that of freedom. Although individual A feels a need for the commodity of individual B, he does not appropriate it by force, nor vice versa, but rather they recognise one another reciprocally as proprietors, as persons whose will penetrates their commodities. Accordingly the juridical moment of the Person enters here, as well as that of freedom, insofar as it is contained in the former.21 Out of the act of exchange itself, the individual, each one of them, is reflected in himself as its exclusive and dominant (determinant) subject. With that then the complete freedom of the individual is posited.22 Therefore when the economic form, exchange, posits the all-sided equality of its subjects, then the content, the individual as well as the objective material which drives the exchange, is freedom. Equality and freedom are thus not only respected in exchange based on exchange values but, also, the exchange of exchange values is the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom. As pure ideas they are merely the idealised expression
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In particular for our interest Marx does not suggest that in the light of the previous separation between subjective and objective existence of the labourer, it is in the social relations of the family that ‘this basis is raised to a higher power’, that ‘freedom’, ‘equality’ and ‘individualism’ are experienced and lived out.24 Consumption of commodities is part of that experience, but perhaps more important is procreative reproduction – an area left almost entirely to the labourer and his family, and the most dominating task included in women’s domestic labour. Despite dealing, then, at considerable length with the necessity for capitalism that the means of production be separated from producers, Marx does not attribute any great significance to what seems an interdependent split he is also pointing to: the separation of production from reproduction. He does not, as the Political Economy of Women Group paper indicates, find any inconsistency between: . . . on the one hand, viewing capital as a mode of production in which workers are dependent for their subsistence on wage labour, and, on the other, relegating the question of the maintenance and reproduction of labour power to an ahistorical and peripheral terrain.25 As far as he is concerned: ‘The maintenance and reproduction of the working class is and must ever be a condition of reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave its fulfilment to the labourer’s instincts of self-preservation and propagation.’26 As the earlier quotes from Marx illustrate however, in order that the wage labourer can appear each day to independently exchange his labour power for a wage, he must be reproduced elsewhere than on capital’s terrain. Marx underestimates when he says ‘the capitalist may safely leave . . .’ that reproduction: it is rather a precondition, one in which women are intimately involved, for capital to proceed. Roberta Farr, in one of the Women and Socialism Conference papers, describes capital’s position thus: ‘This “freedom” of the wage worker from servitude to an individual master absolves the individual bourgeois from direct reproduction of the worker as a worker.’27 Branka Magas et al. are also insistent that the separation between domestic and wage labour is a structural pre-requisite for the wage form and the eventual realisation of surplus value. The necessity for women’s domestic labour arises from the ‘essence of capital production. In a free market system there can be no control over the labour force as characterised slavery or feudalism.’28 Marx describes the position thus: As a slave, the worker has exchange value, a value; as a free wage worker he has no value; it is rather his power of disposing of his labour, effected by exchange with him, which has value. It is not he who stands towards the capitalist as exchange value, but the capitalist towards him. His valuelessness and devaluation is the presupposition of capital and the precondition of free labour in general . . . the worker is thereby formally posited as a person who is something for himself apart from his labour, and who alienates his life-expression only as a means towards his own life.29 The labourer as ‘something for himself apart from labour’ has come to be such in the context of the family. Though we might say that during the period of industrialisation, when
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all a man’s family were required to work excessive hours, the worker could be no more than mere worker, the continuing success of capitalism has depended on developing the family, in this form originally a bourgeois institution, as the arena for personal and individual ‘freedom’ for the working class too. Buffering and to some extent concealing the alienation of his ‘life-expression’, the family, Jean Gardiner maintains, by no means ‘currently satisfies all of men’s emotional needs’. Nevertheless we must recognise that there are ‘very few ways in which these needs can be satisfied outside it in a capitalist society’.30 The emotional satisfactions provided by the wife, in addition to the sense of ‘ownership’ of the family enable the labourer to feel the ‘subjective individual’, the ‘free’ person, capital demands him to be. To describe the family as an oppressive backwater, as it commonly is, not operating through the law of value, is to miss its entire function for capital: indeed to be precisely that, in order that the law of value itself appears to be built on ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’, which are, of course, illusory. For as Marx says: In presenting bourgeois society as a whole, this positing of prices and their circulation etc. appears as the surface process beneath which, however, in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear. It is forgotten, on one side, that the presuppositions of exchange value, as the objective basis of the whole system of production already in itself implies compulsion over the individual, since his immediate product is not a product for him, but only becomes such in the social process, and since it must take on this general but nevertheless external form; and that the individual has an existence only as a producer of exchange value, hence that the whole negation of his natural existence is already implied; that he is therefore entirely determined by society, that this further presupposes a division of labour etc., in which the individual is already posited in relations other than that of a mere exchanger, etc.31 This leads us then to the phenomenal form of the wage itself and domestic labour’s relation to that. As we already know, the labour process is split into two processes ‘which are not only formally, but also qualitatively different and even contradictory’.32 First the process of exchange in which the labourer sells his commodity labour power for a specific sum of exchange values – his wage which capital concedes to him. Second the capitalist obtains labour itself, sets it to work, as a value positing activity and is able to realise surplus value. In the exchange between capital and labour the first act is an exchange, falls entirely within ordinary circulation; the second is a process qualitiatively different from exchange, and only by misuse could it have been called any sort of exchange at all. It stands directly opposite exchange; essentially a different category.33 To the worker his payment of wages appears to be payment for the work he has done for capital, since he usually does not receive it until he has finished work. It does not appear in its true character of being a payment – agreed before he works – to reproduce his own labour power. That is the first mystification of the wage form. In addition it appears that the capitalist is paying him, before his capital, when in fact he, the labourer is only taking back a part of his own objectified labour i.e. the labourer produces the labour fund from which the capitalist pays him. This is the second mystification. The value of labour power, that is, the wage received in the labour market, is determined by the labour time necessary for its production and reproduction, as is every other commodity.34 The value also presupposes the family and within that Marx occasionally hints at the necessary ‘free’ labour provided by
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the wife in contributing to the reproduction of labour power. The third mystification of the wage form involves this domestic labour. The wage does not pay for the actual reproduction of the labourer though it would appear to do so. The labour which determines the value of labour power, i.e. a part of the labourer’s own social labour embodied in the commodities necessary for his and his family’s reproduction is not the only labour required for that reproduction. There is too labour from the state, his own private labour and above all that of the housewife working on the commodities bought with the wage. On the one hand then, since the value of labour power assumes a domestic unit and must include means of subsistence for wife and children, its value is higher than if society were made up of individual reproductive units. On the other hand, the labour that she necessarily has to perform is unacknowledged, completely absent from the wage. This is the third mystification of the wage form. In this way women’s domestic labour reduces the value of labour power insofar as if the wage had to pay for these services, entirely, assuming they were commodities outside the home, in order to reproduce labour power, it would have to be considerably greater. At the same time of course, the value of labour power would be spread over that of his wife since she presumably would then be able to work in provision of her own means of subsistence. Thus domestic labour does ‘affect’ the value of labour power but in a complex way. Simply however domestic labour does not exist as far as the phenomenal form of the wage is concerned, and yet is crucial for its appearance. According to the PEWG paper we can say that: ‘domestic labour permits capital to provide a wage lower in terms of use values than the total subsistence level of the working class. In this sense its existence benefits the production of surplus value, and indeed makes that production possible.’35 The phenomenal form of the wage hides beneath it then not only the labour power which is sold on the market, when it speaks of labour, but also the domestic labour which appears only off stage, when it speaks only of wage labour. As we have been shown in the last section, capital makes many gains from maintaining domestic labour. These are gains which do not have to be, but are also ‘sexist’ in origin. It is women who are performing these tasks but as far as capital is concerned that is an historical event rather than a structural necessity. To explain why it is women who are oppressed in this way, we have to situate economic production or ‘needs’ in relation to biological reproduction. These are simultaneous, and not always separate production processes necessary to maintain the collective life of all human societies. As Engels described it, it is when private property appeared as a patriarchal phenomenon, within the ruling class, that gentile relations and the realm of reproduction were subordinated to economic relations and the first ‘sexist’ oppression was, according to Engels, smoothly delivered.36 According to his account, concomitant to that is the appearance of goods for exchange and the beginnings of a separation between use value and exchange value. If ‘sexism’ emerges when men control exchange, then the class struggle of capitalism develops when labour power itself is exchanged. Note however that it was not the division of labour at the root of women’s oppression, though Engels maintains that it is, but what came to be first the separation and then the dominance of economic production of commodities over biological production, however that was socially defined. With the advent of capitalism not only was the split hardened, since men and production were taken out of the home, but the sex oppression already there was built on by capital for its own purposes. From serving the patriarchal household domestic labour now comes into service for capital as well as men. In serving men, it is one instance disguising the labourer’s real position in the relation between capital and labour. And for women themselves, in the so-called apparent ‘haven’ of home it obscures their first oppression by men and their second by capital. Domestic labour is then at
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the heart of both class and sex oppression. It is the role to which all other women’s roles within a capitalist mode of production will refer. It is the role ‘harder to overcome than any of the other obstacles in the way of equality’.37 I am suggesting here then, that because without some of the features of domestic labour the capitalist process could not continue, there are inscribed within capitalism important limits to the process of socialisation of domestic labour. Possibly it is quite compatible with a different form of family and even with no family, if we consider that the definition of family hinges on: a unit of reproduction of children. But in the light of what I have considered earlier, it is crucial to capitalism to maintain bourgeois individualism while alienating the life of the labourer. It is crucial too that production prevails over biological reproduction. Since in itself socialisation will not significantly shift male domination as it is expressed through the domination over reproduction, it will continue to be women who close this gulf. Not only will they remain secondary but remain the ‘humanisers’ – bearing men’s children and giving men emotional support in private. It is the ‘freedom’ to carry out these private roles which, alongside the consumption of commodities, reproduces capital successfully. So, briefly to summarise, I do not hold with the notion that domestic labour produces surplus value. Domestic labour produces use values and in particular the commodity labour power. In that production domestic labour contributes to and is a presupposition of the mystification of the wage form. That role of domestic labour however, is built onto or emerges from the structure of a patriarchal relation between husband and wife. Only if we look at domestic labour as the focus for the relation between production and reproduction do we begin first to clarify its importance, second recognise the embedded character of its function and third appreciate the difficult possibilities hinging on that relation, which exist to alter it.
4 Relations of production: Relations of reproduction In looking at the problem of domestic labour, it has become increasingly clear that the theorists discussed have all, to a greater or lesser degree, followed a tendency which ultimately results in mechanical materialism. They attempt to invest the women’s movement with a political practice arising from marxist theory, by putting women in an analogous position to the working class and applying the models of productive and non-productive labour, production of surplus value, etc. Thus the determinant in the subordinate role of women is seen by them to be the relations of production, and relations of reproduction are seen only as a sort of secondary mirroring of the primary determinant. This is not only a profoundly undialectical view of history, in that it fails to grasp the material force of ideology, but it also results in an incorrect analysis of the present conjuncture which suggests a form of political practice that can only remain marginal. If the family did correspond as a simple superstructural formation, reflecting the economic base of capitalism, it would not now be necessary for what seems to be the current concern of Maoism with the ideological problem of women and the need to contend with ‘the thought, customs and culture that brought China to where we found her.’ The refutation of Lin Piao and Confucius which played a central role in the cultural revolution is part of this ‘struggle’ in the superstructures and it fully acknowledges the material force of ideology in the construction of subjectivity in the relations of reproduction and therefore sexuality. The work of Lacan on language and the dialectic has made possible the analysis of the dialectic of subject and language in a way that can prove more productive for the study of women. This isn’t (and I am forced to stress the obvious here) in opposition to Marxism, but
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to mechanical materialism which neglects these problems. Julia Kristeva (in La Révolution du Langage Poétique and Des Chinoises) has used the work of Lacan to explain the relations of reproduction in the determination of the position of women. The central thesis is that procreation is the determining factor in the production of goods; in this, it is not dissimilar to the Althusserian formulation: In order to exist, every social formation must reproduce the conditions of its production at the same time as it produces, and in order to be able to produce. It must therefore reproduce 1) the productive forces, 2) the existing relations of production. ‘Ideology and the State’, in Lenin and Philosophy, NLB. The productive forces are not simply the materials of production but also the human labour force. To propose that this reproduction of the species might operate as a specific determinant which is not necessarily capitalist, is to propose a very different understanding of the problem. It is not a rejection of the determination in the last instance of the economic formation, and therefore a denial of the need to analyse capitalism in its specificity. Rather, this analysis attempts to explain the contradictions of the role of the family in capitalism, which the preceding theorists have attempted to gloss over, and to use these contradictions as the starting point for any theory. The principle of these concern the so-called crisis of the family, epitomised by the legalisation of divorce and the appearance of female sexuality no longer organised solely to reproductive ends. This, together with the fact that in our society 44% of the work force are women, makes it possible to envisage the continuation of capitalism without the nuclear family, so frequently marked out as the corner stone of capitalism by mechanical materialists. Indeed it is possible to see a certain form of feminism – that which ignores the theory of the construction of sexual difference – to be a rationalist exigency of capitalism. Margaret Thatcher would be an excellent example of this. The symptom of this contradiction is the ideological lag which can negate political and economic advance, so that women appear in the work force performing a socialised form of their traditional work. How is this contradiction to be understood? For this the developments of the Freudian unconscious by Lacan are of central importance. These insist on an understanding of the construction of unconscious attitudes in a culture of sexual difference. These formations have their own specific history, and it is only by including this dimension that one can produce a dialectical understanding of the subject in history. Without this dimension, for example, it becomes impossible, except by extreme crudification, to explain why women are often, the most reactionary group acting against their material interests. This form of analysis becomes imperative to deal with a phenomenon like the Cowley wives, working women with the double burden of wage labourer and unpaid domestic worker who nevertheless adopt positions harmful to their material situations. But this analysis meets with a great deal of resistance because it deals with an area tabooed by dogmatic marxism. Nevertheless, the examination of the laws of operation of the unconscious in its relation to social constraint seems to be the most constructive way to approach the problem of the way in which the family functions to enforce the division between relations of production and relations of reproduction. Levi-Strauss has shown that, despite the appearance in the contemporary family of a line of descent that can be ‘undifferentiated’, i.e. inheritance of property and status can be from either the mother or the father, there still remains an absolute historical primacy of patri-linear over matri-linear. Even in the few rare matri-linear institutions with matrifocal
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homes, it is in fact, still the fathers and the brothers who govern parental exchanges and, in general, the law of the community. The act of exchange holds society together, i.e., human society is different from animal organisation, precisely because of the laws of exchange governing society in opposition to the natural family, laws of exchange resulting from the law – in all known societies – of the prohibition of incest (with its inevitable corollary, the Oedipus complex). The rules of kinship are the society. Whatever the nature of the society – patriarchal, matrilinear, patri-linear, etc. – it is always the men who exchange the women. J. Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism Whatever the type of descent in a society, whenever a society reaches a political level, that is, is in some way organised, law has belonged to the father. To say this is to situate feminism in a rather different problematic to those who seek always to attribute the position of women to the specific economic organisation of capitalism. One strategy that has been developed by dogmatic marxism for incorporating this analysis is to accept its validity, but to accept it as simply delimiting the ‘outer limits’ of the social formation, in other words to see it as a sort of nature/culture dialectic which is therefore ahistorical and material to which the good marxist is correctly indifferent. This analysis isn’t situated outside history since it doesn’t conceive of the possibility of any instinct outside culture and since its specific aim is to show that all workings of the ‘instinctual’ or the ‘libidinal’ take place across sociality, and can themselves become determinants in the formation of the subject, in different social formations than those in which they originated. Whether one accepts Engels’ theory of the historical primacy of maternal law or the theory of the absolute primacy of patriarchal structures, both tendencies lead to the same conclusion: it is paternal law – where women are the occasion for establishing bonds between men – which has founded the institution of marriage, and which attempts to ensure that the reproduction of the species isn’t disturbed or challenged in any way. As soon as society reaches the level of the production of property, it needs to ensure the reproduction of the productive forces, as well as the reproduction of the relations of production. Until the theoretical intervention of Lacan, there has been nothing in our culture to question the construction of sexual difference which is necessary for the reproduction of the productive forces. Juliet Mitchell in Psychoanalysis and Feminism quite correctly stresses the notion in Freudian psychoanalysis of the bi-sexuality of the infant’s drives in its pre-oedipal state. Lacan’s work on the structuring of sexuality in patriarchal society, suggests that reproduction is only achieved by the construction of sexual attitudes that place the woman-as-mother at the centre of a ‘mystery’ of reproduction, whereby the family can function as the indispensible unit of production (as suggested by the previous sections). The Lacanian analysis deals with the process by which sexual pleasure in the woman is structured according to the demands of the relations of reproduction. It is only at the cost of separating the domains of reproduction and production that the reproduction of the species is ensured. And, according to Lacan, the central term in the dialectic by which this alteration in needs is accomplished, is the Phallus. All pleasure is localised in the Phallus and is characterised by the imaginary dominance of the phallic attribute. In the claim of this dominance, the phallus is seen to be ‘the signifier of desire’ and, as such, the means by which all desire is organised. To put this in its proper perspective, it is necessary to stress that the phallus is not the penis. The term phallus is used
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throughout Lacan’s writing in the way it was used in classical antiquity, as the figurative representation of the male: a simulacrum. Yet despite this representation of the reality of the organ, it is still necessary to account for the paradoxical privilege of the phallus in a theory of the construction of subjectivity which has as its main substance culture and not biology. This privilege is based on the theory of the phallus as a signifier (See Ecrits, La Signification du Phallus). He refers to it as such, not because it appears in articulation, but because it has a referent outside itself, that is, because it refers to a condition outside itself that makes articulation possible. ‘The phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire’. The condition outside itself to which the phallus refers in order to make articulation possible, is the situating of subjectivity in the symbolic order (i.e. the Cultural order). Before the emergence of the castration complex (which for Lacan operates as a necessary structuring of sexuality) the mother occupies the place of alteriority in that she is the receiver of all demands, and is the place of all narcissistic aspects and satisfactions. The discovery of castration – the mother lacks a penis – detaches the subject from its dependence on the mother, and makes the phallic function the symbolic function. This is, in other words, the recognition of the structural function of the phallus, which establishes ‘difference’, thereby ensuring the sexed reproduction of the species. This establishment of difference enables the subject to detach itself from the mother by situating itself in the cultural or symbolic order by the identification with the ideal type of its sex. Kristeva puts it thus: The subject finds its identity in the symbolic, is separated from its implication in the mother, localises its pleasure [‘jouissance’ which in the French also implies the excess of the normal limits of pleasure, i.e. orgasm] and transfers the movement of drives into the symbolic order. Révolution du Language Poétique In this notion of sexuality ‘jouissance’ is seen to be what is repressed in order to ensure the retention of political power which is masculine. Paternal law represents the social face – concerning the relations of production – and is the obverse of what is censured and/or attributed to the mother. This is the genital function of sexuality and because of its displacement onto women, it could be called the maternal function. It’s not to the individual woman or women in general that symbolic activity and social representation are refused: the privileged object of this repression is the wife, the sexual or genital partner, who becomes the mother of the man’s children. It’s the reproductive woman who is forbidden the form of expression in a society organised for the maintenance of property relations. These relations of reproduction have a more fundamental role in societies where the productive forces are underdeveloped and which depend therefore largely on man-power. Thus the Lacanian position indicates that there is a structural necessity, in all societies concerned with the production of goods, which is to ensure its reproduction in having it regulated by the relations of production. This masculine power has to be maintained by keeping hidden what in woman’s sexuality exceeds the organisation belonging to the social power of men, i.e., phallic power. ‘Jouissance’ repressed in the mother is only allowed to appear in a certain form, that is, in its contribution towards production: REPRODUCTION. Forms of descent that prove always in the last instance to be dependent on phallic power (organisation of the law by father or brother) are a manner of subordinating procreation and unproductive expenditure of pleasure that goes with it and is inseparable from it, to the needs of the relations of production. As soon as there is a form of descent therefore, there is
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paternal law, built on the genital (maternal) organisation of sexuality and ensuring the procreation of the species on the vital conditions that the importance and centrality of the mother in all this remains hidden or some kind of mystery. Women are victims of this situation and accommodate themselves to it. On the one hand there is narcissistic gratification to be found in the cult of the mystery. On the other, the division of labour instituted in this way spares some women from the necessity of work and its discomforts and allows the continuance of this ‘pleasure’ but only in the relationship with the children. What relevance then can this analysis have for a contemporary feminist movement? In the first place it results in a totally different understanding of the position of women at the present time. This analysis has made it possible to see that there are two main contradictions, resulting from the development of the productive forces, which question descent as the structural limit to society. Undoubtedly it will be those who consider themselves good marxists who will be most outraged at this section. But it is Marx who has demonstrated that contradictions are the moving principle of history; contradictions that are the ‘incompatibility of certain social institutions and trends of development’ (Markovic). What then are the trends of development that have produced the women’s movement? The crude marxist has no answer for this other than to describe it as part of the general unrest and disatisfaction which manifested itself in the late sixties. Consequently, the resulting political position can only ever be marginal if it fails to understand these contradictions. Kristeva points to the two main contradictions as (1) . . . an over-developed industrial society whose economy is no longer at the mercy of the human numerical factor, even to the point where to ensure the continuation of the species, it has almost become necessary to reduce the rate of growth of the population. So the family is not only no longer essential as a unit of production in an economic process which is highly specialised and international, but could actually endanger the economic equilibrium of capitalism if it continues to obey the social necessities that founded it, that is, reproduction. (2) . . . the contraceptive measures claimed from positions as different as feminist organisations, to economic specialists, challenge the automatic nature of reproduction that the family has always been asked to assure. These have been felt increasingly since the end of the nineteenth century. Industrialisation to a large extent fractured the family unit, depriving it of its economic power since feudalism. In other words capitalism, while reforming the ideological mode of the family in a particularly repressive and exploitative mode of the nuclear family, has also developed the productive forces to the point where they are actually in contradiction to the structure. This is not to use ‘contradiction of capitalism’ in the glib way in which Juliet Mitchell excuses her inability to produce a feminist politics from a Freudian analysis. Rather, it proposes a way of understanding the family’s ideological and structural role under capitalism, to produce another political direction. This is a direction that refuses to retreat into the marginalism that typifies women’s (and men’s) liberation groups. It is a direction that insists on participation in class contradictions as the motor of history, with the knowledge that a socio-political transformation isn’t possible without a transformation of subjects in relation to their social constraints.
Notes 1 Ian Gough. ‘Marx’s theory of productive and unproductive labour’ NLR 76. p. 50. 2 Caroline Freeman. ‘Introduction to domestic labour, and wage labour’ in Women and Socialism (Conference papers) 1974, p. 3.
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3 Union of women for liberation. ‘A few words concerning “Theories” on wages for housework’ [A very misleading title] Women and Socialism p. 46. 4 Ibid. p. 53. 5 Ibid. p. 56. 6 Ibid. p. 59. 7 Capital Vol.I. Ch.6. 8 Caroline Freeman. op cit p. 2. 9 UWL op cit p. 71. 10 Mariarosa dalla Costa. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Falling Wall Press 1972. 11 Wally Seccombe. ‘The housewife and her labour under capitalism’. IMG publication of New Left Review no 83; Feb. 1974. 12 Wally Seccombe. p. 9. 13 Wally Seccombe. postscript p. 30. 14 Jean Gardiner, ‘Women’s Domestic Labour’, New Left Review 89, pp. 47–58. 15 Ibid. p. 47. 16 Jean Gardiner, Susan Himmelweit, Maureen Mackintosh, ‘Women’s Domestic Labour’, The Political Economy of Women Group Paper (unpublished MS) 1975. 17 L. Althusser, For Marx, Allen Lane, p. 99. 18 K. Marx Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Penguin 1973), pp. 463–4. 19 Ibid. p. 241. 20 Ibid. p. 242. 21 Ibid. p. 243. 22 Ibid. p. 244. 23 Ibid. p. 245. 24 Though it may at first seem strange to be suggesting that ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ are experienced within the family it is not when we (a) compare conditions in the family to those of production (e.g. a man’s time is relatively more his own in the first than the second; he is his own boss) and (b) see that both capitalist and labourer have families within which they are no longer either capitalist or labourer but both of them husbands and fathers as well as sons – they are ‘equal’ in this respect. 25 Jean Gardiner, Susan Himmelwelt, Maureen Mackintosh ‘Women’s Domestic Labour’, the Political Economy of Women Group paper (unpublished manuscript 1975), p. 4. Referred to here as the PEWG paper. 26 K. Marx Capital Vol 1 (Lawrence and Wishart 1970) p. 572. 27 Roberta Farr ‘The Woman’s Movement and the Class Struggle against Patriarchy’ in Women and Socialism Conference Paper 3 p. 19. 28 Branka Magas, Margaret Coulson, Hilary Wainwright ‘The Housewife and her Labour under Capitalism’, New Left Review 89, p. 68. 29 Grundrisse, pp. 288–9. 30 Jean Gardiner ‘Women’s Domestic Labour’, New Left Review 89, p. 56. 31 Grundrisse, pp. 247–8. 32 Ibid. p. 274. 33 Ibid. p. 275. 34 Capital p. 170. 35 PEWG paper p. 15. 36 F. Engels Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. 37 Caroline Freeman and Jane Tate ‘Class struggle and the Women’s Movement’ in Women and Socialism Conference Paper 3, p. 85.
26 ‘It is well known that by nature women are inclined to be rather personal’ Charlotte Brunsdon
Judge Ewart James, summing up the case against Corporal Reginald Booth at Winchester Crown Court, said that although women had won ‘greater equality’ with men in terms of jobs, money and government, the law still gives them their protection in sexual matters. ‘It is well known that by nature women are inclined to be rather personal. They attach themselves to persons. They become fond of people and they are inclined to follow them, and they may follow them to their detriment because they are fond of them,’ he said. [my italics] Guardian, 29 October 19771
This is not in any way a history of the current British Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM). I don’t mention most of the things women did, and I particularly don’t look at any particular campaigns or struggles. There are groups of women at present trying to put together this history.2 I am just writing one way of understanding some of the characteristics of the early WLM. One of these characteristics is the distinctively personal nature of much WLM writing and practice. I suggest here, as have many feminists, that the personal experience of the recognition of a common oppression has been a formative feature of the WLM. The implications of this view have had a rather contradictory effect on the article. I have tried to quote from other women as much as possible, but do so in the context of my own argument, which means that at times the quotations carry the weight of that argument.3 I am using the sentence, ‘It is well known that by nature women are inclined to be rather personal’, to focus this article for two reasons. Firstly, it occurs in a statement that ‘manages’ the contradiction between women’s ‘greater equality’ and their continuing subordination through reference to what is presented as an innate feminine characteristic. Framing the sentence, we have the judge’s confidence that he draws on conventional wisdom. This truth is such that it is depersonalized: ‘It is well known . . .’ Secondly, the argument he makes – that ‘women are inclined to be rather personal’ – has been given a double edge by the WLM, summarized in the slogan ‘the personal is political’. I examine some aspects of this association of women with ‘the personal’ in the second part of the article. Here, I want to briefly look at the causal element in his argument: ‘by nature’. In this sentence it is ambiguous: both ‘women have rather personal natures’ and ‘women are naturally rather personal’. This ambiguity focuses on nature, as meaning both (or either) human personality (which is seen as being sex-differentiated) and a type of originating cause. The subordination of oppressed groups, and discrimination against them, is frequently legitimated through reference to ‘nature’.4 It is usually a case for inferior natural characteristics or against unnatural practices.5 My concentration here on the particular resonance of
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arguments ‘from nature’ about women is not in any way to claim that women are the only group affected by this type of argument. The specificity of the argument from nature in relation to women has several threads, which I present very schematically. Biological and anatomical difference is central to all of them, and I would suggest that it is the reality of this difference which gives these arguments their force. I am thus suggesting that arguments from nature have an ideological centrality in the subordination of women, precisely because their reference point is always biological and anatomical – natural – difference. It is these arguments which feminists meet in every area of our practice, and it is possible to see the beginnings of the WLM as the start of a self-conscious organization against them. I concentrate on the ideological level in this article for two reasons. Firstly, I would argue that one of the central features of the WLM is ‘a breakthrough in consciousness’. This is not to suggest that femininity is ‘false consciousness’, and feminism somehow a transcendence of, or ‘outside’, ideology. It is to try and recognize that the beginnings of the WLM was perceived by many of the women involved as a break from the traditional leftist practice of organizing around the point of production and economic exploitation, into the uncharted implications of organizing round a ‘sense’ (Rowbotham) or ‘instinct’ (Mitchell) of oppression.6 That is, organization that started from consciousness – that partly engaged first with the ideological level – by challenging the ‘naturalness’ of our condition. ‘Our window on the world is looked through with our hands in the sink and we’ve begun to hate that sink and all it implies – so begins our consciousness’ (Williams, Twort, Bachelli, 1970, p. 31). Secondly, ideology remains central to an understanding of women’s continuing subordination in days when ‘women have won greater equality with men’, and discrimination on grounds of sex is now meant to be illegal. We still do not really understand the particular relations in the historical articulation of economic, political and ideological factors which produce the ‘intimate oppression’ of femininity as lived.7
Women by nature Juliet Mitchell points to one ‘argument from nature’ about women in the approach to a discussion of the consequences for women of the possible transformation of the ‘mode of reproduction’ through readily available contraception: The biological function of maternity is a universal a temporal fact, and as such has seemed to escape the categories of Marxist historical analysis. However, from it is made to follow the so-called stability and omnipresence of the family, if in very different forms. Once this is accepted, women’s social subordination – however emphasised as an honourable but different role . . . can be seen to follow inevitably as an insurmountable bio-historical fact. The causal chain then goes: maternity, family, absence from production and public life, sexual inequality. Mitchell (1971, p. 106) Mitchell here traces an ‘argument from nature’ which finds women’s subordination natural by understanding ‘the family’ as natural through women’s natural procreative ability. She goes on to deconstruct this argument by differentiating the structures of sexuality, reproduction and socialization of children, pointing to their historical, rather than necessary, combination in the modern family.
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Leonore Davidoff (1976, p. 125) points to another type of ‘argument from nature’, which makes a woman closer to nature than men. Since women are for a longer period of time more involved with physiological processes (menstruation, childbirth, lactation) they are seen as closer to nature than men. . . . Men are seen as people, but women are ambiguous simply by the fact of being also conscious beings who are not men but who do take some part in the culture of society. Yet women are active beings in their performance as a ‘mediating agency’ between nature and culture: the raw and the cooked. Sheila Rowbotham (1973, p. 7) makes a related point about the cultural construction of feminity in the 1950s: ‘. . . social science contributed towards a notion of feminity in which baby-doll became a new natural-savage substitute’. Here we have elements of an argument which finds women more natural than men – somehow, outside history, and both central to, and absent in, culture. As Trevor Millum (1975, p. 166), commenting on the connotations of exterior settings in advertising in women’s magazines, puts it: It is the woman who maintains this connection, who is in touch with the pastoral past, who guards the health of the community by her adherence to the old stable values, by her functions of childbearing, nursing and rearing, and of cooking and ministering, and the assertion of common sense drawn from the wisdom of the earth: age old tasks which never change . . . Perhaps the most important ‘argument from nature’ for women is that which reads gender difference as the natural expression, rather than the cultural constitution of sexual difference (Mead 1960, Oakley 1972). The centrality of this argument, which underlies and reinforces others, is in the way it permeates every aspect of our understanding of sexual difference. ‘Just like a girl’ – ‘big boys don’t cry’: we live in a culture of real men and true women. We can thus outline, very crudely, the main elements in the ideological matrix which finds women’s subordination ‘natural’. Naturally different to men through their procreative ability, women are understood as closer to nature than men, more natural; and feminity, as culturally constituted, is seen as the natural expression of these differences, finding its natural fulfilment in the family. It was partly to this matrix of ‘naturalness’ and its contradictory manifestations that much early WLM practice can be seen as directed. I look briefly here, in a very general way at some elements of this practice.8 At one level it involved the attempt to separate woman from her definition through her procreative ability and her sexual attractiveness to men – a definition through her body. Of the Miss World contestants it was written: Their condition is the condition of all women, born to be defined by their physical attributes, born to give birth, or, if pretty, born lucky, a condition which makes it possible and acceptable within the bourgeois ethic for girls to parade, silent and smiling to be judged on the merits of their figures and faces. [my italics] Women’s Liberation Workshop, London (1970) ‘Born to give birth’ – in the period when: ‘For the first time there is the possibility that maternity will become an option for all women, rather than a vocation they are trained for’ (Delmar, 1972).
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But when there still remained what Lee Comer (1971) called: ‘. . . this one central assumption that underlies everything that pertains to women, that a woman’s true purpose in life and the pinnacle of her fulfilment is motherhood.’ This contradiction has several aspects which have been approached differently. Firstly, what became the fourth demand of the WLM,9 ‘free contraception and abortion on demand’, the demand for control over our reproductive capacity,10 to choose whether or not to have babies: We demand that women have control over their bodies. We believe this is denied us until we can decide whether to have children or not and when we have them. This requires free and available contraception and free abortion on demand. Shrew, February 1971 Secondly, there was an attempt to break down ‘the total identification of women with childcare’ (Shrew, March 1971): the double-bind which meant women were often either isolated at home with young children, or feeling guilty if their children were cared for in nurseries. The result was both the demand for state provision of twenty-four nurseries, and attempts to demystify the relationship between mothers and their children (Comer 1971, 1974). This often meant trying to find new forms of child-care, the active involvement of men; and the endeavour to create a new content of child-care, which did not reproduce stereotypical feminine and masculine roles.11 But women are also ‘born to be defined by their physical attributes’ in a different sense. The ephemeral phrase ‘sex object’ was used to condense a whole set of recognitions about this definition through our bodies. Women are reduced to our sexuality, which is at the same time, not our sexuality but a sexuality defined in relation to men – both passive and a commodity: a sexuality used to sell men cars, cigars and liquor, and women the commodities to allow us to achieve the ideal which sells us the stuff.12 No longer the aloof expressionless clothes peg of the ’50s the model is required to be ‘natural’ – however this so called ‘naturalness’ of the latterday model girl is not allowed to obtrude on the product being sold, rather as Chrissy [the model being interviewed] pointed out ‘the model and the product merge’ – indeed they are both goods for sale. Elyse and Bridget (1971) The commercial exploitation involved in, and the inherent contradiction in the publicity of the make-up, deodorants, bras, girdles, fashions, hair cosmetics which would make us naturally just how we were meant to look, smell and feel, provided an immediate focus for both discussion and action.13 One example is ‘Some thoughts on the successful “think women stink” advertising campaign, or why one woman feels it’s worthwhile getting uptight about vaginal deodorants’: It seems pretty obvious that the advertisers’ copy equates the natural odours of a woman’s body with dirt, the word clean/cleanliness occurs over and over again. The other obvious drift is the use of terms associated with medicine, e.g. gynaecologist, hospitals, etc., as if women have an illness that only vaginal deodorants could cure. R. Johnson (1969)
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The attempt to separate woman from her definition through her procreative ability revealed a major contradiction. We might be defined through our bodies, but our bodies were at the same time unknown to us. We might know, through the years of ‘problem pages’, to avoid chips and ‘all greasy foods’ if we didn’t want to get fat or spotty, that we should regularly apply grease to our faces if we wanted to keep our complexions (always take care not to pull or rub the sensitive skin round the eyes), but many of us didn’t know what the doctor saw when we had an internal examination, or what a clitoris was. Sheila Rowbotham (1973): Think for example how we learn even our psychology and physiology from our oppressers. We substitute our own experience of our genitals, our menstruation, our orgasm, our menopause, for an experience determined by men. We are continually translating our own immediate fragmented sense of what we feel into a framework which is constructed by men. The attempt to separate our selves from a definition through our bodies at the same time manifested itself in the determination to reclaim them, through learning about them ourselves: We think that the first self-examination should be about getting to know what your vaginas and cervices look like rather than establish the presence or absence of an infection. In the women’s movement we demand the control of our own bodies – self-examination is about understanding our potential for health, while most doctors are taught to concern themselves only with disease. ‘Notes by a women’s health group,’ Spare Rib 21 We began to try and understand our own sexuality, rather than our sexuality defined in relation to men. From our own position of growing awareness and consciousness of our selves, we have no further needs of male definitions of our sexuality; they are obsolete. From now on women want to hear from each other, to construct a body of knowledge which corresponds to reality. P. Whiting (1972) This had very different implications for different women. Perhaps a choice for celibacy, perhaps struggling for change in heterosexual relationships, perhaps ‘coming out’ as lesbians:14 ‘For the first time in my life I was not ashamed of being a woman and a lesbian’ (Bruley 1976).
. . . inclined to be rather personal The WLM has shown that we have to understand women’s relationship to ‘the personal’ in several different ways: in terms of women’s structural position within the ‘production and reproduction of material life’ (see Article 3), how this is understood and represented politically, and ideologically, and how women live their lives within and through these terms (see Articles 4, 5 and 7). It is in the interrelation of these different levels that we find some of the elements which contribute to the particular power and, eventually, if
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remaining within these terms, limitations, of much of the experiential writing of the early WLM. We attempt to outline some aspects of women’s structural position in the next article in this book. Here I want to concentrate on the way that the WLM began to challenge and transform some of the definitions and representations of women’s situation in our society which underlie our inclination to be ‘rather personal’. I argue that this involved a personal engagement, at the level of consciousness that has been a precondition for analyses of women’s situation which attempt to grasp the elements that structure this consciousness. Thus, I argue that the discovery of the politics of the personal is central in understanding women’s subordination, but that remaining within the politics of personal experience will not fundamentally transform this subordination. Defined primarily through our destinies as wives and mothers – to be somebody else’s private life – women are principally placed, politically, ideologically and economically, in ‘the personal sphere’ of the family. ‘The “family”, as it is experienced, is the woman and the children in the house, the flat or the room and the man who comes and goes’ (Williams, Twort, Bachelli, 1970). The Red Collective (1971) argued: The domestic unit is the institutionalised expression of the dissociation of emotional and work life, and, it is within the domestic unit that women live. Women therefore live their lives concretely more within one side of the capitalist fragmentation of work and emotionality, in the sphere of the exclusively private and personal, the primarily emotional. This sphere is understood as radically apolitical, both outside ‘politics’ and as natural, undetermined by the mode of production (Brunsdon and Morley 1978). Through this women have a political status which is either exceptional, and involves a precarious juggling with their femininity (Butcher 1977; Images of Women 1974) – compare the press treatment of Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir – or, alternatively, an apolitical status as housewives (consumers). The implications of this apolitical status when women take political action as housewives is sometimes that it can be represented and understood as non-political. Thus Michele Mattelaut (1975), discussing the role of militant action by women in the downfall of the Popular Unity government in Chile;15 argues: Paradoxically, the peculiar element which the Right was counting on, and which it used with impunity, arose precisely from a sacred part of the dominant ideology – the division between women and politics. This separation, once unconsciously present in every individual . . . allowed the bourgeoisie to present the women’s new activity as devoid of political content and to have it accepted as such. Traditional symbols and values which unequivocally defined the meaning of women’s behaviour were relied upon to legitimise these demonstrations. Demonstrations were seen as the spontaneous reaction of the most apolitical sector of public opinion, brought together and activated by a natural survival instinct. Sue Sharpe (1972) summarized this ‘division between women and politics’ in terms of cultural meaning: ‘Women mean love and the home, while men stand for work and the external world.’ It has been argued that a large part of the unrecognized work that women perform
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in this personal sphere is emotional work; the emotional centre for both men and children: Women provide the intimate personal relationships which are not sanctioned in the work organization, although the system itself is dependent on the maintenance of this emotional outlet. Women are made synonymous with softness and tenderness, love and care, something you are glad to come home from work to. Sharpe (1972) That is, although women generally carry the responsibility for the day-to-day running of the home at a material level (shopping, cooking, cleaning, etc.), they are also responsible for keeping it running emotionally. ‘A woman needs time alone – after a day of being a public servant to the rest of the family, of giving out all the time, of being open to all demands . . .’ (Williams, Twort, Bachelli, 1970). Part of the social acquisition of femininity is the learning of these personal skills (Bellotti 1975; Sharpe 1976; Loftus 1974). This woman lore is a delicate art, half imparted by other women, half learned from experience. She attunes herself to him, she picks up the slightest quiver of resentment, nurses his vanity with tenderness, follows the flow of his speech, responds to his rhythm. Rowbotham (1969) A necessary learning for survival, and the way to what has been understood as success for a woman: ‘getting her man’. Women’s place in this personal world is contradictory. For women, the personal world is constructed as central – to be a woman without the personal fulfilment of fulfilling the personal desires of others, and tending to their needs, is to fail to be a true woman. Further, the values associated with the home are designated human values – basic, central and natural; it is the sphere of personal freedom, of love, of familial relations (Davidoff, L’Esperance and Newby 1976; Zaretsky 1976). However, this world and these concerns are largely invisible in the ‘real’ world of commodity production which is ‘a man’s world’ but which is nevertheless dependent on the home world. Sheila Rowbotham (1973, p. xv) wrote of the radical potential of women’s situation: Women as a group span both the world of commodity production, and production and reproduction in the home. In their own lives the two coexist painfully. Traditionally, the interior, private work of the home is feminine and thus the integration of women into the public work of work and industry is only partial. The contradiction which appears clearly in capitalism between family and industry, private and public personal and impersonal, is the fissure in women’s consciousness through which revolt erupts. Juliet Mitchell examines, in Woman’s Estate (1971), the particular political and cultural context of the birth of the WLM in the 1960s.16 Changing black consciousness (Black Power, Black is Beautiful), the anti-Vietnam war movement, an expanding education system and ‘the student revolt’ were formative in the consciousness of the mainly white middle class women who first began organizing together as women. Mitchell finds another element in the
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‘politics of experience’: ‘an analysis of society from the perspective of one’s self ’ which she traces directly to R. D. Laing and anti-psychiatry:17 ‘In the ideology of capitalist society, women have always been the chief repository of feelings. They are thus among the first to gain from the radical “capture” of emotionality from capitalist ideology for political protest movements’ (Mitchell, 1971, p. 38). She thus points to the transformation in the value accorded to personal experience present in the radical movements of the late sixties. The dependence on direct experience is one of the aspects of our oppression – the culturally limited representation and exclusion of our experience is one of the conditions of our subordination. ‘This inability to find ourselves in existing culture as we experience ourselves is true of course for other groups besides women. The working class, black, national minorities within capitalism . . .’ (Rowbotham, 1973, p. 35). For a subordinate class or group, thinking only through direct experience and common sense, does not allow the construction of a coherent oppositional world view, although it may provide the basis for limited political action (Gramsci 1971; Nichols and Armstrong 1976; Harris 1968). Rather, it produces an understanding of events as episodic and random, in which personal experience is the strongest continuity, and direct experience exists as the only form of ‘proof ’. What is experienced may be in contradiction to available explanations, but it is very difficult to work out coherently why or understand how. So despite the experience of contradiction, what is often ‘proved’ is the naturalness of the way things are. It is partly within these contexts that the distinctively personal character of much WLM writing and practice can be understood. We have to hold not only the background of the sixties – the political upheavals, the availability of the Pill, the increasingly important role of women as consumers, the ‘sexual sell’ – with women’s ‘privileged’ place in the personal sphere and its particular contradictions, but also the forms of consciousness of oppressed groups and classes – the reliance on direct experience in relation to fragmentary and partial access to coherent ways of thinking about the world which only confirm subordination. The WLM began to piece together a way of understanding the world from the point of view of women, which necessarily drew on individual experience. At a very simple level, it could be said that the WLM began to explore what Simone de Beauvoir called woman’s ‘otherness’, Betty Freidan’s ‘the problem that has no name’. To examine through ‘a sense of oppression’ the experience of being a woman in class society. ‘To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men’ (Berger, 1972, p. 46). The beginnings of the WLM was partly concerned with recognizing this space – as ‘allotted and confined’. ‘The present inability of ‘she’ to speak for more than herself is a representation of reality . . .’ (Rowbotham, 1973, p. 34). ‘Everytime a woman describes to a man any experience which is specific to her as a woman she confronts his recognition of his own experience as normal’ (Rowbotham, 1973, p. 35). It is ‘allotted and confined’, not just in terms of the type of jobs we can do or what we get paid for them, the provision of child-care facilities, the availability of contraceptives and abortion, but also in terms of how we, as well as men, experience and think of ourselves. We have been defined negatively in relation to the culture into which we have been born: our experience has tended to be made invisible, and in the face of male definitions we have, until recently, kept quiet. Dalston Study Group (1976, p. 76)
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Society has made us women in a male-defined world. Locked inside heterosexual couples most women never break from the bondage of father or husband. The ideological hold of patriarchy persists to make women feel weak, passive or dependent. Our relationships with each other are usually governed by jealousy and competition. Bruley (1976, p. 21) These relatively recent statements draw on the strength of being involved in a movement which is women-only.18 The exclusion of men from the movement has to be understood as an essential element in women learning to speak for and of themselves: ‘The most common ailment among oppressed women is lack of confidence usually manifested in inarticulateness or incoherence’ (R. Larne, 1969). But it was not only a question of confidence; it was also a question of breaking through a primary definition of one’s self in relation to men: But, all in all, they some way felt that they didn’t really feel second class in every cell of their bodies, and refused themselves any real feeling of fervour, possibly because in some way it might mean betraying their men. At the next meeting we voted to exclude men, because we knew it would be more difficult without them. J. Williams (1969) The exclusion of men was, at this stage, a decision that demanded constant justification: The next meeting we held we decided not to have men because we wanted to work things out amongst ourselves. One man came in fact to this meeting and kept saying we must have a theoretical reason to exclude him. We said we didn’t have one but we were fed up with being told by men what we ought to think about ourselves and them. Rowbotham (1972, p. 95) The political and theoretical reasons for a women-only movement began to come clearer through being in women-only meetings: The separatist politics of Women’s Liberation may have come out of one of the chief manifestations of women’s oppression: their diffidence, but it certainly debouches straight into its central theory – that it is women as a group who are oppressed, and that, though all oppressed groups should work to a point of solidarity with each other, their own understanding of their own situation comes from their own analysis. Mitchell (1971, p. 58) One of the men said that, by coming to our meeting, he was joining the movement. We explained to him that just as whites cannot, by virtue of their colour, join the black liberation movement, so men cannot join the WLM. Shrew, August 1971 This clarity came from what could in general terms be described as consciousness-raising – the beginnings of the development of a group consciousness. The specific organizational form of consciousness-raising was the small local group, which was usually closed for some period of its existence.
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Charlotte Brunsdon In order to become an effective small group it is necessary to relate and trust one another as a group. To attain this closeness as a group we can talk together at weekly meetings on a personal level. . . . Once this close knit friendship has been attained we should have the basis of an effective group. Diana (1971)
There have by now been many accounts of consciousness-raising groups, although few circulate outside the WLM.19 It is a practice which has many, many aspects – no two groups ever talk about exactly the same things in the same way, and each woman’s experience of the process is different. Its insights have been differently understood in ways which have led to different political, theoretical and anti-theoretical positions and practices. I write here, as a feminist and a socialist, a very partial description of what seem to me important elements in the context of trying to think about the importance of the ‘personal’ for women. Much early WLM writing could be described as consciousness-raising, if consciousness-raising is understood, at a very basic level, as a process/practice through which women began to make ‘she’ speak for more than ‘herself ’ by first learning to speak for and of herself. And this often from a situation akin to that Friedan had described, particularly as it was mainly white middle class women who first became involved in Women’s Liberation. They did not lack things. On the contrary they often had too many things. But they felt that their lives were empty. They did not know who they were or what they wanted to become. It was by no means apparent that their situation could be understood politically. How could you organise around a sense of emptiness? [my italics] Rowbotham (1973) The (pre)beginnings of one London group: On Peckham Rye in South London there is a one o’clock club – financed and run by the GLC parks department – for women and their children under 5. Over a period of 18 months a group of about six women were meeting there in the afternoons with their children, and talking, mainly about their children, their hair, their husbands and their homes. The chatter seemed to have an umbrella over it – an umbrella of depression (misery). This torpor was by no means such a concrete fact that it could be talked about objectively. J. Williams (1969) Earlier work had pointed to the contradictions in women’s situation.20 For example, Hannah Gavron, in her study of the conflicts of housebound mothers had concluded: ‘The role of woman today is incredibly ambivalent. There is an air of confusion which hangs over the whole question of women, their functions in society, which seems at times to extend to every aspect of their activities’ (Gavron, 1966, p. 129). Henri Lefebvre had noticed women’s particular situation, but failed to allow it any specificity from the point of view of woman in his analysis: ‘. . . the misery of everyday life, its tedious tasks, humiliations reflected in the lives of the working classes and especially of women, upon whom the conditions of everyday life bear heaviest . . .’ (Lefebvre, 1971, p. 35).
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Lefebvre recognizes the effects of women’s structural position, but what the WLM began to do was to argue that the construction of femininity through our destinies as wives and mothers, and hence women’s responsibility for the day-to-day running of the home, materially and emotionally, whether or not they also did paid work, was both oppressive to women and was necessary for the continuation of the ‘system’. Women were in a position of structural subordination, which was both most hidden and most apparent in the female experience of everyday life; hidden, because the female experience of everyday life is confined to women, while the male experience is generalized, understood as the experience: women have a women’s page while men have a newspaper. Apparent, only when we begin to articulate that experience, organize around it. The WLM has made a sustained assault on an understanding of everyday life constructed in masculine hegemony: an understanding which takes women’s subordination for granted, just as black movements have exposed the taken-for-granted racism of this (white) culture. And in doing this the WLM questions what the left too has taken for granted: ‘The intimate oppression of women forces a re-definition of what is personal and what is political’ (Rowbotham 1973: xi). Everyday life is broken open, revealed as structured through domination and subordination at both its most intimate and banal levels. Sheila Rowbotham wrote of The Feminine Mystique: Her book was a revelation to many women because it was so determinedly about everyday matters. And most of our lives are ‘everyday’. It includes all those little things which became so important because women encountered them over and over again. Rowbotham (1973, p. 5) She has also, through her own experience, tried to trace the changing consciousness of the women on the student left who were most involved in the beginnings of the WLM: The Ford’s women also helped to make the question of women’s specific oppression easier to discuss on the left. At first the men would only admit that working class women had anything to complain about. Very defensively at first, and with no theoretical justification, only our feelings, women on and around the student left began to try and connect those feelings to the Marxism they had accepted only intellectually before. Rowbotham (1972) The practice of consciousness-raising is that of becoming conscious of being a woman in a man’s world, of how each individual inhabits the structures of femininity. It is a process through which women began to understand our individual experience as being structured by being part of an oppressed group. Sharing oppressive experiences with other women gives them the understanding that the situations described are not personal but social. The awareness that revealed that problems are common to all the women in the group consequently shifts the attention away from one’s own inadequacies towards finding the real causes of these problems and gives a perspective that can lead to action. It also gives strength to go back to those inadequacies and start to change them. Tufnell Park (1971)
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It is the process of discovering the way that personal experience is at the same time not only unique and individual but also gender specific. The process through which gender specificity was recognized was precisely one of speaking from and to individual experience. Consciousness-raising developed through the process of putting back the ‘WO’ in ‘MAN’, of placing centrally the personal experience of ‘the 51 per cent minority group’. However, this process demands its own transformation, the placing of the now ‘present’ woman within an understanding of class society, in order to understand the particular historical and structural determinants on her previous ‘absence’. This attempt is fraught with contradictions and difficulties which exist at different levels.21 The making of a feminist consciousness in the finding of a common oppression is a labour which must recognize the different oppression of black women, lesbians, of older women, working class women, as well as those women most articulate within the dominant culture, young, straight, white middle class women. The attempt to move beyond ‘experience knowing’ is complexly caught in its own origins, unless it recognizes more than sexism. Gay Liberation and Women’s Liberation have both pointed to the social construction of the sex/gender identity which is lived, with whatever difficulty, by the individual in class society. We have argued that men are masculine and women are feminine in a relation of domination and subordination which is partly sustained through the ideological construction of sexuality as heterosexual genitality – thus tied to reproduction.22 As pointed out earlier, this challenges the ‘naturalness’ of the images and roles of women in our society. By extension, it also challenges the ‘naturalness’ of the feelings through which we experience ourselves, particularly those structured through the major sphere of personal life, the family. One of the implications of this argument is that it displaces the individual as the originating and unique ‘source’ of the feelings through which experience, by pointing to the social constraints of this experience. We see women’s ‘natural inclination’ to be ‘rather personal’ as specific to women’s situation. One implication of finding the personal political is the recognition that the personal is political in a class society which defines it as apolitical. One of our difficulties becomes how to understand this connection precisely, to make a politics that is more than personal. To avoid interrogating the personal is to miss the specificity of women’s oppression as lived, but to remain within this interrogation if to remain where our subordination places us. There is no easy fit between theoretical knowledge and consciousness which does not tend to dismiss or reduce one or the other, or of the relation between the intimate politics of a small group and a wider political activity. We have somehow to hold the necessary articulation of female experience (our oppression lies partly in the invisibility of this experience) with the struggle to understand the determinants on this experience to allow us to change it at a more than individual level.23
Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Barbara Carter, Rowena Clayton, Catherine Hall and Janice Winship for struggling through this piece at various draft stages. It’s not their fault that it is as it is.
Notes and references 1 Booth, in what became known as the ‘Casanova Corporal’ case, faced nine charges, including procuring women to have unlawful sexual intercourse and obtaining or attempting to obtain money by deception. He was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment.
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2 They can be contacted through the Women’s Research and Resources Centre in London, 27 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1. 3 This may well mean that I have implicated other women in a position that they would not hold. 4 Not specifically in this context, Williams (1976) examines changes in the use and meanings of ‘nature’. Williamson (1978) discusses ‘nature as a referent system’ in her examination of advertisements. 5 These arguments are widespread in a way which means they cannot really be referenced to particular authors as sources. The debate around intelligence testing and innate ability provides one focus. Much writing on ‘race’ and the justification of discrimination against ethnic groups provide another. The representation of homosexuality as a perversion is a third. What seems important is that ‘arguments from nature’ are used both at a common sense level: ‘it’s only human nature’, ‘it’s unnatural’, and (consciously and unconsciously) within more theoretically elaborated systems of thought. 6 Rosalind Delmar (1972): Another new feature of modern feminism is its analysis of ideology. American feminist groups started to discuss the visible manifestations of women’s day-to-day oppression. This led to a critique of ‘male chauvinism’: the ideology of male domination.
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10 11 12 13
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I concentrate here mainly on the British context, between 1969 and 1972. I do not look at the extent of the important American influence. Some of the other articles in this journal examine different theorizations of women’s subordination, while some are more concerned with femininity as lived. I am concerned here with what I would see as the precondition of this work: the recognition of women’s oppression as it was posed by the WLM. The generality of my argument should not be mistaken for a general overview of the WLM in Britain. This piece is very selective – I hardly touch on the politics outside the personal, and this gives a rather misleading impression. The two collections of British WLM writings, Wandor (1972) and Allen, Saunders and Wallis (1974), provide more of a basis for an overview. There is also the consideration that the particular politics of the WLM means that much of its history remains as local and personal knowledge, unwritten, and only partly and fragmentarily accessible in old leaflets, conference papers and publications. My own involvement began in 1971. I do not here consider all of the first four demands on the WLM. The continuing definition of woman through her procreative capacity is sustained by, and sustains, women’s differential socialization, education, employment opportunities and pay and trade union activity. The two demands I have not discussed are those for equal pay (see Article 3) and equal education and opportunity. The 1974 conference in Edinburgh added demands for 5) legal and financial independence for women, and 6) an end to discrimination against lesbians and the right to our own self-defined sexuality. Ehrenreich and English (1974), and Oakley (1976), discuss the exclusion of women from control over reproduction. Out of the Pumpkin Shell (1975) is one account of running a Women’s Liberation playgroup – in Birmingham. The other most accessible accounts are those in Wandor (1972). Anne Koedt’s ‘The myth of the vaginal orgasm’ (1970) was an influential pamphlet on female sexuality. The London Women’s Liberation workshop manifesto (1970) had as its second point: ‘We are commercially exploited by advertisements, television and press’. There was a demonstration at the 1969 Festival of London Stores where Miss Nelbarden Swimwear was appearing (Shrew, July 1969). An early account of the Miss World demonstration (Shrew, November/December 1969) appeared in the same issue as a report of a group discussion on wearing make-up. Myers, Mitchell, Kay and Charlton (1976) discuss the changes in their own lives since becoming involved in the WLM. Gay Liberation Front started in 1970, and an adequate account of the recognition of lesbians’ oppression would have to chart the struggle within GLF and the WLM. Wilson (1974) raises some of the issues of gay politics in the WLM. I know that Chile is Chile, not England, but I think the point still holds. Jo O’Brien (1971) makes a similar point about our historical knowledge of British women: It is acceptable for women to act over food prices because this accords with the idea that they
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Charlotte Brunsdon are, and always have been, domestic centred. We do not hear of the female trade unionists in that town, the women who formed the large Nottingham Female Political Union in 1838 to support Chartism and the numerous female political associations that were scattered all over the country at the time. Such activity does not agree with common assumptions about the apolitical nature of women.
16 Rowbotham (1972) stresses the importance of the campaign led by Lil Billocca and the fishermen’s wives to improve the safety of trawlers in 1968, and the 1968 Ford’s machinists’ strike, in giving women the sense of the possibility of effective organization. 17 See R. D. Laing (1967) and D. Cooper (1968). 18 The Dalston Study Group’s comment is made in an article which suggests that the 1976 Conference on Patriarchy drew on traditionally masculine, rather than feminist, modes of organizing. Sue Bruley’s pamphlet explicitly contrasts several years of involvement in a left group with the experience of a consciousness-raising group. 19 The most accessible British accounts are Sue Bruley’s (1976), those in Wandor (1972), and sections in Mitchell (1971) and Rowbotham (1973). Roberta Henderson (1976) considers the problem of ‘consolidating consciousness’. 20 See Rapaport and Rapaport (1971). 21 Conditions of Illusion collects writings of the WLM between 1972 and 1974 which give some idea of the diversity of developments. This collection does not include much writing from a separatist political position, which is another distinct development. Rowbotham (1977) discusses some of the developments in the WLM. 22 See Articles 3, 6, 8 and 9 for different approaches to theorizing women’s subordination in relation to reproduction. 23 The reader is here better directed beyond the confines of this article. As far as reading goes, perhaps to periodicals and magazines like Red Rag, Gay Left, Spare Rib, Women’s Report, Catcall, Scarlet Woman. Most of these can be obtained through the Publication and Distribution Co-operative, 27 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1R 0AT.
27 A woman’s world ‘Woman’ – an ideology of femininity Janice Winship
We are, perhaps, only too familiar with what we recognize on the crowded news-stand as a typical Woman cover.1 Always a white woman’s face: young but somehow ageless; skin smooth and plastic as a doll; pretty – though not beautiful as in Vogue; smiling widely – having fun perhaps; red, shiny lips framing the perfection of white-toothpaste-ad teeth; clear eyes gazing at you, addressing you intimately.2 As potential buyers, we women casually peruse that cover for its verbal indication of the contents, but we ‘read’ the visual image only as the sign of the magazine Woman. As feminists we may dismiss the cover and the magazine it invites us to as yet another ‘exploitation’ of women: a patronizing abuse and trivialization of women’s ‘real’ position in society. Yet if we consider it as an ideological construction, it is already a work of ideology3 which, both consciously and unconsciously, has constituted this condensed representation.4 If we deconstruct this representation, we can begin to reveal some of the important contradictions of women’s patriarchal subordination5 under capitalism with which the magazine as a whole must necessarily engage. First it is a woman on the cover looking primarily at us, its female consumers and readers. Not only is it the most personally revealing part of the body that is represented – the face – but it is the most personal aspect of the face – the eyes, which steadily catch our eyes.6 Eyes, and lips as well, supremely shouting ‘woman’, pointing us the way inside to a world of woman: woman to woman. But that representation of woman is no ordinary woman – yet she is a woman all the same; she has a glossiness and perfection about her that we, however many layers of beauty cream we daub on (and off), never achieve. We are failures in comparison with this woman, who in her perfection is a man’s woman. And this in two senses: although it is women who look at and buy this magazine, the cover represents woman with the seductive expression directed, not to women, but to men; second, however, it is an idealized woman as defined by men, but which we, in vain, emulate. As John Berger (1972, p. 47) writes: ‘The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus, she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.’ And Eva Figes (1970, p. 13): ‘Woman, presented with an image in a mirror has danced to that image in a hypnotic trance. And because she thought the image was herself it became just that.’ Finally, the woman is not simply an ‘ideal’ woman but also not a woman: it is not her as a live, fluctuating and enigmatic person that is represented, but her as a thing. She is constructed from commodities: make-up by . . ., clothes by . . ., hair by . . . reified, her person denied her as she becomes the named photographer’s (usually male) constructed feminine commodity. She is also the commodity – the magazine itself which is to be consumed.
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This image encapsulates, then, patriarchy in its articulation under capitalism, as it positions women as feminine subjects. What appears to be central – the relation of women to women – is simultaneously defined in relation to absent men/masculinity – they are feminine; and in relation to an absent reality of capitalist production – they are consumers to be themselves consumed as commodities which appear ‘natural’. As Marx describes this fetishism of commodities: The mysterious character of the commodity form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. [my italics] Marx (1976, p. 164) This characterization begins to suggest why it is important that as feminists we consider women’s magazines seriously. We are directed to the problem of feminine subjectivity in the particular attempt magazines make to construct our presence out of an absence – primarily through the construction of ‘motherhood’. They both express and cope with the fragility of that absent presence. They recognize the problem of femininity, yet finally refuse it as a problem.7 If in the Women’s Movement we are challenging the construction of our ‘absent’ femininity, our feminism does not and cannot break wholly from it. Our femininity is not something any of us can escape. All of us as women ‘achieve’ our subjectivity in relation to a definition of women which in part is propounded by women’s magazines. We may be struggling against such a definition, but none of us, though we might like to, can eliminate the modes of subjectivity in their patriarchal form by disparagingly ignoring them; as if we too do not live within them, having to find our place within the parameters they set. As feminists we frequently negotiate the tension between our secret reading of magazines for their ‘useful’ diets and zany fashion, and our attempts to break with the modes of femininity they represent. While women’s magazines can deny subordination by acclaiming femininity and the centrality of women in society (is it not true that women, indispensably, bear and bring up children?), feminism embraces certain aspects of that femininity – including ‘child-care’ and ‘personal life’ – as central sites of political struggle. The specificity of feminism is partly constituted through the struggles by which it draws on these aspects of women’s oppression, but transforms them into aspects of feminist strength. As part of understanding that movement from femininity to feminism and the relation between them, we need to explore the processes by which femininity ‘manoeuvres’ within and against masculine hegemony8 in its capitalist forms, i.e. that femininity is not merely a passive acceptance by women of patriarchal domination but represents an active subordination. Unless we understand those processes, as Louis Althusser affirms, ‘down to the effects of the fetishism of ideology . . . in which men [sic] consciously or unconsciously live their lives, their projects, their actions, their attitudes, and their functions as social’ (1970, p. 66), we have no hope either of challenging them or building from them. Furthermore, to dismiss women’s magazines as make-believe and trivial is not only to discount and disregard those women who in their millions9 read them, who we might think are easily deceived by them, but also to mistake the necessarily intimate relation between magazines and their readers as a causal one. It is not magazines in themselves that determine what women are. Their ‘peculiarity’ – note there are no men’s magazines of a comparable
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kind – is constituted from the marginality of women’s position ‘outside’ the magazine, which in turn contributes to that subordinated position.11
The ideology of femininity In Article 3 of this book we have attempted to explore women’s subordination in terms of their ‘economic place’ in patriarchal relations under capitalism. We were not centrally concerned in that article with the focus of our attention here, in relation to women’s magazines: the representation of those relations in the specifically ideological domain which women inhabit and construct. While not wanting to argue a direct correspondence between the social relations of re/production12 and ideology, I do intend to hold to the notion that ideology places the individual in relation to those relations.13 As Althusser describes ideology (1971a, p. 165), it represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing relations of production (and the other relations that derive from them), but above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the relations of production and the relations that derive from them. What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live. Ideology is a ‘level’ relatively autonomous from the economic and political instances so that, for example, we can conceptualize women’s magazines as primarily ideological production. But the work of ideology, which is organized through, and places the subject in, an imaginary relation, operates at different levels. Furthermore, it provides a coherence by eliminating and negating social contradictions through operations which are themselves contradictory. Here, in relation to women’s magazines, we are concerned both with the contradictory representations of femininity in the magazine, and also with how the means of representation are contradictory. In a wider study than this, we would need to look at the contradictions between the representations of femininity in Woman, which is the focus of concern here, and those in Cosmopolitan say, and between those in magazines and TV soap operas, for example, and so on. First, however, I want to sketch out the broad parameters within which, contemporarily, the ideology of femininity operates. Although it is the representations of femininity in Woman that I am engaging with, these general features extend outside that terrain. The ideology of femininity as it is constructed through patriarchal capitalist determinations must always be seen both in relation to its overdetermination by ‘masculinity’ and as it is simultaneously included but set apart from the capitalist construction of the ‘free’ individual. Ideologically, women, as women, whatever their actual place in production, are negatively placed within the social relations of re/production. Mitchell (1974, p. 404) notes that ‘men enter into the class dominated structures of history while women’s . . . is the sphere of reproduction . . .’ The ‘subdomains’ of ideology which contradictorily contribute to it, and which can only be separated out for the purposes of analysis, consist first and dominantly of ‘motherhood’. This slides into ‘personal life’, ‘everyday life’ and ‘domesticity’, all of which place women as mothers at their centre, while also differently addressing men. Second, ‘femininity’ concerns ‘sexuality’ – in the sense both of ‘attractiveness’ and ‘availability’ – which are ‘hidden’ from ‘motherhood’. Third, ‘femininity’ is inscribed within ‘masculinity’ which determines it, so that
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it takes over in a mediated/transformed way aspects of ‘masculinity’: ‘femininity’ is represented in some of its manifestations as masculine (see ‘Indoor Sports’ photo p. 132). Finally, the ideology of the ‘free’ individual cuts across this composite ideology of femininity, to contribute an ideology of ‘feminine independence/individuality’. The construction of the ‘feminine’ position for women is contradictory in a mode different from that in relation to ‘masculinity’ and men. As a subordinated group defining ourselves through our absences, we know first what it is we are absent from.14 As it has been described within psychoanalysis, ‘the place she is in is one of referring to an image of herself that is always not-male’ (Coward, Lipshitz and Cowie 1976, p. 12). Women learn to define themselves in relation to men first as they are fathers within the social relations of reproduction within the family, and second as that position is consolidated at the moment they become ‘breadwinners’ within the social relations of production: women become ‘mothers’ and ‘dependants.’ Marx argues (1973, p. 244) that it is out of the act of ‘exchange’ of commodities that ‘the individual each one of them is reflected in himself as its exclusive and dominant (determinant) subject. With that, then, the complete freedom of the individual is posited.’ But it is the moment at which men, as breadwinners, ‘freely’ exchange their labour power for a wage, that their individuality specifically ‘arises’. That relation from which women are largely excluded (because their position is always mediated through men even when they too are wage labourers – see Article 3) represents the potential ‘split’ that has developed under capitalism: production/consumption; work/ leisure; work/personal life; work/everyday life (Marcuse 1969, 1964; Zaretsky 1976; Lefebvre 1971; Red Collective 1971). It is a split which operates for men but which is dependent on women’s patriarchal subordination – their confinement to family, home, personal and everyday life (Brunsdon and Morley 1978; Davidoff, L’Esperance and Newby 1976; cf. Article 2). Women inhabit this area contradictorily. On the one hand, they make sense of their ‘lack’, their absence from the social language of politics and production, by taking on the ‘marks of womanhood’ (Mitchell 1975): narcissism, masochism and above all motherhood – when becoming a mother compensates for this lack. They justify their lack as well as recognize it as such: women as well as men ‘glorify’ motherhood but women also apologize for it – ‘I’m only a housewife’. On the other hand, these ‘marks of womanhood’ are always overdetermined by masculinity. Mitchell’s psychoanalytic analysis of this phenomenon, also apparent in the social acquisition of femininity, makes this clear: ‘femininity is in part a repressed condition that can only be secondarily acquired in a distorted form . . .’ (1975, p. 404). Masculinity always ‘runs through’ femininity. Thus in the work/personal life split women are defined/ confined by men to be entirely within personal life. However, women themselves recognize that collapsed within personal life is the work they must perform to establish men’s personal life. In relation to their own lives women both do and do not operate according to that divide structured through men. What Pierre Bourdieu writes of the Berber house is, despite its cultural separation, illustrative of ‘home’ here too: The orientation of the house is fundamentally defined from the outside, from the point of view of men and if one may say so, by men and for men, as the place from which men come out. The house is an empire within an empire, but one which always remains subordinate because, even though it presents all the properties and all the relations which define the archetypal world it remains a reversed world, an inverted reflection. ‘Man is the lamp of the outside and woman the lamp of the inside.’ 1973, p. 110
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In the magazine context it is a divide which is constantly managed: the home is simultaneously just an arena of leisure for women, and one of leisure and work, where ‘work’ is justified as such (even when we might not think of it as work – the work of beauty) by resort to the masculine concepts of work – efficiency, planning, etc. (cf. Conran 1976, Davidoff 1976). But the mode in which ‘masculinity’ structures ‘femininity’ is complicated by the position of men as a site of coincidence between patriarchal and capitalist relations. Since it is the male labourer who is ‘freely’ able to sell his labour power, that ideological relation of capital is conferred on ‘masculinity’, i.e. the particular ideological form which ‘individuality’ takes under capitalism – that of the ‘free’ individual as the source of individuality – is historically gender-specific. The individual who is ‘interpellated as a (free) subject’ in order, as Althusser (1971a, p. 169) says, ‘that he shall (freely) accept his subjection’, is indeed ‘he.’ Nevertheless, women also live, contradictorily, within that ideological construction through their femininity. For example, narcissism for women as the ‘mark of womanhood’ in which you ‘love yourself as you-would-like-to-be/your-man would-like-you-to-be’ – the sexually attractive and available woman – can in one sense be an evasion of ‘true’ femininity as ‘mother’ who is sexually unavailable: you ‘work’ at narcissism to achieve an ideological independence from men through a specific feminine construction of ‘individuality’ – what Freud calls ‘self-sufficiency’ (Freud 1961, S.E. vol. 14, p. 94). Under contemporary capitalism that work is carried out through the consumption of commodities, which itself contributes to ‘individuality’. It is of course a ‘self-sufficiency’ which aims ultimately to be dependent on men (see discussion of ‘Indoor Sports’ photo below). In Woman these contradictory processes of ideology centred on the ideology of motherhood are, as we shall see, intricately worked on and organized to legitimate women’s subordination. It is that legitimation which provides the magazine’s raison d’être. The organization however depends on the magazine as a media production.
‘Woman’ as media re/production of ideology We can point to the ideological specificity of women’s magazines through their content. For Women in 1977 that would be something like: letters page, fiction, ads, beauty/fashion, and home features, things to make/bake, feature on a celebrity, the story of a ‘brave and valiant’ family/individual, horoscope and problem page. It is a content already suggested to us in the text on the cover. But if we were to define it as that complete whole, we would be positing an object ‘out there’ separate from the producers on the one side and the readers on the other. Of course it is that: the object we casually pick up in the doctor’s waiting room or avidly pounce on as it drops through the letter box each week, without considering how it is produced. As a cultural object, however, we have to consider three modes of relatively autonomous production which separate and relate it to women who read it. Firstly, women’s magazines are a particular commodity produced within a cycle of capitalist production and consumption in which ultimately women must be the consumers. In part, then, the specificity of a women’s magazine is shaped by a series of technical determinations: photography and reproduction, the size of letter boxes, etc., and economic determinations – that is a capitalist profit-making enterprise which ‘needs’ advertising and regular consumption. That consumption depends on the success of a second process making it ‘readable’ and ‘enjoyable’ enough for it to be bought. The second process is that of media production. Initiated by the editorial team who write and design the magazine, it employs visual and verbal forms, selects, transforms, neglects
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material according to certain media criteria, which set it up as a women’s magazine and not a newspaper or wholly practical do-it-yourself journal. In particular, women’s magazines are primarily concerned to entertain, although on the terrain of women’s work.15 In addition, they provide entertainment which offers (although not in all the features) a more idyllic world. As Richard Dyer suggests, writing particularly of Hollywood entertainment (1976, p. 3): ‘Entertainment offers the image of ‘something better’ to set against the realities of day to day existence.’ But simultaneously ‘. . . the ideals of entertainment imply wants that capital itself promises to meet’. The general criterion of ‘entertainment’ determines the balance of features; the limits to serious topics which can be discussed; the kind of casual, chatty language that is employed; the use of colour, titles, design, etc. But while it frames the overall shape and conservatism of the magazines – as one editor said, ‘You don’t give readers what they want, but what they enjoy’ (White 1977, p. 70) – nevertheless the magazines are finally determined by, and constructed through, the ideology of femininity. The third level of production is that by which the ideology of femininity, in its contradictory aspects, is worked through the constraints of media production. That production of ideology finally delivers us the specific ‘complexly structured unity’ (Althusser 1970; Mitchell 1971, p. 101) which is the magazine’s list of contents. The construction of ‘femininity’ as a represented content – women’s lives – is narrated to and represented from particular ‘feminine’ standpoints which women reading the magazine are constituted by and live within. The magazine, however contradictorily, therefore has a meaning for women in relation to the ideological representations which they live as their everyday life. What I shall focus on here is the magazine as discourse(s) in which ideology, positioning the reader as the feminine subject who is included within it, is constructed through the different modes of representation that make up the magazine in its constituent parts. As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith writes, again about film: The spectating subject requires the relation to an other in order to situate itself, and somewhere the film must provide it with that other. (The objection that the spectating subject is comfortably in an armchair and knows perfectly well that it is so situated is here beside the point.) 1976, p. 28 It is from the centrality of woman – woman addressing you the individual woman as mother: past, present, or yet-to-be – that the dominant discourse of the magazine is organized. It is, however, a selective construction of ‘motherhood’: an idealization in which the customary dependence of women as mothers on men is minimized or absent and the essential function in society that women perform as mothers is defined as natural. It is a discourse confined to certain parts of the magazine, separated from others. For example, it is not usually ‘spoken’ by the visual of the cover – unless it is a ‘celebrity plus baby’, or by fashion features – except at its limit: woman attracting man. These displacements and boundary constructions are a means by which the magazine tends to avoid or negate both the appearance of the more burdensome aspects of motherhood which it contradictorily deals with, and potentially disruptive discourses of ‘you the free individual’; ‘you the sexually attractive woman’. In managing these contradictions, the magazine operates within a representation schema of fantasy/reality or practicality (which overlaps with, but is distinct from, a leisure/work division), where into fantasy are displaced both the ideals and resolutions which the reality
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of subordination does not deliver. But, at the same time, our understanding as readers of this schema is recognition of that subordination. It is that recognition which Henri Lefebvre in his astute appreciation of ‘experience and make-believe’ in women’s magazines fails to appreciate. Thus, in the following quote, it is he who wonders in ‘utter bewilderment’, not women who read the magazines: . . . experience and make-believe merge in a manner conducive to the readers’ utter bewilderment. Indeed a single issue may include practical instructions on the way to cut out and sew up a dress or precise information such as where and at what price to buy another, alongside a form of rhetoric that invests clothes and other objects with an aura of unreality: all possible and impossible dresses, every kind of dish from the simplest to those whose realisation requires the skill of a professional. . . . The reader, according to his personal taste, invests this subject matter with a concrete or an abstract interpretation, sees it as pragmatic or imaginary, imagines what he sees and sees what he imagines . . . It is a fact that women do read these practical texts on make-believe and these make-believe sections (including publicity) on practical fashions. Lefebvre (1971, p. 85) It is this noticeable division that has led Cynthia White to describe Woman in recent years as ‘uncertain, even schizophrenic’.16 The magazine’s schizophrenia, however, is already rooted in women’s lives.17 The fantasy/reality schema immediately confronts us on the cover in the condensed image of a woman: perfect and not like you, but a woman and like you; in the headlines luring us to the contents: the sexual fantasy of ‘Clint Eastwood – what goes on behind those icy blue eyes?’ and the down-to-earthness of ‘Telling your child about sex – before it’s too late’. Inside it intervenes in the representation of sexual relations of women with men: fiction romance, in contrast to the abrasiveness of ‘love’ affairs on the problem page; family life as lived by celebrities in one feature, juxtaposed with more mundane family life of ‘ordinary’ people in another, and so on. A prime means by which fantasy and reality, and, therefore, contradictions, are held together is through the differential use of verbal and visual material. Visuals are consistently of young, attractive women; verbal content is not necessarily about or addressed to such women. Fashion features pose models in bizarre/exotic surroundings, in everyday or fairly outrageous garments but overleaf provide instructions to sew/knit. The same form is applicable to food and recipes: ordinary food or ‘ornamental cookery’ (Barthes 1972, p. 78) in an out-of-the-ordinary environment with ‘simple’ recipes provided. Ads, particularly, use these means while simultaneously contradicting editorial features: an ad for ‘cushion floor’ illustrated with two extraordinary and expensive bathrooms, sandwiched between the letters pages with their written theme of everyday life.18 In constructing the magazine in its constituent parts, we work through the contradictions of the ideology of femininity and the magazine’s means of representing them, beginning from their organization into the dominant discourse which places you as ‘mother’. This description of the magazine’s ‘contents’ divides the magazine into six sections which cut across the list of contents as it is spelt out by the magazine, but attempts to embrace it.
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A woman’s ‘stronghold’: consigned to everyday life (Lefebvre 1971, p. 92) While ‘motherhood’ is central it is also the fulcrum for an ideology of everyday life which it works through but with which it is not quite synonymous. As we turn the pages of the cover and then an ad we are embraced ‘In a Woman’s World, by the editor’.19 The editor sets up the intimacy of ‘we’re all women together whatever our station in life’, through our similar position and memories as mothers/cooks/housekeepers concerned with the details of everyday life, whether it be packing for a holiday or worrying about our cash outflow in the home. The extraordinariness and fantasy of some of the articles that are pointed to is balanced against this practicality: you are brought into the excitement through your everyday life which, in one of its actions coincides with other women’s more exciting experiences – that action through its place within the fantasy illusorily ‘elevates’ you. Thus a fashion team is flying off to Israel; you relate to them through the ‘problems of packing your suitcase’ (Woman, 9 July 1977) – whether it be for Israel or Brighton. On the same page is the renowned space for readers’ letters, ‘Woman to Woman’: this is the page where you have your ‘say’, where the common terrain of everyday life is explored. These letters are from women to women, concerned with those aspects of life women can only say to women and which will only be of interest and entertainment to women: laughing at their own feminine foibles, importantly mocking men’s behaviour, as well as recounting the humorous, detailed escapades of their children. It reads as antidote to any radio or TV news bulletin – everyday life as it does not appear in the news: it is organized around the family and personal life, it is cheerful, it deals with ‘trivia’, ‘good deeds’, ‘generous and ordinary people’ as opposed to the ‘famous’, ‘disasters’, ‘important events of state and industry’, and ‘crime’. It is not presented as ‘progress’, the development of the world, history in the making, i.e. as news, but as a cyclical repetition through differences – women’s life is always the same, its values apparently almost untouched by capitalist production (although there is nostalgia for the past). Everyday life has its own moments of drama and extraordinariness which disrupt, enliven and enrich what seems a monotonous closed trajectory. They are in some sense what keeps us going: they make everyday life, which we all live, worth living each day. As we are given it here, it is through these differences that you as a woman live your individuality: everyday life which is paradoxically never the same, but always the same each day, concerns both events which happen to you but also events which you determine and have control over. PEACE PLEASE I was one of eleven children and we used to save up for special occasions such as Christmas and birthdays to buy mother a present. We’d usually ask her what she’d like and never could understand her answer: ‘Just five minutes peace’. We couldn’t buy that so what did she mean? Now I have a family of my own and know exactly what she meant. But we couldn’t have afforded it – peace is priceless. Hilary Kennedy, Houston (30 July 1977) As entertainment, the letters’ page seeks self-reflexively to affirm the selected point of view of ‘women in the home’ that it sets up. While it is idealized and cut off from the world outside it is precisely because women are peripheral in the ‘real’ world of masculine concerns that the place they do have in everyday life is so central here. There is recognition of
A woman’s world the different access women have to everyday life, but that spurned as ‘oppressive’: it is men’s lack, not women’s. In its different aspects, everyday life underlies all the knitting and buying clothes for children, the ‘common Dr Meredith’s surgery’), the ‘domesticity’ of cooking and ‘personal life’.
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is something to be valued, not magazine: the practicalities of sense’ approach to illness (‘In ‘home building’ and, above all,
Personal life is . . . motherhood . . . is nationhood The emotional experiences of ‘personal life’ as they are represented on the letters’ page are not about relations with friends – women or men, but about boyfriends and husbands, parents, and centrally about ‘the family’ in which you, as a person, are ‘mother’. On the letters’ page everyday life as family life is cheerfully endorsed. However, it is recognized elsewhere that its reproduction is secured neither without encountering problems nor without challenges to this status quo. These problems are the ups and downs that any family, even if not like yours or mine, might experience and which threaten to disrupt the self-satisfaction of family life. Yet through adversity, the family is re-established in the closeness of its relationships: the family is reconfirmed as a national institution. ‘Real life’ families appear in features such as ‘The right to love (see photo p. 132) – a ten-year struggle to adopt a foster child’; ‘Living without him – two widows whose husbands were killed by terrorist bombs’; ‘The baby with ten lives’; and ‘Two for the road: the couple who gave up city life, for a caravan in Wales’. As ‘documentaries’ these features are usually illustrated by black and white photos (often the only illustrations in the magazine to show ‘ordinary’ rather than famous people or young models) which suggest ‘having-been-there’ (Barthes 1971).20 Emphasis is on the emotional strength of women who, not without initially exhibiting weakness, learn through the ‘trials’ that appear to have been sent to ‘test’ them. So you, another ‘weak’ woman can/will also conjure up hidden reserves of emotional power when misfortune befalls your family. The misfortunes dealt with are your worst fears as mother and wife realized, but nightmares which turn out successfully: your attempt to adopt a child thwarted by her real, biological mother; your child dying from cot death; you are widowed; your marriage is falling apart. But at the end of the tunnel a bright light shines yet and you gain in experience and the quality of your life – almost through a religious salvation. These features recognize the problems of marriage but simultaneously see those problems as reinforcing the marriage bond, not challenging it as an institution which confines such problems to a private torture. As Sheila in ‘The baby with ten lives’ says, I’d never expected marriage or motherhood to be a bed of roses . . . I’d seen how hard my mother had to work with us five children and I’d helped her after my Dad had his accident when I was 13. But I hadn’t expected the troubles Ray and I had had. But: ‘As for Ray and me, we’ve been brought much closer through all our trouble over Donna’, 23 July 1977. Women’s actions in these features often border on the masochistic but for altruistic purposes – usually for the sake of the children. It is on their behalf that mothers put on a ‘brave face’ and continue in the daily grind of everyday life despite their emotional loss. In this case, it is the loss of a husband: ‘. . . they need Jane’s determined cheerfulness and
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reassurance badly. Weekends are still the hardest to get through’ (16 July 1977). Yet it is also children who make that life worth living again. Sometimes the difficulties concern the family as the economic unit of capitalism, through which personal relations are precariously constructed. ‘Two for the road’ features a couple who find themselves caught up in the ethic of material possessions: Geoffrey Edwards was obsessively dedicated to his job and the material possession it provided. With growing dismay, his wife Josie watched as his burning desire to make money undermined their marriage. Then came the decision which changed everything. 23 July 1977 While this problem is a common one that the reader can identify with, their ‘decision’ to solve it is extreme, in the sense that it is out of the range of possibilities for most women. They give up their jobs, sell all their belongings and attempt a self-sufficient, travelling life through which they regain the ‘romance’ in their relationship. In this return to ‘precapitalism’, which makes an individual rejection of capitalist values, the family nevertheless is strengthened. As Josie says: ‘In fact we’re so close now that we’re thinking of having a baby to make our happiness complete.’ Family life represented as lived right across the country, irons out class and cultural differences. The several ‘family’ features that I have already mentioned span the spectrum of class, but, while we can identify characteristics which define these families in class-specific terms, those potentially conflicting differences are minimized through what they are seen to have in common – ‘the family’, not as historically and classspecific but the ‘natural’ unit of all time. In this context, it is royalty and celebrities to whose family lives we gain a keyhole view. For Woman, the Jubilee highlight (19 November 1977) was the Queen’s visit to the home of an ‘ordinary’ family in Glasgow. She is adored with a ‘religious’ fervour, but what contributes to her ‘power’ for women is her simultaneous distance from most women and her proximity as wife and mother. She, at the head of the nation, like you at the ‘bottom’, is a family woman who supposedly speaks the same language of being a wife and mother. It is this aspect which in part creates ‘the nation’ of families. Polly Toynbee, writing of Woman’s Realm, has condemned such an approach in which even Margaret Thatcher is discussed in terms of her ‘preoccupation with trivia’. Toynbee (1977, p. 11) calls it: ‘. . . a kind of nonsensical conspiracy to bring all women, however high-flying, right down to the lowest common denominator. . . . It implies that there is no escape from real womanhood.’ What is absent here is the recognition that women who regularly read women’s magazines are likely to be more trapped within the social relations of reproduction in the family than Margaret Thatcher. The ‘trap’ of motherhood is also consistently posed as one of the ‘fruits’ of life: even if women wish for more than just family life, they would not want to forsake it in the black and white choice of either/or (see Article 4). Features on, say, Lulu becoming a mother are reassuring because she is combining the values of a mother with those of a top salary earner in the competitive, ruthless world of pop. It is finally children who make the world go round. Nevertheless, as Toynbee maintains, these features do glorify motherhood as if no woman can be fulfilled or mature until she is herself a mother: it is the only ‘fruit’ in life for women: it is what makes a house a home. As Lulu comments: ‘Now they’ll have to accept that I’m grown up. Having a baby is proof of that isn’t it? I’m not a little girl any more, I’m a woman’ (15 October 1977).
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Work at femininity . . . beauty and fashion . . . cookery and home . . . and catch your man Simone de Beauvoir writes that for a woman: ‘to care for her beauty, to dress up is a kind of work that enables her to take possession of her person as she takes possession of her home through housework; her ego then seems chosen and recreated by herself ’ (de Beauvoir, 1972, p. 543). But, as Shulamith Firestone insists, though not specifically in relation to ‘beauty’: It takes one’s major energy for the best portion of one’s creative years ‘to make a good catch’. (To be in love can be a full time job for a woman, like that of a profession for a man.) Women who choose to keep out of this race are choosing a life without love, something that as we have seen, most men don’t have the courage to do. Firestone (1972, p. 155) Working at beauty is both the means by which you achieve a ‘creative’ individuality and the mode through which, in making yourself loved as an object, you find a man. It is also a work, like housework, which can only be carried on through the consumption of commodities; like housework too it is repetitious and invisible work (McRobbie 1977). Unlike housework, however, you work at constructing yourself into the commodity men will ‘consume’. Fashion, like ads, then, directs us in a complex way to capitalism in its patriarchal form. Boldly extravagant in colour and design, fashion does not generally address you as ‘mother’ but as ‘a gay young thing out for a good time’. In the ‘Indoor Sports’ example our attention is directed to the women dressed in their capitalist commodities, explicitly the glittery wool, implicitly the other accoutrements: makeup, pink jeans, jewellery, which complete the ‘glamour’ of femininity. Second, we are given those commodities as the models become them in their relation to men. The charged, almost garish colour accentuates the heightened but undeclared sexual atmosphere between these ‘glamorous’ women and ‘classy’ men. This takes a particularly complex form of masculine hegemony which contradictorily both accepts and subverts. The whole scene is premised on women’s absence from the game of billiards, which provides the setting, and from most of the other predominantly male games which the sweaters depict. That absence is recognized even though it is constructed as a presence – the models are not playing the appropriate games, they are posing for men. The process sabotages masculinity, makes fun of it, employs guerilla tactics, but only to acknowledge masculine dominance – to achieve femininity by getting a man. Our sports wear never saw a playing field – and is never likely to. These are glamorous versions of what the men usually wear and are absolutely right in a party setting. Score your points for femininity, don’t play according to the rules and keep him from watching Match of the Day. (12 November 1977) While men engage here in the world of sport, women engage in a mediated form – the sport of catching men, which through its common denominator of ‘sport’ constructs the appearance of equality between women and men. Third, this fashion item operates through the schema of fantasy/reality into which you are implicated. It is a spectacle: a staged scene which is not one of everyday life, but whose
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meaning utilizes knowledge of that everyday life in its masculine form, and whose objects – the ‘absurd’ sweaters – are incorporated into everyday life by you knitting them (patterns overleaf). By association you too become sexually provocative and catch your man. The achievement of individuality, through the narcissistic construction of you, the particular loved object, relies not on work at the point of production as it does for men, but on work at the point of consumption. As consumers women ‘work’ with the acumen that is generally attributed to business, not to receive a wage but to receive compliments; ‘cutting the cost of coats’, ‘cut capital outlay’ – on clothes; budgeting for the cheapest buys. We are given suggestions for ‘rational’ action: ‘think of your cheeks in terms of three sections’; for adopting techniques which smack of the underside of big business: ‘with a bit of clever cheating . . .’ (in relation to hair colour). Contradictorily the aim is both a ‘false’ look, because the use of cosmetics is not denied, but always within a ‘natural’ genre, assisting the natural – which is women’s true attribute – not destroying it. It is not a beauty ‘au naturel’ but a beauty of deceit: as if (to men) it were natural, but in fact a total construction.21 Cookery and do-it-yourself home features which use similar means of representation, although this time they address themselves to you as housewife/mother, carry the same ambiguity as the fashion features: work for women is represented as pleasure/leisure. At one level they are eminently practical but are set within a framework of fantasy so that you, the reader, transfer the meaning of ‘adventure’, ‘nostalgia’, ‘extravagance’, to what is by itself an everyday creation – a work of production, not consumption for women. Thus ‘Berry ripe’ (16 November 1977) is a double-page colour spread mostly taken up by close-up shots of woven baskets full of luscious fruit you can almost taste. Above are small illustrations of the completed dishes you can bake from the fruit. Even without the accompanying text, we are transported both to the past and to the depths of the country, where such rural life as signified by the rural baskets and the abundance of fruits still goes on. The work of picking the fruit and that of baking are hidden – the recipes are overleaf.22 In control – ‘Actionwoman’ – with rights and power . . . and duties The magazine’s representation of women’s ‘individuality’ is constructed through women’s negotiation of their lives in relation to fashion and the home. It is an individuality represented as independence while circumscribed by masculine domination. The arena where ‘independence’ is strongly affirmed, apart from some do-it-yourself tasks more commonly performed by men which you are encouraged to tackle, is in the ‘Actionwoman’ column. It has taken over (significantly in the period since the Women’s Movement has gained some respectability as well as visibility – it first appeared in 1974) from what used to be called in the 1950s ‘How it’s Done’, a feature primarily concerned with appropriate etiquette, whether at home entertaining or making funeral arrangements (White 1970). It may now seem to have considerably shifted its terrain, focusing predominantly on consumer issues in terms of how women can act to establish their rights, but also casting its net wider to include more general legal rights, and problems of paid work. On the one hand, it is concerned with women as individuals with equal rights to men, in a way that ‘How it’s Done’ could not conceive. On the other, the consumer emphasis tends to undermine that, as it defines women primarily in their position as housewives. Nevertheless, the image of ‘Actionwoman’ – actually Lynn Faulds Wood’s team, but by implication you – is of ‘getting tough’, ‘delivering ultimatums’, generally of being in control and dictating terms.
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The feature devoted to ‘On going back to work’ (15 October 1977) suitably illustrates the contradictory pulls in play. First it was a ‘special’ feature, i.e. did not rest easily within the weekly format and focus of consumers in the home. Yet, as indication of the topic’s importance, it was much longer. Woman’s recognition of the need for women’s independence is clearly stated: ‘With children back at school and time possibly hanging heavily, many mums are beginning to feel the need to go back to work, either to earn more money or even just to provide a little independence . . .’ [my italics] but it is a very qualified independence that is envisaged. The article never considers paid work as a right for women with children and, therefore, considers it within the framework of, ‘Any hope of part time work or even work at home?’ Jobs considered all fall within the category ‘women’s work’ and there is nothing about unions or Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination legislation. Yet the article is encouraging to women – suggesting they have acquired more skills from running a home than they might think, posing the problems involved in returning to paid work: the economic situation, hours available in work, children and husband. In the end, however, the problem is presented as an individual one for you in your family: ‘You could be the biggest obstacle of all by letting yourself by daunted by all these drawbacks.’ The horoscope, always appearing towards the end, also begins from this position of the individual. It poses for you that you as an individual must recognize the potential opportunities or disasters which your star influences have structured for you. If you take the appropriate action, which you are directed towards, then you are likely to keep on a steady keel and have some sense of progress into the future. In part, you are in control of your own life; if you take the wrong initiative, the resulting upset in your daily life is partly your fault. Life then is represented as a delicate combination of fate and the stars but finally of your own judgements and actions. It deals with the areas you would expect: relationships to boyfriend/ family/friends; finances; work/career; leisure/social life and health, organizing them as a composite of ups and downs, action and passivity, which never wholly soars to the heights of pleasure or plummets into total despondency. As an obvious ‘fun’ feature in the magazine, it carefully follows the work/leisure boundaries of our lives. Love is . . . romance . . . is marriage and children ‘ “Come away for the night,” said Cary Grant’, ‘What goes on behind those icy blue eyes?’ On these cues, as we gaze at large close-up photos we are no longer a spectator just about to peel potatoes in the kitchen, but are whisked away on a magic carpet and drawn into the personal lives of these male filmstars, Cary Grant, Clint Eastwood, Muhammad Ali, Telly Savalas. These fantasies are distanced from us, spatially (they are frequently in the States and most often in Hollywood) and by class (see Personal life . . . section above), but like dream fantasies, they are emotionally and sexually charged. On our behalf the interviewer, usually a woman, intimately discusses their relationships with women, and imaginarily we identify and change places with those women. These relationships are sexual. Woman, unlike Cosmopolitan, cannot easily handle women’s sexual relationships except on its problem page, or in an almost biological context of having babies – ‘Tell your children about sex before it’s too late’ (12 November 1977). Motherhood and sexuality are ideologically separated: for mothers sexuality is hidden, if anywhere, in the privacy of husband’s beds. However, they are more easily managed from the obverse position of men’s relations with women, when it is men who are sexually active, women passive, or from the position of a female celebrity, although the ‘management’ still involves little more than sexual innuendoes and acknowledgement of sexuality.
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But the sexual relations of these men that are hinted at are always finally overdetermined by family life. Either it is their wives who see them, despite their sexual recklessness, as primarily ‘good fathers’ to their children, or they themselves place the ‘still point’ (Davidoff et al. 1976, p. 175) of home – their wives, or consider their children as first in their lives. Thus we learn of Telly Savalas: ‘Who would have guessed a doting father lurked behind that tough image’ (8 October 1977) and Veronica Porche, Ali’s ‘new woman’ comments: ‘They think the way he acts is the way he is. Wild and talkin’ when he’s really quiet and shy. . . . He’s the most wonderful father’ (23 July 1977). For women reading these articles, this final containment of sexuality within the family form allows the fantasized extramarital sexual relation to be ‘experienced’ but to remain at the level of fantasy, reconciled with their affirmed position as wives and mothers. Compare here ‘The right to love’ photo – love is loving a child within a family. The short stories (I am not here intending to deal with the serials – usually historical/ thriller/romances) have much in common with the fantasies above,23 although they range more widely, extending over the problem of femininity in all its contradictions. They employ a means of representation analogous to the dream work of dreams which Freud describes, giving the illusion of describing a ‘reality’ but only alluding to that reality: condensation, displacement, representability and secondary revision.24 They are fantasy – initially indicated by the visuals, hazy, impressionistic, another world, too ‘simple’ for ‘real’ life; they are egoistic: the construction of the stories is from the point of view of an individual, usually a woman; they are about sexuality – masculinity/femininity – but only allude to sex; they are bereft of much detail which would locate the scenes in more accurate class terms, say, but are rich in other; they are symbols onto which the emotions of relationships are displaced, and are punctuated by ‘magical’ moments which allow a resolution (wish fulfilment) to be achieved. They tend to concentrate on three moments in a woman’s life: the problem of getting a man and its relation to wage work and ‘independence’ for women; the difficulties within marriage, particularly when children are small; and the dilemmas of middle age when children are leaving home. With the shift to a younger readership of Woman it is the first two which are now more frequent. Here we consider an example of each, very schematically, taking them as particular stories constructed in a general way. ‘The right man’ (9 July 1977) The story sets up the situation where Julie is in competition with Matt, in relation to a job: they’ve both got social studies degrees. At the same time, she is in competition with a ‘lovely brunette’ for him. The problem is compounded when: 1
Matt wins in the job market through his masculinity – he’s good at games. The ‘swinging’ tennis racket however makes its first appearance as a symbol of male virility – when he waves good-bye with it to the ‘lovely brunette’. It now takes on the characteristics of domination. Julie has to resort to the typically feminine occupation of temporary secretarial work. 2 The ‘lovely brunette’ who is successful with Matt is also wealthy – she’s driving a sports car. Failing on both fronts: femininity and the larger (masculine) world of work, Julie then checks out her assets: a) attractive enough in the mirror – NB also fair in opposition to the ‘lovely brunette’; b) she’s got brains – OK.
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We then shift back in time (cf. dreams) to the history of her relationship with Matt which she terminated over the problem of sexual relations, although this is never explicitly stated: ‘Julie had become rather sensitive to the way things were going. Considering that Matt had never spoken of love and marriage, they were going much too fast.’ The problem of ‘sex before marriage’ is fused (condensation/displacement) into that of ‘independence’: all the difficulties of a woman achieving ‘independence’ or being trapped by ‘dependence’ are focused into ‘not having sex’/‘having sex’, i.e. premarital relations cut short a woman’s ‘independence’. ‘She wanted to be her own woman before and after she became a wife.’ Back to the present. Matt is visiting her parents, a device which indicates that, welcomed by parents, he will soon be accepted by her. He again makes advances towards her and sexual innuendoes are made: ‘she was turning to jelly’, but then she gets the better of him, by putting an ice cube down his back. That ‘coldness’ decisively cuts off the ‘warmth’ of any relationship. However, she’s upset. Matt, i.e. her relationship with a man, is seen as a disturbance in her life. Her attempts at ‘independence’ in terms of a job and not bothering about men have been thwarted. She then finds a job and simultaneously meets a man who is impressed by her mind. In contrast when Matt comes to say cheerio to her family (he’s off to his new job), he laughs at Julie’s dishevelled appearance as she leaps out of bed, i.e. at her non-femininity. Good at her job she achieves ‘self-respect’, ‘a place in the world’, i.e. the masculine world. In addition there is no worry over Bill, who makes, we assume, no sexual advances: ‘she was safe and comfortable with him’. Nevertheless, she feels this isn’t her ‘real’ self, i.e. not fulfilling her femininity – she misses Matt. Now comes the moment of fate intervention, necessary to ‘resolve’ the problem which is unlikely to be neatly resolved in ‘real’ life. She catches her mother sadly turning out her old love letters and her mother explains how because of her pride and stubbornness, she and her boyfriend had misunderstood each other, never declared their love before he went off without her ever seeing him again. Julie recognizes the comparison and her attempt at ‘independence’ is collapsed into ‘getting your own back, how nasty it sounded’. So she rings Matt . . . The story finishes at a moment of ‘balance’ and ‘equality’ between Matt and Julie: the problems of work/marriage-family for a woman are finally evaded although they have been raised. ‘The Meringue’ (30 July 1977) On to this meringue are displaced the problems of marriage: ‘marriage is a confidence trick – a trick that gives you confidence’. The scene is set with Becky slaving away on a Friday evening waiting for her husband, who is already two hours late after a week away at his work: ‘travelling, selling, meeting people, seeing’. He bounds in joyfully, completely insensitive to how she feels, trapped at home. He makes excuses for being late: ‘ “. . . traffic, you know . . .”. Only she didn’t know. Becky was never there, only here.’ She knows he’s lying: he’s been drinking with friends. She’s cool and unfriendly, tells him the meal is already overdone, their child Maidie overtired. . . . The kitchen having been swamped by his homecoming is now ‘small and empty’ again as he exits. Ambiguously she has her ‘space’ back again. Over dinner, she forces herself to chat: ‘She heard herself underlining the trivial, just to show how trivial her life was compared to his’. He, realizing she’s upset, asks what’s the
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matter. ‘No use saying “nothing”. They both knew. And they both knew he knew. And probably, she thought bitterly, he knew, she knew he knew.’25 Rather than say anything because she does not want him to think she’s nagging him, she sighs, goes out and brings in ‘the elaborate meringue pudding she’d made with such excitement and anticipation in the morning. The whole meal a hymn to love, a tribute to the homecoming. An empty gesture now.’ The cake stands between them; like their marriage a fragile but complicated structure. He refuses any and sulkily leaves the room. Then Maidie, who had been kept up ‘to make the reunion complete’, i.e. children make a marriage, symbolically destroys their marriage by banging the meringue to pieces, i.e. children are also the source of the problem of marriage for women. However, a few minutes later when she watches Maidie asleep Beckie smiles: ‘The baby was worth all the disappointments of marriage.’ Returning downstairs, she grudgingly washes up while he sleeps in front of the TV. ‘She wanted to cry, to scream, to bang doors, break plates, make him understand the terrible frustration that built up inside during every week he was away and exploded each time he let her down.’ She doesn’t because she remembers how her own mother had, and had frightened the children: Becky doesn’t want to upset Maidie. She returns to the living room where he’s asleep – as Maidie was. The similarity of the sleeping state takes on the added meaning of a child asleep: A man? He was more like a bewildered boy. Like Maidie. . . . Both of them, she thought; all of us perhaps as she remembered her pride in her meringue, need our own confidence tricks. Things to boost our egos, keep us reassured, secure. And if she had to control herself for Maidie, surely she must do the same for this equally sensitive man too. ‘So her anger leaves her, she kisses him and they go to bed; the meringue is still edible for tomorrow.’ Thus at one level women’s oppression in the family is experienced and understood, its implications of subordination are finally denied, resolved only within the personal relations of individuals. The work/family split in which women and men are placed on opposite sides is recognized, but work is seen to be ‘just as bad’ as being trapped in the family: her husband is judged an ‘individual’ like her and their child, both of whom she masochistically ‘mothers’. But it is mainly the child who makes any other conceptualization of the problem impossible, i.e. having children is synonymous with mother at home (see Article 4). What other mode is there . . .? Dear Anna Raeburn, femininity catches me, traps me . . . oppresses me – but I keep crying for more . . . ‘Problems? Anxieties? Difficulties?’ spill out into real life as we close the magazine’s last page – the last feature, uncontainable and irresolvable; in contradiction with the final ad: ‘Insist on Hoover for good looks and reliability. Hoover makes things better for you.’ Here is everyday life as it weighs down on women – its ‘misery’ (Lefebvre 1971, p. 35): personal life in its privacy of torture; motherhood as masochism; sex experienced as men’s power over women; women isolated from each other. These are aspects of femininity as oppression but in their representation as ‘individual’, particular problems the magazine copes with a potentially explosive last couple of pages. This is not Anna Raeburn’s ‘fault’: she does her best to deindividualize the problems, point to organizations, groups to join, suggest friendships as important/more important than the claustrophobia of the nuclear family. She encourages women to have
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confidence in themselves, to take initiatives. But in the context of a magazine which, while constantly negotiating the tensions of these problems, does not admit to them except here, the deduction that recognizes them as common oppression can never be made by women: the problems will continue to be reproduced and experienced by women as ‘individual’ problems. The contradictions of femininity which women recognize, experience and seek advice about cannot be challenged from within femininity – which is finally, through contradictions, what the magazine as a whole endorses. NOT LIKE MEN (19 November 1977) We’ve been married for 27 years and I’ve brought up three children. I never went out to work because I thought it was my duty to look after the family. But now that they’re married and off our hands, is it too much to expect my husband to take me out sometimes? He still thinks I should be content to stay at home doing the household chores. The only entertainment a woman needs, in his opinion, is a gossip at the local shops. Our sex life is far from satisfactory. He has his girlie books and pictures but when I ask what satisfaction I have, he says women don’t need stimulants like men. He also seems to think I should need as much sex now as I did in my 20s which is making me very tense.
Notes and references 1 This article focuses contemporarily, not historically on the magazine Woman, using illustrative material from July, October and November 1977. It relies however on a much wider reading of Woman and other women’s magazines, and hopefully its relevance extends to include them. 2 In the last three years, the cover has often broken with traditional format. Recently for example we have seen the Queen; Lulu and baby; Muhammad Ali, girlfriend and baby, in that prime position. In addition cover women are posed much more seductively – cf. Cosmopolitan. 3 See Barthes (1967, p. 92): ‘Ideology is the form of the signifieds of connotation.’ For work on ideology see Althusser (1969): ‘On the materialist dialectic’; ‘Transformation of a determinate given raw material into a determinate product . . .’ 4 See Screen (1975) vol. 16, no. 2, p. 26. ‘Condensation’, as a concept taken from Freud’s analysis of dreams, is best understood in the context of that ‘dream work’. The manifest content of the dream is the product of the dream work which transforms . . . the materials of the dream. Analysis works backwards from the analyser’s account of his manifest dream to the materials of the dream. The main mechanisms of the dream work are condensation (accumulation of a number of dream thoughts, etc. into a single manifest representation), displacement (shift of cathexis [energy/attention] from one representation to an associated one, or replacement of the former by the latter), considerations of representability (translation of abstract thoughts into concrete images) and secondary revision (assembly of the result of the three other mechanisms into a relatively coherent and comprehensible whole). 5 By ‘patriarchal subordination’ we understand men’s domination of women through control of their sexuality, procreative potential and their labour – organized economically, ideologically, and politically. 6 See Millum (1975, p. 57) who considers the ‘personal’ aspects of ‘face’ and ‘eyes’. 7 See Butcher, Coward et al. (1974), particularly the introduction which poses some of the problems we are confronting here on the cover, and the sections on ‘Women’s magazines’, and ‘Ads’ which cover the ground we are working through here. 8 While the term ‘hegemony’ originates in Gramsci (see Article 2), ‘male hegemony’ has been used by Rowbotham (1973). Here we use the term ‘masculine hegemony’ to suggest the contradictory acquisition of gender for women and men in which ‘femininity’ resists the ‘dominant masculine’ order as well as being subordinated by it – right down to the level of the ‘unconscious’ where hegemony must ‘start’ and ‘terminate’. See Article 3, footnote 25 to Women working in the home (p. 74). 9 See White (1975, p. 50). The mass weeklies, My Weekly, Woman’s Weekly, Woman and Woman’s Own,
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17 18
19 20
21 22 23
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together with the monthlies, Annabel and Woman and Home have a combined sale of 7.2 million copies per issue. Men’s magazines are of the ‘fantasy’, ‘girlie’ variety, or of the ‘specialist’ practical kind, e.g. Hi-fi, or Do-it-yourself. White (1970, 1977), Faulder (1977), Toynbee (1977) all tend to conceive of magazines as ‘causing’ women’s subordinated position. By social relations of re/production, we mean social relations of reproduction of the individual – mainly in the family, which includes the production of use values, and social relations of capitalist production. See Article 3, Equal Pay section. See Hirst (1976) who argues against a direct correspondence but is left with no concept of ‘determining in the last instances by the economic’. As a subordinated group, women bear this in common with other subordinated groups. For example, blacks ‘know’ the ‘colonial culture’ in which they are colonized. See Fanon (1967). Although we would claim that for women buying a magazine has always been a ‘treat’, however much it may assist in the ‘work’ of femininity, IPC has only recently, in the face of falling sales, reassessed the long-held priority of ‘service’ to be replaced by ‘entertainment’. However, it would seem to be implemented not as a change in topics, but in the mode in which it is presented (see White 1977). White is specifically talking about the contrast between the ‘cosy’ editorial features and the ‘shock treatment’ meted out on its final page by ‘the most stringent of all agony column writers, Anna Raeburn’ (White 1977, p. 52). However, that clash is only a modified form of the fantasy/reality representation. See Laing (1961), where all his schizophrenic cases are women but he makes no mention of that fact. The consideration of advertisements is a considerable omission in this article when they take up about a half of the magazine. However, they are particularly complex in their ideological construction of femininity. They both support and contradict other constructions in the magazine. I have considered it better to omit an analysis of them here than to too briefly ‘explain’ them. For the present, see Millum (1975), Butcher et al. (1974), and Williamson (1978). Curiously because of the ‘personal’ address that is made here, ‘the editor’ is never ‘personalized’ and named. However, this is by no means the case in all women’s magazines. As Stuart Hall suggests in relation to news photos, photos play a crucial role in this form of personification for people where ‘personalisation . . . is the isolation of the person from his relevant social and institutional context, or the constitution of a personal subject as exclusively the motor of history’ (1972, p. 78). For more on this ideological work constructing ‘the natural’ see Article 2 and Williamson (1978), who specifically considers its operation within ads. Cf. ‘the natural’ above, this time not in relation to ‘femininity’ but to a similar ideological work – see ads, and Williamson (1978). As Mirabel Cecil writes, ‘. . . reality is not what magazine stories have ever been for. They provide women with a world which is larger than life, more romantic, more exciting or more ordered than their own world. They want to lose themselves in it for the moment and then come back satisfied, to their own familiar lives’ (1974, p. 236). See footnote 4 above. Cf. Laing (1970).
28 Housewives Isolation as oppression Dorothy Hobson
DH AB
Do you ever think about yourself and if you do, how would you describe yourself ? I’m always looking for something better . . . I can’t really . . . I just see myself as the one that has to stop at home . . . (laughs). Sometimes I’m very contented and other times I think ‘this ain’t fair’, you know. I can’t really think of myself.
This article is based on current research into the culture of young working class housewives at home with young children.1 The research is conducted by tape-recorded interviews in their homes and covers many aspects of women’s personal experience both before they were married and in their present situation.2 The article will concentrate on their present role as housewives and mothers and their understanding of this role in relation to their previous experience as wage labourers. It focuses on the isolation of women within the privatized sphere of the home, and attempts to present isolation as one of the ways which these women experience oppression and to locate the experience within the structures of capitalism. Although it is recognized that there is no simple way of ‘reading’ accounts of subjective experience, I would hold that they do point to the sites of structural contradictions, however indirectly. I also think, as is argued by Sheila Rowbotham (1973), that women’s subjective experience reveals a ‘sense of oppression’, and this oppression I would see as having a material basis. The centrality of women’s work in the day-to-day and generational reproduction of the bearers of labour power has been examined in Article 3 of this book and it is on the theoretical position of that article that this analysis is premised. The capital given in return for labour-power is converted into means of subsistence which have to be consumed to reproduce the muscles, nerves, bones and brains of existing workers, and to bring new workers into existence. Within the limits of what is absolutely necessary, therefore, the individual consumption of the working class is the reconversion of the means of subsistence given by capital in return for labour-power into fresh labour-power which capital is then again able to exploit. It is the production and reproduction of the capitalist’s most indispensable means of production: the worker. The individual consumption of the worker, whether it occurs inside or outside the workshop, inside or outside the labour process, remains an aspect of the production and reproduction of capital, just as the cleaning of machinery does, whether it is done during the labour process, or when intervals in that process permit. Marx (1976, p. 717) Marx recognized that the production and reproduction of the worker is indispensable to capital and that although this takes place outside the labour process it remains ‘an aspect of
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the production and reproduction of capital’. In the same chapter he continues (Marx 1976, p. 718): ‘The maintenance and reproduction of the working class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave this to the worker’s drives for self-preservation and propagation.’ He then writes (p. 719): ‘The reproduction of the working class implies at the same time the transmission and accumulation of skills from one generation to another.’ It is within this essential region which is outside the labour process that the unwaged work which women perform is located. The work which women perform in this process remains ‘invisible’ from the point of view of capital, and their oppression also has remained invisible in most analyses of the process of capital accumulation because of its structural absence or ‘invisibility’. Likewise, the transmission of skills necessary in generational reproduction, I would locate as performed within the family both before and after the entry of children into the state apparatus of education (Althusser 1971a).
Methodological notes The method of interviewing in a one-to-one situation requires some comment. I usually feel some apprehension when first arriving at someone’s house to interview them, although I am more nervous at the clinic when I initially approach the women. However, the situation in the home is never as tense as an ‘interview’ may sound because the ‘setting’ is informal. Young children or babies are usually present, often playing noisily in the room or needing attention, and this eliminates any tendency towards a formal interview. What I find most difficult is to resist commenting in a way which may direct the answers which the women give to my questions. However, when the taped interview ends we usually talk and then the women ask me questions about my life and family. These questions often reflect areas where they have experienced ambivalent feelings in their own replies. For example, one woman who said during the interview that she did not like being married, asked me how long I had been married and if I liked it. When I told her how long I had been married, she said, ‘Well, I suppose you get used to it in time, I suppose I will’* (see Key to transcripts, p. 529). In fact, the informal talk after the interview often confirms what the women have said during the interview. It is impossible to tell exactly how the women perceive me but I do not think that they see me as too far removed from themselves. This may partly be because I have to arrange the interviews when my own son is at school and leave in time to collect him. They may see my life as being more ‘exciting’ than their own lives but they do not seem to see me as having an ‘ideal’ life. As one woman put it, ‘I bet even you have a more interesting life than I do.’* They are certainly always interested in the research and in knowing what other women feel about their own lives. The methodology and form which I use may tend towards amplification of feelings of isolation and might produce a sensitive reading of the women’s lives, which focuses more on their feelings of isolation than on other aspects. I do not think that this invalidates any of the findings, indeed I think it brings into sharper focus my fundamental point. The isolation remains. One woman at the end of her interview when I was leaving, said to me, ‘I bet no one ever refuses to let you come to interview them, it’s been something to look forward to and I’ve really enjoyed it.’* The first part of her comment is true: no one has ever refused to let me interview them. The presentation of tape-recorded material creates problems because much is lost when transferring spoken language to written representation. The particular absences are the inability to represent adequately the significance of intonation and the registration of
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meaning by non-verbal communication. I am not proposing to examine the significance of non-verbal communication except for the crucial incidences where laughter occurs. Sheila Rowbotham (1969) has commented on girls giggling: ‘Girls giggle at the moment of taboo. It is a way at once of making a point and avoiding the issue. It precludes criticism and does not give the game away.’ In this article the presence of laughter has been identified as a point of theoretical importance in understanding women’s oppression. The following comments relating to laughter are based on an analysis of the extract on pages 82–3 below, but the theoretical points about laughter are applicable to the whole analysis. First the woman laughs when she is talking about the jobs she had before she was married. She is conscious that she has had many jobs but never articulates any recognition that it was because the jobs themselves were intolerable that she had so many; rather, she sees the fault as being her own. She describes herself as being ‘terrible at jobs’ and the laughter indicates that she is aware of this as a fault in her. The second area where laughter occurs is when she discusses the possibility of her going to work instead of her husband. This indicates a recognition that she is mentioning a role reversal which she considers a ‘taboo’ area, unthinkable unless the boldness and ‘scandalous’ nature of the proposal is checked, contained and half-denied by laughter. She is aware that the traditional attitude is that the male should work and her suggestion that she would like to take on this role is an area where discussion is to be avoided. A further point about laughter relates to the quotation at the beginning of this article, taken from a transcript with the same woman: ‘I just see myself as the one that has to stay at home . . . (laughs).’ Here the woman recognizes her own oppression but accepts the situation, though not without indicating that she realizes that it is unfair. The laughter precludes the necessity for either of us to discuss the matter further; the statement stands but the laughter contains it. It shows a recognition of the contradiction which nevertheless is allowed to stand. I want to extend what Sheila Rowbotham has written about laughter in relation to my understanding of the significance of laughter in these interviews. In the examples discussed here and in others noted in this article, the laughter occurs at points of contradiction where actual alternatives are possible, if unlikely, or when sites of contradiction are revealed. However, the laughter also establishes an area of shared understanding between the women and myself. There is no need for them to explain why they laugh, or indeed why I laugh with them at some points, because the laughter is a form of non-verbal communication which is understood by both of us. It ‘works’ against the background of tacit (consensual) knowledge, of common sense about women, which is constantly evoked in the exchanges, on the basis of which the statements ‘make sense’.
Wage labour The experience which the women have of wage labour has been in the traditional areas of work which are both class and gender specific for working class girls leaving school. They have worked in shops, offices, factories and the lower end of the servicing industries. The following extracts are women talking about the jobs which they had before they were married. I want to concentrate on two aspects of these accounts of working. The nature of the jobs which were performed is self-evident; for the most part they are boring, monotonous labour, and the young women were subject to the occupational hazards associated with such work – they were made redundant and suffered industrial injury (allergic to the plastic). What made the work tolerable and even enjoyable was the company of other people at work – someone to talk to. There is then in the accounts a recognition that the work which they had to
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do was boring and that there is a rapid turnover of staff in the jobs but there is no recognition that they and other women workers are being exploited. The faults are identified as personal failings. But what is ‘recalled’ are the human compensations which made intolerable work tolerable. Anne DH When you were at work what sort of job did you do? AB I’ve done all sorts (laughs). I started off in a factory, no, when I was fifteen I had a parttime job on, just Saturdays, while I was at school. Then, I was there for about two years actually. DH What was that? AB Woolworths. (laughs) And then I left there and I worked in a factory and got made redundant after six months. DH What did you do in the factory? AB Assembling – record players. And then I went into a factory where they made wire, wire ropes. Very dirty that was. I left that after six months and then I went to Butlins. I’m terrible at jobs I can assure you. (laughs) DH What did you do at Butlins? AB Two jobs, first I was in a shop, then I went on to waitressing. I liked the waitressing a lot better. DH Have you liked the jobs that you’ve had? AB Yes I have. The only one that I didn’t like was the dirty one, as I said, the one where they made wire. It was rather, you know, boring, more boring than a lot of factory jobs because it was too noisy to talk. I don’t mind working in a factory having boring work if you’ve got somebody to talk to next to you. But . . . this place you couldn’t really talk. DH Did you make a lot of friends at work? AB Yes. DH You don’t work now, would you like to go to work? AB I’d love to. (laughs) I would, I said to Richard this morning, I said, ‘Can I go to work and you have the baby?’ I would love to. You know if it wasn’t for the fact that he literally will not change his nappies, that is it’s a fact, he won’t touch them, I’d let him stay at home and I’d go out to work. ’Cause I could get a job easily really, ’cause I do hand-press, power-press and them sort of jobs are, you know, people leave them quick. Linda LW First I went into a shop – Lewis’s. I was there for six months and then I left because the hours was too long. I was getting home late and I couldn’t go out, and then I went to work in a factory that done garden sprays and I had to leave there ’cause I was allergic to the plastic. And then I went to work at the same place as me mom, in a factory, doing drilling and milling. DH Yes, and did you like that? LW Yes, I loved it. DH Was it the work you liked or . . . LW I liked the work ’cause you had a different job every day and I liked the people, there was a nice lot of people there. Betty BW Well, when I first left school I worked in town in a shop, British Home Stores, and I didn’t like it very much and I went to a smaller wool shop afterwards and I used to like
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it. But then during the summer it went very quiet and I was bored stiff, you know, just ((Mm)) sort of sitting around doing nothing. There was only me and the manageress and sometimes she’d have to go over to the other shop, or if in the dinner-hour she had to go out, or a holiday, and I’d just be left to sort of manage the shop on me own, and it was very lonely with nobody coming in ((Yes)) you know, I tidied up in the morning and you’d sort of wait and keep on waiting all day. ((Yes)) Betty talking about other jobs: BW Well, there was a nice lot of girls in the office and one fortnight was very quiet and towards the end of that week you could more or less relax but the girls were all right and you could talk to them and that, ((Mm)) to pass your time. But the one fortnight was really busy when the agents were coming in with the books. (. . .) There was a lot of industrial policies and when they was coming in you used to have to check through the files to see if they’d had any other policies out on them and send them up to Head Office. And you’d do the surrenders if somebody wanted to surrender a policy and that. It was interesting. DH I mean, was it important to you to be among friends at work as much as being at work for what you were doing? BW Oh yes. I liked to like the people I worked with ’cause I worked at one job, I only stayed there three weeks, the people there were ever so horrible. They didn’t speak to you, they sort of kept looking at you funny and you sort of didn’t feel as if you belonged; you felt as if you shouldn’t be there. They didn’t want you there. Well I only stayed there three weeks, I didn’t like that job. These accounts again share the recognition that most of the jobs were unsatisfactory and in many cases boring. In the first extract Anne has no illusions about the nature of the work which she performed. Factory work is identified as being ‘boring’ and when it was ‘too noisy to talk’, i.e. not compensated for in the culture of work, it became intolerable. However, the fact that she left after six months is expressed almost as a personal failure, confirmed by the laughter discussed earlier in this article. Significantly, while recognizing that factory work is boring, she still wishes to return to it. At another point in the interview she said, ‘I’d like to go back to a factory.’ In fact, after expressing dissatisfaction with shop work, Linda eventually found a job which she liked in a factory, drilling and milling, and she said that she enjoyed the work because of the variation; but the people were also important to her. At a later point in the interview she said, ‘I miss the money and I miss the lads that I used to work with, you know, like if I went back to that place now it wouldn’t be the same because they’re not there.’ By far the most common reason which the women gave for having enjoyed their time at work was the company of other workers, women and men, and the opportunity the job provided for talk with other people. Betty explains the loneliness of working in the wool shop when she was left alone. The jobs that she found satisfactory were the ones where as well as providing interesting and varied work to do, she could talk to the other girls in the office. When she was not accepted into the work group at the job mentioned in the last extract, she left the firm solely for that reason. These accounts all privilege the company of other workers as being an important element in the satisfaction the women experienced while engaged in wage labour. It is not suggested that women only worked for ‘company’ and have no instrumental orientation to wage labour. What I think this concentration on the social elements of their previous work does reveal is as much a reflection of their present isolated situation as compared with their earlier working lives. They see work as an escape from isolation at home – an unconscious
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expression of an absence in their lives. It is through the concept of isolation that the rest of this article attempts to understand women’s oppression.
Isolation The separation of the sphere of work from the privatized sphere of the home under the capitalist mode of production, and the designation of those realms to men and women respectively, has meant that women are at one stage primarily located within the home performing domestic labour and child-care. It is the isolation of women within the home and the privatized nature of the work which they perform which some women have articulated as being a site of oppression for them. Industrialisation has had these lasting consequences (sic) the separation of the man from the intimate daily routines of domestic life; the economic dependence of women and children on men; the isolation of housework and childcare from other work. Hence, through the allocation to women of housework and childcare; through modern definitions of the role of housewife and the role of mother industrialisation has meant the restriction of the woman-housewife to the home. The restriction is psychological more than physical . . . Oakley (1974, p. 59) Oakley sees the restriction as more psychological than physical but the experience of working class women is often one of actual physical restriction in their home with their children.3 Anne I said to him, you’ll have to teach me to drive and then I can go out. I wouldn’t mind so much then, it’s just, up here the only connection you have with the outside world is the radio and the tele, and you can’t really get much off the tele. Television and radio is seen by the woman as the only relationship which she has with the ‘outside world’ and this, of course, is experienced as a passive relationship on her part. Television and radio are not, of course, the only relationship which she has with the world. She has relationships with her husband, family and some friends but obviously to her these do not constitute the ‘outside’ world; they are part of her ‘family world’. The media is what she sees as her connection with the ‘outside’ world.4 The following extract gives a further depressing picture of the isolation which young married women experience. The woman speaking, Betty, lives on the ninth floor of a multistorey block of council flats; she has two children, aged five and two and has been married for eight years. Her husband works, two weeks on day shift and two weeks on night shift, on the assembly line at British Leyland. She has lived in the present flat for five years. DH BW
DH BW
Do you know many people in the block? I s’pose I know a few to say ‘hello’ to, y’know. When I see them I speak to them ((Mm)) I speak to a few of them ((Mm)) but I don’t really know them to sort of like, to ask them in ((No)) or to go and visit them. I just say ‘hello’ to them. Have you got any other, erm, friends? Ooh no, they was my friends when I was at work and I lost contact with the one girl I used to work with at Patrick Motors. She gave me mum her telephone number a couple of years ago and I was going to ’phone her up and I never got round to it and then I lost it.
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What do you do in your spare time, that you have? I don’t have too much really, you know, just sit down and watch the little one playing ((Yes)). I do that a lot really. You don’t, erm, and it’s usually on your own is it? Yes, usually on me own, not like when me husband’s here weekends, ((Yes)) but I usually just sit on me own. It’s not very often anyone ever comes y’know. ((No)) It’s very rare anybody comes. ((Yes)) Is your husband on nights very often or . . . He does a fortnight about. (. . .) Well he goes to bed about half past nine [a.m.] and gets up about half past five [p.m.]. Oh, so you’re still on your own really? On my own mostly, yes. And then I s’pose, then you’re on your own at night as well? Yes, ’cause he goes out at eight o’clock so I’m on me own all night then, but I got used to it. Y’know at first I was very frightened of being on me own in the night ((Mm)) but you get used to it after a bit. ((Yes)) I didn’t feel so bad, we had a cat at first and I used to feel safe with the cat, which is ridiculous ((Yes)) and then we had to get rid of it ’cause the neighbours kept moaning about him all the time ((Mm)) (. . .) Andrew shush cause Daddy’s in bed. When I had Shane he was good company y’know, me first baby. He was quite a lot of company and I just used to talk to him from when he was very tiny. ((Yes)) I used to think he understood but I don’t suppose he did (laughs) but he was just like a bit of company, somebody to talk to. (. . .) Before I had him I used to talk to the cat (laughs) and I’m sure that cat used to understand. (laughs)
These extracts, although perhaps presenting an extreme example of isolation in terms of actual length of time spent alone (because the woman’s husband works on a night shift for two weeks out of every four), nevertheless do present an accurate representation of the isolated existence of many women.5 Betty does not know many women in the block of flats where she lives and only knows a few ‘to say hello to’. This expression is used to indicate a passing acquaintance with people who are sometimes seen around the district; it does not suggest any form of friendship or real point of contact. It is a phrase which recurs in all my interviews; many women express that they do not really ‘know’ someone, just ‘know them to say hello to’. Like many women after they marry, Betty has lost contact with friends from work and school and the ability to make new friends appears to be difficult. Since girls often have one ‘best friend’ (see Article 5 in this book), they do not always have a group of ‘mates’ as boys do, and they often lose their best friend after marriage. I do not want to suggest that women do not ever have friends, but simply to suggest that the amount of time which some women spend with any other people is minimal. When Betty says, ‘I usually sit on me own. It’s not very often anyone ever comes y’know. It’s very rare anybody comes,’ it is an accurate reflection on her own state. The lack of contact with other people coupled with the almost non-existence of a social life or leisure activities participated in by women outside the home, presents a depressing picture of the lives of many women.6 Another woman tells of how often she looks out of the window of her flat and counts the cars which go by on the road, nine storeys below her – ‘just for something to do’.* To count cars, to talk to a cat for company, indicates that the isolation to which the woman is subjected is an insidious form of oppression.
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Domestic labour: endless toil with no leisure No group experienced the subjective isolation of personal life so deeply as women, trapped as they were within the family, blamed for its egregarious faults, or forced to negotiate the limbo between it and the world of wage labour. As housewives and particularly as mothers, women became a focus of the modern aspiration for personal happiness. The newly emerged areas of personal life were the housewife’s responsibility – in particular childhood but also sexuality, emotional expression and the family’s pattern of consumption. Far from being a refuge for women the family was a workplace. Zaretsky (1976, p. 113) The location of women’s domestic labour and reproduction of the agents of labour power, within the privatized sphere of the home, has meant that for women there is neither a physical nor an emotional separation of the sphere of work and leisure. The privatized nature of housework which necessitates the isolation of the individual woman in the home is one of the most recognizable sites of her oppression. The male wage labourer returns to the private sphere of his home to be ‘reproduced’ in a fit state for work the next day. This period away from work can be seen as the time when the wage labourer has leisure time. However, there is no space for leisure for women at the same time. The woman works in the home during the day when the man is at work but when he returns from work, she still has to work. DH BW
DH BW
So you think there’s more of a separation between men’s work and their spare time than there is for a woman. Yes, I think men have got more spare time ’cause their work they have to go to and so when they come out of it they’re away from their work so what they do then really it’s up to them. I mean if they don’t want to help the wife, I mean nobody can force them to and they can then just sit down all night if they want to and do what they like. ((Yes)) Whereas with a woman they’ve got to keep on working and they don’t clock out at five o’clock, they’ve still got to cook the tea and do anything else that needs doing. Like if one of the children make a horrible mess of the room or something, or throw a bottle of milk on the floor or tip something on the floor, then they can’t say, ‘Oh, it’s gone five o’clock it’ll stop, it’ll stop there now till nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’ They’ve got to clean it up. But why do you think women have got, more to do it than men, why do you think women can’t say, ‘I’ve finished now it’s five o’clock’? Well, there’s nobody else to do it (laughs) y’know, you have to do it else it would get left, but I think a man can more or less ignore any mess really, they sort of shut their eyes to it, whereas a woman would, like it’s Shane mostly who tips the stuff out, like sometimes he just tips sugar on the floor. Well, I can’t sit and look at it, it would worry me to death all night ((Yes)) and I’d have to get up even if I was determined not to. I’d have to get and clean it up ’cause I wouldn’t be able to sit still with it there ((Yes) y’know, I wouldn’t be able to relax all night till I’d done it. (laughs)
This extract poses the distinction between the working life of men and that of women. As Betty says, men have to go to their work and they leave work behind when they leave the site of production. Men have a choice of what they do because there is a distinct non-working period in their working day. There is no official working time for women. Recent figures reported the length of the working week for housewives as being an
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average of seventy-seven hours (Oakley 1974). However, women are not forced to work such long hours, but their own self-compulsion drives them on even when they feel that they should be at leisure. This compulsion to work must come in part from the absence of boundaries and from the structurelessness of housework; there are no boundaries between work and leisure and no notion of how much housework is ‘enough’. Betty expresses the compulsion she feels in this extract. She recognizes that she is not able to control her own wishes. One reason for this inability of women to stop themselves from working would appear to be connected with their having no place to escape to. It is easier to leave unfinished work if you are not confronted with it continually, but almost impossible if you can see it and know you will have to finish it the next day anyway. Housework is endless toil rather than a series of work tasks to be accomplished, and this has resulted in women internalizing the endless nature of their work. Here is the same woman talking about housework: DH BW
DH BW
Do you find it monotonous? It is a bit really, ’cause it’s the same thing over and over again. ((Yes)) There’s no difference in it all. There’s nothing where you can sort of occupy your mind like, I mean just sort of cleaning and putting the vacuum round the floor and dusting and anybody can do it. You’re not using any brains to thinking like, how to do it. ((No)) It’s just boring really. Do you enjoy housework and if you do, y’know, why do you? Usually, it depends on what mood I’m in. If I’m in a good mood I don’t mind doing it and I enjoy it then, but if I feel a bit tired or fed up, I don’t ’cause I think, ‘Well, I’m doing this and I’ve got to do it all over again tomorrow. And if I don’t do it today, who’s going to notice anyway.’ And then I sit down and think, ‘I won’t do it.’ But then I look at the floor and think, ‘Oh, I can’t sit and look at this, I’ll have to do it.’ Y’know, and then I get fed up of doing it day after day and it seems pointless you know, it don’t matter how often I do it I still got to do it and I’m just getting nowhere. ((Yes)) I get a bit fed up.
These extracts reveal the recognition of the repetitive and compulsive nature of housework. The repetitiousness of housework intensifies the compulsion which women experience in managing it. Nothing is really achieved even when the task is finished because it still remains to be repeated the next day. Yet for women there is no escape from housework. It is ever-present, cyclic and infinite. In the next extract Anne talks about the different nature of her husband’s waged work compared to her work in the home. DH Do you think your husband has an easier or a harder life than you do? AB Easier (laughs) because he can just walk out of the flat in the morning and forget all about it. I don’t know, he just gets out and forgets it but I can’t, I’m here constantly. I mean, it’s not actual hard, hard work as you put it. I suppose it’s hard on your mind really, more than anything. I mean when you’re working, he knows his job so well he could almost do it with his eyes shut, he can be thinking of other things and he can get completely away but I’ve just got to sit here. Hard in a different way, you know what I mean, hard to think, ‘What shall I do next?’ It is not the physical nature of housework which Anne finds hard. She says, ‘It’s not actual
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hard work as you put it. I suppose it’s hard on your mind really, more than anything.’ It is hard because she has to completely discipline all her own actions, yet the very nature of domestic labour makes this difficult. It is hard to discipline yourself to do something which you know you will have to repeat tomorrow. Housework is in effect boring and monotonous, like factory work, yet in the privatized sphere of the home the woman has no companion to talk to to relieve this boredom. In this extract the woman mis-identifies the home as somewhere from which her husband would wish to escape, when she says that he is free to walk out of the flat and ‘forget all about it’. Yet the home is the place where men escape to, from the site of production. In fact, men can also escape from the home to male leisure activities. Although the women interviewed did not go out independently of their husbands, the husbands did go out to the pub, football matches, with their ‘mates’, etc., and the women accepted that men had a ‘right’ to do this. The home, then, is the site of the ‘reproduction of the capitalist’s most indispensable means of production: the worker’ (Marx 1976) and it is also the woman’s work-place. Women, however, cannot escape from the home. ‘The woman pays in persona’ (Adamson et al. 1976). It is the combination of isolation within the home and the impossibility of escaping from their place of work to a privatized sphere that structures the oppression which these women experience under capitalism.
Generational reproduction Women’s role in generational reproduction is both the site of their oppression and of the pleasure they experience in ‘motherhood’. This is often the most enjoyable aspect of the women’s lives, despite the restrictions which motherhood imposes on their freedom. Women may be reproducing the future generation of workers but this is not how they experience and internalize motherhood. It is rather, an experience of bringing up and teaching skills to an individual and looking forward to the child’s future which they express as being enjoyable. There is, then, a marked distinction between short-term or day-to-day reproduction and long-term or generational reproduction. Housework may be boring but child-care is more pleasurable. Yet the role of bringing up children is a site of contradiction for women. The women that I have talked to often express ambivalent feelings in negotiating this role with their wish to return to work. DH Did you prefer working to being a housewife? AB Yes and no. I mean I preferred working but I wouldn’t give him up [the baby]. You know what I mean, if I’ve got the choice now of going back to work and just leaving him with somebody, I’d rather stay at home with him. So yes I preferred work but I couldn’t leave him with somebody to go to work. It’s not that bad. DH What do you see yourself doing in the next few years, or have you got hopes for yourself for the future? AB Well I want to have more children and get over the business of having a family and get them, well the youngest to the age of five, school age, and then I’d like to take up another job, part-time at first until I can take on full-time, you know, until they’re really settled in school and they know what they’re doing and know how to cross the roads . . . you know, then build up to buying our own house. Anne sees her prime responsibility as being to her child and, indeed, to any future children which she intends to have. She knows that it is her responsibility for looking after her child
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which prevents her from returning to work. She sees her role not only at the level of day-today reproduction but also at the level of generational reproduction. She talks about the ‘business of having a family’ as something to be ‘got over’. She has a definite notion of skills which she has to transmit to her children and this would prevent her from considering even part-time work until they are at school. The same woman talks about the split in her experience of housework and child-care and its effects on her sexuality: DH I mean do you think that doing housework and that sort of side of your life is different from when you’re looking after the baby? AB Yes that’s different. DH And do you think that there’s another you, this you that wants to go to work? AB Yes, I mean I’m not sitting here feeding him and thinking, ‘I’d love to go to work,’ you know, it’s just a phase that I go through for about five minutes and I forget it. But when I pick him up I’m a different person from when I’m doing me housework. I get quite moody I suppose when I’m doing me housework. If me husband comes in, you know trying to mess about with me, I . . . (laughs) you know, ‘get lost!’ sort of thing. But if he comes round when I’ve got the baby I don’t mind. I can’t really say much more than that really. Women often recognize their oppression but refuse to challenge or confront the situation, even to the extent of refusing to accept the feelings which indicate their oppression. Anne is conscious that she is performing roles and duties which are at variance with how she thinks of herself but when the thoughts come into her mind she shuts them out. She does recognize that housework affects her moods but she puts the blame on herself – she is ‘moody’. She recognizes that housework affects her sexuality – she does not want sexual or affectionate advances from her husband when she is doing housework but these are acceptable when she is with the baby. She has a sense of herself as being a different person but she does not let her mind dwell on the contradictions within which she experiences her life. Sheila Rowbotham (1973) identifies this aspect of women’s consciousness: ‘Women have devised particular resistances within the framework of their lives as they are. There is the switching off, the halfthere swimmy feeling, the barriers round yourself, and there is illness.’
Conclusion This article has attempted to look at the effect on some working class women of their ‘invisible’ but essential contribution to the process of capital accumulation. It has necessarily been a very fragmentary account of women talking about their experience of living the contradictions of their situation. It has sometimes been very difficult to comment on the extracts because of a consciousness that any commentary may appear banal and superfluous. What I have felt is that in many cases the words spoken by the women are more forceful when left to stand on their own. For this reason this article is concluded with a long extract, spoken by one woman, left without detailed comment because I think the woman speaks her own oppression. In doing so, she reveals her own experience of femininity through the move from the control of her father to that of her husband and the change in her life since having her children. Her account synthesizes the points which I have tried to make in this article about the lived experience of these women. DH
Erm, these questions are about, well just about you really. Is being married and being a mother as you expected it would be or if not, how is it different?
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BW
I don’t really know, ’cause I never really thought about it before I had the children, about being a mother, and being married. I ’spose it’s the same as I thought ’cause I thought, ‘Well you have more freedom when you’re married ’cause you can do more or less what you like, you’ve only got your husband to tell you what to do and, sort of, and you can more or less stand up to him and say, ‘Er, no! if I don’t want to do it I won’t.’ ((Yes)), you know, whereas, if your Dad tells you what to do then you sort of do it, you don’t say ‘No, I won’t,’ you sort of do it. (laughs) ((Yes)) Y’know, its sort of different, but with the children I never really thought about having children sort of, till he came. Erm, so is your life how you expected it would be with the children and . . .? I s’pose it is really ’cause I never really thought about it much, about the children, I just thought I’d just carry on going to work and that really. Before you had the children how had you thought things would be? Well I just thought it would be just like it was when I was single but I’d be married so I could please myself what I done y’know. ((Yes)) We’d just sort of go on holiday together and that and things like that. Do just more or less what I wanted to do instead of having to get home at a certain time every night. ((Mm)) I never really thought about having children and having to look after them and stop going to work. It never occurred to me. (laughs) If I asked you what you were, what do you, what do you think of yourself ? I don’t know, just an ordinary housewife, just doing like what other people do ((Yes)) y’know, just ordinary. And do you think, do you think of yourself as having one job or a lot of jobs? I don’t think much about it. I s’pose I do lots of different things, but I don’t really think about it, I just sort of do it. ((Yes)) I don’t think. In fact, me husband says I don’t think much. (laughs) I says, ‘I haven’t much to think about!’ Do you, used you, I mean did you ever plan things and think about what you were going to do? I used to before I was married. I used to plan everything for months. Like, we planned the wedding months in advance ((Mm)) and any holidays, they used to be planned well ahead and like, we used to plan ahead for Christmas. Or if we was going out I used to plan like, what I was going to wear and if I was going to go to the hairdressers and have me hair done and all that. But I don’t now, I don’t think about anything till it just comes and then at the last minute it just hits me, ‘Oh dear, I’ve got nothing ready,’ you know ((Yes)) and it’s just one mad rush. I don’t know, I think it’s just since I’ve had the children, I don’t seem to think about anything really much. Why do you think you’ve changed in that way? I don’t really know. Me husband says I’ve changed an awful lot since I’ve had Shane, y’know, but I don’t sort of think about things like outside the house. All I can think about is like, babies and children and sort of how to keep nappies clean (laughs) and sort of boring things like that . . .
DH BW DH BW
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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Stuart Hall for his comments on the draft of this article and Paul Willis for his discussion of this article and discussions of research methods, but mostly for the example of his own work. Thanks also to Mrs Lemon of the Mother and Baby Clinic and particularly the women without whose co-operation the research would not be possible.
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Finally to Charlotte Brunsdon for her friendship and intellectual support during the past year which has been invaluable to the development of my work.
Notes and references 1 The women are originally contacted at a council ‘welfare clinic’, where the health visitor kindly allows me to approach the women while they wait to see the doctor. I explain my research to them by saying that I am interested in how women experience being wives and mothers and ask if they would be prepared to help me by allowing me to visit them at home and ask them questions about their lives now and before they were married. 2 Because of the limitations of space, I have not concentrated on many aspects of these women’s lives which I do recognize as being important. Other areas which are covered by the interviews include: family and educational background, leisure activities before marriage, attitudes to housework and detailed discussions of housework routines, social networks, present leisure activities, the role of the media in their lives, their feelings about their present lives and their future. The most obvious omission is any reference to forms of resistance which women may negotiate in terms of, for example, sexual resistance or fantasy, particularly through their relationship with the media (see footnote 4). However, I do not think that these omissions would alter the main arguments of this article (see forthcoming MA thesis). 3 See also Gavron (1966): ‘In conclusion, it can be said that although the middle-class mother may encounter psychological difficulties concerning her role as an individual with her first baby, she very soon makes a deliberate effort to assert her own rights as an individual. The working-class mother who sees motherhood as inevitable is in fact less prepared for the ties of children and is less able to cope with the isolation that follows.’ 4 Mass communications in the form of radio and television have emerged as an important aspect of the day-to-day experience of the women in the study. Television and radio are never mentioned as ‘spare time’ or leisure activities but are located as integral parts of everyday life. To take radio as an example, Radio 1 and local radio are listened to during the day while the women are engaged in domestic labour. From a reading of their comments about the role of radio in their lives it would appear that they see the radio disc jockey as another ‘person’ in their privatized world. Phone-in programmes are also important in counteracting isolation. One woman said, ‘I like listening to the people that phone in, I like the conversations (. . .) I suppose it’s ’cause I’m on me own.’ These programmes not only provide a contact with the ‘outside’ world; they also reinforce the privatized isolation by reaffirming the consensual position – there are thousands of other women in the same situation, a sort of ‘collective isolation’ (for a more detailed analysis of this aspect of the women’s lives see forthcoming MA thesis). 5 The number of manual workers engaged in shiftwork increased by more than half during the decade 1957–67 and since then has been increasing (Cliff 1970). Kinnersley (1973) gives examples of the effect on workers of shiftwork and makes some comments on disruption of family and social life of the worker, but neglects the effects of shiftwork on the wives. See also Young and Willmott (1973, Chapter 7: ‘Shiftwork’). 6 This lack of leisure activities is also in sharp contrast to their lives before they were married, when they often went out every night of the week and only stayed in to wash their hair and ‘do their ironing’.
Key to transcripts ... ( ) * .. (( )) (. . .)
pause non-verbal communication, e.g. (laughs) taken from field notes, not transcript speaker interrupted phatic communication, e.g. ((Mm)) passage edited out
29 Psychoanalysis and the cultural acquisition of sexuality and subjectivity Steve Burniston, Frank Mort, Christine Weedon
Introduction Psychoanalysis has been severely criticized by feminists for the nature and implications of its account of the development of female sexuality, in which women’s subordinate position is located in the structures (Oedipus complex, penis envy, etc.) through which sexual identity is acquired. These psychoanalytic structures are posited by psychoanalytic theory as fundamental to civilized culture and as a result, women’s subordination becomes an inevitable consequence of the development of human sociality. Nonetheless Freud has been recognized by many feminists as the first theorist to bring the question of sexuality to the fore and to show that sexual identity is socially constituted rather than biologically innate. In this article we intend to look briefly at developments in psychoanalysis since Freud in relation to the acquisition of sexuality, language and subjectivity, and to examine its usefulness in the development of a materialist theory of sex/gender relations – a theory which might explain ideologies of sexual identity in such a way as to point to useful political strategies against women’s subordination and sexism generally. Like much of the rest of the book, this article is located in a space between Marxism in its present state of theoretical (under)development and what, from a feminist political position, we envisage as marxist-feminism. The move which many marxist-feminists have made into the area of psychoanalysis has often been precipitated by the existing state of marxist theory and politics, in which there is no definite space for questions of sexual oppression. This absence can be seen historically as a consequence of an over-evaluation of economic factors which directly determine, in an expressive way, the political and ideological superstructures. The revolution in marxist theory precipitated by the work of the French marxist philosopher, Althusser, in which the importance of politics and ideology as relatively autonomous levels of the social formation has been reasserted, together with a fuller notion of ideology as material practices, has opened up the possibility of examining sexual ideologies in their own right. Nonetheless, in the absence of a full theorization of the relations of sex, gender and biological reproduction (the impetus for which has come largely from the Women’s Movement), the feminist element is always in danger of being lost. By this we mean the recognition that gender too (in articulation with class) structures and is structured by ideologies, and that gender relations in their present form imply the subordination of woman to man. It is in the light of this need for a full theorization of sex/gender relations that we are looking at psychoanalysis. We begin with a critical exposition of Freud and Lacan and move on to consider feminist assessments of psycho-analysis. Following from this, in the concluding sections, we examine some of the political and theoretical questions raised by psychoanalysis in relation to feminism and Marxism.
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Freud: anatomical or cultural privilege? The current re-emergence of Freud’s work, and its particular Lacanian developments, from within the Women’s Movement, has meant that psychoanalysis is now defined in an explicitly political context. The insistence by Juliet Mitchell and others that psychoanalysis is a feminist theory by default, and that it contains a unique set of concepts for an investigation of the construction of human sexuality and the development of sexual asymmetry has encouraged a symptomatic reading 1 of Freud’s works of sexual theory – a reading which interprets and delivers ambiguities and absences. In such an analysis, the valorization of the male genital (against which in the Oedipal phase the infant is defined in its specific sexual identity), the castration complex, and the concept of female penis envy, are given a sociocultural interpretation. They are read as the symbolic representations at the level of the unconscious of the overall patriarchal form of social organization: that is, of the terms in which women are, and have been, subordinated to male control. Freud’s theory is, in that sense, seen as specific to the historical development of patriarchal structures. Yet the difficulties which a feminist reading of Freud’s text on sexuality must confront still centre on the problems of biology and anatomy, insofar as they inform Freud’s specific theorization of the acquisition of sexual identity, and as they constitute an implicit part in his overall psychoanalytic theory. Freud’s discovery of the original bisexuality of the drives in the pre-Oedipal phase provides a valuable political argument against ideological concepts of innate masculinity and feminity. However, as feminists, we experience major difficulties in any investigation of the process by which, according to Freud, bisexuality becomes unisexual in its object-choice, in the movement towards the acquisition of a masculine or feminine identity. Central to the structure of the Oedipus complex is the dominant role awarded to the penis in the father’s intervention in the mother-child relationship. The significance of the penis is such that, as Laplanche and Pontalis (1973, p. 313) point out: ‘. . . its absence or presence transforms an anatomical distinction into a major yardstick for the categorisation of human beings . . .’ The little girl’s discovery of her ‘organic inferiority’ (Freud 1977, p. 379) – the fact that her own ‘small penis’ will not grow and that she has in effect been castrated – and the consequent move into a passive ‘feminine’ role, is dependent on the significance of the male genital in an anatomical rather than a cultural context. For Freud, the primacy of the penis is located in its role in biological reproduction: ‘. . . the penis owes its extraordinary high narcissistic cathexis to its organic significance for the propagation of the species . . .’. [our emphasis] Freud (1977b, p. 341). Though the distinction is marked between anatomical sex differences and the mode of their psychic representation, the structuring of the Oedipal triangle is nonetheless based on anatomical rather than social privilege. In the context of Freud’s original theorization, the work of some of the early female psychoanalysts who engage critically with Freud at precisely that level of anatomy and physiology seems more than justified. The studies made by Karen Horney (1974) and Helene Deutsch (1976) in the twenties attempt to refute biologically what they interpreted Freud’s theory to be: that is, a theory of the anatomical inferiority of the female. They mark the terms of a literal level of engagement with Freud’s work. Horney, in particular, follows the logic of a biological critique of Freud, to insist in turn on the physiological basis of a newly founded ‘femininity’. Ultimately, there is no sense in which a symbolic interpretation of Freud’s theory of sexuality such as Mitchell conducts in Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1975) can appear as
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anything other than a partial reading. Certainly Freud’s work in this area does not mark any progressive movement from the anatomical and physiological hypotheses to a specifically socio-cultural theory of the acquisition of sexuality. Biology is a continually significant factor in Freud’s work on sexuality, as it is in his general psychoanalytic theory. Furthermore, we should be aware that Freud never makes a completely clear distinction between anatomical sexual characteristics, the psychic acquisition of a masculine or feminine identity, and the type of object-choice. This ambiguity between the biological derivation of sexual difference and the terms of its psychic representation marks, more generally, distinct points of divergence in Freud’s general psychoanalytic theory, and in the schools of development post-Freud. Broadly speaking, we can refer to the instinctual dynamic in Freud’s work as the model for the functioning of the unconscious in which the psyche is located firmly within the biological functioning of the organism. With specific reference to sexuality, associated concepts here include: the location of the development of mental sexual characteristics in a corresponding physiological base, the investigation of the biochemical determinants of human sexuality (see particularly Freud 1977a), and the notion of sexual libido as the quantitative movement of psychic energy towards a specific object-choice. According to the instinctual model, sexual drives are directed to a particular form of object cathexis (attachment) in the Oedipal phase by the determinants of physical anatomy (i.e. the possession or lack of the penis). Specifically symbolic readings of Freud (such as that of Althusser 1971b), maintain that the instinctual model is merely the ideological and ‘home-made’ schema used by Freud at the inception of the new science of psychoanalysis. In fact this model consistently informs Freud’s study of sexuality in works as distant as the ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ (1905) and the essay, ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931). It marks the extent to which Freud never wholly removes his science from its origins within orthodox medical practice. Freud’s concern with anatomical privilege, in isolation from the total social situation, should be seen partly in the light of his inheritance from traditional physiology. There is in fact a distinct dualism in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory which is exemplified by his ambiguous conceptualization and location of the unconscious. Further, the position occupied by the Oedipus complex forms a significant point of intersection in that psychicbiologistic duality. It is clear that a conception of anatomical determinancy is central to Freud’s view of the acquisition of sexuality in the Oedipal phase. Yet the Oedipus complex is also the major point of reference for the investigation and analysis of symptoms in the case studies. It is seen by Freud as the formative element in the deep structure of the neurosis. Neurotic symptoms are, for Freud, the expression of a psychic conflict, the origins of which lie in the Oedipal phase of infantile sexuality. It is in the attempt to comprehend the determinants of neuroses (through presented symptoms, through jokes and slips of the tongue and, most significantly, through the interpretation of dreams) that Freud develops the psychoanalytic method, and constructs a model for the unconscious which contrasts with the physiologically based quantitative energy model. The psychoanalytic method consists of bringing out the unconscious meaning of the words, the actions and the products of the imagination of a particular subject (dreams, fantasies, delusions, etc.) according to a theorization of the unconscious in which linguistic and verbal structures are a crucial determinant. It is this ‘linguistic’ model which forms the basis for non-biologist developments of Freudian theory, such as the work of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, who insists that ‘the unconscious is structured as a language’ (Lacan 1972, p. 188). More significantly it is the model which has formed, via Lacan, the major point of entry for psychoanalysis in recent feminist debates on sexuality.
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What we would argue here, with regard to the distinction between the dual conceptions of the unconscious as they appear in Freud’s work, is that there can be no easy integration of the two systems. We cannot simply assert that Freud’s representational model for the psyche is always predicated on an instinctual base, for as Althusser suggests (1971b, p. 207) the specificities of the particular model (i.e. instinctual or representational) result in radically different conceptions of the unconscious, which are not reconcilable. It is precisely because the two theories are continually present in Freud’s work (often in the same text), and in terms that are not resolved, that we would maintain they exist as a duality in psychoanalytic theory. Furthermore it seems crucial here to indicate the difficulties of Freud’s theory in relation to the physiological/psychic and instinctual/representational distinctions, precisely because these dualities are the starting point for mutually exclusive post-Freudian developments in psychoanalytic theory. The current feminist demand for the theoretical inclusion of the psychoanalytic categories of sexuality has been posed largely through Lacanian concepts. This stresses the linguistic side of Freud’s original programme, and the potential in Lacan’s work for the development of a theory of sexuality which is rooted socially rather than biologically. But the work of Herbert Marcuse, for example (as characteristic of the Frankfurt School’s approach to psychoanalysis), takes Freud’s instinctual dynamic as an implicit model for the theorization of sexuality, in what is ultimately a political strategy for the liberation of instinctual drives. For Marcuse, the Ego of consciousness co-operates with the social forces of ideological manipulation and sexual repression, while the Id preserves the potential for liberation in the sexual instincts. Both Wilhelm Reich and Marcuse attempt to demonstrate, practically, the potential for ‘political’ action contained in such a theorization. Reich, in his Marxist period, conceives of the structures of the unconscious as historically specific to particular forms of social and economic organization. His original programme, conceived of as the attempt to ‘understand the way in which social institutions, ideologies, life-forms, etc., mould the instinctual apparatus’ (Reich 1972, p. 21) remains a valuable point of departure in any attempt to locate the structures of the unconscious within material social practices.2 Marcuse sees instinctual liberation, and specifically the liberation of repressed sexuality, as part of an explicitly political programme. Contemporary forms of sexual repression, Marcuse maintains, channel the sexual drives into compulsory heterosexual and monogamous forms of object-choice. What is demanded in Eros and Civilisation (1964) is a non-repressive expression of the original ‘polymorphous perversity’ of the drives in a variety of sexual orientations (homosexual, narcissistic, etc.). The problems implicit in the instinctual model for a theorization of sexuality centre on the way in which Marcuse poses the innate structure of human drives in opposition to the historically specific structures of social organization. Sexual drives, for Marcuse, may be rearranged, or to a greater or lesser extent socially repressed, but their structure remains safely fixed within physiology. In that sense, the free flow of libidinal energy is conceived of as the biological extension of the ‘truth’ or ‘essence’ of ‘human nature’. A non-repressive form of social organization would, for Marcuse, both rationally and instinctually express the essence of each individual subject. This location of the unconscious within the physiological processes of the organism places psychoanalytic theory once again firmly back in the problematic, in which the individual is defined in opposition to the movement of social forces. And the problem of sexuality and sexual liberation thereby appears as the problem of individual liberation, rather than as necessarily involving the transformation of social structures. In contrast, it is the Lacanian system (however questionable in its present form), with its emphasis on the linguistic construction of the psyche, which provides the potential for a material location of the unconscious. For Freud it is centrally the works on dreams that
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provide the impetus for a conceptualization of the unconscious in which the role and function of language is crucial (e.g. The Interpretation of Dreams (1965) and the dream studies in the Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis (1975)). In specific relation to these works, two elements should be distinguished in an attempt to identify the centrality of linguistic and verbal concepts. Firstly, there is Freud’s constant reference to the dream work as a script in which the latent dream content ‘seems like a transcript’ of the manifest dream thoughts. Freud’s comparisons and analogies here are continually linguistic: dream thoughts have ‘a mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation’ (Freud 1965, p. 312). Secondly, verbal elements are quite literally central to Freud’s theorization of the movement of unconscious impulses, through the processes of condensation and displacement (see Article 7, footnote 4) to the form of their representation at the level of consciousness. The unconscious idea is displaced along a chain of associative paths, to be represented ultimately in consciousness as symptoms, fantasies or dreams. In that process, word presentations (the verbal residues of memories and perceptions) are the crucial determinants in the movement of the repressed idea from the unconscious proper to the system of consciousness. The pre-conscious is defined by Freud as the point at which the unconscious idea is brought into connection with these word presentations. Repressed unconscious impulses are represented in consciousness by becoming attached (cathected) to word presentations in the pre-conscious system (Freud 1961, p. 20). A major part of the work of psychoanalysis (the bringing to consciousness of the repressed wish) involves supplying the pre-conscious system with the intermediate verbal links to which impulses from the unconscious proper may become cathected.
Lacan: sexuality, language and subjectivity Lacan sees his work as a return to this ‘essential’ Freud, the impact of whose work had been lost in the post-Freudian biologist development in psychoanalysis. The essential theoretical advance made by Freud is identified by Lacan as his theory of the unconscious and the challenge it offers to the notion of a unified, self-present subject, an ‘I’ who exists unproblematically in and for itself. This conceptualization of the subject, exemplified in Descartes’s premise: ‘I think, therefore I am,’ makes the subject the source of meaning and language, rather than, as Lacan would have it, socially constructed in and through language (see below). In Lacan’s reading of Freud, centrally his work on dreams and jokes, etc., the unconscious is not the site of biological drives but rather their manifestation in the mind, through the primary processes of which condensation and displacement are most important. Freud uses linguistic analysis to uncover latent meaning, which has been transformed by condensation and displacement and appears as the manifest content of a particular dream. In his approach to the unconscious, Lacan is not, however, searching for latent meaning, since he insists that meaning can never be original and fixed. He is rather seeking to understand the way in which apparent meaning has been organized through the action of condensation and displacement, Freudian concepts which are reformulated in Lacan’s theory as the linguistic concepts of metaphor and metonomy.3 This reformulation marks the difference between Lacan’s theory of representation and that found in Freud’s work (see below). The biological basis of the drives, the importance of which for Freud varies at different stages of his work, is not seen by Lacan as coming within the terms of the object of psychoanalytic study. The shift in emphasis in Lacanian theory is towards the problem of the social structuring of the unconscious through language. Lacan sets out to read Freud’s work on dreams and parapraxis in the light of Saussurean linguistics and to develop further
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the notion of the unconscious structured as a ‘language’, the specific cultural form this structuring takes and its importance for a theorization of subjectivity. ‘Language’ in this context refers to the formal linguistic structures, of which the speaker is usually unconscious, which underpin and enable individual speech acts. The essential principle of language, according to Saussure, is that it consists of signifying chains, the individual elements of which are called ‘signs’ and consist of the unity of signifier and signified. Within the two systems of signifiers and signifieds, individual signifiers or individual signifieds are distinguished by their difference from all the other elements in the system. There are no preexisting positive terms in which meaning is located prior to its enunciation in the signifying chain. On the contrary, the sign receives its meaning from its place in the signifying chain. The Saussurean concept of the sign is however criticized by Lacan (together with Derrida 1973 and Kristeva 1974) for being open to the suggestion that meaning is fixed prior to its articulation in the signifying chain. The notion of a pure signified – a concept existing outside of its articulation in language – relies on a fixed source of meaning, a unified, transcendent consciousness, which can guarantee meaning and which it was Freud’s achievement to question. Lacan suggests that in effect there are only signifiers which stand in a relation of difference to one another and that they are endowed with meaning retrospectively when the signifying chain is cut.4 The unconscious in Lacanian theory is structured in the form of signifying chains, organized around what Lacan calls nodal points. These are certain privileged signifiers whose position is given by the law which is the precondition of the structuring both of the unconscious and of the symbolic order of language, meaning and human culture. Both the unconscious and the symbolic order are founded through the organization of desire specified by this law. The law in question is what for both Lacan and the French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss founds culture and sociality and is the source of meaning, which supports the symbolic order. It is in effect that law by which desire is controlled, i.e. what Lacan calls the law of the phallus (the phallus being the symbol of the control of desire). It takes the universal cultural form of the Oedipus complex and the incest taboo, which results from it and which, in Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology, is consolidated in the universal law of the exchange of women between kinship groups. It is referred to by Lacan as the law of the ‘Other’, i.e. the law which sets up the limits within which the ‘I’ as subject can function. Lacan uses this formulation of the ‘Other’ to stress that meaning in the symbolic order of language does not originate in the subject who speaks. This assumption is a result of a misrecognition by the speaking subject of itself as occupying the place of the ‘Other’, i.e. of being the source of meaning. In effect the terms within which the subject can function in the symbolic order are pre-given by the law that founds this order and determines the way in which the subject is constructed, as a sexed individual, in and through language. Thus the place that the individual can occupy as a subject in language and culture is fixed by the law which structures the symbolic order. This law organizes desire, and by extension sexuality, through the Oedipal triangle. Lacan locates the source of this law as the symbolic position of the ‘Father’, which is the source of meaning and the precondition for language and culture. (The Judaic notion of ‘God the Father’, who is absent, who is the law-giver and whose name is so sacred that you cannot even speak it, is an example of what is meant by the symbolic ‘Father’.) This position of control is not to be confused with that of the real father in the Oedipal triangle since this position, and the triangle itself, are but effects of the organization of the cultural realm according to the symbolic laws. Nonetheless, at the resolution of his Oedipal complex, the male child identifies with the position of the symbolic ‘Father’, imagining himself as potentially able to occupy this position. In doing so he
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collapses the position of symbolic ‘Father’ into that of the real father of the patriarchal family and misrecognizes himself as being able to control desire at some future date. In the development of the human infant the unconscious is constituted, along with subjectivity, at the moment when the child, having resolved the Oedipus complex and accepted a heterosexual love-object through repression of aspects of its bisexuality, is able to enter the symbolic universe and can position itself within language. This is the culmination of a process of development from the pre-Oedipal phase, through the mirror phase, the Oedipus and castration complexes. At the moment of resolution of the Oedipus complex, the presences and absences which the child has experienced in relation to the zones of the body (e.g. having or not having the mother’s breast), which led it to distinguish between itself and the world, are retrospectively given meaning. At this point the representation in language of presence and absence enables the child to exercise some degree of control over its situation, by representing what it experiences to itself.5 Thus the Oedipus complex is the point in the development of the child, when a third figure, that of the father, intervenes in the relationship between the child and the mother, and for the boy, taboos any incestuous relationship with his mother. This is effected by the threat of castration. In the case of the girl, it is a question of her recognizing that she can never sexually possess her mother, the object of desire. This possession requires having the ‘phallus’, which she can only hope to receive in the form of a penis or baby, if she changes her pre-Oedipal sexual attachment to her mother for a heterosexual love-object – in the first instance her father. At the point of resolution of the Oedipus complex, the child enters into subjectivity – the position of ‘I’ in language – which it can now distinguish from the second and third persons (you, she and he). This entry into language is sex-specific and sets the child on the path to femininity or masculinity, according to the laws of the symbolic order. Both Lacan and Lévi-Strauss stress that the laws and positions which constitute their theories of human culture are symbolic. Thus the organization of human sociality, according to the Oedipal triangle, which serves to order desire in the unconscious and thus found sexuality and meaning, is (they stress) a neutral structure. This means that although Lacan cites the ‘Father’ as the source of the law, this does not necessarily imply the subordination of women. Similarly, Lévi-Strauss insists that his fundamental law of the exchange of women by men is also neutral. However, in the development of the human infant, its entry into a specific form of sexed subjectivity, in accordance with the laws of culture, is predicated on a specific resolution of the Oedipus complex, which functions through the recognition of anatomical difference. This difference, having or not having the penis, comes to mean, in cultural terms, having or not having the phallus. Although this position is based on misrecognition, in the sense that no one can actually possess the phallus, i.e. become the source of the laws which structure human sociality, it is nonetheless men, as possessors of actual penises, who are able to identify with this position of control. Thus the phallus can in effect never be a neutral signifier of difference, since the anatomically grounded elision between the phallus and the penis implies a patriarchal organization of desire and thus of sexuality. Because Lacan’s theory ultimately rests on the biological difference between the sexes, manifest at birth, it is impossible to detach the phallus from this particular physical difference and give it any non-oppressive, cultural significance for women. As it stands, Lacanian theory necessarily implies a power relation between men and women, in which women are subordinated; yet for Lacan it is not a historically specific privileging, but an eternal law of human culture. The supposedly pure symbolic function of the phallus cannot be explained solely in terms of the internal logic of Lacanian theory whilst it relies on an anatomical difference. It is this which constitutes the phallocentrism (privileging
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of the phallus/penis), of Lacan’s theory. Once we reject the notion of a necessary, ever pre-given patriarchal structure for the organization of desire (and it is here that a feminist critique of Lacan, as of Freud, must centre), the dominance of the phallus, in its equation with the penis, can only be explained historically and materially, by an analysis of the structural relations between the sexes, which are manifest in material practices. It is only this materialist analysis which can ground the phallus as a symbol of the social organization of sexuality at the level of the unconscious.
Feminist assessments of psychoanalysis The relation of feminism to psychoanalysis is discussed most fully, and in the light of Marxist, Lacanian and anthropological concepts, by Juliet Mitchell in Psychoanalysis and Feminism. The feminist assessments of psychoanalysis which predate this are examined by Mitchell herself (1975, pp. 303–56). Before we present our account of Mitchell’s work we would like briefly to review the general problem of the relation between psychoanalysis and feminism as it is treated in these works. Certain basic objections to Freud’s work are common to all, but outright dismissal of psychoanalysis is more rare – only Germaine Greer (1970) and Eva Figes (1972) take this position. Other feminist writers retain a sense of the possible usefulness of Freud’s work, often on broadly similar grounds. Each text presents its own general thesis about the extent and nature of women’s oppression and the necessary strategies in the struggle against it. Thus in each case, the detail and emphasis of the discussion of psychoanalysis is determined by wider feminist arguments. (Perhaps the most ambitious of these is Shulamith Firestone’s (1972), which envisages a dialectic between the Male Technological and Female Aesthetic principles, ending in a synthesis.) In the chapters on psychoanalysis, attention is mainly focused on Freud’s account of the construction of femininity and its implications. The feminists say less about general problems such as that of the relative importance, within the theory, of physiological and psychic determinations. The general charge against Freud’s work is that it reinforces, ideologically, the oppression of women by describing the characteristics of feminity in terms of the immutable structures of the psyche. The point is made that the dominant and positive significance attributed to the penis or to its symbolic representation by Freud (and by Lacan) constitutes the extension into psychoanalytic theory of cultural and historical notions of male superiority. To this objection is added the argument that psychoanalytic theory should be seen as a product of a social and historical situation, in a way which comprises it, as a supposedly objective and scientific theory. The suggestion is strongly resisted by Mitchell (1975, pp. 322–3), who counters it with claims as to the scientificity of the theory, which owe much to Althusser’s notion (1971b, p. 184) of science as breaking from ideology. In this way Mitchell removes it, as a science, from the restraints of the particular historical conjuncture. A related objection made by Kate Millet (1970), among others, is to the ahistorical nature of the Freudian theory of psychic development. Here the problem of the effectivity of biology versus that of psychic representations is raised. Millet accuses Freud of biologism, and advances the alternative notion of socialization, effected solely through the historically specific forms of social relations, although, unlike Mitchell, she omits a consideration of Freudian representations, or language, as part of this process: What forces in her experience, her society and socialization have led (a woman) to see herself as an inferior being? The answer would seem to lie in the conditions of patriarchal society and the inferior position of women within this society. But Freud did not
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Mitchell rightly objects to the reduction of Freudianism to biologism, although her own reading of Freud also presents problems, as we shall see. A further issue, in the feminist discussions of Freud, is the question of the consequences of psychoanalytic practice. Some feminists make the distinction between Freudian theory, and psychoanalysis as practised by later analysts in various countries, especially the USA. Figes sees the later developments mostly as ameliorations of true Freudian repressiveness; for her the problem is that ‘not only are there still many orthodox Freudians practising and writing, but Freudian ideas have also become very popular currency’ (1972, p. 160). Under these conditions, she says, women are ‘brainwashed’ into an acceptance of their own supposed inferiority intellectually, personally, and sexually. Her argument contrasts with the Lacanian view of American analysis, as a corruption of Freud’s original practice which, it is maintained, was concerned not with conformity to social or sexual norms, but with self-knowledge (cf. Lacan 1977, p. 7; Mitchell 1975, p. 337). The questions raised by Freudian theory of sexuality are seen as crucial by the feminist writers because, throughout their works, they locate sexuality as an important site of women’s oppression, inasmuch as it is conceived as passive, receptive, dependent on the active, stimulant male presence, even masochistic. This conception of female sexuality seems to be the point at which all notions of women’s inferiority meet and condense. The Freudian theory of the vaginal orgasm, as the mature form of feminine response, is regarded as a major factor in the reinforcement and reproduction of these repressive notions of female sexuality. This was clear for the first time following the findings of Masters and Johnson that ‘all female orgasms originate in the clitoris’ (Greer 1970, p. 96). Until this recognition, as Greer points out, ‘the woman who knew that all her orgasms originated in the clitoris was shamed by the imputation of immaturity and penis envy’ (1970, p. 93). On the other hand, if Firestone calls Freudianism ‘the misguided feminism’, part of the reason is her appreciation of the revolutionary implications of the Freudian stress on sexuality. The fact that Freud treated sexuality in overt separation from questions of morality, and in an analytical fashion – however unsatisfactory his conclusions – was important in laying the basis for subsequent feminist developments of the kind that Firestone outlines. Freudian theory offers at least the prospect of an account of the construction of sexuality which shows it to be a social and historical rather than a natural phenomenon. The tendency to see Freud’s work as flawed but potentially useful for a theory of feminine socialization is inseparable from overall political tendencies. An account of socialization and of sexuality as it is developed in the individual is thought to be necessary, not only because feminists recognize that sexuality and sexual practices are an important terrain of political struggle. These accounts are seen as also contributing to an understanding of political action as the conscious effort to change personal relationships. It is necessary to be aware of both the positive and the limiting aspects of this conception of political action. This point is developed later. Feminists continue to evaluate and appropriate psychoanalytic concepts in a non-Lacanian and non-Althusserian context. Ann Foreman’s Femininity and Alienation (1977) is a recent important example. Here both the appreciation of Freud’s work on sexuality, and the ultimate rejection of his ahistoricism, reappear – this time combined with an anthropologically based attack on the universality of the Oedipus complex (Foreman 1977, pp. 18–23). While
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Foreman’s critique of Mitchell is perceptive, her own thesis suffers from a tendency to reduce Marxism to a theory of human alienation – the economic category ‘labour power’ becomes ‘a term expressing the alienation of productive activity’, and the class struggle is ‘the historical working through of the process of alienation’ (1977, p. 130). There is a danger, with this kind of terminology, of retaining an unspecific and utopian conception of political action as the necessary expression of inevitable historical progress.6
Juliet Mitchell: the material location of the unconscious In terms of recent history, it was the Women’s Movement of the sixties and early seventies, with its emphasis on the ideological forms of sexual subordination, and the development of strategies for ideological struggle, which utilized psychoanalysis politically, in the move towards a theorization of sexuality and sex-oppression. As Juliet Mitchell insists polemically in Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1975, p. 362): ‘The longevity of the oppression of women must be based on something more than conspiracy, something more complicated than biological handicap and more durable than economic exploitation (although in differing degrees all these may feature).’ In many ways, the theoretical developments achieved within the Women’s Movement, in the move towards a theory of the construction of sex/gender identity in its historically specific ideological forms, parallel in a broad sense recent advances made in Marxist theories of ideology. Both represent an increasing disillusion with the various forms of reductionism and economism, in their inability, in this specific context, to provide anything other than a partial analysis of women’s subordination, together with their restrictive potential for political practice. Exclusive concentration, for example, on the ‘domestic labour debate’7 leads to a merely partial analysis of woman’s oppression which, within a wider perspective, fails to preserve the historical specificity of female subordination as it predates capitalism. As Gayle Rubin insists (1975, p. 163): To explain women’s usefulness to capitalism is one thing. To argue that this usefulness explains the genesis of the oppression of women is quite another. It is precisely at this point that the analysis of capitalism ceases to explain very much about women and the oppression of women. It was in the context of this theoretical absence that Psychoanalysis and Feminism opened the way programmatically within a section of the Women’s Movement for an inclusion of the categories of Freudian psychoanalysis in the investigation of the functioning of sexual ideology. In general terms, psychoanalysis is posited by Mitchell as the repertoire of concepts necessary for a more extended analysis of the functioning of the ideologies of sex and gender. In what appears to be an Althusserian reading of the social formation, Mitchell usefully insists that the relationship between specific forms of sexual ideology and the structures of political and economic organization is not one of direct correspondence, but rather that each specific level exists in a state of relative autonomy from the others. Thus particular ideologies are not seen as mere direct reflections of the economic base of society, but possess their own internal laws and dynamics, and their own material location within specific social practices. Furthermore, Mitchell maintains that it is the developments in psychoanalysis made by Freud and Lacan (together with existing Marxist concepts of ideology), which provide the point of departure for the understanding of the social organization of sexuality.
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Arguing that the wholesale rejection of Freud, made by some radical feminists, is in fact fatal for the overall development of a theory of woman’s subordination, Mitchell insists that Freud’s discoveries provide a unique conceptual schema for an investigation of the construction of human sexuality. Although she acknowledges that biologism does exist in Freud’s work, Mitchell argues that the continual denunciation of Freud’s patrocentric bias halts any movement towards an evaluation of the potential of psychoanalysis.8 Freud’s theory, Mitchell states (1975, p. xvi) is inherently social: . . . psychoanalysis is about the material reality of ideas both within and of man’s history; thus in ‘penis envy’, we are talking not about an anatomical organ, but about the ideas of it that people hold and live by within the general culture. It is this . . . factor that also prescribes the reference of psychoanalysis. [our emphasis] She argues for a decisive break from concern with anatomy and biologism, and points to Lacanian developments in psychoanalysis, as a theory of the cultural acquisition of sexual identity (though as a feminist, disturbingly uncritically in the light of Lacan’s explicit phallocentrism). For Mitchell, as for Lacan, it is the ‘symbolic’ Father (only imperfectly incarnate in the presence of the ‘real’ father), who embodies the law that constitutes human society and culture. The specific history of the individual in fact takes place within this larger structure, which embraces all historical forms of social and cultural law. The Oedipus complex is the terrain on which, at the level of the unconscious, the infant acquires her/his place as a sexed subject within the human order, which is simultaneously the acquisition of a place and nomenclature within language and within culture. In her attempt to ground Lacanian concepts more explicitly within material and social practices, Mitchell turns to Lévi-Strauss for an account of the way in which the patriarchal Oedipal invariant is internalized at the level of the unconscious. Her claim is that the material organization of kinship structures, and specifically the exchange of women, are in ‘structural homology’ with the structuring of the unconscious according to the law of the symbolic ‘Father’. The exchange of women in the social order finds its internal equivalent in the constitution of the unconscious within the structures of patriarchal law. The problem with Mitchell’s analysis is not that it is in any sense wholly misdirected, but that it is not sufficiently developed, and in a quite specific sense, given what appears to be her initial Althusserian reading of the social formation. The structures of kinship and familial organization are recognized by Mitchell as the principle material practices which determine the construction and development of the unconscious in its patriarchal form. Yet those kinship structures are themselves posited by Mitchell as forming a wholly autonomous system of social organization, and as unrelated to developments at other levels within the social formation. Quite specifically, they are not seen as the crucial site for the location of the terms under which economically, politically, and ideologically, women are subordinate to male control. Rather, the forms of kinship/familial organization are the site of patriarchal structures which are seen to form a separate system. The crucial point in Mitchell’s theorization here concerns her use of concepts derived from Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss himself argues (significantly in terms which form the basis for Lacan’s own developments), for a theory of the symbolic exchange of women, which conceptualizes that system as synonymous with the constitution of culture and human society itself. Kinship structures are not seen by Lévi-Strauss as overdetermined by the overall form of social and economic organization, but rather: ‘the rules of kinship and marriage are
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not made necessary by the social state. They are the social state itself ’ (Lévi-Strauss 1969, p. 490). This emphasis on the importance of the structure of the act of exchange fails to locate the fact that within that structure women exist in a relationship of subordination to men, which is a power relationship.9 Furthermore, it is in fact precisely this type of ‘structuralist’ analysis that Mitchell herself performs: ‘The act of exchange holds a society together: the rules of kinship (like those of language to which they are near-allied) are the society’ (1975, p. 370). From her reading of Lévi-Strauss, Mitchell maintains that kinship structures are not themselves articulated in their historical specificity on the larger structures of social and economic organization. Kinship, for women, at any rate, appears in Mitchell’s theory as the equivalent of the concept mode of production, not as its dependent structure. Certainly in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, kinship/familial structures are never conceptualized, either in the historical or the contemporary analysis, as functioning at a variety of levels within the social formation. Specifically here, Mitchell seems to show little awareness of the crucial economic function of the family under capitalism in reproducing labour power (both biologically and in the production of use values). It is precisely the lack of this larger articulation that enables Mitchell to argue that the structuring of sex and gender relationships, in contemporary forms of familial organization, are obsolescent and archaic, and in no way related to the demands of the capitalist mode of production. Furthermore, it is this separation of the structures of kinship from the specific forms of economic and political organization, which leads Mitchell to search for the ‘origins’ of patriarchal structures, both as they determine the forms of the unconscious, and the forms of the social exchange of women. That search leads, by default, not into a materialist analysis, but into the anthropological-mythical realm of Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1961), where we find an account of the ‘world historical defeat of the female’, the defeat of the primitive matriarchies, and the subsequent rise of ‘patriarchy’, and hence of civilization itself. It is from these theoretical developments that Mitchell derives her particular political position; women are located within the social structures of ‘patriarchy’ rather than within class structures. Hence the trajectory for feminist political struggle is predicated on a terrain independent from that of class struggle: ‘. . . men enter into the class-dominated structures of history while women (as women, whatever their actual work in production) remain defined by the kinship patterns of organization’ (Mitchell, 1975, p. 406). In her attempt to preserve the specificity of the oppression which women experience as theirs and theirs alone, Mitchell moves from a position of scrupulous relative autonomy, towards total autonomy, the implications of which appear to be separatist. The terms of Mitchell’s political programme are directly derived from her theorization of women’s subordination as located within the autonomous patriarchal structures of ‘human society’.
Marxism and Lacanian theory: feminist developments Juliet Mitchell’s work is important for British feminists and marxists as an introduction to Lacanian and Althusserian concepts. Since the appearance of her book, feminist discussions of psychoanalysis, inasmuch as they have accepted the general argument of Psychoanalysis and Feminism, have been prompted to return to the original texts of Althusser and Lacan for a clarification of the specific marxist and psychoanalytic concepts used in Mitchell’s work, in relation to a theorization of women’s subordination.10 In addition, attention has been focused on the work of Julia Kristeva, who has taken up Lacan’s theory of the constitution
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of sexed subjectivity in a specifically feminist way and attempted to unite it, at least in principle, with an Althusserian theory of the social formation. Kristeva claims to complement Althusser’s theory of ideology, in the sense that she sets out to theorize the nature of the ‘always-already’ given subject, which constitutes Althusser’s theory of ‘ideology in general’ (Althusser 1971a). She locates the subject as constituted through what she calls (1974) the mode of sign production. (This is the process of ‘significance’, which consists of both the symbolic, and semiotic, i.e. unconscious, feminine, aspects of signifying practice.) It is ultimately determined by the laws of Lacan’s patriarchal, symbolic order. Although Kristeva is still working with a notion of an ‘individual’ subject, constructed in the mode of sign production, she does recognize that the constitution of subjectivity is part of a social process, which involves other levels of the social formation. Yet she does not adequately theorize the relationship between what she terms the mode of ‘socio-economic’ production and the mode of sign production. Yet, inasmuch as Kristeva attempts to deal with the constitution of subjects, in a certain relation to the order of language, or symbolic representation in general, her work has had vast implications for the analysis of texts, in particular artistic texts. The specificity of artistic texts, in which the semiotic (unconscious, repressed, feminine), determinations are more pronounced, lies in their particular property of undermining the experience of fixed subjectivity at unconscious levels of identity and desire. This has led Kristeva (1974), Barthes (1970), and in Britain, contributors to Screen, among others, to develop Lacanian readings of film, poetry and prose narrative. The work of Julia Kristeva is significant as an attempt to clarify and develop the Lacanian theory of subjectivity in a feminist direction, in the context of the construction of a specifically marxist-feminist concept of aesthetic and political practice. Her work on subjectivity goes much further than Lacan’s, in trying to readdress the problem of the drives (which she translates into her concept of pulsions), and their psychic representations. At the same time, she retains the sense of the effectivity of symbolic – i.e. culturally determined – significations. The implications of this for feminism lie in the fact that, for Kristeva, the pulsions and their significations, which constitute the repressed realm of the semiotic, are to be valued at the expense of the fixing, repressing agency, the symbolic. Kristeva retains the Lacanian account of femininity, seeing it as constituted through a different form of acceptance of castration, involving a less complete subjection to the patriarchal laws of rational discourse. She describes (1974, esp. pp. 209–350) a revolt against these laws in the works of the French avant-garde writers, Lautréamont and Mallarmé. Their works, she argues, are dominated by the sensual and rhythmical semiotic process, which relativizes logic and meaning. Kristeva maintains that the same challenge to meaning is presented on a historical scale by the feminist revolt against the patriachal laws of family, state and language itself. Kristeva, in her theorization of sexed subjectivity, attempts in principle to hold to an Althusserian reading of the social formation. In this sense, her work contrasts with that of another Lacanian feminist, Luce Irigaray (1977, pp. 62–77). Kristeva accepts the notion of an unsexed libido, effective at the pre-Oedipal stage in children of either sex. According to her theory, women are not so much fundamentally different from men, as constituted by the relative dominance of a semiotic mode, which is present, but less effective, in the male psyche. By contrast, Irigaray asserts that: ‘it is in order to establish their difference that women are claiming their rights’ (1977, p. 68). She sees women as having a specifically feminine libido and language, the recognition of which demands a separatist political stance, in opposition to a phallocentric culture. The problem of the centrality of the phallus in Lacanian theory (posed afresh by Anthony
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Wilden 1972), and of its universal and essential nature, remains central to feminist appropriations of Lacan. We would argue that a solution to this theoretical problem would necessarily involve a fundamental recasting of the whole conceptual system, far more radical than that undertaken by Kristeva. Yet a more basic problem, even than this, from the position of marxist-feminism, is that of the relation between the two theories, which both Mitchell and Kristeva attempt to hold to: Marxism and a psychoanalytic theory of the constitution of sexed subjectivity, however recast. We would argue that the problems in this area have not, in any way, been resolved by the assertion of the necessity to marxist theory of a general conceptualization of the constitution of the subject (see Irigary 1977), and we will return to this point in our concluding section.
Political and theoretical perspectives: psychoanalysis, feminism and Marxism What then is the political and theoretical importance of psychoanalysis? Disregarding its historical phallocentrism, for the moment, the initial recognition, that forms of sex gender are cultural, rather than biologically innate, makes a potentially greater control of our own sexuality a viable proposition. We are made aware of the ideological nature of sexual stereotypes, and led to question their social functions, i.e. ultimately to place forms of sexual relations and emotional behaviour in relationship to social and economic relations. A rejection at an individual level of dominant sexual ideologies can offer a framework in which to understand one’s emotional life, too, as culturally formed in response to certain social ideologies, which may be repressive or contradictory. Sexual identity is linked in Lacanian theory with forms of subjectivity, which are understood as socially constructed in language in relation to sexual difference, rather than ever pre-given. This notion, also, can have important political effects on how we see ourselves in relation to ideologies, which function by fixing the individual as subject, within the structure of their own meanings. It is these meanings which, though constructed to intervene between the individual and her/his ‘material conditions of existence’, appear ‘true’, natural and eternal, and which we feel ‘privileged’ to share (Althusser 1971a). Once we move beyond the level of useful personal-political insights, to examine how adequate psychoanalytic concepts are for a theorization of the acquisition of sexual identity, we are confronted by all the problems of the ahistorical phallocentrism of psychoanalysis. Nonetheless it is important to realize that psychoanalysis does preserve the particular dynamic of sexuality and gender relations, structured in dominance and subordination, with their own history and development, in a way which other theories of the social construction of sexuality do not. The various specific sociological approaches to the acquisition of sexuality11 all, in a general sense, insist that sexual identity is learned and reproduced by the interaction of the individual with various social and cultural practices, in the overall process of socialization. The problem here is that attempts to particularize this form of analysis, i.e. to articulate a relationship between specific forms of gender characterization and the structure of social relations, often tend towards either reductionism of a form of sociological functionalism, in which the family appears to regulate sexuality and sexual identity in the ‘interests’ of capitalist production. The patriarchal eternalism of Freudian theory is not sufficient reason for marxistfeminists to disregard it. When applied in a historically specific way to the patriarchal nuclear family – clinical evidence of which founded the theory in the first place – it can offer
544 Steve Burniston, et al. a useful analysis of women’s position, and a symbolic reading of the power of the penis can generate a way of focusing actual structures of male power and control. We must nonetheless be aware that such a shift involves a real transformation of the original psychoanalytic concepts. However, it is not a question of either socialization or psychoanalytic theory. We need both elements in an analysis of the construction of sexuality, the ideological conditions of which structure women’s subordination and the sanctioning of selected sexual practices. Furthermore, we need an analysis which is not reductionist and yet attempts to articulate the relationship between historically specific ideologies of sexual identity and sexual practices, and other levels within the social formation.
Psychoanalysis and Marxism Throughout this article we have been mainly concerned with examining the limitations of psychoanalysis and locating its appropriation or rejection by feminists. Psychoanalysis has been valued because of its attention to sexuality as a social construction, to the problem of language and ideology as factors in the oppression of women, and to the vital role of the family and kinship structures in the reproduction of that oppression. But what are the possibilities of marxist analysis in these areas? And what is the relation between Marxism (as a theoretical method and a materialist philosophy), and psychoanalytic concepts? Are they mutually contradictory, antagonistic, or can they be seen as complementary? The situation is affected in an important way by Althusser’s use of concepts which closely resemble those of psychoanalysis, especially of the Lacanian type (cf. Althusser 1971a). His work in this respect must be seen in the context of his attempt to specify the nature of the ideological instance, and its relation to the economic and political levels. In accordance with his attempt to think of ideologies as material social practices, Althusser presents an analysis of these practices. What concerns us is his awareness of the family as one of the material social practices which constitute the ideological level (1971a, p. 252). What is also implied, albeit in an unsatisfactory way,12 is the importance of these ideological practices, via their role in social reproduction, as a terrain of political struggle. But the implications of the Althusserian argument for the struggle against the oppression of women are buried rather deep. There is another dimension to Althusser’s analysis of ideology; this is his theory of ‘ideology in general’ (1971a, pp. 262–78). Althusser’s attempt to analyse the internality of specific structures of the ideological level – as distinct from its place or role in the social formation as a whole – involves him in efforts to theorize the unchanging and ahistorical aspects of ideology. Here the echoes of Lacanian theory are louder. Ideology in its most general aspect is theorized in relation to the individual, to language and the nature of subjectivity. The general role of ideology, most importantly performed through language, is to ‘interpellate’ the human individual, that is, to enable the individual to imagine her/ himself as a unified, central point from which experience and being radiate, i.e. as a subject (1971a, pp. 272 ff.). Althusser stresses the extent to which expectations and roles, embodied in linguistic and other practices, pre-exist the development of the individual, pre-forming the limits and possibilities of that individual’s conception of her/himself. In Lacanian terms, Althusser’s article relies on an impermissible dislocation between problems of subjectivity and language, which seem to remain in part ahistorical and universal, and the structures of kinship and familial relations (including, presumably, relations of sexuality), which are located in the historical and political sphere. But does
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Althusser’s attempt indicate the possibility of a merger between Marxism and psychoanalytic theories of the constitution of the subject, from which feminist analysis would benefit? Later work, developing Althusserian problems, has involved an increasing awareness of their implications for feminism.13 However we would argue against any notion of a merger between the two theories in this specific context. Marxism is characterized by its attention, for fundamental reasons, to the historically specific. Historically general concepts, such as productive labour, are necessary for Marxism, but are formulated only in so far as they are needed in the analysis of the specificity of, for example, a particular mode of production. From a marxist point of view, the fact that the human individual uses language and is constituted as a member of a system of ideological, political and economic practices, when considered as general, is a necessary and sufficient starting point. The detail of the entry of the individual into a social position, understood as an eternal and universal process, does not have to be explicated for any politically useful analysis. It is precisely because psychoanalysis is implicated, at its inception, in those eternal and universal questions that the attempt to develop concepts of subjectivity in a marxist direction is so fraught with difficulties. If we are able to retain the term psychoanalysis in what follows, this is conditional on our awareness of its inherent idealist dynamic. The Lacanian use of the term, for example, refers to a discourse which centres around the conditions of human life in general (notions of desire and alienation): a metaphysical discourse of little political relevance. Such considerations must be seen to depend on historically and politically specific situations. The basic project of psychoanalysis – to understand the process of constitution of sexed subjectivity – is fundamentally flawed as a philosophical starting point. Where the attempt is made both to retain this basic project, and to develop a wider conception of political action, it is hindered by the individualist structure of the original theory. This structure is seen in its purest form in the patient-analyst situation, where all action is ideally conceived of as the transformation of intersubjective relations. Marxism should articulate some concept of intersubjective relations, but with a conception of political, economic and ideological relations, which together constitute the field of political action. Our contention would be that Marxism can be developed in such a way as to extend and refine its analysis of women’s oppression, and that these developments would not depend on a theorization at a general (i.e. ahistorical) level of the constitution of sexed subjectivity.
Conclusion Finally, we would wish to indicate programmatically the ways in which the concepts of psychoanalysis could be transformed and integrated into material and concrete analyses of the construction of sexuality and the forms of sexual oppression. We would see this work of historical and conjunctural analysis as crucial in determining the forms of political action to be taken, in the attempt to transform existing structures of sexuality. Furthermore it is a project which would preserve as its absolute precondition the historically specific location of the forms of subjectivity within material practices. Throughout the exposition of Freud and Lacan, we have insisted on this task as the continually necessary correction to tendencies in both theories, which, either through biologism or universalism, return us to a static conception of patriarchal structures. More positively, now, we would indicate the need to move towards a theorization of the terms in which psychoanalytic structures of the unconscious
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could be materially located – as a stage in the overall investigation of the construction of sex and gender. Althusser himself, in ‘Freud and Lacan’ (1971b), tentatively provides a framework for that type of theorization. The line of development, outlined in that essay, attempts to articulate the relationship between the structures of the unconscious, the concrete form of kinship structures, and the form of sexual ideology conceived of as contributing to the maintenance and reproduction of particular social relations. Ultimately, Althusser’s theorization of that relationship remains at the level of a structural homology. However, his framework returns us usefully to the project, outlined by Mitchell in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, of materially locating psychoanalytic structures, but in terms which insist on a fully marxist theorization of the social formation. Althusserian developments in marxist theory provide precisely that structural analysis which avoids a simplistic collapse of certain ideological functions of the family with its economic role. Yet the concept of relative autonomy does not, of itself, enable a sufficient theorization of the relation of sexual ideology and sex-oppression with the political and economic levels. What is needed beyond that, is the necessary task of tracing, concretely, the relationship between historically specific forms of sex/gender identity (including their unconscious representation), the material practices which structure the acquisition of that identity (the media, the educational system, the labour process and primarily the mode of kinship/familial organization), and the organization of economic and social relations which constitute the mode of production. The crucial determinant is the multi-functional aspect of the family, as the point of intersection of the economic and ideological levels. It performs significant tasks within the circuit of economic production and reproduction and, also, it is the primary material practice within which sexual identities are constructed. Work performed by marxist anthropologists has already noted the various economic, political and ideological functions of kinship structures (i.e. the socially transformed variants of genealogical and blood relations) in pre-class societies.14 What is now needed is to extend the terms of that analysis, to include an investigation of the way in which the nuclear family still preserves a multi-functional purpose under capitalist relations. For it is in this type of interrelated analysis of the family that one can begin to locate materially and structurally the psychoanalytic determinants which contribute to the acquisition of a sexual identity. Current analysis performed by marxist-feminists still tends to separate out as a duality the economic and ideological functions of the family. We are now in a better position to comprehend the terms under which the specific form of domestic labour performed by women, together with women’s role as biological reproducers, contribute to the circuit of capitalist production. Further, the psychoanalytic theory of construction of sexuality, and the various socialization theses, insist that it is primarily in the family that sexual identity is acquired and ‘learned’. Yet beyond posing that duality of functions, little attempt has as yet been made to analyse concretely, within a Marxist framework, the way in which a dominant sexual ideology is effective in maintaining and reproducing the structure of social relations, within which women find their subordinate place in the circuit of capitalist production and biological reproduction.15 Tentatively here we would outline one specific structure in which to ‘think through’ that articulation between the economic function of the family and the social and unconscious acquisition of sexual identity. Working on the terrain provided by Althusser in the essay on ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’ (1971a), we should ask not only the question, ‘How is the reproduction of the relations of production secured?’, but also, ‘How is the reproduction of the relations of (biological) reproduction secured?’ Part of the answer, to draw further on Althusser, is that these
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specific relations, which are relations involving the subordination of women to men, are secured and controlled by the legal, political and ideological superstructures (located in specific material practices) and also by direct intervention of the state.16 But, we would argue further, that these relations are massively maintained and reproduced by the functioning of the dominant form of sexual ideology. The ideological interpellation of the individual, into a masculine or feminine identity, operates socially (with all the attendent baggage of maleness, and the reciprocal ideologies of motherhood and femininity) and through the structures located by psychoanalysis as articulating a ‘living out’, at the level of the unconscious, of a specific form of masculinity or femininity. Furthermore, these sexual structures (operating socially and unconsciously) contribute to the maintenance of the specific form of social relations, necessary for the (biological) reproduction of labour power. Such a conceptualization provides one tentative schema for a theorization of the terms under which an ideology of sexuality, in its conscious and unconscious structures, is articulated with a given structure of the social relations of production and reproduction. Beyond this, what is required is the massive empirical task of a precise historical and conjunctural analysis of the functions and structures of the family – that is, the class-specific forms of its economic, political and ideological effectivity, under determinate historical conditions. Most urgently of all, we require that type of conjunctural analysis for political purposes, in the movement to transform existing sexual ideologies and practices. It is to that programme that this study is tentatively addressed.
Notes and references 1 A symptomatic reading is a reading which actively constructs the theoretical absences, inherent in the way in which the object of study is originally conceptualized. See Althusser 1969. Althusser’s method relies on the model provided by a Freudian analyst’s reading of the patient’s utterances. 2 We refer here specifically to the period of Reich’s work which broadly covers the years of his involvement in the Sex-Pol clinics in Berlin, in the 1920s and early 1930s, up to his expulsion from the Communist Party in 1933. Thereafter, Reich’s increasing dissatisfaction with both Marxism and orthodox Freudianism led him into very different fields, which are characterized by the attempt to liberate the repressed sexual instincts through his self-styled ‘Vegetotherapy’. 3 Metaphor and metonomy are the two processes whereby language functions and through which meaning is constituted. The terms were first used in this way by Jakobson, and correspond to the concepts of condensation and displacement in Freud. 4 Lacan does ultimately have to discuss the relation of a signifier – the phallus – to the real. Why should this vital signifier of desire bear any relation to the anatomical feature, the penis? Lacan provides only a few unsatisfactory comments: It can be said that this signifier is chosen because it is the most tangible element in the real of sexual copulation . . . by virtue of its turgidity, it is the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation. (1977, p. 287) 5 Cf. Freud’s description in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of the ‘fort/da’ game. The child’s action of drawing a cotton reel to itself and throwing it away again, whilst articulating the words ‘da’ (here) and ‘fort’ (gone), enabled it to symbolize a control over the presence and absence of objects, in particular the mother. 6 For an Althusserian critique of such theoretical tendencies, in a related context, see Molina (1976, p. 236 ff.). 7 See the section, Women working in the home, Article 3. 8 In fact we would argue that Mitchell’s position in relation to Freud’s biologism is rather too onesided in its polemical insistence that psychoanalysis is nowhere concerned with physiological and instinctual processes. It appears that in her attempt to demonstrate the usefulness of psychoanalytic categories, for an analysis of sexual ideology, Mitchell underplays what, we have insisted, forms a
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continual part of Freudian theory: namely, that definition of the instincts, which locates them within physiology. Mitchell’s structuralist use of the concept of exchange has a long history, which can be traced via Lévi-Strauss and the group of the Année Sociologique, to part of Durkheim’s original programme in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1961) and, with Marcel Mauss, in Primitive Classification (1963). For a valuable survey of the history of developments in Structuralism, see Hall (1977). See for example the chapter of Lacan in Coward and Ellis (1977) or the paper on psychoanalysis given at the Patriarchy Conference 1976 (Ros Coward, Sue Lipshitz and Elizabeth Cowie, in ‘Psychoanalysis and Patriarchal Structures in Papers on Patriarchy, Women’s Publishing Collective, Lewes 1976). Examples here would include Plummer’s theory of the ‘learning’ of sexual roles in Sexual Stigma (1975), and that of Gagnon and Simon (1973) on the construction of sexual identity through ‘sexual scripts’. See Hirst’s objections to the essay: Hirst (1977). At the time of writing, a proposed new journal, m/f, promises to contribute to this work. See Article 8 on anthropological approaches to the theorization of the relations of reproduction. Some progress towards a materialist history of the family has been made by Eli Zaretsky (1976). Examples of state control of specific forms of sexuality would include, for example, the politicaljuridical intervention on the question of male homosexuality, and the economic/ideological legislation, which constitutes the Beveridge Report of 1942 (where ideologies of motherhood and domesticity are crucially linked to the economic position of women, both in the home and as wage labourers).
30 The good, the bad and the ugly Images of young women in the labour market Christine Griffin
A recent Woman article reported on the increasing use of girls aged 10–14 in advertisements which present them as ‘innocent but sexy’. Hollywood trade papers carried a recent ad. for one of these models: 10-year old Tina Payne, posing naked with the caption ‘would you believe I’m only 10?’. Tom Masters, the publicity agent hired by Tina’s mother, who was responsible for this ad., described it as a quick way of cutting through ‘the long process of getting Tina known . . . we set out to be deliberately controversial . . . It paid off. Everyone was talking about her. I compare it to selling a tube of toothpaste—Tina is one of thousands of little girls that have the mind of a 10-year old attached to the body of a 25-year old’ Woman, 8/8/81, p. 40.
The above excerpt from a popular women’s magazine first led me to think about particular ‘common sense’ assumptions concerning young women, and their position in un/employment.1 The piece seemed to crystallise some of my ideas about the complex links between young women’s positions in waged work and ‘leisure’. Tina Payne was employed (through her mother) as a child model to sell various products, and was herself sold (likened by her agent to a tube of toothpaste) as a female child in an adult (i.e. sexually ‘mature’) woman’s body. She was sold posing naked, in an advert, which aimed to be ‘controversial’ through the use of images more commonly associated with pornography. My work with young working class women2 has made it clear that forms of sexuality play an important part in their experiences and position in the transition from school to un/employment. This has varied from experiences of sexual harrassment, ‘common sense’ assumptions about young women made by teachers, employers and parents, through to the cultures and structures of young women’s jobs. I was unable to find an appropriate theoretical framework which would be capable of dealing with these issues, and this paper represents an initial attempt to make connections between what have been seen as disparate areas of feminist theory. The second part of the paper relates to specific themes in dominant discourses around femininity which focus on young women’s sexuality. A number of analyses have mentioned the contradictions posed by the division between Good and Bad women: virgins and whores, (eg. Hamilton, 1978). I wanted to extend this ideological division to include its mediation through the ‘norm’ of heterosexuality as the compulsory form of sexuality, particularly as these ideological forms are relevant to young women. Rather than focus on an analysis of specific texts (cf. McRobbie, 1978a), I have started from young working class women’s experiences. My concern is not to see these young women as solely positioned in a reactive, passive manner by dominant discourses, but as also resisting, negotiating and affecting those
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discourses and structures through individual and collective production of their own cultures and meanings (see Willis, forthcoming, for a clear review of the ‘structuralist’ and ‘culturalist’ approaches).
Young women’s position in the sexual, marriage and labour markets Various attempts have been made to explain women’s position in the labour market. These have ranged from the descriptive accounts of sociological ‘dual labour market’ theorists (Barron and Norris, 1976); marxist-feminist analyses of women as part of the Industrial Reserve Army (Beechey, 1977); to attempts to link women’s unpaid domestic work to their waged work outside the home (Women’s Studies Group, CCCS, 1978). A common theme has been the view of structural class relations as fundamentally determining women’s position in waged work, and gender relations (particularly patriarchal ideologies) as primarily operating within the ‘privatised’ sphere of the home (eg. Kuhn and Wolpe, 1978; Mitchell, 1975). Christine Delphy has broken from this pattern in her emphasis on the material aspects of women’s oppression (Delphy, 1977). Delphy likens marriage to a form of labour contract within patriarchal relations but her stress on the economic aspects of ‘the material’ is somewhat limiting. Most of these analyses have been based on theories which were initially designed to explain the position of groups of men(mainly white and working class) in waged work, and which then attempted to include an understanding of women’s position. This has been relatively useful, but particular areas of women’s experience of waged work are difficult (if not impossible) to understand from these perspectives: for example, sexual harrassment at work, or prostitution. Conversely, analyses of the importance of sexuality in ideologies of femininity have mainly concentrated on representations of domesticity and motherhood in relation to women’s position in the home, (eg. Birmingham Feminist History Group, 1979). These studies have often taken specific texts as the basis for semiological analysis, and have placed less emphasis on particular women’s experiences. The structuralist approach exemplified by the journal m/f (see double issue on sexuality: 1981, vol. 5/6) clearly does not start from the cultural, experiential level. This is not to deny the validity of the structuralist approach, but for my purpose it poses a profound limitation for the analysis of sexuality as a form of social control. For the purposes of this paper, two studies are particularly relevant: Angela McRobbie (1978a) has examined contemporary ideologies of femininity centered around romance and sexuality, as expressed in teenage magazines like Jackie, as they relate to ‘leisure’ for young white working class women. Janice Winship (1980, 1981) looked at advertising in a range of women’s magazines, from Woman and Woman’s Own in the 1950s, to Honey in the 1960s Her emphasis has been on patriarchal ideologies of domesticity and sexuality in relation to women’s position on circuits of production and consumption in monopoly capitalism. This covers the construction of women as a new ‘market’ of consumers for the family/home, and as potential objects for male consumption. Analyses of the role of sexuality as a form of social control at the material level of women’s oppression have focussed on rape (eg. Brownmiller, 1975), prostitution (eg. Barry, 1979), and pornography (eg. Dworkin, 1981). This work has been seen as coming within a different approach to that of the structural analyses quoted above, for complex reasons which it is not appropriate to go into here. I wanted to be able to draw these different strands
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of feminist analysis together in thinking about the transition from school to un/employment for young white working class women. The first stage in this process involves taking a new look at the sphere of ‘leisure’ for women. Sociological theories of ‘leisure’ have mainly reproduced dominant ‘common sense’ assumptions about the work/leisure relation, (eg. Parker, 1971; Roberts, 1970 and 1978). Men in full-time waged work are explicitly used as the models against which everyone else (including housewives and the unemployed) is judged, so that ‘leisure’ is not deconstructed as an ideological category. Feminist critiques of this work have suggested that such men’s ‘leisure’ time outside of waged work rests on women’s unpaid domestic work and childcare in the home. Most women’s ‘leisure’ is constrained by a double load of work if they are employed: waged work outside the home (or inside it for homeworkers), and unwaged work in the home. Women’s ‘leisure’ is severely limited by what may be 24-hour childcare responsibilities, and is frequently subject to male approval, (Griffin et al., 1980). In this sense, men are work for women. Conversely, women play a crucial part in men’s ‘leisure’, whether as escorts (paid or unpaid), prostitutes, or simply as objects of male gaze. (A 35-year old University lecturer recently informed me that he and a colleague frequently spent the evening at a city centre disco; ‘we only go to look at the girls’). Women are seen as, and frequently serve as, objects of potential and actual consumption for men’s ‘leisure’ – objects of sexual consumption. Women’s position as ‘leisure for men’ is certainly age-specific in its construction of young women as the ideal.3 Prostitution is one example of work for women which also plays an important part in men’s leisure, and masculine cultures outside of (and sometimes inside of) waged work. Feminists have renamed pimping as the oldest male profession, but prostitution has been seen as the ‘oldest profession’ for women for centuries. It is the only sphere where women are accorded professional status with few objections from men. It is surprising that analyses of women’s position in waged work have so rarely mentioned prostitution, or modes of social control of women’s sexuality in the labour market. (However, it is mentioned in Sheila Lewenhak’s (1980) review of women’s work from earliest prehistory to the present). Prostitution is waged work for women which predates capitalism, and continues at all levels due to overwhelming male demand. Kathleen Barry has seen prostitution as a form of ‘female sexual slavery’, which she defines as ‘present in ALL situations where women or girls cannot change the immediate conditions of their existence; where regardless of how they got into those conditions they cannot get out; and where they are subject to sexual violence and exploitation’ (Barry, 1979, p. 33, her emphasis). She links international traffic in women and children to prostitution, and sees the identification of women ‘first as sexual beings who are responsible for the sexual services of men as the social base for gender-specific sexual slavery’ (Barry, p. 33, her emphasis). She sees extreme – but nonetheless widespread and continuing – forms of sexual violence and exploitation of women as closely related to rape and forms of ‘family sexual slavery’, such as incest (daughter-rape), and male violence in the home. These she links to the widespread patriarchal objectification of women as sexual objects for men. Kathleen Barry’s analysis allows us some space to relate young women’s experiences and position in the labour market to their ‘leisure’ time, and to women’s sexual objectification by and for men. This does not mean that young women’s position in other forms of waged work is equivalent to that of young women in prostitution, but it is important to consider the ways in which the two areas are linked. Nowhere is this connection more explicit than in the
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position of black women in the labour markets of the so-called ‘Third World’, through the operation of patriarchal imperialism. Western-owned multi-national companies open manufacturing plants in order to use local young black women as cheap labour, paying them minimal (often less than subsistence) wages to assemble electronic circuits, micro-processors, and other technological wonders for the West. After only a few years, these women cannot continue with the work, since their eyesight is ruined. They are laid off, or forced to leave, and, probably with young children to support, have no alternative but to turn to prostitution in order to survive. International tourism and visiting businessmen (as well as military servicemen) swell the demand for their ‘services’, which are advertised as part of package holiday trips – as ‘cheap thrills’, (Thitsa, 1981). In contemporary Britain, some teachers and employers clearly see prostitution as a potential ‘option’ for female school-leavers, especially those young working class and black women who are seen as ‘troublesome’ or ‘disruptive’. My own work has demonstrated the pervasiveness of such ‘common sense’ links between prostitution, employment and unemployment for young working class women. The headmaster of a co-educational comprehensive school in a working class district told me that: ‘some of our kids don’t get jobs but they manage alright . . . some girls will find work alright – they go on the streets – some of them are already there while they’re still at school. Their mothers are prostitutes too, after all it’s the oldest profession, and the girls get their training there’ (genial laugh). In one sense, this view has some material basis, since many young women are forced to go on the game for financial reasons, or by their mothers’ and friends’ pimps. The processes through which young women enter prostitution are complex, and pimping strategies play a considerable role, (see Barry, 1979). This paper is not intended to develop an understanding of young women’s position in prostitution, but focusses on the ways in which the latter relates to the transition from school to un/employment for young working class women, and to their sexual objectification in waged work and leisure. In seeing prostitution as an example of waged work for women (and leisure for men) in this way, I am not suggesting that prostitution is a model for all young women’s jobs, nor that it is necessarily the last resort for women who can find no other place in the labour market. Although most theories of women’s position in waged work have failed to consider the role of prostitution, it is a potential job for women, and it is clearly seen by some teachers and employers as a possible source of income for particular groups of young women: those who are seen as ‘non-academic’ and/or ‘disruptive’. Including an understanding of prostitution and the importance of women’s sexual objectification in any analysis of young women’s position in waged work would significantly affect the nature of that analysis. I would suggest that women are simultaneously positioned in the labour market and the sexual marketplace. The former includes the traditional sociological view of the labour market and the full range of potential jobs for women – and men. The latter refers to the ways in which women are judged as potential lovers (paid and unpaid), and as potential objects of male gaze and sexual consumption: as ‘fair game’. Prostitution forms a link between the two, having a place in both the sexual and labour markets for women. Whether they work as prostitutes or not, and even if they are unaware of the process, women (and especially young women) are seen as potential objects of male gaze and sexual consumption, and this affects the cultures and structures of women’s jobs, and their position on the labour market, as I hope to demonstrate. The sexual market overlaps with what has been called the ‘marriage market’ for women (see Hamilton, 1909), in which women are judged as potential wives and mothers, working
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for, and emotionally and sexually servicing, men and their families. Cultural and ideological pressures on young women to ‘get a man’ in order to succeed as women fundamentally affect their experiences of the transition from school to un/employment, (Griffin, 1982). These different marketplaces demand different and contradictory forms of femininity, some of which will be discussed in the last section of the paper. For example, those marketplaces and discourses which construct young women as potential objects of sexual consumption for men define heterosexuality as the ‘norm’. The sexual market does not treat all women as an undifferentiated group. Women’s potential ‘goingprice’ in the sexual marketplace is class, age and race specific, with young, white and apparently middle class women at a premium. These differences are also partially reflected in the structure of the labour market for young women, such that young working class and black women are in the worst paid, most menial jobs, and are more likely to be unemployed than their white and middle class (and male) peers, (see Malcolm, 1980). The dominant male view of all women, and especially young women as potential ‘game’ is reflected in the frequences of women’s experiences of sexual harrassment in and out of work (see Backhouse and Cohen, 1978, and Farley, 1976). For example, two unemployed young women (both white and working class) recently walked around the ‘jewellery quarter’ in Birmingham, smartly dressed, and looking for vacancies. This is an area of numerous small manufacturing firms and warehouses. In broad daylight they were solicited several times, in an area which is not a known ‘red light’ district, simply because they were two young women walking along the street without male ‘protection’. Most young working class women move into ‘women’s’ jobs in three main sectors of the labour market (if they can get jobs): office work, shop work or factory work. These jobs are characterised by low pay, low status, with poor working conditions and negligible possibility of training. Although the pay is not necessarily any better, office (and some shop) work is seen by most young women, parents, teachers and careers officers as more attractive than factory work: a ‘nice job for a girl’. One reason why office work in particular is seen as the more attractive job is the potential that it might (supposedly) offer for meeting eligible men in secure staff (rather than production) jobs. This perception is a partial reflection of ideological and cultural pressures on young women to get a job and to get a man, and of their simultaneous transitions to the labour market, the sexual market and the marriage market (see Griffin et al, 1980 for a discussion of the implications of this view of young women’s jobs for their experiences of waged work and ‘leisure’). An important aspect of the differentiation between various young women’s jobs concerns the forms of femininity which are required in particular types of work. These forms are age, race and class specific, such that office work tends to demand ‘well-groomed’, ‘nicely-spoken’ young women who are usually white and middle class, or who can at least pass as middle class in speech and appearance. Some young Asian women do get office jobs, due to racist stereotypes of Asian femininity as passive and docile, and to dominant images of ‘exotic’ Eastern sexuality, (see Parmar and Mirza, 1981; Race and Politics Group, CCCS, in press). For example, a woman administrator, working in local further education provision engaged a young Afro-Caribbean woman as a secretary. She told me that she had purposely practised ‘positive discrimination’ because of young black women’s doubly ‘disadvantaged’ position in the local labour market. She had been astounded at the reactions of her (white) colleagues and visitors. On hearing ‘Yvonne’ answer the phone, or seeing her in the office, visitors would assume that she was the cleaner – simply due to the pervasiveness of race-specific and racist assumptions about young black women’s position in employment.
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The importance of appearance in such supposedly ‘glamorous’ jobs is frequently reflected in training provision for young women (where any such provision exists). For example, a large subsidiary of a multi-national corporation, which is involved in heavy engineering work, has two training centres. The craft training centre takes on about 30 male apprentices per year (and one young woman a year for the past 3 years), for the 4-year training period. The secretarial school takes on about 10 young women a year for the 8 months training, and is almost unique of its kind. Office work training usually takes place ‘on the job’, or in school/ FE college. Apart from shorthand, typing and office practice, the training course included sessions on makeup, fashion and ‘grooming’, and advice on contraception. As one young woman said to me: ‘they don’t want us to get pregnant yet – not after they’ve trained us’. Such an accent on appearance would have no direct equivalent for these young women’s male peers, apprentices in the firm’s craft training centre. Indeed, only when young women train in ‘men’s’ jobs alongside men is this emphasis on appearance absent in the training programme itself – but not in supervisors’ and male trainees’ comments on the appearance of the female apprentices.4 There is a distinction between women’s position as visible symbols (usually) of male prestige and power, and as invisible workers who do the menial and monotonous jobs. Young white and middle class women tend to get the former, and working class and black women the latter jobs. The structure of secretarial and clerical work is one example of the way that this division operates within a particular type of job. A secretary with 15 years experience explains the contradictions produced by the divisions within office work: I started out in the typing pool and that’s hard work – it’s so monotonous. They just hope that you will get pregnant and leave. I went on to a job in a small firm which was much more interesting and varied. I had more responsibility, but the pay wasn’t too good. I went to night school and got all my qualifications book-keeping and that. A few years later I got a PA’s job (personal assistant), and there I was, with a good salary, at the top of the tree, and bored out of my mind. I had all these qualifications, but I couldn’t use them because a PA is just like a servant to the boss, like a status symbol of his power. I had to go out and buy his wife’s anniversary present. Within office work there is a distinction between the badly paid, tedious, ‘production line’ work in the typing pool, and the more prestigious, better paid PA jobs, where the secretary sometimes does little more than act as the boss’s substitute wife. (See Hazel Downing (1981) for a discussion of the operation of patriarchal relations in the office, and the contemporary structure of women’s office work). The role of appearance in such apparently ‘glamorous’ jobs is more complex than I have been able to suggest here. Those young women’s jobs which do stress the importance of appearance need not necessarily involve women in directly servicing men. A number of these jobs are concerned to sell the importance of ‘glamorous’ femininity to women: hairdressing and ‘beauty therapy’ for example. Where young women’s work involves this stress on the importance of appearance and speech, it is according to a criteria of women’s visibility on male terms. Young women frequently turn the dominant views of what constitutes acceptable femininity around, distorting, exaggerating and/or rejecting them. Anna Pollert (1981) and Hazel Downing (1981), for example, have discussed the ways that forms of femininity can be used as modes of individual and collective resistance in the factory and the office. This can take
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the form of young women’s sexual put-down of male supervisors and bosses as unattractive, inept – or just unbelievably old. Just as different groups of young women can use forms of femininity as resistances in waged work in complex and contradictory ways, different jobs demand different forms of femininity, which cross-cut on race, age and class specific lines. It is difficult to imagine how a young woman taking home £30.00 a week as an office junior can be expected to appear in different ‘smart and fashionable’ clothes and make-up every day. Young women in factory work are expected to have a pragmatic and instrumental approach to their work, yet employers have (literally!) wrung their hands in desperation to me, complaining when these young women make pragmatic, sensible decisions about their lives, and leave the job when it suits them to do so. Of course, the process of looking ‘glamorous’ is not solely about pressures to be attractive to men, or to get a particular job; it can be a pleasurable experience in itself. Experimenting with make-up and dressing up, alone or with other young women, is an important part of feminine cultural practice, (see Hemmings, 1982). Janice Winship (1981) has discussed the importance of narcissism and self-image for women’s experience of looking glamorous. The role of speech and appearance in defining women’s visibility in waged work is complex, and in the last section of the paper I want to consider the ways in which this is related to contradictory themes in ideologies of adolescent femininity. Different jobs and different marketplaces construct and demand different and contradictory forms of femininity: there is no one straightforward and ideal form of femininity to which all young women could conform, even if they wanted to.
The good, the bad and the ugly: images of young women The final section of the paper serves as a synthesis of the ideas so far expressed, as they are relevant to the contradictions set up by dominant discourses around adolescent femininity. This is not a textual analysis in the strictest structuralist sense, since it is grounded in the experiences of young, white working class women who are at specific transition points in the labour, sexual and marriage markets, facing cultural and ideological pressures to get a man and to get a job. Of course, aspects of ideologies which are expressed in specific texts do not necessarily have any straightforward relation to young women’s experiences. The most common dichotomy in ‘common sense’ ideas about adolescent femininity is expressed by the John Travolta character in Saturday Night Fever, when he asks a young woman: ‘you can either be a nice girl or a pig . . . which one are you?’ Or a young prostitute quoted in a 19 article: ‘I have seen so many pretty girls become absolute tarts, horrible people, and no one wants to know when you are like that’ (19, November 1980, p. 47). Kathleen Barry has seen this ‘virgin/whore’ dichotomy as a crucial foundation to female sexual slavery, women’s sexual objectification, and as a means of dividing women against one another. It has its own specific expressions in different cultures, in different cultural practices and in various historical periods, and the male-dominated religions have been to its establishment and reproduction (Hamilton, 1978; Stone, 1976). The virgin/whore dichotomy has been, and remains, of central relevance to patriarchal power. It creates a double standard which is currently experienced by many young women through the need to guard their sexual reputations, and to cope with male demands for sex (Griffin, 1982; McRobbie 1978b). ‘The lads’ demand sex, and if you comply you’re a slut, but if you don’t you’re frigid. If you go on the Pill, that is planning it in advance, so you must be a real slag. ‘What do you do if a man asks you for sex?’ is a question which
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crystallises many young women’s fears about men, sexuality, contraception, male violence and ‘romance’. The dichotomy between Good and Bad women is not a straightforward ideological division which can be negotiated. It is a profound contradiction in which young women always lose, whatever they do. The Good/Bad: nice girl/slag division is more complex even than setting up a contradiction which it is impossible to negotiate successfully, since it takes race, class and age specific forms. The image of ‘ideal’ adolescent femininity is the virginal nymphet (cf. Lolita), who is white (preferably Aryan, with blue eyes and blonde hair), and ‘nice’ (ie middle class). Despite her virginal aura, this male ideal is also potentially sexually available. The ‘nice girl’ isn’t stupid – she has a few ‘O’ and even ‘A’ levels – but she’s not too intelligent. Young working class women are seen as ‘rough’, ‘less academic’ or ‘supermums’ in relation to this dominant ideal of the ‘nice girl’ which pervades the education system, the social services, the NHS, the home and the workplace in its various forms. The ‘nice girl’ is also white, since ideologies around gender and sexuality are clearly constructed and experienced in racist terms, (Race and Politics Group, in press; Brent CHC, 1981). ‘Common sense’ (i.e. white) views of black femininity see young Afro-Caribbean women as deviant because they are seen as too heterosexual, too available, and aggressive. Their cultural and family traditions are seen as pathological in relation to the white, middle class nuclear family ‘ideal’, which labels black children as ‘illegitimate’ if their mother is not married. Young Asian women are also seen as being trapped within a ‘deviant’ family structure based on arranged marriage, which does not conform to the white western ideal of romantic love, courtship, and the myth of the companionate marriage (cf. Parwar and Mirza 1981). The stereotype of young Asian women is based on an image of ultrapassivity, counterposed with images of ‘the exotic East’. These racist views of black femininity have their own historical traditions stemming from white, western colonialism, slavery and imported ‘immigrant’ labour, both in the past and the present (Race and Politics Group, in press; Hall, 1978).5 There is an added dimension to the division between Good and Bad women, since it is seldom realised that this distinction, complex and contradictory as it is, is mediated through a powerful ‘norm’ of compulsory heterosexuality. What Adrienne Rich (1980) and Gayle Rubin (1975) have called ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ refers to an important aspect of patriarchal social relations; a process which operates at ideological, cultural and structural levels, and in different ways for different groups of women. ‘Compulsory heterosexuality’ is not used in the biological sense, but refers to the social construction of heterosexuality as the ‘normal’ expression of male and female sexuality, thereby rendering all alternatives ‘deviant’, ‘evil’, ‘abnormal’, or simply non-existent. The operation of this process has varied considerably through different historical periods (Faderman, 1981), affecting discourses and practices around female and male sexuality through a huge range of marriage forms and kinship systems (Rubin, 1975). The cultural constraints and ideological pressures imposed by the system of compulsory heterosexuality are particularly crucial for young women, (see Griffin, 1982; Leonard, 1980). As a clear instance of the contradictory nature of dominant assumptions about adolescent femininity, I want to quote from a book by Harold Marchant and Helen Smith on ‘Adolescent Girls at Risk’ (1977). This was based on a detached youth work research project in a North of England borough, which was intended to define the concept of ‘at risk’ for young women under 18. The project workers ‘studied’ groups of young women, in order to analyse the most effective methods of detached work for amending their behaviour. For those social services which are primarily concerned with adolescent ‘deviance’, young
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women are usually presented as being passively ‘at risk’, and young men as actively ‘antisocial’ and ‘disruptive’. In one sense young women are more at risk – precisely from those young men, (Griffin et al, 1980). Marchant and Smith’s work is quoted as an example of dominant ‘common sense’ assumptions about ‘deviant’ (and hence also non-deviant) adolescent femininity. Their study is not a straightforward reflection of all teachers’ parents’, employers’ youth workers’ – and researchers’ – views of young women, but it does represent a clear theme in dominant discourses around adolescent femininity: the view of female sexuality as a problem. For the purposes of this paper, I want to quote Marchant and Smith’s 14 ‘at risk’ factors in full, as they were developed on the basic of field-workers’ observations and reports. They are: 1 Poor attendance at school or employment. 2 Home background of stress or disruption. 3 Staying away from home overnight (visits to friends or relatives . . . known to parents . . . not included). 4 Difficulties with general social contacts (. . . either no social contacts as suggested by girl consistently on her own, or particularly frequent changes of companions). 5 General social behaviour difficulties (this factor also referred to opposite extremes of behaviour: either general apathy or aimlessness, or behaviour which demands attention, for instance, continually dominating the conversation). 6 Involved with drug taking (this included social involvement with a drug-taking group or individual). 7 Drinking heavily while of school age. 8 Illegal activities eg. shoplifting, stealing. 9 Miscellaneous bizarre behaviour (such as to suggest psychiatric disturbance). 10 Attention-seeking appearance (eg. sexually provocative dress, makeup unusual among a girls’ peers). 11 Girl is tattooed. 12 Difficulties in general contacts with males (eg. girl markedly disinterested in males, frequently changing superficial contacts with males, promiscuous). 13 Frequent association with delinquents, ‘roughs’, gypsies. 14 Frequent association with older men outside girls’ peer groups’. (Marchant and Smith, 1977, p. 14, their emphasis) Any young woman found to have more than 4 of these factors is defined as ‘at risk’. It is clear that a majority of young women are at risk’ according to these criteria – I certainly was! These factors demonstrate that young women are seen as ‘at risk’ from men, although it is their behaviour which must be ‘amended’, since the girls are defined as at fault and ‘provocative’. Kathleen Barry (1979) has called this the ‘rape paradigm’, such that women are simultaneously presented as passive, and as to blame for men’s behaviour. The ‘at risk’ factors are primarily related to young women’s sexuality and the risks presented by ‘rough’ male sexuality. For our purposes, factors 4 and 12 are the most relevant, but it is worth mentioning point 5 in passing. Dale Spender (1980) has recently demonstrated the myriad ways in which men usually dominate conversations, whereas women’s participation is judged against an ideal of silence, so that women even speaking comes to be seen as a problem. From points 4 and 12, the ‘opposite extremes of behaviour’ which are seen as equally problematic involve being ‘promiscuous’: too heterosexual, or not being heterosexual enough:
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the unspoken threat of lesbianism. So the division between Good and Bad women is mediated through the ‘norm’ of compulsory heterosexuality. This constructs a three-way division between the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The third element in this relates to those young women who are seen as too ‘ugly’ to get a man; those who are judged to pay insufficient attention to men; and those who choose not to get a man. With all the risks that heterosexuality holds for young women, appearing not to be heterosexual, or interested in men, is seen as an equally difficult (if not worse) problem by Marchant and Smith. This third element is also a synoym for the profound threat posed by women’s friendships, support groups, and collective resistances to patriarchy. It can even come to stand for women merely being together, or alone, out of male control (Griffin, 1982). Contemporary ‘common sense’ constructs lesbians (and any women who live ‘unattached’ to a man) as unable to get a man, not sufficiently attractive to men, or just ‘going through a phase’. Lesbianism is in itself a social construction which began to have particular resonances in Britain after the first War, partly because fewer women chose to marry, and as a response to women’s struggles for the vote, and the ‘first wave’ of twentieth century feminism (Faderman 1981). What I have called ‘the Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ forms a fearsome ideological triad which operates in race, age and class specific ways, and which is experienced, negotiated and resisted by different groups of young women in varying and complex ways. Young women are faced with pressures to be feminine in certain ways which vary in different schools, different work-places, and in ‘leisure’. Part of the power of these pressures lies in their contradictory nature, and in their construction of ‘ideals’ which are impossible to attain, as well as in their suppression of any alternatives. Celibacy, lesbianism, women living together without men, and any alternatives to the white, middle class nuclear family ‘norm’ are denied, or seen as ‘evil’ or pathological (Griffin, 1980; Race and Politics Group, in press).
Conclusion In this paper I have been primarily concerned with dominant assumptions about adolescent femininity as these affect young women’s experiences of, and positions in the transition to un/employment. I have argued that notions about young women’s sexuality and appearance are crucial here. Rather than consider in detail the specific assumptions of groups in dominant positions over young women (such as teachers, fathers, mothers, boys, employers or careers officers), I have concentrated on the central themes which run through dominant assumptions about young women. Different individuals and groups would combine these themes in a variety of ways to shape their perceptions of, and practices towards different groups of young women. These ‘common sense’ assumptions will, to some extent, be reflected in young women’s experiences and perceptions. Part of the power of dominant ideas lies in their percolation to every corner of a society, so that they appear, not as the ideas of a dominant group, but as natural and ‘popular’ common sense ideas, which are taken for granted, and rarely questionned, (see Hall, 1980, and Race and Politics Group, in press, for two accounts of the uses of Gramsci’s notion of ‘common sense’). In this paper I have tried to define and deconstruct some of these ‘common sense’ ideas; to question their status as supposedly ‘natural’ laws; and to begin to understand the ways in which they might relate to the position of young working class women in the labour, sexual and marriage markets. The paper is intended to provide a starting point from which to think about and develop connections between the transitions to un/employment and to heterosexuality and marriage/motherhood for
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different groups of young women with particular respect to ‘common sense’ about, and control of, their sexuality.
Notes 1 This paper was originally presented at a British Sociological Association Women’s Caucus seminar on ‘Images of Women in the Labour Market’ at Keele University, November 1981. I am grateful to Chris Hardy, Maureen McNeil and Mandy Root for their comments on the first draft of the paper. 2 This paper is based on my work on a Social Science Research Council project, ‘Young Women and Work: With Special Reference to Gender and the Family’, following a group of young, white working class women from school to waged work – and unemployment. 3 Seeing women as part of men’s leisure would not deny the role that specific groups of men have also played in men’s (and some women’s leisure). Male prostitutes continue to service men, for example the ’Dilly boys in London’s Piccadilly. On a different level, Afro-Caribbean artists have played an important part in white North American and European entertainment throughout the twentieth century, from the Jazz Age to contemporary soul, disco, funk and reggae. 4 Constraints on women’s speech and appearance are also found in more ‘middle class’ jobs like teaching and nursing. This can take the form of racist sanctions, as for example, when young Asian women are banned from wearing the trousers which form a crucial part of their cultural and religious tradition, as students in school and in nursing. Alternatively, one white woman science teacher I know was doing her probationary teaching in a mixed comprehensive school in Essex, and the male head would not allow women teachers to wear trousers. She had to cycle to and from work on a pushbike, and if she wore trousers to protect herself from the worst of the winter weather, she could not risk losing her job by keeping them on all day. She had to bring a skirt to change into. On her last day, when she had found a job elsewhere, and her probationary period was up, she came to school in trousers and kept them on all day – as a last gesture of defiance. 5 It is important to understand the race-specific and racist nature of ideologies of femininity. A recent paper by Celia Cowie and Sue Lees (1981) is one example of the ways that white feminist academics can render black women invisible, and ignore the effects of racism in their analysis. They interviewed young women students in a ‘multi-racial’ school, mainly about the use of the label ‘slag’. Presumably some of these young women were white, and some were black, although this is never mentioned in their paper. Work with white people should aim to develop an understanding of, and challenge to, forms of white racism, since it is essential that any analysis of ‘race’ is not concerned solely, with black people. Black people, and black cultures are not the problem where ‘race’ and racism is concerned: dominant white cultures and institutions and forms of white racism are the problem. It is simply indefensible that Cowie and Lees have failed to discuss the specifically racist use of ‘slag’ by young white men and women against young black women.
References Backhouse, C. and Cohen, L. The Secret Oppression: Sexual Harrassment of Working Women, Toronto, MacMillan Press, 1978. Barron and Norris, ‘Women and the Dual Labour Market’ in D.L. Barker and S. Allen (eds.), Dependence and Exploitation in Work and Marriage, London, Longmans, 1976. Barry, K. Female Sexual Slavery, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1979. Beechey, V. ‘Some Notes on Female Wage Labour’, Capital and Class, 1977, 3, p. 45–67. Birmingham Feminist History Group, ‘Feminism as Feminity in the 1950s’ Feminist Review, 1979, 3, p. 48–65. Brent Community Health Council, Black People and the NHS, Brent CHC. pamphlet, 1981. Brownmiller, S. Against Our Will: Men and Rape, New York: Simon and 1975. Cowie, C. and Lees, S. ‘Slags or Pigs’, Feminist Review, 1981, 9. Delphy, C. The Main Enemy: A Materialist Feminist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, WRRC. pamphlet, 1977. Downing, H. Secretarial Work and Technological Change: Patriarchal Relations in the Office’ CCCS. Ph.D. thesis, 1981.
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Dworkin, A. Pornography: Men Possessing Women, The Women’s Press, 1981. Faderman, L. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, Junction Books, 1981. Farley, L. Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harrassment of Women on the Job, McGraw Hill, 1976. Fletcher, R. The Family and Marriage in Britain, Penguin, 1966. Griffin, C., Hobson, D., McCabe, T., and McIntosh, S., ‘Women and Leisure’ paper presented at BSA/LSA ‘Leisure and Social Control’ conference CCCS, Birmingham, Jan.1980; and in J. Hargreaves (ed), Sport Culture and Ideology, Routledge and Kegan Paul, in press. Hall, S. ‘Race and “Moral Panics” in Post-War Britain’, BSA lecture, 1978. Hall, S. ‘Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some Problems and Problematics’, in S. Hall et al. (eds), Culture, Media, Language, Hutchinsons, 1980. Hamilton, C. Marriage as a Trade, The Women’s Press, first published 1909. Hamilton, R. The Liberation of Women, London, Allen and Unwin, 1978. Hemmings, S. (ed), Girls are Powerful: Young Women’s Writings From Spare Rib, Sheba Press, 1982. Kuhn, A. and Wolpe, A-M. Feminism and Materialism, RKP, 1978. Leonard, D. Sex and Generation: A Study of Courtship and Weddings, Tavistock, 1980. Lewenhak, S. Women and Work, Fontana, 1980. Malcolm, P. ‘The Anatomy of Youth Unemployment’, Careers Bulletin, D. of E., Summer 1980. Marchant, H. and Smith, H. Adolescent Girls at Risk, Pergamon Press, 1977. McRobbie, A. ‘Jackie: An Ideology of Adolescent Femininity’, CCCS, stencilled paper, 1978a. McRobbie, A. ‘Working Class Girls and the Culture of Femininity’ in Women’s Studies Group, CCCS, Women Take Issue. Hutchinson, 1978b. McRobbie, A. and Garber, J. ‘Girls and Subcultures: An Exploration’ in S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds), 1975. Mitchell, J. Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Penguin, 1975. Parker, S. The Future of Work and Leisure, Longman, 1971. Parmar, P. and Mirza, N. ‘Growing Angry, Growing Strong’, Spare Rib, 1981, III. Pollert, A. Girls, Wives, Factory Lives, Macmillan Press, 1981. Race and Politics Group, CCCS, The Empire Strikes Back, Hutchinson, in press. Rich, A. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, Only Women Press pamphlet, 1980. Roberts, K. Leisure, Longman, 1970. Roberts, K. Contemporary Society and the Growth of Leisure, Longman, 1978. Rubin, G. ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy of Sex” ’, in R. Reiter (ed). Toward an Anthropology of Women, Monthly Review Press, 1975. Spender, D. Man Made Language, RKP, 1980. Stone, M. The Paradise Papers: the Suppression of Women’s Rites, Virago, 1976. Thitsa, K. ‘Tourist Thailand: Women for Sale’, Spare Rib, 1981, 103: see also Elson, D. and Pearson, R. ‘Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers: An Analysis of Women’s Employment in Third World Export Manufacturing’, Feminist Review, 1981, 7, p. 87–107. Willis, P. ‘Structures and Forms in Cultures of Resistance in School’, Unit 30, Open University Course on Popular Culture, forthcoming. Winship, J. ‘Sexuality for Sale’, in S. Hall et al (eds), Culture, Media, Language, Hutchinson, 1980. Winship, J. ‘Woman Becomes an Individual: Feminity and Consuption in Women’s Magazines 1954–69’, CCCS. stencilled paper, 1981. Women’s Studies Group, CCCS. Women Take Issue, Hutchinson, 1978.
Section 5
Race
Introduction Lost in translation Hazel Carby
From 1978–1984, when I was associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, completing first an MA and then a PhD, were years of seemingly inexhaustible intellectual energy, passionate commitment and political vision. Pessimism of the intellect, a response to a rapidly increasing state authoritarianism, the brutal effects of everyday racism and gender inequality, and what appeared to be the continual defeat of left and progressive agendas, was countered by an optimism of the will exercised in intellectual activity in the service of social, political and economic transformation. I arrived at the Centre, an obnoxiously self-righteous, anti-racist activist, in my seventh year as a high school teacher of English on a fully paid sabbatical from the London Borough of Newham. With me came the historical baggage of those years: a politics of the classroom forged in defence of the tenets and practices of progressive education against the insidious incursions of the Department of Education under ‘Maggie Thatcher the Milk Snatcher’;1 and a politics of the street honed in anti-racist battles waged against fascist gangs and their racist cousins in police uniform who patrolled our neighbourhood. While I learnt much from each of those struggles they cost me little. However, I riffed upon them brazenly, elaborating them as ‘street cred’ to disguise how terrified and insecure I actually felt about being back and black in graduate school. I had worked in the vibrant and turbulent multiracial, multiethnic, unstreamed classrooms of a comprehensive school where a handful of us worked collectively in the hope that our pupils could be equal partners in the learning process. I saw how young minds and bodies opened under progressive, creative and imaginative educational practices supported by generous resources. But, in the midst of possibility, I also saw my black students terrorised by violence and the threat of violence: bricks were thrown through their windows as they slept; faeces and/or flaming bottles were pushed through their letter boxes; and to get to and from school or the shops they had to pass through a gauntlet of racist slogans daubed throughout our neighbourhoods. At any hour of any day they could be subject to physical and/or mental abuse, in or out of school, from their peers, from shopkeepers, from the police and social service workers. To be of any use to them, my classroom had to be transformed into a laboratory not only for the forensic examination of the roots and causes of racist encounters and their emotional toll, but also for the translation of this analysis into practical strategies for countering and overcoming its effects. When I applied to attend the Centre I had a much-thumbed copy of Paolo Freier’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed on my bedside table, a text which informed my practice in my high school and my adult literacy classes. I had also assembled a growing library of books and papers published by CCCS including Resistance through Rituals and On Ideology. Exhausted at the end of the day, in moments stolen from grading papers or working on lesson plans, or
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during a weekend when I wasn’t taking my form on a camping trip, or to the theatre, I read with diligence and care what was being written at the Centre. I was eager for an intellectual challenge though I sometimes found the reading difficult and occasionally impenetrable. But I never doubted that the effort was worth it. Even though I hadn’t met any of the members of CCCS I regarded them as allies in the fight against the increasingly authoritarian and conservative forces being mobilised against the poor, the working class, the black and the immigrant, in short, against everyone in my world. I devoured the insights which addressed our condition in an area with high levels of unemployment, imprisonment, immigration, inadequate housing and racism and very low income levels. CCCS publications, I thought, contained analyses with which one could begin to develop defensive strategies and to imagine the construction of paths to a just and equitable world. The interview following my application to the Centre terrified me but the letter offering me a place terrified me even more. I was afraid that I would be unable to translate the knowledge I carried with me into what I regarded as the theoretically sophisticated world of CCCS. Before I left Newham I carefully explained to my students that I was going to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies for a year to study and get a Masters degree and they all seemed to understand and applaud my reasons and motives. When I met five or six of them outside the butcher’s shop around the corner from my flat in Forest Gate after my first term in Birmingham, they were very pleased to see me and we chatted for ages. But gradually they revealed some doubts about my rate of progress, were curious as to exactly how hard I had been studying, and asked if I was sure that I could pass my exams at the end of the year. They sounded like me when concerned about a failing student! Eventually it dawned on me that the cause of their concern derived from the fact that my manner of speaking had not ‘improved’ in their eyes, despite the months that had been spent studying culture. Only gradually did I understand the terms of their equation: for my students, “cultural studies” translated into becoming “cultured” and being “cultured” meant sounding like a BBC broadcaster. Culture, then, was the means by which I was to acquire class mobility, class position in Britain being recognised, confirmed and secured by accent. My failure to make ‘progress’ was registered in my voice and much was at stake in my evident lack of success. If I hadn’t learnt to speak differently how on earth was I going to be able to teach them or their children to be cultured, and thus upwardly mobile? If I didn’t make it they didn’t either. The year before we had taken a class trip, not one of our major expeditions, just a walk down the road to the office of Docklands Development in the last class period of the day. There we walked around and between tables on which lay detailed models of our area, ‘developed.’ Gone were the familiar shabby streets, decaying high rises and council flats. The voices of my pupils usually loud, energetic and buoyant were hushed, their almost whispers a measure of a certain awe and respect, if not of comprehension. I stood apart from them, against the wall, an observer, for I had visited this office before, seen the display and recognised what it meant for the residents of the area. I didn’t have the heart to translate it for them; I wanted them to see and understand for themselves what was coming. ‘It’s beautiful’, I heard one say, followed by, ‘Which of these houses do you want?’ ‘I want this one right on this canal.’ ‘I don’t, it’s too close to the water.’ ‘Why does the water go right under the side of these houses?’ ‘So you can keep your boat in there, stupid.’ ‘But my mum doesn’t have a boat.’
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Silence was followed by gradual realisation. First they understood that these houses were not for people who didn’t have boats, and especially not for people who couldn’t even imagine owning a boat. Then they saw that re-development was not for them; that people like them were not to be included in the rosy images of the future docklands. How many of them knew that people like them were expendable and would, inevitably, be displaced, I don’t know. The volume of their voices rose to their normal levels, they glanced rather than looked at me for explanations they didn’t want to hear. Without being prompted they turned their backs on the tables and gathered jackets and bags ready to leave. In a chorus all of them thought of places they had to be. So, a year later, outside the butcher’s, another hope, the one placed in their teacher, bit the dust. Between 1967 and 1970 I studied for an interdisciplinary degree in English and History from the extraordinarily talented faculty at Portsmouth Polytechnic; I learnt about the power of the state from the riot police in Grosvenor Square. I was the first in the family to go to college or to regard the United States as anything other than a saviour of the ‘free’ world. During WWII my Welsh mother was a civil servant in the Air Ministry and my Jamaican dad served in the RAF. Persecuted and ostracised as a ‘multiracial’ couple, education was their primary investment as a material legacy for their two children. Education was not just a path to financial security and social mobility; it was armour for ‘half-caste’ children. The mantras of ‘words will never harm you’, and ‘just be the best, be the first in your class and they will leave you alone’, resonated in the background of our school years. My brother and I knew differently, of course: words of hatred often immediately preceded the sticks and stones that broke bones, or in my case teeth. Education, in my family, demanded endless sacrifice. We were removed from the local schools and send to private schools. My brother had a partial scholarship but my mother still had to work multiple jobs, day and night, to pay the fees. I am convinced that my parents’ belief in the promise and transformative power of a British education was a measure of the depth of their faith in Britishness. My brother and I never witnessed the wavering of this faith, not even when my father had to go to the Tottenham Court Road police station to obtain the release of my Dulwich Prep and Alleyns-educated brother, who had been arrested and detained under the SUS laws for walking along Oxford Street with a cheque book (his own) in his hand. You could say that I inherited an obsession with education, but I translated it into an entirely different political and intellectual agenda. I didn’t have faith, I had questions. I registered for a post-graduate degree in education at the Institute of Education, London University, to investigate why the educational system preserved rather than challenged inequalities of class, gender and race. My mother wept as she drove me to my first teaching job in what she regarded as the ‘slums’. If this was the result of private schools, college degrees and the fruit of her sacrifice, she wanted no part of it. I accepted the position as an English teacher in Newham because I naively thought I could be part of fixing what was broken. I guess going to CCCS was another step in the same direction. I chose this particular narration of an individual history and the political concerns I brought to CCCS as a response to the request of the editors of these two volumes for a context against which they could be read.2 I cannot, nor would I wish to write, the history of the individual members of the Centre with whom I worked or of the authors whose work is represented in this section. The point is we all came from particular places with particular concerns. As authors of introductions to each section we were also asked to discuss the significance of the papers for the development of the field but I think that we should consider that the
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papers gathered together in this particular section under the label ‘Race’ do not represent a ‘field’ as such. Rather the collection, organisation and publication of these two volumes of essays written by members of working groups produces, in my opinion, a fictional narrative about CCCS, a narrative that should not be read as fully constitutive of its history. As a professor I am delighted that these essays will now be easily available to my students but as a former member of CCCS I worry that its closing is creating an obsession with its reproduction as mythology. While I do not mean to suggest that this collection is part of that obsession, I do want to ask that this collection of selected stencilled papers, interspersed with chapters from some of the books produced by working groups, be considered as only one form of constituting its archive. I make this analogy because I think that this collection, like an archive, does not just passively re-present or reflect CCCS history, it constructs it. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues: Archives assemble. Their assembly work is not limited to a more or less passive act of collecting. Rather it is an active act of production that prepares facts for historical intelligibility. Archives set up both the substantive and the formal elements of the narrative. They are the institutionalised sites of mediation between the sociohistorical process and the narrative about that process. They enforce the constraints on ‘debatability’ . . . they convey authority and set the rules for credibility and interdependence; they help select the stories that matter. (1995: 52) I am arguing then that the essays in these two volumes should not be received as a transparent history of the work of the Centre. On the contrary, I am comparing this collection to an archive because the selection and ordering produces a knowledge about the work of the Centre that requires interpretation and I am asking readers to be conscious of the workings of knowledge production as they read. The essays selected for these volumes are entities ordered, bound and fixed in a particular sequence which cannot capture the fluid, dynamic multiplicity of the simultaneously intersecting and diverging intellectual and political universes of the Centre, a discursive multiplicity which would befuddle the neat boundaries between and around their thematic placement. The essays in this section are gathered under one label, that of ‘Race’, but they have become detached from the many and varied concerns and conversations from and in which they originated. When I look at the contents of these two volumes I see essays ‘structured in dominance’, (Hall 1980) their fixture into sections reproducing many of the inequalities of academic thought against which we worked and wrote. When a reader opens volume one and encounters the heading ‘Theoretical Frameworks’, is the title a measure of the value or sophistication of the essays that follow? Are we to conclude that the essays not included in this section are non-theoretical or un-theoretical, or have a practical as opposed to a theoretical application? In the Race and Politics sub-group all of us, though in recognisably distinct ways, considered our work to be intervening in and contributing to the theoretical frameworks active in the work of CCCS. We hoped to make contributions to, among others, marxist theories of capitalism, theories of the state, concepts of ideology, theories of class and gender formation and antagonism, as well as engaging in a critique of theories of race relations, racial formations and racism. ‘Down these Mean Streets’ by Tony Jefferson and John Clarke and ‘Reggae, Rastas and Rudies,’ by Dick Hebdidge were published in 1973 and 1974 respectively, and represent
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research undertaken long before I arrived at the Centre. They were not written in the context of the Race and Politics group, of which I became a member, a subgroup that did not form until 1978. The genealogy of Jefferson’s, Clarke’s and Hebdidge’s analyses, arguments and theses can be traced to the Centre’s work on youth subcultures. Because these two essays are not included in the Popular Culture and Youth subculture section of this volume it is difficult for readers to discern the development of a growing concern with ‘race’ and processes of racialisation in that subgroup in the seventies, whereas we can see the beginnings of the engagement with feminist issues because Angela McRobbie’s and Jenny Garber’s essay, ‘Girls and Subcultures’ is there. The concern with ‘race’ led in different but related directions, subcultural formations and the response of the state to the presence of black youth, work which resulted in the publication of Resistance Through Rituals: Youth subcultures in post-war Britain published in 1975, and three years later to Policing the Crisis: mugging, the state, and law and order, the earliest traces of which can be seen in the first of the two books (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hall et al 1978).3 The work undertaken under the aegis of the Race and Politics group represented a theoretical break not only with the ‘race relations’ school of thought in Britain but also with many of the assumptions and premises of Hebdige, Jefferson and Clarke. For example, Hebdige in ‘Reggae, Rastas and Rudies’, takes what actually constitutes ‘race’ for granted in dramatic contrast to later work of Carby, Paul Gilroy (volume one), Andrew Green, Errol Lawrence and John Solomos et. al., whose essays not only problematise the uses and function of the term and concept of ‘race’ but whose object of study is actually racism. Jefferson and Clarke, in ‘Down these Mean Streets,’ do not analyse the processes and stages of the criminalisation of black youth in Britain by the state, the police and the media. Instead they theorise and position theft as a strategy of resistance of an underclass. In these respects each of these essays form a part of the background of thinking about ‘race’ that later generations at the Centre tried to theorise, making the concept much more complex and problematic. This distinct shift, or break, can be seen in Green’s assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of early theorisations of race and class first returning to the work of Oliver Cox and then developing a systematic and theoretically informed critique of existing studies of racial formations and studies of race relations in the UK in order to construct a more sophisticated and comprehensive analysis of race and class formation, to assess its advantage to capital, and to begin to analyse the condition of black labour in UK in comparison to migrant labour in Europe. Likewise Solomos et al and Lawrence mark the emergence of a new and distinct racial formation situating racist ideologies as ‘an organic component of attempts to make sense of the present crisis’. No collection as archive could, perhaps, adequately capture the fluidity of the Centre’s intellectual projects as interventions but what is also lost is the complex, contradictory and intensely contested relations of collective work. It is also difficult to see the articulation between and among the multiple and varied concerns of those of us who attempted to delineate the historical specificities of the uses and discourses of ‘race’ and practices of racism as members of the Race and Politics subgroup. When I clambered awkwardly off the paternoster and into the Centre I worked with three different subgroups, English studies, the Media group and the Race and Politics group. Most of us worked under the aegis of more than one sub-group although work became focused on a particular group when a publication was being planned and produced. I was also an active feminist and a member of OWAAD.4 This is to say that all of us had distinct histories, multiple affiliations and allegiances inside and outside of CCCS, which cannot be easily compartmentalised. Subgroups were formed
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around shared areas of concern and objects of investigation, not a shared or uniform politics: disagreement not agreement shaped our collective efforts. As Paul Gilroy described in the Preface to The Empire Strikes Back: Precisely because the collective is greater than the sum of its individual parts, it has been sad to watch the numbers of our group dwindle as we put our ideas onto paper and real conflicts began to emerge. We were always divided by ‘racial’ and gender differences, and it was unusual to be able to work together at all. The same political differences which took their toll on group membership, were also part of the creative process of production. Gilroy 1982 I too have made no attempt to speak in a definitive collective voice but I am concerned that the placement of the essays in these two volumes resurrects and reproduces the intellectual boundaries that many of us were trying to critique in our work. As readers, I would urge you not to reduce our varied histories, intellectual interests and political concerns to the singularity of the title of this section but rather to re-imagine the multiple conversations that were being opened and the many assumptions that we tried to interrupt and recast. If certain conversations are created through the juxtaposition of the essays, other complex engagements with a variety of practices, theories and discourses are firmly refused. ‘Multicultural Fictions’ which seems such a crude rendering of the debate now, was written when I was working with the English Studies subgroup. Intended to interrupt the discourse of multiculturalism and question its practices I would like it to be read in relation to the context of the essays in the previous education section or, even more imaginatively, in relation to the questions raised by the essays in the ‘Literature and Society’ section. While I am gratified that ‘White Woman Listen’ is being reprinted I regret that it is being archived as an essay about ‘race’ and not, among other things, about racism and feminism. It is engaged in a deep conversation with and debate about the theoretical foundations of thinking about gender in the Women’s Movement of the seventies and represented in the work of the earlier feminists in CCCS whose work was published in Women Take Issue, some of which is collected in the Women’s Studies and Feminism section. I do not claim to have made any definitive claims or conceptual advances in ‘White Woman Listen,’ but I do mourn not only the repression of the multiple conversations being engaged at the time of its writing but the loss of conversations that might have been in its reprinting – conversations which it is necessary to imagine if we are ever to have a richer, fuller and more complete idea of the human. New forms of multicultural fictions continue to proliferate to the point of absurdity. Professor Linda Colley seems to think that ‘race relations’ will improve if the face of Olaudah Equiano appears on British banknotes, while Trevor Phillips, head of the Commission for Racial Equality, wants to institute a compulsory citizenship test at 18.5 They would do well to read Errol Lawrence’s ‘Just plain common sense: the “roots” of racism’ which opens with these words: Racist ideologies . . . are an organic component of attempts to make sense of the present crisis. The fear that society is falling apart at the seams has prompted the elaboration of theories about race which turn on particular notions of culture. The ‘alien’ cultures of the blacks are seen as either the cause or else the most visible symptom of the destruction of the ‘British way of life’. p. 47
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There is still great power in Errol’s powerful and incisive analysis of racist ideologies. But in saying this I do not want to imply that we can or should return to this reprinting of CCCS working papers in search of a political agenda that addresses our present and future. Of course, we need to confront and contest the new elaborations of ‘race’ and nationalism that have been mobilised to manage the ‘present crisis’ in which digits replace complex understandings of historical conjunctures. ‘9/11’ and ‘7/7’ have become mantras iterated and reiterated as if they hold magical meaning, while evocations of ‘race’ and ethnicity deny and repress the political nature of current insurgences, rebellions and resistance to the new imperialisms led by the US and the UK. But the process of writing this introduction has made me conscious of how much of our work at CCCS remained nationally bounded. Readings are always temporally inflected but I would hope that within these pages the significance of the intent, to fuse the theoretical and political, which galvanised our work will be recognised. Twenty-five years after the publication of The Empire Strikes Back, now is not the time for nostalgia of any sort. Against Gordon Brown’s programme of fewer civil liberties, more flags and more British history, and in opposition to his insistence that this is the moment to dedicate ourselves to an excavation and celebration of our national roots, and to a reinvigoration of our civic culture through an imitation of the mindless patriotism of the US of A, it is necessary to assert the politics of multiple affiliations and allegiances, of the necessity for international solidarity with the wretched of the earth. To hell with celebrating a chilly, damp and grey ‘British Day’ in November in the confines of fortress Europe (Brown 2006), revolutionary transformations are happening in the global south where neoliberalism is being challenged by a formidable array of anti-globalisation movements, which are demonstrating that ‘um outro mundo é possível’.6 Hazel V. Carby is Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies, Professor of American Studies and Director of the Initiative on Race Gender and Globalization https://research.yale.edu/irgg/index.html at Yale University. Her publications include Reconstructing Womanhood (OUP, 1987), Race Men (Harvard, 1998), and Cultures in Babylon (Verso, 1999). She is currently completing Child of Empire: Racializing Subjects in Post WWII Britain. Hazel Carby is a dual citizen of the U.K. and the U.S.A.
Notes 1 Margaret Thatcher held the office of Minister of Education in the Conservative government led by Edward Heath from 1970–74. In June 1971 this phrase was screamed in the streets by striking teachers, of which I was one, protesting the abolition of the programme which supplied free school milk, one of the earliest of Thatcher’s attacks on the welfare state. Thatcher became leader of the Opposition 1975 and Prime Minister in 1979. 2 A ‘variety of narrators is one of the many indications that theories of history have a rather limited view of historical production. They grossly underestimate the size, the relevance and the complexity of the overlapping sites where history is produced, notably outside of academia.’ (Trouillot 1995: 19) 3 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, p. 52. 4 The Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent. 5 See http://www.fabian-society.org.uk/press95office/news.asp?cat=43 for these and other ideas about Britishness articulated at the Fabian Society Conference. 6 ‘Another world is possible,’ the political vision which brings together the formidable array of antiglobalisation forces under the aegis of the World Social Forum.
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Bibliography Brown, G. ‘The Future of Britishness,’ keynote speech to the Fabian Future of Britishness Conference, 14th January 2006. www.fabian-society.org.uk/press95office. CCCS (1978) On Ideology London: Hutchinson. CCCS (1982) The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain London: Hutchinson. Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed New York: Seabury Press. Gilroy, P. (1982) ‘Preface’ in CCCS The Empire Strikes Back. Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds) (1976) Resistance Through Rituals: youth subcultures in post-war Britain London: Hutchinson. 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. (1980) ‘Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance’, in Guillaumin, C. and O’Callaghan, M. (eds) Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, UNESCO: Paris. Lawrence, E. (1982) ‘Just plain common sense: the “roots” of racism’ in CCCS The Empire Strikes Back. Trouillot, M. R. (1995) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Women’s Studies Group, CCCS (1978) Women Take Issue: aspects of women’s subordination London: Hutchinson in association with the CCCS.
31 Down these mean streets . . . the meaning of mugging Tony Jefferson and John Clarke
This paper is an attempt to briefly present one aspect of a larger collective project being undertaken by members of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies on ‘mugging’.1 In this paper we offer an account of the rise in those incidents previously called ‘bag snatching’ or ‘robbery with violence’, which have, in the last twelve months become publicly redefined as ‘muggings’. For reasons of space we have not tried to detail the social reaction to these incidents, nor the uses to which the term ‘mugging’ has been put.2 During the period we are concerned with, the late 1960s and early 1970s, we believe that ‘muggings’ (or rather, those robberies and assaults which were susceptible to public definition as mugging) did increase, and that West Indian youths from ‘deprived’ inner ring areas were significantly overrepresented in the statistics, certainly the predominantly West Indian names mentioned in the newspaper court reports support this. Further support for this argument is to be found in articles by Colin McGlashan (e.g. New Statesman, 13.10.72) who identifies the problems faced by black youths in inner city areas as lying behind the recent statistical rises. This socio-geographical location of mugging is also reinforced (and further compounded) by the activities of special ‘anti-mugging’ squads, both of London and provincial police, and of the London Transport police, who seem to have largely concentrated their efforts on West Indian youths in these areas. Basing ourselves on this premise, we believe that the following account of worsening structural inequalities, especially in relation to West Indian youths, together with the way these act to close cultural options, and demand the creation of new cultural responses, offer a meaningful explanation of why this should be so. We wish to firmly distinguish, at the outset, between West Indian and Asian communities in Britain, in terms of their differing cultures. The strength and self contained nature of Asian culture, primarily contained in family and religion, and arising from a pattern of colonialism, is very different from the fragmented West Indian culture resulting from the period of slavery which all but destroyed the native culture. This means that Asian teenagers do not experience the worst effects of structural and racial inequalities in present day British society, since they can, and do, remain within a largely self contained culture. For this reason the situation of Asian teenagers in this country is radically different from that of West Indian adolescents: this may not be the case 10 years from now as the Asian young are gradually acculturated or ‘westernized’. In the text which follows, we thus talk only of the problems of West Indians and not of Asians. This is not to say that Asians do not experience deprivation and racism, simply that they are better protected by their culture from its effects, at the moment.
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Worsening structural inequalities We take the basic structures of our society to be education, employment, income, housing and race. Education The situation of many working class children in schools has been one of growing frustration and hostility. This has become visible via a number of developments: the ‘deschooling’ debate and its practical outgrowth the ‘free school’ movement; the concern over R.O.S.L.A. especially in relation to the ‘unwilling’ learner; the concern with the ‘growing violence and vandalism in schools’ initiated by the N.A.S. and later taken up by the D.E.S.; the growth of ‘pupil power’ and the increase in truancy. All these developments are related in that they are both symptoms of dissatisfaction and responses to it. But to be West Indian has meant to have additional problems: the problems of ‘identity’, of racism, of an ignored or misrepresented cultural heritage, of having to take culturally biased intelligence tests, and of being educationally misplaced. To discuss all these developments in detail is beyond the scope of this article – a few illustrations must suffice. In 1968 a London branch of the A.M.A. was reported as claiming that bad pupil behaviour, resulting in teachers’ nervous breakdowns, was responsible for driving teachers out of London secondary schools; in 1972 the N.A.S. conference was preoccupied with the ‘rising tide of violence in schools’ and the consequent need for more safeguards for its members; and even liberal educationalists, less stridently perhaps, perceived the changing atmosphere: A. Rowe on R.O.S.L.A. (1972) talked of 20% in secondary schools (mostly working class children) being ‘bored, indifferent or actively hostile’, and A. Clegg in a N.F.E.R. document (1973) talked of the group of ‘violent, resentful children, rejects of a qualification conscious society, becoming more conspicuous’. Given that many working class children are hostile to school, the problems of being West Indian and working class are compounded by the racial element. Where teachers are not openly racist they may be either unwittingly or patronisingly so with, as a consequence, low expectations of their West Indian charges. Textbooks, more or less overtly, perpetuate racist myths; the curriculum usually ignores West Indian culture or, where the effort is made often presents it through ‘white eyes’, owing to the shortage of West Indian teachers. West Indian patois, unacceptable and incomprehensible to white middle class ears, is held to necessitate remedial language classes. All this takes its toll on West Indian children and many become ‘self fulfilling prophecies’: poorly motivated with low self-expectations they become low achievers; confused and made anxious by a grudging, qualified or patronising acceptance they become, according to disposition, listless and apathetic, or more commonly, frustrated and hostile. But whereas the majority of West Indian children perhaps perceive themselves to be school failures, some are officially labelled so by being sent to E.S.N. schools. And here, as elsewhere, West Indian youths are significantly over-represented, as Bernard Coard has so successfully demonstrated, mainly because they have been wrongly placed there (in the case of immigrant pupils, incorrect placement was 4 times as likely to have taken place as compared to white pupils). Nevertheless these mistakes are rarely rectified. These ‘wrong’ placements, the consequence of culturally biased I.Q. tests administered by white examiners (both factors contributing to ‘depressed’ scores) and increasingly, of the referral for E.S.N. assessment of West Indian pupils on behavioural rather than educational grounds,
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are the final links in the chain of educational discrimination experienced by West Indian children. Employment The period has been marked by a high level of unemployment, and a growing concern with the unemployed school leaver, especially the West Indian school leaver. The immediate post war ‘boom’ has been followed by a period of economic crises and, since 1966 a rise in unemployment to a post war record ‘high’. At certain points the ‘magic million’ has been passed and the percentage unemployed nationally has been of American proportions (4%+), whilst local figures have often been considerably higher. While the official figures were bad enough, trade unions and others have claimed that they were actually much worse because of the numbers not registered. Census figures, released in 1972, confirmed this more pessimistic view. The reason, simply, is the general disappearance of jobs, many of them permanently. Successive recessions and mechanization have meant a ‘shake out’ of labour in traditional labour intensive industries. Since this has not been accompanied by a fall in production, this shift from man to machine looks permanent and continuing. To illustrate, up to 1966, new jobs were being created at the rate of 200,000 p.a., since then they have been disappearing at half that rate, i.e. 100,000 p.a. In London, between 1966–70, 400,000 jobs have disappeared, three times as many as would have been reasonable to offset the population exodus (Eversley). This resulted in 1972, in the job area – unskilled and semi skilled – which has been most hit by mechanization, in an unemployed to vacancies ratio in London of 10:1. But the problem of unemployment has been made worse by being accompanied by a falling cost of living). This existence of a double problem, shared by all the advanced industrial societies, and the nub of their various economic crises, means that a choice had to be made between tackling inflation or unemployment. Since the former seems more politically sensitive, Heath, following the American example, has been preoccupied with incomes (and prices): the problem of unemployment has been criminally neglected. The unemployed school leaver The number of unemployed school leavers has risen even more sharply than unemployment generally. The Census figures of 1972 revealed a rate of about 8% for teenagers (born in the U.K.), but there were alarming rises in the rates of increase for school leavers: January 1969 saw a 16% increase, and April 1972 a colossal 130% rise. The factors affecting the labour market bore particularly hard on school leavers: their inexperience made them no match for older more experienced men in the declining unskilled/semi-skilled area; mechanisation reduced the number of craft apprenticeships; and the cut-back on office staff meant that for the first time girls became difficult to place. So we were faced with a growing army of ‘virtually unemployable’ school leavers. The West Indian school leaver If we look at the census figures on unemployment for 1966 and 1971 we find two things: a high rise in teenage unemployment for the period, and, on both occasions, an unemployment rate for teenagers born in the West Indies twice that of white or Asian teenagers. Thus the 1971 figures revealed that 16.2% of teenagers born in the West Indies were unemployed.
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Bad as these figures are, we believe they conceal the real situation which in many areas is worse. Since they do not include British born West Indians, the real extent of the discrimination may have been obscured. Additionally, the figures obscure the fact that areas of high immigrant settlement tend to be areas of declining job opportunities and the local rates in some of these inner city areas are undoubtedly much worse. Finally to this already grim picture needs to be added the fact of the higher aspirations and expectations of this generation of West Indians: even where they are ‘lucky’ enough to get an unskilled job they are unlikely to be satisfied with the boredom and repetition involved. Income The crucial fact about the period is the growing inequality. The worst sufferers have been ironically the poorest of all: those on social security, pensions and unemployment benefit. These facts are born out not only by the poverty ‘lobby’ but also by government statistics, politicians, and various reports. Peter Townsend, a prominent ‘poverty lobbyist’ has convincingly demonstrated on a number of occasions Labour’s failure to combat poverty in allowing inequality in real incomes to continue, and in allowing pensions and social security increases to fall behind wage increases. Since then the poverty lobby have opposed all Tory legislation on income (with the exception of the proposed changes in taxation which are not due to come in for 4–5 years). Thus they spoke out against Barber’s tax allowances (March 1972) as being ‘mean and inadequate’ for those on welfare; against the poverty ‘wage trap’, whereby a wage rise, because of the loss of benefits, meant a fall in real income for the poor; against the ‘wage stop’ policy of social security, which, in cases where evidence of past earning could not be produced, or where earnings were already low, was stopping payments at the rate (outdated) for labourers on normal time, despite a Commission’s report authorising the payment of an overtime allowance. Three government reports statistically detail this inequality. Social Trends(3) dispels the myth of the affluent manual worker (non-manual workers were six times as likely to be earning £60 per week as manual ones – 1971); Economic Trends (1972) noted that ‘the poor continued to get relatively poorer and the rich slightly richer’; and the National Child Development Study, the largest ever commissioned, reported that social class inequalities remained as large as ever. Other reports echoed these sentiments: A.Harrison of Essex University (1972) noted that the rich (£5,000 and over p.a.) had benefited most since November 1969, married couples on £2,500 p.a. with three children had a rise in real income of 11%, a similar family on supplementary benefit had 9%, while married pensioners gained a 7% rise. Sir Keith Joseph, the Social Services secretary, was not unaware of these facts. He initiated a joint effort by the departments of Social Security and Education with the purpose of outlining proposals to enable people to break out of the ‘cycle of deprivation’ mentioned in the National Child Development Study. But his own views on the subject, wanting to instigate pilot projects to help people prepare for parenthood, in the light of such glaring and increasing structural inequalities, can only make the plight of the poor more desperate. Predictably, immigrants, almost by definition, figure heavily in the poor: ‘invited’ here in the early 1950s they are to be found predominantly in dirty heavy jobs involving long hours and poor pay. Housing The basic facts about housing for low income groups are: an increase in homelessness; a worsening of conditions for those renting privately; poor future prospects; little real
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advantage in being rehoused; and predictably, West Indians badly affected by all of these factors. Homelessness The growth of homelessness between 1950–68 prompted the Labour government to institute two studies in order to determine who the homeless were, where they came from, and why they became homeless. Professor Greve’s study of London revealed that nearly 50% of London’s homeless families, many of whom were Commonwealth immigrants, were homeless as a result of action by private landlords who were finding it increasingly more profitable to sell, demolish or convert to ‘high rent’ property. Other factors we could cite would include the fact that during this same period (1950–68) four times as much low income housing was torn down as was rebuilt; the displacement of large numbers by motorway development and totally inadequate house building programmes. The related growth of homelessness among the young and single which prompted the coming together of a number of organisations under the heading C.H.A.R. has origins in the decline of the lodging house sector, rising unemployment, rents and house prices, an inadequate discharge system from State institutions (prisons/mental hospitals), and the sheer frustration of (mainly) young West Indians with living in the substandard and overcrowded rooms of their parents (which is added to by the peculiar nature of the West Indian ‘generation gap’ where the authoritarian parental regime is often unacceptable to their children who have become accustomed to the more liberal-permissive atmosphere of Britain in the late 1960s). A number of projects, locally and nationally, have been started to deal with the problems of homelessness among young West Indians, problems which have caused concern at all levels. The private rented sector This has always been the worst sector of housing, having proportionately more unfit dwellings, existing in the most deprived areas, being occupied by the poorest sections of the community, experiencing the greatest tensions as successive governments have attempted to reconcile the antagonisms between landlord and tenant. But it has become worse. As renting to the poor became increasingly unprofitable, landlords either sold (as many did between 1950 and 1972 when the number of privately rented dwellings dropped from 45 to 14 per cent of total housing) or converted the property into a high rent dwelling (using government grants) which usually housed less people when completed. The Notting Hill People’s pamphlet Losing Out suggests that whole areas, at the present rate of conversion, could be exclusively high rent areas by 1980. In order to convert, however, tenants have to be ‘removed’: Islington, with more homeless than any other London borough (1972) reported that complaints of harassment and unlawful evictions went up by one third in the first quarter of 1972. It is here, in the declining and decaying areas of cities, that most West Indians have been forced (both by selling and renting policies, and by the need for mutual support) to take rented housing and to inhabit overcrowded accommodation. As one Birmingham West Indian said: ‘It’s better to sleep in an overcrowded house than sleep in the railway or the park, or something like that, and if the West Indians didn’t let houses to their friends, that would happen, definitely.’ p. 66, Black British, White British; D. Hiro, Pelican, 1973.
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Prospects Though things are bad, there is every indication that they will be worse in the near future. The inadequate house building programmes, coupled with the ‘explosion’ in house prices in the last few years, the decline in the private sector of rented accommodation, and the notorious waiting lists for council houses in the major cities has meant that Shelter are now having to help (in addition to those they ‘normally’ help) families on average incomes. One third of the families asking for help in the first nine months of 1972 had an average income of £30 per week, and two thirds of the heads of these families were in full employment. Additionally the Housing Finance Act is likely to lead to the ‘ghettoing’ of the poor on the worst council estates, since newer houses are unlikely to be given to those likely to be requiring a large rebate. Finally, the government is planning, in the midst of all this, to reduce housing subsidies in four years time, and to reduce council housing expenditure by 13% (in 1976–7) compared with present expenditure. Due to the depreciation of the Pound, this is obviously an even greater reduction than it appears. Rehousing The ‘lucky’ few are rehoused. Unfortunately, their problems are not always ended by this move. Coates and Silburn, investigating people rehoused from St. Anne’s, Nottingham, found that the people were generally worse off (economically) than before, and that more children were ‘in poverty’. Even where this is not the case, the notorious lack of amenities on many new housing estates and the lack of play space in tower block developments has prompted Dr. Halsey to ask for these areas to be made into Educational Priority Areas. What we have said up to now concerning structural deprivation applies equally strongly to the white, lower working-class or ‘lumpen’. In terms of absolute numbers, since West Indians form only a minute proportion of the total population in this country, there are obviously more poor Whites than poor West Indians. But we have chosen to concentrate on the problems of West Indians, and from now on, we shall be even more specific. Since young West Indians, we believe, are over-represented in the statistics for ‘muggings’, we believe this approach to be justified. Also, by concentrating on just one section of the poor we can give the kind of specificity we feel is required. However, we do not wish it to be overlooked that poor, white teenagers face similar problems, with the exception of racism which we discuss next, and for them, too, ‘mugging’ can be a (temporary) remedy to these problems as it is, as we shall later argue, for some West Indian youths. Race The problems encountered by West Indians in these structural areas parallel, as we have just mentioned, some of the experiences of the white working class, but their problems are heightened both objectively and subjectively by the existence of white racism: objectively, in that racism acts in the various structural arrangements to worsen the relative position of West Indians in these areas; subjectively, in the increasing sense of exclusion and rejection felt by coloured communities in England. Race is the crucial mediator of those structural inequalities to the subjective and cultural level, for it is through racism that these impersonal inequalities are carried by white society and are personally received by West Indians. Successive immigration acts have become more and more overtly racist, while public and government discussion has focussed increasingly on the ‘immigrant problem’ and never
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the problems of the immigrants. (The term ‘immigrant’ has, of course, become publicly synonymous with ‘coloured’). The terms of reference for debate about the ‘immigrants’ have been set, even for the liberally minded, by the concern over numbers, illegal entry and repatriation. This Government intervention (stemming originally from the late 1950s) into the ‘immigrant problem’ has provided official confirmation of what West Indians had already experienced in their day to day interaction in British society: that they were unwanted outcasts, ‘second class citizens’ indeed. What had previously been the individual policy of private landlords, employers, publicans etc., was now confirmed by the highest authority as being part of our institutional arrangements. The West Indian response, confronted by this increasingly overt racism, has moved through a number of stages3 from an originally integrationist view of British society towards a more self defensive and self assertive valuation of black identity, drawing heavily of course on the American growth of black power, and demonstrating a sympathy with Afro-American ‘black brothers’. Nevertheless, this final stage is only a ‘move towards . . .’, for the hold of the cultural hegemony exercised by British colonialism over West Indian culture, and the continuing socialization of West Indian children in British schools is not so easily broken, but the contradictions are becoming increasingly visible. The growing distrust of West Indians for white officialdom may be seen in their declining use of the Race Relations Board – their only formal avenue of redress. The drop in the numbers of complaints, especially in the area of unemployment (where even the small number of successful complaints result in the loss of the job anyway owing to the length of time taken to conduct the inquiry) reflects the increasing dissociation of West Indians from official agencies. Pressure groups and grass roots organizations Parallelling this dissociation, and symptomatic of these worsening structural inequalities has been the rapid growth of both national and local ‘pressure groups’ and ‘grass roots’ organizations in attempts to prevent the situation worsening, and hopefully, to effect changes for the better. Though they vary in political outlook, size, financial strength and organizational structure, they are united in being centred on problems as experienced by black people, on the notion of people’s needs before greed, and on the idea of self help through direct pressure and active struggle. Thus during these years, we have seen the development of neighbourhood centres, legal advice centres, ‘black power’ groups, and projects to help young West Indians with education, jobs and accommodation. Finally in this area there are the police. Once regarded by all as fair and impartial, they are now regarded by many West Indians, especially the young, as racist ‘enemies’ who taunt, intimidate, assault, plant and ‘trump up’ charges: the face to face agents of repression of the ‘man’. Derek Humphrey’s excellent Police power and Black people gives specific examples of this; the evidence to the Commons Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration presents the general picture. In this evidence, community workers talked of black youths ‘dreading’ police harassment (Islington), of it being difficult to find any West Indian ‘who has not had an unfortunate experience with the police’ (Wandsworth), and of a ‘total breakdown between police and blacks in south east London’ (S.E. London N.C.C.L. referring to the notorious Lewisham Police Station). The usual police reply (ironically affirming the breakdown) was in terms of a denial of the existence of the problem. Scotland Yard, referring to the S.E. London N.C.C.L.’s complaint talked of the ‘usual stereotyped accusations’. The situation is worsened by the summary way the police deal with complaints: investigating
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themselves, very few complaints are actually substantiated, and even where misbehaviour is admitted, the usual redress for victims is an apology. This has led to substantial concern over the need for an independent element in these investigations, and growing hostility from the West Indian community. The preceding sections have tried to indicate that the situation of the deprived, in the last few years, has been getting worse, that West Indians bear a disproportionate share of that deprivation, and crucially for us, young West Indians have fared worst of all. The difference between the structural situation of young West Indians, many either born here or mainly educated here, and that of their parents who came here in the early 1950s, is great and crucial. Whereas their parents have never suffered the subtle racial inequities of the British Educational system, were ‘invited’ here (albeit to take the heaviest, dirtiest and lowest paid jobs), eventually found accommodation (albeit substandard and decaying), and were left relatively unharassed by the police and public, the picture for their children is radically different. Their education has made them more expectant and aspirant, while simultaneously, through a subtle and pervasive (although often unwitting) racism, robbing them of the means (a firm identity, self respect and the qualifications) of achieving their higher aspirations; this situation is compounded by the job market, where even white unqualified working class youths are ‘virtually unemployable’, by homelessness, and by a changed ‘mood’ noticeable both in the public and the police. Enoch Powell, the National Front and the media’s obsessive concern with the ‘immigrant problem’ have succeeded in providing a public focus for concern over housing, unemployment and a rampant inflation. And the police, in certain places seeing their role as ‘expressors’ of this new mood, have, as far as young blacks are concerned, successfully institutionalized this mood. It is in the light of this new structural situation of young blacks from the late 1960s onwards that we must seek to interpret their different cultural responses: responses which are different in kind from their parents’, since they are expressive of a changed structural situation. Cultural options Whereas structures are largely beyond the control of the individual, and have their source in the distribution of power and wealth in a society, cultures represent systematic attempts to come to terms with these structures. They are thus both subjective responses to objective structural conditions, and attempts to objectivate subjective experiences of the world, that is, they are attempts to impose meanings, either directly through ideas, beliefs and values, or indirectly through a variety of cultural symbols and artefacts. Circumscribed by structural conditions, they are necessarily adjustments or negotiations. Created for people and recreated by them, at any given time there are a number of cultural options available. Since not all are mutually exclusive and are often interconnected, people ‘belong’, with varying commitment, to numerous cultures; but some people, because of their structural situation have access to more cultural options than others, and may have more power to impose their options on others. Thus white middle class youths, for example, have access to a wider range of options than do middle aged West Indians. Similarly, as the following attempts to demonstrate, middle aged West Indians have more options than their children. Cultural options of older West Indians As we have suggested, West Indians were by no means unaware of these structural inequalities, but their confrontation with them is by no means a simple and direct one; rather they
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are mediated to them in two different ways. Firstly, they are mediated by the levels at which such discrimination operates: that is, the West Indian was not confronted by a racist society as a whole, but experienced its racism at different points within it, in attempting to find jobs and houses, and in attempting to find clubs and dances at which to spend his leisure time. We all rarely see our society as a totality, but only those points of it which are most directly relevant to our immediate interests. Secondly, the experience of the structural inequalities mediated by previously existing cultural outlooks and expectations. It is within this framework that the experience is interpreted and reacted to, and those interpretations and reactions may come to form the basis for new cultural responses to the situation, In short, neither the society facing the West Indians, nor their cultural responses to it are static: instead as the society and their experience of it changes, so do their reactions to it (and vice-versa: their reactions may call for further changes in the rest of society). The basic outlook of the original West Indian immigrants (who began to arrive in sizeable numbers in the 1950s) was integrationist: they saw themselves as coming to live and work as part of the ‘mother country’ (whose colonial education had supposedly shown them the values and way of life of British Society), whose ‘enlightened’ politicians had once released them from slavery. Consequently their reception in terms of a simple black-white dichotomy (compared with the complex class-colour system of the West Indies) was strongly at odds with their expectations, especially for those of once middle class status, who found themselves forced into manual work. These experiences of discrimination, followed by the racial violence of the late 1950s, left no doubt about their status in Britain, and a number of identifiable cultural adaptations developed. One possibility was assimilation, to give up one’s West Indian identity, to accept totally the life style, culture and identity of the white man (skin lightening, hair straightening etc.). This option was by no means simple, for it was difficult to conceal the fundamental fact of ‘West Indian-ness’ from whites, however much one psychologically tried to identify with them. A second related option was that of acceptance of the status of second-class citizen: to take on not the white man’s identity, but the white man’s definition of West Indian identity, and to make the necessary psychic adjustments. Such an approach was often based on the projection of achievement aspirations onto the second generation and their passage through the education system. Both these options demand a heavy, psychic price from those who attempt them (both involving the abandonment of one’s own identity in favour of one or other of those of the dominant culture), and the alarming rises in the admissions of black patients to mental hospitals seem to indicate that this price is being paid. It may not be stretching the point too far to suggest that schizophrenia (quite literally involving two identities) has become an, albeit involuntary, cultural option for West Indians. A third option (though less extensive than popular mythology would suggest) was involvement in small scale crime (typically such behaviours as pimping, pickpocketing and drug pushing) which offer both more income and more status than the legitimate job market. One final major option was the development of a largely self defensive West Indian consciousness. This grew out of a number of factors: the need for mutual assistance between West Indians, especially in housing; the need for self defence following on the Notting Hill and St. Annes’s race riots of 1958; and the need to share some sort of cultural life when excluded from so much of England’s. These groupings took a variety of forms, ranging from the overtly political pressure groups both at local and national level, through the temporary
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defensive organisations of 1958, to the re-emphasis of West Indian cultural traditions, for example, fundamentalist Christianity and the ‘shabeen’ (the Saturday night blues party). These adjustments by no means resolved the problems, and indeed created new ones of their own, being either internally destructive, or subject to being labelled ‘undesirable’. Thus the schizophrenic is ‘sick’, black parties and politics are deviant (and demand the mobilisation of respectable resources to restrain them) and ‘underworld’ activities are criminal. Cultural options of young West Indians We have said that the structural and cultural arrangements of our society are not static, and it is through their changes that we must come to see the present situation of ‘second generation’ West Indians. Their structural and cultural situation is crucially different from that of their parents, and that difference is given added tension by the ‘peculiarly heightened form of the “generation gap” ’ in West Indian families in this country that we have already mentioned (but see NOTE below for further amplification of this term).* A number of the parent options have become increasingly closed for the young. Assimilation, already difficult, has become doubly so as a consequence of the increasingly overt racism of recent years. A black skin was always difficult to hide, but now carries even more social stigma. Acceptance is likewise increasingly difficult. As one’s ‘second-classness’ becomes even officially confirmed, it is so much more difficult to negotiate. The experiences of failure, and the institutionalized (white) expectations of it, add up to a denial of admittance to manhood. Nor is it possible to rationalize such acceptance by projecting aspirations onto the next generation, for this generation, unlike their parents, have been through the education system and are living evidence of the fallacy of such hopes. Also, they have grown up within the society and have had the chance to observe for themselves that positions of status and power are almost exclusively reserved for white, not black, adults. Their
*
NOTE This notion of a ‘peculiarly heightened “generation gap” ’ existing in this country between West Indians and their young is a ‘collapsed’ notion in that it subsumes under it a lot of complex arguments about the West Indian family-structure. We can only hint at some of the complexities here. Some would want to argue that slavery, colonialism and a migrant male labour pattern have combined to make the West Indian family structure, in the West Indies, an unstable and fragile unit. We are not convinced that a matrifocal type of family structure – one fairly widespread family structure in the West Indies with its extended kinship networks of older female relatives is unstable or fragile, despite the infrequent presence of the father. Not that this will not produce some problems of adjustment for some young people in some families – in the same way that European nuclear families, with their absence of kinship networks, do. However, we would prefer to argue that underlying any instability there may be in West Indian families in the West Indies, is the endemic poverty. For our purposes though, the emigration of large numbers of West Indian males to Britain in the 1950s, whatever the specific family situation of the young in the West Indies, typically compounded the problem in four possible ways: (1) (2) (3) (4)
The pattern of emigration meant that children were usually sent for after a number of years. They thus had to adjust, on arrival, both to English society and to parents they hardly knew. Additionally they often had to adjust to a nucleated family existence having come from an extended family network of female relatives. Further, they might be required to adjust to a step-parent and to half-brothers and sisters born in Britain since many of their parents would have contracted new unions in this country. Their experience of British society, both in schools and elsewhere, often did not marry up with the rigid, authoritarianism prevalent among their parents: an authoritarianism resulting from their own colonial, Victorian education and upbringing.
Obviously not all children experienced all four of these problems. But nearly all of them would have met enough of them for us legitimately to talk of a ‘heightened “generation gap” ’.
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experience and their view of their parents’ situation indicates that their predicament is not the result of individual discrimination and personal misfortune (e.g. having been educated in the West Indies) but is systematic and all embracing.4 Their experience of British society has also closed the option of fundamentalist Christianity since its puritan dedication no longer holds a strong appeal to those exposed to the secular liberalism of present day Britain, and lacks the support of memories of rural community in which it is rooted. Those options remaining open, or opening, for them are those of politics and crime (and to a lesser extent, in that it may co-exist with others, drug use). The distinction between politics and crime here is a somewhat artificial one, for in fact the two are closely connected (as our account will show) and are for many intermingled. The political option is linked to the increasing West Indian identification with the American and African negro struggles, originally with the Civil Rights movement and then, more forcefully, with Black Power (partly from their growing visibility and partly from the increasingly obvious British racism). This move towards an Afro-American-Caribbean ‘black brothers’ identity (based on a recognition of common heritages and a common struggle) has not always been at the level of articulate, ideological, and organised politics (though such groups are growing), for it is precisely these powers which are denied to black youths by their education. But the especially visible American imagery (e.g. Black Power at the Olympic Games) may be effective in the search for identity and style. Thus ‘black is beautiful’ may not always be a rallying call for the Black Panthers, but does offer an alternative source of positive identification. Another example of this continuity of ‘political’ identification lies in the Rastafarian Cult and its return to Africa theme. Echoes of the Biblical imagery of the return to the promised land of this movement are to be found in much Reggae music (cf. Copasetic/McGlashan). Mugging: a desperate solution to a desperate situation Both the politics and crime among West Indians have an increasing edge of desperation, involving more or less articulately the recognition that the system intends to repress and control them, to deny them their identity and a place in the society. Thus the stance becomes increasingly one of self assertive confrontation, whether black power groups against the police, or violence against ‘whitey’ on the streets. For some, then, ‘mugging’ became the best available solution for a desperate situation. It supplied the ‘bread’ to supplement a meagre dole (which is hardly sufficient for one who has to ‘kill’ long periods of time in a period when little can be done for nothing, and who is likely to spend little time indoors because of substandard or overcrowded accommodation). It allows the expression of toughness and masculinity (the long described cultural value of ‘machismo’) and thus, when legitimate avenues lead to failure allows an assertion of identity and status as ‘a man’. This theme is a strong one in West Indian culture and is reinforced by the image of the ‘rudie’ in Reggae – the super cool hooligan who always come out on top. This may be one of the ways in which such general cultural values are mediated to the level of individual meaningfulness. More importantly, mugging strikes fear (individual and collective) into the white population who have for so many centuries held (both literally and metaphorically) the whip hand.5 As the public hysteria has shown, it is indeed a potent example of ‘black power’. It for once allows them to control the situation. As we said, the dividing line between politics and crime is an artificial one, we may see within ‘mugging’ the attempt to create and assert a collectively validated identity for
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blackness (which is parallelled in the American politicization of black criminals, most visibly in the case of George Jackson), and to assert at least temporary control over their own life situation, to seize it back from the hands of those in power. The difference between ‘mugging’ and the older West Indian’s criminal options both highlights the changing cultural and structural situation and is expressive of the present situation of the young. Whereas the older criminals are engaged in relatively ‘safe’ areas, and where, in the case of ‘pimping’ and drug pushing there are no ‘victims’, the younger West Indians’ choice of ‘mugging’ seems expressive of a different mood. Risky, because of coming face to face with the victim, brazen and reckless, it indicates a growing desperation, an increased alienation, and latently at least, a ‘non-ideological politics’. As a young West Indian put it more concisely than we ever could, ‘Tievin’s freedom, man.’ Biographies We have dealt with mugging largely at the level of general cultural values. Of course not all West Indian youths are equally susceptible to the ‘attractiveness’ of mugging as a cultural option: the majority still find internally destructive ways of coping like their parents. It is the links between such cultural values and the individual’s biography which are crucial. The individual’s career may have developed in such a way that other possibilities carry more weight (e.g. an increasing option is involvement in sport), but we would argue that the general structural and cultural situation of young West Indians make the choice of the sort of self-assertive political-criminal options we have drawn out above, rational ones. In this situation, as in the case of this West Indian youth, violence can be a solution to an intolerable situation. . . . when you go to school here, you realize the difference, you’re made to realize it. They (the white kids) pick on you. First you try to bribe them – sweets, ices the lot. But then one day you can’t stand it any more. You get vicious, real vicious and you lick them. p. 79, Black British, White British, D. Hiro, Pelican 1973. We could sketch out an ‘ideal-type’ pattern of involvement (in mugging) for a West Indian youth as follows: He leaves school at the earliest opportunity without qualifications and with a firm belief that White society has taken no real interest in his educational welfare. His prospects, which he can see only too clearly, are a series of ‘dead-end’ jobs, interspersed with long periods of unemployment or more-or-less continuous unemployment. Underemployed or unemployed (and virtually unemployable) he rows with his parents who do not fully appreciate the changed nature of the employment situation (from the full employment of the early 1950s to the technological unemployment of the late 1960s) nor the child’s hostile response to this situation resulting from his very different aspirations. The parents blame the child, the more harshly since their hopes were heavily centred on his succeeding where they failed. A result of this row, or series of rows (exacerbated by the overcrowded accommodation) is that the youth leaves home. On the move from friend to friend or sleeping rough and isolated from parents, much time is spent on the streets. Here he comes into contact with the police. They probably see him as idle, apathetic and, in some vague way, a threat, in his constant bored loitering. Especially if it is late at night they will probably stop and search him – just to let him know they want no trouble. Ironically, this harassment and intimidation, oft-repeated, has the reverse effect. The youth learns, from such experiences, to fear and hate the police.
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So, poor, bored, homeless and increasingly alienated, since the only official agents of society he comes into contact with are bureaucratic officials in the Social Security and Youth Employment Office (who will often make him feel it is his fault for not having a job, begrudge him his money and ‘free’ time and often keep him running around after jobs they know he has little chance of getting simply to keep him occupied) and the hated police, he can become desperate. At this point crime can become an option since it is a ‘solution’, at least temporary, to his problems. Mugging, given this situation, is the ‘perfect’ crime: needing no criminal knowledge or skill to execute, it is both ‘instrumental’ (in that it can supplement income) and ‘expressive’, with its violence, of the felt desperation and hostility. This response, resulting initially from overbearing structural arrangements and in a situation of limited cultural options, is triggered off by the biographical circumstances outlined above (themselves the product of this nexus). It is thus comprehensible, meaningful and rational, though desperate and, ultimately, self-defeating. Reform or overhaul? What then is the ‘solution’? From what we have argued it is not a matter of more social, community and youth workers and more black policemen: this only deals at the level of symptoms by attempting to ameliorate them. Since the problems are rooted in structural inequalities, combined with limited cultural options, any solution must operate at this level with a genuine concern to tackle these inequalities. Most practically this concern would be demonstrated by a massive donation of funds (without strings) to local Black groups (and to similar White groups) of the kind that, as we have mentioned, are growing. Dealing with symptoms in a reformist fashion only confirms the notion that the individual is the problem to be dealt with, and helps to hide the real problems the individual West Indian (and poor White) face. If the ‘individual problem’ to be dealt with happens to be black, this confirms and justifies a racist ideology: necessary to elites to justify their privileges and necessary to the white working class to blame, in ‘scapegoat’ fashion, for their deprivations – the visible ‘cause’ of their misfortune. At either level racism is ideologically necessary to maintain the status quo. Most reforms attempt to ‘patch up’: we would argue that a more radical overhaul is necessary – if we are serious about the problem of mugging.
Notes 1 We would like to thank all the members of the group for the extensive comments on, and criticisms of earlier versions of this paper. 2 An account of the social reaction can be found in 20 YEARS, published by the Paul, Jimmy and Musty Support Committee, c/o The Action Centre, 134 Villa Road, Birmingham 19. (price 20p.) 3 For an extended account see D. Hiro, Black British, White British, Pt.1. 4 And with so many now English educated, traditional employers’ accounts such as ‘he can’t speak English well enough’, have lost their validity, and the racist discrimination between them and their white classmates stands revealed. 5 Compare Tom Wolfe, ‘Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers’.
Bibliography A. Clegg, Guardian, 25 Jan., 1973. J. Copasetic, Johnny Cool and the Isle of Sirens in C. Gillett (ed.) Rock File, N.E.L., 1974. B. Coard, How the West Indian child is made educationally subnormal in the British school system. New Beacon Books, 1971.
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K. Coates and R. Silburn, Poverty: the forgotten Englishmen. Penguin 1970. Eversley, Guardian, 19 Jan. 1972. Greve Report, Guardian, 11 Dec. 1972. A. Harrison, Guardian, 2 Oct. 1972. D. Humphrey, Police power and Black people. Panther, 1972. C. McGlashan, ‘The Sound System’, Sunday Times Magazine, 4 Feb. 1973. A. Rowe, Guardian, 15 Feb. 1972. T. Wolfe, Radical Chic; and Mau-mauing the Flak catchers. Bantam 1971.
32 Reggae, Rastas and Rudies Style and the subversion of form Dick Hebdige
Introduction In ‘The Style of the Mods’, I attempted to describe a specific style of the 1960s, and to distinguish in what ways it was innovative. I put forward a theory of style as a means whereby commodities can be redefined and used to signal a measure of freedom (albeit circumscribed) from the values of the dominant groups which control the production of those commodities. In the study of the Kray Twins I looked at the equally exclusive style of the London gangster, who shared not only the same space (Soho) and time (the mid 1960s) as the mainstream metropolitan mod, but aspired towards a similarly pernicious hedonism and suffered from the same dependence upon identical forms of popular fantasy. I attempted to show how, through the sanctification of style, the unstable and volatile Ronnie Kray managed to avert the crisis and chaos which permanently threatened him. Beyond this, the daily devotions of the Firm assisted the deification of Kray and validated the formalization of style into a complete system of closure. The world was thereby rendered controllable and comprehensible. Both the mods and the gangsters participated in the same dream and evolved styles by which the successful fulfilment of that dream was, at least symbolically, denoted. Whilst caricaturing certain aspects of the dominant culture, they remained ultimately inaccessible to mainstream analyses and orthodox sympathies, and were conspicuously excluded disreputable and dangerous. Whilst not suggesting that the mods’ style and the Kray Twins’ closed system possessed any overtly oppositional potency, I think they can both be legitimately termed techniques of cultural appropriation – ways in which an increasingly alien environment could be conquered and invested with meaning. The traditionally tense relationship between sections of the working-class community in certain areas of London and the agencies of social control (school, work, police, etc.) had, of course, created deviant subcultures in the past – subcultures which had sought to evade and subvert the classifications imposed upon them. In the 1960s, as the processes of change were accelerated (by large scale redevelopment, and rehousing programmes etc.) the need for alternative self-definitions became increasingly urgent. The council flat and family car demanded at least a modification in the old aggressive consciousness of class and seemed to forbode assimilation, and the onus fell more and more upon the deviant group to effect the required inversion of the dominant perspective, to articulate the feelings of exclusion which persisted despite the greater opportunities for consumption which the post-war world offered. The temporary suspension of large-scale class antagonisms led to a kind of cultural implosion whereby the keen and bitter awareness of class was dispersed throughout the community and reconstituted itself in a distilled form inside the deviant group.
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Consequently, postures of defiance became more visible and extreme, the ways in which that defiance was communicated became at once more sophisticated, more subtle and more various. But the sensational excursions undertaken by the mods (to the coast, to the West End) and the gangsters (into Soho, into violence) merely aggravated the myopic condition endemic to both groups and indicated only a partial disaffiliation from the values and goals of those in power. Neither group was sufficiently disaffected to draw out the implications of its position to a point where an ideological break with the dominant system was possible. Or, to apply Paul Willis’s terminology, the mod and the gangster were unwilling or unable to transcend that time-scale in which each cultural ‘moment’, each ‘apparently spontaneous, concrete circumstance, constitutes a reaffirmation of the economic base.’1 I shall now turn to other subcultures, more or less contempraneous with those already studied, which, to a greater or lesser extent, understood the subtle mechanics of internalisation and determined to reverse that insidious process whereby ideology perpetuates itself in a disguised form (as ‘common sense’ etc) by evolving more radical and effective techniques of cultural appropriation. I shall start by pursuing a subculture from its point of origin in Jamaica to its transplantation inside the immigrant communities of South London. Apart from illustration how the development of class-consciousness can be facilitated by a recognition of the added dimension of colour, I intend to indicate in what ways the immigrant subculture interacted and converged with similar subcultures generated within the host community, and in what ways it retained its integrity.
1. Notting Hill nightmare, Brixton’s broken dreams Man to man is so injust, The man in whom you place your trust, He’s the man to do you an injust. And that’s life, you know But life is the thing which is ‘life’ And life is not just ‘life’ And life is what you make it, as I will say. So if you try it-you can break it If you try it you can make it, if you try. Big Youth in reggae lyric ‘The Facts of Life’ In his book, Black British, White British, Dilip Hiro describes how emigration proved a profoundly disorienting and disappointing experience for the majority of West Indians who entered this country in the 1950s and 1960s. The post-war economic boom in Britain left a demand for unskilled labour which the native worker was either reluctant or unable to supply, and many of the skilled and semi-skilled workers who figured largely in the first wave of immigration were themselves forced to take on menial jobs. The formation of black communities, where deplorable conditions prevailed, followed exactly that pattern set years before in the States. As the West Indians moved in, the whites tended to move out and profiteering landlords exploited to the full the limited accommodation available to blacks. In London, the West Indians largely concentrate in the South – in Paddington, Brixton and Notting Hill, and, as immigration from the Caribbean accelerated until a peak was reached in 1962, these areas became saturated and there was a concommitant deterioration both in
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housing conditions and in relations with the host community. The good jobs, improved status and sanitary housing which the West Indian had come to expect from the mother country (which, according to Hiro, was presented as ‘the historico-cultural navel of West Indian society’) were not forthcoming and his disappointment was compounded by the often hostile attitude exhibited by members of the white community – an attitude which found climactic expression in the 1958 race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill, and in the hysterical support which Enoch Powell received in the 1960s. Paradoxically, Powell’s manipulation of white hysteria helped the immigrant community to clarify certain questions of racial identity which had previously been baulked and confused by the official West Indian policy of multi-racialism, which had been enshrined in ideal form in the national motto of the newly independent Jamaica (‘Out of many, one people’). The arrival in Britain, in December 1964, of Malcolm X and the formation by Roy Sawh, Jan Carew and Michael de Freitas of the Racial Adjustment Action Society (abbreviated with aggressive irony to the Jamaican swear-word RAAS) helped the concept of blackness to be evaluated positively by many West Indians. But the new consciousness of colour flowed through other and less formal channels than those constructed by either Malcolm or Michael X. It was embedded in the patois, the reggae and the ‘rudeness’, which was beginning to emerge from the slums of Kingston. The bulk of the immigrants who flocked to this country in the early 1960s as the ‘open door’ threatened to close once and for all, were drawn from the ranks of the poor and the unskilled and, if they were not directly responsible for the importation of the new styles, then they were clearly extremely receptive (more so, perhaps, than the earlier immigrants who were largely committed to middle-class goals) to the collective redemption and personal confidence which such styles promised. To understand these developments and to ensure an accurate assessment of their impact on, and applicability to the standard West Indian community in Britain, we must first consider the Jamaican context.
2. Sun, sea, and slavery There are no facts in Jamaica everybody has his own version of everything’ Michael Thomas in ‘The Wild Side of Paradise’ (Rolling Stone’ July 19, 1973) ‘Statements which are believed to be true are often sociologically more important than those which are true’. University College of West Indies report: ‘The Ras Tafari Movement in Kingston Jamaica’. In 1962, Jamaica won its independence, and its commitment to racial integration was advertised in the already mentioned national motto. In 1965, Marcus Garvey, the founder of the ‘Back to Africa’ movement of the 1920s was nominated Jamaica’s first national hero by the new government. These two apparently irreconcilable gestures expose the central contradiction in Jamaican society, which, despite national autonomy, remains unresolved. Jamaica’s parliament and judiciary (both modelled directly on their English counterparts) continued, for many years, to function as though the ideals of harmonious coexistence and equal opportunity had already been realized.2 These myths (precious, of course, to all Western democracies) were particularly dear to a Jamaica which was anxious to achieve recognition as a ‘civilized’ nation and to win respect from the white powers. The posthumous honours bestowed upon Garvey were a concession to public opinion inside Jamaica and completely undercut the impulse towards racial synthesis.
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To fully explore this contradiction, one should really resort to a more detailed analysis of a history of Jamaican race relations than I am prepared to undertake. Rex Nettleford accomplishes this task admirably in his book ‘Mirror, Mirror’ and does justice to the complexity of the subject. These relations are indeed complex, but the basic issues seem remarkably clear (at least from a distance). The simple facts of economic exploitation are transparent; or, to be more precise, they are written in colour across the face of Jamaican society. The white colonial aristocracy lingers on above a middle class which is chiefly brown (mulatto, Indian, Syrian) or yellow (Chinese immigrants own many of the larger shops) and the blacks remain on the bottom in the appalling slums of Ghost Town, Trench Town and the Dungle in West Kingston, and in the shanty towns of the rural districts. Colonial exploitation persists in a thinly-disguised form as tourism, and the north coast is more or less constantly besieged by armies of very rich, very rapacious Americans and Europeans whose involvement in local culture extends to the occasional bland calypso,3 and, of course, the ubiquitous bacardi and coke. The depredations of the tourists are only surpassed by those of the large American companies who control the mining of bauxite which is extracted in huge quantities and shipped out to the States, where it is used in the production of aluminium. The American reliance on Jamaican bauxite guarantees that every proposal to establish a Jamaican-based aluminium industry is baulked and circumvented at a governmental level. To the dispossessed black it would appear that the white man only interrupts his colossal programme of play and consumption to devour the very land on which he lives. In effect, the position of the black in Jamaican society has not improved qualitatively since the days of slavery. If the account seems loaded, it is because the facts themselves are loaded, and it is because exploitation is so visible in Jamaica and proceeds so consistently on strict racial lines, that it is so amenable to metaphorical analysis. Indeed the structure of Jamaican society seems to lend itself to the type of poetic exegesis which we shall encounter when examining the subcultures of the Kingston slums, and the awareness of the continuance of a modified form of slavery provides the necessary fuel for the hell-fire rhetoric of the various apocalyptic cults which proliferate throughout the Caribbean, supplies the Rastafarian with the experiential foundation upon which his elaborate metaphorical system is built, and shapes the angry and violent response of the urban rude boy. And so I shall pass from the Sorelian ‘diremption’ (a heuristic device used to further the argument) to the infinitely more significant collective ‘myth’ (from which, as Sorel asserts, ‘proceeds action’).
3. Babylon on Beeston Street ‘The bars they could not hold me Walls could not control me’. from The Wailer’s ‘Duppy Conqueror’ I was born with the English language and it proved to be my enemy. James Baldwin Revolution soon-come. Bulldog quoted in ‘The Wild Side of Paradise’ The experience of slavery recapitulates itself perpetually in the everyday interactions of the Jamaican black. It is principally responsible for the unstable, familial structure (disrupting
Reggae, Rastas and Rudies 589 the traditionally strong kinship networks which even now survive among the peoples of West Africa) and obviously goes on determining patterns of work and relations with authority. It remains an invisible shaping prescence which haunts the slums of Ghost Town and even now defies exorcism. In fact it is interpolated into every verbal exchange which takes place on the teeming streets of every Jamaican slum. As Dilip Hiro points out: ‘the evolution of the creole language was related directly to the mechanics of slavery’. Communication was systematically blocked by the white overseer who banded slaves of different tribes together so that cultural links with Africa were effectively severed. The laws which forbade the teaching of English to slaves meant that the new language was secretly appropriated (by rough approximation, by lip reading etc) and transmitted orally. The seventeenth century English spoken by the master class was refracted through the illicit channels of communication available to the black and used to embody the subterranean semantics of a nascent culture which developed in direct defiance of the master’s wishes. Distortion was inevitable, perhaps even deliberate. Subsequently, the language developed its own vocabulary, syntax and grammar; but it remains essentially a shadow-language fulfilling in a more exaggerated and dramatic way those requirements, which, under normal circumstances, are satisfied by regional workingclass accents and group argot. Form implicitly dictates content, and poles of meaning, fixed immutably in a bitter and irreversible experience silently reconstruct that experience in everyday exchange. The ‘langue’ indeed, proclaims its parenthood in everyday ‘parole’. As we shall see later, this fact is intuitively grasped by the members of certain West Indian subcultures, and language is used as a particularly effective means of resisting assimilation and preventing infiltration by members of the dominant groups. As a screening device it has proved to be invaluable; and the ‘Bongo talk’ and patois of the rude boy deliberately emphasise its subversive rhythms so that it becomes an aggressive assertion of racial and class identities. As a living index to the extent of the black’s alienation from the cultural norms and goals of those who occupy higher positions in the social structure, the creole language is unique. The expulsion of the black from the wider linguistic community meant that a whole culture evolved by a secret and forbidden osmosis. Deprived of any legitimate cultural exchange, the slave developed an excessive individualism and a set of cultural artefacts which together represent the vital symbolic transactions which had to be made between slavery and freedom, between his material condition and his spiritual life, between his experience of Jamaica and his memories of Africa. In a sense, the transition was never satisfactorily accomplished, and the black Jamaican remains suspended uneasily between two worlds neither of which commands a total commitment. Unable to repair this cultural and psychological breach, he tends to oscillate violently from one world to the other, and ultimately he idealizes both. Ultimately, indeed, he is exiled from Jamaica, from Britain and from Brixton, and sacrifices his place in the real world to occupy an exalted position in some imaginative inner dimension where action dissolves into being, where movement is invalidated and difficult at the best of times, where solutions are religious rather than revolutionary. In fact, the initial rationalizations of slavery took an explicitly religious form. Barred from the white man’s churches, the slave learnt the Christian doctrine obliquely and grafted it, with varying degrees of success, onto the body of pagan beliefs which he had carried over from Africa. The residual superstitions (voodoo, witchcraft, etc) persist even now beneath the surface of the Christian faith and periodically reassert themselves in their original forms in the hills and rural areas of Jamaica, and are resurrected in the music of the
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more esoteric city-based bands.4 The schools of Christian worship native to Jamaica still retain the ancient practises of the trance, spirit-possession and ‘speaking in tongues’, and these Churches (the Pentecostal Church, the Church of God in Christ, etc) continue to attract enormous congregations. As a means of consolidating group ties and of articulating a group response to slavery, these nonconformist churches were to prove very valuable indeed. By appealing at once to the individual (by subscribing to the doctrine of personal ‘grace’) and to the group (by promising collective redemption), they provided an irresistible solution – a means not of closing the gulf but of transcending it completely. The Bible offered limitless scope for improvisation and interpretation. The story of Moses leading the suffering Israelites out of captivity was immediately applicable and won a permanent place in the mythology of the Jamaican black. The various cults pursued the ambiguous apocalypse along exactly those paths traced out elsewhere by Norman Cohn,5 proclaiming at different times divine revolutions, post-mortem revelations. Whenever God seemed to be procrastinating, there were always the chiliastic cults of the rural areas ready to hurry things up. Even now, on occasion, ‘pocomania’ (literally ‘a little madness’) spreads with brief but devastating effect through the townships of the hills, and the Revival is, of course, always there to be revived. A million millennia counted out in days and months have come and gone and still God speaks to wild-eyed men in dreams. Judgement Day, the Day of Turnabout is never remote: it is always the day after tomorrow. And Judgement Day is dear to the heart of every Rasta and every other Rudie; and for these it means the redistribution of an exclusively secular power. The displacement of material problems onto a spiritual plane is of course by no means peculiar to the black Jamaican. The ways in which this essentially religious perspective is transmuted into a purely idealist existentialist one are, perhaps, more extraordinary and certainly more pertinent to the phenomenon under consideration here. Christianity still permeates the West Indian imagination, and a Biblical mythology continues to dominate; but at certain given points in the social structure6 this mythology has been turned back upon itself so that the declared ascendancy of Judeao-Christian culture (with its emphasis on work and repression) can be seriously scrutinized and ultimately rejected. Instrumental in this symbolic reversal were the Rastafarians. The Rastafarians believe that the Emperor Haille Sellassie of Ethiopia is God and that his accession to the Ethiopian throne fulfils the prophecy made by Marcus Garvey (‘Look to Africa, when a Black King shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near’) and a plethora of additional prophecies gleaned from the Book of Revelations. He is the Ras Tafari, the Negus, the King of Kings, the Living God, Lord of Lords, the Conquering Lion of the tribe of Judah. More recently, the simple appellation ‘Jah’ has been used. Thus, the racial and religious problems which had preoccupied the Jamaican black for centuries converged and found immediate and simultaneous resolution. Predictably, the cult drew its support chiefly from the slums of Kingston. Events conspired to give the movement maximum exposure. An article in the Jamaica Times (December 7, 1935) assisted the identification of the cult with a certain militancy of opinion as regards matters of race and class. This is again somewhat ironic (cf. effect of Powell on West Indian immigrants in Britain), as the article itself was derived from a piece of Italian propaganda designed to discredit the Ethiopian people with whom the Italians were at war. It drew attention to the alleged emergence in Ethiopia and the Congo of a fanatical sect headed by Haille Sellassie and called the Niyabinghi Order, which was dedicated to the overthrow of white domination by racial war. Niyabinghi was translated in Jamaica,7 as ‘Death to black and white oppressors’ and adopted by the violent fringe of the Rasta
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movement who henceforth called themselves Niyamen. The arrest of two Rasta leaders, L.P.Howell and H.Dunkley, for various breaches of the peace lent the movement a further notoriety, and the formation of the Pinnacle community by Howell in 1941 began that long association of Rastafarianism with the cultivation and smoking of ganja, ‘the holy herb’, which was grown in large quantities in the commune. Pinnacle also showed how strongly the authorities were prepared to react to the Rastas’ attempts at economic and ideological autonomy and the commune was perpetually besieged by police. By 1943, after serving another term in prison, Howell had supplemented the original doctrine with many of his own personal beliefs. Two additions deserve a special mention. Firstly, Howell encouraged the men of Pinnacle to emulate the long, plaited hairstyles of the East African Somali, Masai and Galla tribesmen who were appearing regularly in magazine photographs at the time. Those who adopted the style thus advertised their faith and invited stigma. They were called ‘locksmen’ or ‘men of dreadlocks’ (‘dread’ meaning ‘capable of inspiring fear and awe’). By 1947, the men of dreadlocks were being sighted in the streets of Kingston. The other crucial improvisation for which Howell was responsible involved a redefinition of the Divinity. Haille Sellassie was internalized by a total act of sympathetic assimilation (I know Him, therefore I am Him?) which was interpreted by the individual Rasta not as a personality disorder so much as a real way of dealing with an intolerable and burdensome alienation. It was the supreme act of faith which diminished the distance between ego and Godhead, between mythical past and fantasy future; and even if it was just an illusion fostered by too much of the ‘holy herb’, it certainly produced results and prophets by the score. Perceptions were suddenly endowed with an extraordinary potency. They became galvanic, and the act of seeing became indeed an act, until ‘seeing’ was itself a verb of startling transitivity. In short, the identification of God with Man, implicit in the cult of Ras Tafari became explicit. This development is again by no means unique (many of the primitive apocalyptic cults studied by Cohn conform to this pattern), but the transformation of the Rasta’s self-image endowed his suffering with the most profound significance and gave it the supreme validation. It helped him to survive (perhaps, even to thrive on) prejudice and official disapproval and enabled him to adopt a position of Anastasias contra mundum. But more than this, it gave him the confidence with which to explore the possibilities for freedom within that mythical Africa which was, quite simply, all those things which Jamaica was not. It allowed him to embellish those Old Testament archetypes with new and vital meanings to locate hell and the land of milk and honey in the here and now. It enabled him to leave the Western world, the Babylon of change, of suffering, of fantasy and vanity, and to enter that timeless Zion which is present time itself. As we shall see, the Rastaman renegotiated his relationship with the universe by means of infrastructural innovations at the complementary levels of language and perception. He cast himself in the role of prophet destined to heal that age-old breach between the unchanging Word of God and the mortal world of sensation by presenting himself as the Living Apocrypha in whom was written the impending debacle of the White Way of Life. Needless to say, Howell was committed to a mental hospital in 1960 (and doubtless diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic). Meanwhile, the disintegration of the Pinnacle commune, following a series of police raids in 1954, led to the dispersal of the dreadlocksmen throughout the black community of Kingston and marked a further deterioration in relations with the law. The movement began to grow as large-scale immigration and a fast-approaching independence made prominent the old problems of national identity. Simultaneously, the victimization of the highly visible locksmen dramatized larger class conflicts, and tended to concentrate attention upon the
592 Dick Hebdige condition of the impoverished black. Tacit support was won from those who, whilst unprepared to make the locksman’s complete break with the social norms were nonetheless willing to extend their sympathy and respect. The authorities’ determination to extirpate the Rasta ‘menace’ from the streets of the capital merely hardened the locksman’s resolve to publicize his estrangement from the moral and legal codes of Babylon. In February 1954, one group of 18 Rastas was charged with rioting, and in April, 32 locksmen were arrested at North Street in Kingston while marching with banner and Bible demanding freedom. This increased harassment coincided with an intensification of interest at a governmental level in the cultivation of ganja. To the middle class, Rasta meant ganja and ganja meant crime and subversion. This simple equation inaugurated a massive campaign against drug usage (which had previously been more or less tolerated amongst the poor and unemployed). In 1957, the Government denied the special privileges traditionally claimed by the Maroons of Accompong involving ganja cultivation. The ritual smoking of grass had performed a sacramental function for most dedicated Ras Tafarians who identified ganja as the ‘herb’ of Genesis 8, Psalm 18 and Rev. 22, and the rigorous enforcement of stricter legislation was aimed specifically at the locksman who boldly paraded his African affiliations and acutely embarrassed a government which was desperately trying to consolidate its nationhood and improve its international image.9 The periodic calls for repatriation to Africa threw these official plans into even greater jeopardy and were greeted with a correspondingly hostile reaction by the dominant sections of opinion. In 1958, the convention at Kingston Pen called by Prince Edward C. Edwards to discuss the project of mass repatriation was met with blanket disapproval in the press. The activities of the Reverend Claudius Henry, who, in 1959 organized an Emancipation Jubilee to celebrate an imminent return to Africa received even stronger censure. Henry, who had founded the Africa Reform Church and styled himself ‘The Repairer of the Breach’, was arrested and charged with felonious treason after an association with black American communists was uncovered. That liaison between the disciples of the Ras Tafari and the exponents of revolutionary politics most feared by orthodox Jamaican opinion had finally taken place. Henry’s house was found to contain an arsenal of guns, explosives and machetes; and letters were found in his possession addressed to Fidel Castro along with open incitements to violence. Public opinion was predictably mortified when, on June 21, 1960, as the Henry trial was still under way, there occured a bloody confrontation at Red Hills between police, national guardsmen and a group of ‘bearded men’, after a secret cache of arms had been discovered. Two officers were killed, and subsequently the bodies of three Rastafarians were found in a grave in Red Hills; all allegedly members of Henry’s Church; all apparently victims of military-style executions. The theory was promulgated in the press that these men were murdered by black American militants who had thereby usurped their position as leaders of the group. This violent incident had obvious repercussions for Henry who was held up as an example to all would-be revolutionaries. Rastafarianism was decried from the bench as a ‘wicked doctrine’ of ‘fantastic stupidity’ which had been foisted by certain ruthless and dangerous men upon ‘the poor and illiterate people of the island’. Three years later, another sensational outbreak of what this time appeared to be a purely spontaneous violence occured on the north coast. On Holy Thursday, 1963, a group of Rasta men attacked and set on fire a gas station at Coral Gardens, 10 miles from Montego Bay, the famous holiday resort, and killed the attendant. They then went on to murder a Jamaican guest at a nearby motel and to attack the house of a local overseer. A skirmish broke out with the police and 8 people were killed (two policemen, three Rastafarians, and three passers-by who were drawn into the battle). Three Rastafarians were arrested and charged with murder. Even the
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opulent tourist centres were no longer sacrosanct and the Coral Gardens incident provoked an even fiercer panic than that generated by the confrontation at Red Hills, three years earlier. Some 150 Rastafarians were arrested in police raids on four different parishes and brought up before the courts on charges ranging from vagrancy to unlawful possession; from being a ‘suspected person’ to being in possession of dangerous drugs and dangerous weapons. A clergyman conducting the funeral service of one of the policemen killed in the incident delivered a torrent of invective during his ovation which aptly summarizes the outraged attitude of the authorities: ‘The Rastafarians’ he said “are . . . a band of vicious people whose doctrine and activities could not suit this or any other government” ’ (from report in Daily Gleaner 16.4.1963). The ostracization of the Rastaman was thus completed. The original intimations of a profound and onerous alienation which found symbolic expression in the cult of Ras Tafari had merely been confirmed by the official reaction. The dreadlocksmen had touched upon certain deeply-rooted prejudices, and racial and cultural anxieties by making an art form out of exclusion. Protracted class and racial antagonisms had created amongst the Rastamen and the constituted authorities mutual expectations of violence, and these expectations, along with a host of Biblical prophecies (the primitive prologue to revolution) had found bloody and disastrous fulfillment in the incident at Red Hills and Coral Gardens. But these spectacular events should not be allowed to obscure the quieter development within the cult itself of a psychology of withdrawal and an accompanying aesthetic far removed from that which had produced the tragic and cathartic denouements of 1960 and 1963. To understand these developments, we must return to the historically important perceptual adjustment already mentioned in relation to Howell. The identification of man with God meant that the minutiae of religious theory and practice could only be decided in the individual conscience. Although the Bible did indeed contain the Word of God, Scripture had indicated that half of this has ‘not been written except in the believer’s heart’ and so ample space was left for improvisation. The movement was of course innately heretical and the concept of an orthodoxy would have been unthinkable. The doctrine of Rastafarianism tended to evolve by schizogenesis and conflicting interpretations of the Biblical and Garveyite scriptures led to the formation of countless independent schools of thought. To reduce this chaos the U.C.W.I. research paper of 1960 managed to set out a broad base of beliefs common to all Rastafarians. The 4 points manifesto went as follows: 1 2 3 4
Ras Tafari is the Living God. Ethiopia is the black man’s home. Repatriation is the way of redemption for black men. It has been foretold and will occur shortly. The ways of the white man are evil, especially for the black.
I shall briefly suggest a clarification of each of these tenets and shall attempt to pursue them to their point of origin in the material situation of the believer. This is undertaken in the interests not so much of demystification (which I don’t think is necessary)10 as of simple decodification of a set of symbolic responses. The location of the Godhead in Ras Tafari, a living man (whether this be the Emperor of Ethiopia, Self, or species-Man) represents the secularization of what were originally religious terms of reference and constitutes the final appropriation of an alien faith. The deification
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of the Black Man concludes that process whereby the white man’s belief-system was encountered, adapted, and inverted to serve the totally different needs of the slave-caste. Ethiopia provides the group with a collective id which promises to dissolve all tension and to reintegrate the Rasta with his tribe, his culture and himself. Dialectically it provides that ideal dimension (Utopia) against which the Rastafarian can judge his present condition and assess in what ways it is lacking. As Rex Nettleford notes in Mirror Mirror emigration is the black Jamaican’s conditioned response to ‘pressure’ (excessive economic determination, severe privation, unbearable cultural contradictions). The question whether this repatriation should take place literally, by a physical journey in the real world or in the imagination by a systematic reclamation of the African cultural heritage is almost irrelevant when we remember what Ethiopia has come to mean to the Rasta man. The total rejection of the white man and his ways is, of course, predictable when one considers the experience of slavery, and although the conspiracy theories11 which are used to back up this rejection are somewhat biassed, they do facilitate the reinterpretation of history. They do enable the Rastafarian to find his own history. Thus, the four precepts represent symbolizations of a whole complex of responses to a situation of extreme alienation. To apply an exclusively literal interpretation would be to underestimate the sophistication of those responses. The religious milieu in which Rastafarianism was evolved demanded a specifically Biblical mythology and this mythology had to be appropriated and made to serve a different set of cultural needs if it was to win support from a people who were accustomed to look for salvation amongst the pages of the Book of Revelations. By a dialectical process of redefinition, the Scriptures, which had constantly absorbed and deflected the revolutionary potential of the Jamaican black, were used to locate that potential, to negate the Judeao-Christian culture which had originally produced those very scriptures. Or, in the more concise idiom of the Jamaican street-boys, the Bible was taken, read and ‘flung back rude’. The points of faith which I have tried to elucidate form a common conceptual base for all the various schools of Rastafarianism. As the 1960 report emphasised, the ‘locksmen’ were merely the militant and conspicuous fringe of a movement which had drawn support from much wider sections of the black community.12 But the ‘locksmen’ constitute an exotic elite which has influenced directly and decisively the rebellious responses of the young urban unemployed of Jamaica and Great Britain by incorporating the cult of Ras Tafari into every aspect of their daily lives, and by seeking resolution now in the extension of anomie into exile.13 In the problematic areas of lifestyle, language and perception, the men of the dreadlocks introduced major qualitiative innovations which prefigured many of the more familiar developments in Western youth culture during the sixties. Following in the footsteps of Howell, some locksmen banded together in communes,14 and lived off the land, adopting a Nazarene code of conduct which helped to guarantee them a high status inside the movement, and facilitated their acceptance as prophets by many groups sympathetic to the cause of African redemption. More important still, the locksmen pursued Howell’s extreme formulations to a point where a complete break with the dominant ideology became possible. The Biblical metaphors were elaborated into a total system – a code of seeing – which was at once supple and holistic, universal in application, and lateral in direction. If we are to appreciate just how completely the locksman has managed to sever the social and psychological ties which theoretically bind him to Jamaica, I must attempt a further explication of this system. I shall merely precis the account given in the 1960 report.
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The black races are interpreted as the true Israelites and Solomon and Sheba are the black ancestors of Haille Sellassie, the black God. Babylon really covers the western world (though many locksmen exclude Russia which has been identified as the Bear with three ribs which ‘will come to stamp up the residue thereof so that Babylon shall be a desolation among the nations’ (Rev III).) The police, the Church and the Government (particularly Sir Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley) are the agents of imperialism and will share the terrible fate of the white oppressors. Ethiopia is the true name for all Africa. Since 1655, the white man and his brown ally have held the black man in slavery; and although physical slavery was abolished in 1838, it continues in a disguised form. All black men are Ethiopians and the Jamaican government is the theocracy of the Emperor Haille Sellassie though communism is much more desirable than capitalism – which is the system of Babylon. Marriage in church is sinful and the true Ethiopian should merely live with a black ‘Queen’ whom he should treat with the utmost respect (she for her part, must never straighten her hair). Alcohol is forbidden, as is gambling. Jamaican beliefs in obeah, magic and witchcraft are superstitious nonsense and have no empirical validity. Revivalism compounds mental slavery. Ganja is sacred. Wordly possessions are not necessary in Jamaica and the individual ownership of property is frowned upon. Work is good but alienated labour is quite simply a perpetuation of slavery. All brethren are reincarnations of ancestral slaves; reincarnation is the reaffirmation of a lost culture and tradition. All brethren who regard Ras Tafari as God, regard man as God. Men are mortal sinners and oppressors. Men are those who know the Living God, the brethren, and are immortal and One, living eternally in the flesh of all brethren – (One locksman will address another as ‘bra’ (brother) and will double up the first person singular – ‘I and I’ – instead of using the ‘you and I’ construction). Beyond these ‘certainties’ which remain relatively static, the locksman habitually resorts to the rhetorical modes of the Bible – the riddle, the paradox, the parable – to demonstrate that he is in possession of the ‘true word’. Michael Thomas quotes a hermetic locksman called Cunchyman who tells how he has conquered the tyranny of work by ‘capturing’ an axe (which can kill 13 men who use it for chopping wood all their lives) and hanging it on the wall. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Bob Marley, the Rasta leader of the Wailers (perhaps the first reggae band with a truly international following) shows how ‘destruction come outta material things’ by using his guitar as a reified metaphor (the guitar plays beautiful music but it can kill if there is a short circuit). Such syncretic and associative patterns of thought make all knowledge immediately (i.e. magically) accessible. Thus, when sufficiently stoned, the locksmen will, as Michael Thomas asserts, discuss literally anything (e.g. which is more powerful – lightning or electricity; which is faster – the shark or the porpoise) with all the casuistry and conviction of Jesuit priest. Ultimately, technology capitulates to belief; belief succumbs to knowledge; and thought is really felt. At this point, a harmonious relationship between the inner and outer dimensions is made possible and the ‘bra’ is said to ‘head rest (or “indwell”) with Jah.’ This explicit identification with the Godhead automatically demands a denial of linear systems; an end to all distinctions, and invites an extreme subjectivism. Mysticism, of course, means stasis and the movement suffered ultimately from the quietist position towards which it naturally inclined.15 The conversion of science into poetry did not lead to the expected redistribution of real power (even though this power was merely apparent; in Rastafarian mythology, a figment of Babylonian vanity.)16 But the crucial act of faith constitutes an archetypal technique of appropriation which escaped the traditional religious displacement by grounding God; which entailed a radical reappraisal of the black Jamaican’s potential and enabled the locksman to reassess his position in society. And if all
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this seems a little too esoteric, we need only turn to the rude boy to confirm the validity of the Rasta perspective. For the secularization of the Rasta Godhead coincided with the politicization of the dispossessed rude boy, and the new aesthetic which directed and organized the locksman’s perceptions, found a perfect form in reggae.
4. Music, film and the overthrow of form A hungry man becomes an angry man A rude boy quoted in Garth White’s Rudie, Oh Rudie Preacher man say Great God come down from the sky Make every body feel happy, make everybody feel high. But if you know what life is worth You will look for yours on earth So now I seen the light I’m gonna stand up for me rights From the Wailer’s ‘Get up, Stand up for Your Rights’ As with most cultures which depend primarily upon oral communication, it is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to ascertain the ‘facts’ of Jamaican social history. The past appears irrevocable and the absence of written documents encourages ‘unscientific’ speculation. Reconstruction, which is, of course, never straightforward, becomes even more of a hit and miss affair, and a batch of contradictory, blatantly partisan ‘versions’ (all reasonably credible; all hopelessly suspect) spring up to explain the most insignificant of cultural ‘events’. It is hardly surprising, then, that the development of reggae should have attracted such a variety of conflicting interpretations. Reggae itself is polymorphous – and to concentrate upon one component at the expense of all others involves a reduction of what are complex cultural processes. Thus, reggae is transmogrified American soul, with an overlay of salvaged African rhythms, and an undercurrent of pure Jamaican rebellion. Reggae is transplanted Pentecostal. Reggae is the Rasta hymnal, the heart cry of the Kingston rude boy, the nativised national anthem of the new Jamaican government. The music is all these things and more – a mosaic which incorporates all the strands that make up black Jamaican culture; the call and response patterns of the Pentecostal Church, the devious scansion of Jamaican street talk, the sex and the cool of American r and b, the insistent percussion of the locksmen’s jam-sessions, all find representation in reggae. Even the etymology of the word ‘reggae’ invites controversy. In Michael Thomas’s article, Bulldog, a rude boy who has made the grade in West Kingston, claims that it was derived from ‘ragga’ which was an ‘uptown’ way of saying ‘raggamuffin’ and that the implied disapproval was welcomed by those who had liked the music. Alternatively, there have been readings which stress the similarity with the word raga (the Indian form) and still others which claim that reggae is simply a distortion of Rico (who, with Don Drummond, was one of the original ska musicians). The emergence of the music itself has provoked even fiercer debate, and one’s response to the music depends upon whether one believes the music evolved spontaneously out of a group experience or as part of a conscious policy of nativization dictated from above. Orlando Patterson tends to play down the folk-aspects of reggae and gives a correspondingly unsympathetic account of Rastafarianism (which he interprets as mystification through ‘group fantasy’).17 Rolston Kallyndyr and Henderson Dalrymple mention only those folk-aspects in their pamphlet (Reggae, A People’s Music) and tend to
Reggae, Rastas and Rudies 597 be somewhat uncritical. In Colin McGlashan’s article ‘Reggae, Reggae, Reggae’ (Sunday Times, February 4, 1973) the King (a leading sound system man amongst the black British community) offers a characteristically unempirical and metaphorical explanation which provides another prime example of Rasta ‘logic’: ‘Reggae is protest, formed out of suffering . . . You got to have that hard strong feeling . . . That feeling come from mothers’ breast, man, the breast milk. It’s true! . . . the natural milk come from the mother’s breast, man. It give you that . . . that . . . stickiness in your body man, an’ that feelings, man, to create things that supposed to been created’. Whilst acknowledging the fallibility of such rhetorical excesses, I should support the King against Patterson, simply because the commercial interests of the entrepreneurs who controlled the new record industry militated against any kind of intervention by the central government. Moreover, the impetus toward Africanization required no encouragement from above – it was already showing itself in the development of the Ras Tafari movement, and in the disillusioned withdrawal of the unemployed youth. The locksmen were not only the militant core of the Rasta movement; they also provided a nucleus around which less coherent forms of protest could gather, and the dialogue which ensued found operatic expression in reggae. But if these conclusions appear to be somewhat premature, I shall now offer an account of reggae which hopefully synthesizes all the available sources. Before ‘ska’ (the forerunner of reggae), Jamaica had no distinctive music of its own. The satirical and articulate calypsoes of Trinidad were processed and pruned down before being played to the tourists. Jamaican calypso or ‘mento’, which developed in the 1950s was never more than a mild emasculated form derived from what had originally been very potent stuff indeed. Beyond this and Harry Belafonte, the North Coast did the samba to the strains of Willy Lopez and his swish Latin orchestra. But in West Kingston, r and b, imported from America, began to attract attention. Men like Duke Reid were quick to recognize the potential for profit and launched themselves as disc-jockeys forming the flamboyant aristocracy of the shantytown slums; and the era of the sound system began. Survival in the highly competitive world of the backyard discos, where rival disc-jockeys vied for the title of the ‘boss-sound’, demanded alertness, ingenuity and enterprise, and, as American r and b began to lose its original impetus in the late fifties, a new expedient was tried by the more ambitious d-j’s who branched out into record production themselves. Usually, an instrumental recording was all that was necessary, and the d-j would improvise the lyrics (usually simple and formulaic; ‘work-it-out, work-it-out’ etc.) during ‘live’ performances. Certain important precedents were set by these early recordings. Firstly, the musicians were generally selected from the vast bank of unemployed labour; used for one session, paid a pittance, and returned to the streets. The ruthless exploitation of young talent continues unabated in certain sections of the record industry. Secondly, the music remains, even now, essentially tied to the sound systems and is designed principally for dancing. Thirdly, the tradition of ‘scatting’ across a simple repetitive backing with impromptu lyrics, continues to produce some of the more interesting and exciting reggae. Lastly, and most importantly, the ‘ska’ beat made its debut on these early unlabelled discs. Ska is a kind of jerky shuffle played on an electric guitar with the treble turned right up. The emphasis falls on the upbeat rather than on the offbeat as in r and b, and is accentuated by the bass, drums and brass sections (trombones were an indispensable part of early ska). Ska is structurally a back-to-front version of r and b. Once again, as with language and religion, distortion of the original form appears to be
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deliberate, as well as inevitable; and inversion seems to denote appropriation, signifying that a cultural transaction has taken place. However, the alchemy which turned soul into ska was by no means simple. The imported music interacted with the established subterranean forms of Jamaica. The Cumina, Big Drum, and burra dances had long since ressurected the rhythms of Africa, and the context in which these forms were evolved directly determined their shape and content; and left an indelible mark on the semantics of ska. The burra dance was particularly significant; played on the bass, funde and repeater drums, the burra constituted an open celebration of criminality. Since the early 1930s, it had been the custom for the inhabitants of the West Kingston slums to welcome discharged prisoners back into the communities with the ‘burra’. The music consolidated local allegiances and criminal affiliations at the expense of commitments to the larger society beyond the slums. As the locksmen began to clash regularly with the police in the late 1940s, a liaison developed between locksmen and hardened criminals. The dreadlocks of the Rastamen were absorbed into the arcane iconography of the outcast and many Rastas openly embraced the outlaw status which the authorities seemed determined to thrust upon them. Still more made permanent contacts in the Jamaican underworld whilst serving prison terms for ganja offences. This drift toward a consciously anti-social and anarchist position was assisted by the police who attempted to discredit the movement by labelling all locksmen as potentially dangerous criminals who were merely using mysticism as a front for their subversive activities. As has been observed so often elsewhere, predictions such as these have a tendency to find fulfilment, and men like Woppy King, who was later executed for murder and rape, joined the Rastafarian fraternity and affected the extravagant style of the dreadlocks. In time, the locksmen took over the burra dance completely calling the burra drums ‘akete drums.’ Inevitably, the criminal ambience which surrounded the music survived the transferrence and the Niyabingi dance which replaced the burra translated the original identification with criminal values into an open commitment to terrorist violence. The crime and music of West Kingston were thus linked in a subtle and enduring symbiosis; and they remained yoked together even after the infiltration of soul. Moreover, the locksmen continued to direct the new music, and to involve themselves creatively in its production. Meanwhile, a survey in 1957 had revealed that 18% of the labour force was without work, and, as the Doxey Report was to state 12 years later, it had now become conceivable that; ‘many young persons will pass through the greater part of their lives having never been regularly employed’. And the embittered youth of West Kingston abandoned by the society which claimed to serve them, were ready to look to the locksman for explanations, to listen to his music, and emulate his posture of withdrawal. Thus, it should hardly surprise us to find that behind the swagger and the sex, the violence and the cool of the rude boy music of the 1960s stands the visionary Rastaman with his commodious rhetoric; his all-embracing metaphors. And so, ska was resilient, armoured music; ‘rough and tough’ in more ways than one. Its inception guaranteed it against serious interference from above or manipulation at the level of meaning. The stigma which was originally attached to ska by the official arbiters of good taste in Jamaica relates directly to the criminal connotations of the ‘burra’ dance, and the early attempts on the part of the government at manufacturing a national sound were frankly unsuccessful. Eddie Seaga, who set up one of first record companies in Jamaica (West Indies Records) was one of those who tried to promote ska to the world as a representative (and therefore respectable) ‘native’ form. His admission to the Labour Cabinet encouraged him in this project and he recruited Byron Lee and the Dragonaires, a ‘class act’ which was currently playing the North Coast; and sent them first to West Kingston to study
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the new music, and then to New York to present the finished product. The music suffered somewhat in the translation. Byron Lee was too polished to play ska properly, and raw ska was too ‘rude’ to interest a world market at that time. So, ska was left, more or less to its own devices. Before I attempt a critical analysis of the content of the music, I shall briefly summarize the chronology. In the early 1960s, the record industry developed under the auspices of Seaga at West Indies Records, Ken Khouri at Federal Studios and Chris Blackwell, a white man and son of a plantation owner, at ‘Island’ records. But Blackwell did not confine himself to the West Indies. He soon went on to exploit the market in England, where more records were being sold to the homesick rudies than to the native Jamaicans. Blackwell bought premises in London’s Kilburn Road and began to challenge the monopoly which the Bluebeat label had managed to acquire over the West Indian record market in Britain. His triumph over Bluebeat was publicly acknowledged in 1964, when he launched the first nationally popular ska record, ‘My Boy Lollipop’ sung with an endearing nasal urgency by the 16 year old Millie Small. Blackwell set up another label, Trojan, which dealt with most of the British releases and left Lee Gopthal to supervise the distribution from South London.18 Then, some time in the summer of 1966, the music altered recognizably and ska modulated into rocksteady. The horns were given less emphasis or were dropped altogether, and the sound became somewhat slower more somnabulent and erotic. The bass began to dominate and, as rocksteady, in its turn, became heavier it became known as reggae. Over the years reggae attracted such a huge following that Michael Manley used a reggae song ‘Better Must Come’ in the 1972 election campaign.19 His People’s National Party won by an overwhelming majority. But this does not mean that the music had been defused for simultaneously during this period, the rude boys were evolving a visual style which did justice to the tesselated structure of ska. The American soul element was reflected most clearly in the self-assured demeanour; the sharp flashy clothes, the ‘jive-ass’ walk which the street boys affected. The politics of ghetto pimpery found their way into the street-talk of shanty-town Jamaica, and every rude boy, fresh from some poor rural outback, soon began to wheel and deal with the best of them in the ubiquitous bars of Ghost Town and Back O’Wall. The rude boy lived for the luminous moment, playing dominoes20 as though his life depended on the outcome – a big-city hustler with nothing to lose, and, all the time rocksteady, ska and reggae gave him the means with which to move effortlessly, without even thinking. Cool, that distant and indefineable quality, became almost abstract, almost metaphysical, intimating a stylish kind of stoicism: survival and something more. And, of course, there were the clashes with the police. The ganja, and the guns, and the ‘pressure’ produced a steady stream of rude boys desperate to test their strength against the law, and the judges replied with longer and longer sentences. In the words of Michael Thomas, every rudie was ‘dancing in the dark’ with ambitions to be ‘the coolest Johnny-TooBad on Beeston Street’. This was the chaotic period of ska, and Prince Buster lampooned the Bench and sang of Judge Dread who, on side one, sentences weeping rude boys (‘Order! Order! Rude boys don’t cry!’) to 500 years and 10,000 lashes, and, on side two, grants them a pardon, and throws a party to celebrate their release. The dreary mechanics of crime and punishment are reproduced endlessly in tragi-comic form on these early records, and the ska classics, like the music of the burra which preceded them, were often simple celebrations of deviant and violent behaviour. Sound system rivalries, street fights,21 sexual encounters,22 boxing matches,23 horse races,24 and experiences in prison25 were immediately converted into folksong and stamped with the ska beat. The disinherited Dukes and Earls, the Popes and
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Princes of early ska came across as music-hall gangsters and Prince Buster warned in deadly earnest, with a half-smile that ‘Al Capone’s guns don’t argue’.26 But in the world of ‘007’27 where the rude boys ‘loot’ and ‘shoot’ and ‘wail’ while ‘out on probation’, ‘the policemen get taller’, and ‘the soldier get longer’ by the hour; and in the final confrontation the authorities must always triumph. So there is always one more confrontation on the cards and there is always a higher authority still, and that is where Judgement Day works itself back into Reggae, and the Rastas sing of an end to ‘sufferation’ on the day when Judge Dread will be consumed in his own fire. The Rastafarian influence on reggae had been strong since the earliest days – ever since Don Drummond and Rico Rodriguez had played tunes like ‘Father East’, ‘Addis Ababa’, ‘Tribute to Marcus Garvey’ and ‘Reincarnation’ to a receptive audience. And even Prince Buster, the boss, the main man, the individualist par excellence, at the height of the anarchic rude boy period, could exhort his followers in ‘Free Love’ to ‘act true’, to ‘speak true’, to ‘learn to love each other’, advising the dissident rudies that ‘truth is our best weapon’ and that ‘our unity will conquer’. In the burlesque ‘Ten Commandments’, Prince Buster is typically ambivalent, proselytizing, and preaching, and poking fun all at the same time; but the internalization of God which marks the rasta creed is there nonetheless behind all the blustering chauvanism: ‘These are the ten commandments of man given to woman/By me, Prince Buster, through the inspiration of I’. As the decade wore on, the music shifted away from America towards Ethiopia, and the rude boys moved with the music. Racial and class loyalties were intensified, and, as the music matured, it made certain crucial breaks with the r and b which had provided the original catalyst. It became more ethnic, less frenzied,28 more thoughtful, and the political metaphors and dense mythology of the locksmen began to insinuate themselves more obtrusively into the lyrics. Groups like the Wailers, the Upsetters, The Melodians and the Lionaires emerged with new material which was often revolutionary, and was always intrinsically Jamaican. Some rude boys began to grow the dreadlocks, and many took to wearing woollen stocking caps often in the green, gold and red of the Ethiopian flag to proclaim their alienation from the West. This transformation (if such a subtle change of gear deserves such apocalyptic terminology), went beyond style to modify and channel the rude boys’ consciousness of class and colour. Without overstressing the point, there was a trend away from the undirected violence and competitive individualism of the early sixties, towards a more articulate and informed anger, and if crime continued to offer the only solution available, then there were new distinctions to be made. A rude boy quoted by Rex Nettleford in Mirror, Mirror exhibits a higher consciousness in his comments on violence: ‘It’s not the suffering brother you should really stick up it is these big merchants that have all these twelve places . . . with the whole heap of different luxurious facilities.’ He goes on: ‘What we really want is this equal rights and justice. Everyman have a good living condition, good schooling, and then I feels things will be much better.’ At the risk of oversimplifying the issue (and overstating my case), I would suggest that, as the Rastas themselves began to turn away from violent solutions to direct the new aesthetic, the rude boys, steeped in ska, soon acquired the locksmen’s term of reference, and became the militant arm of the Rasta movement. Thus, as the music evolved and passed into the hands of the locksmen there was an accompanying expansion of class and colour consciousness throughout the West Indian community. Of course, I would not isolate the emergence of a higher consciousness from larger developments in the ghettoes and on the campuses of the United States. Nor would I dismiss the stimulative effect of the Jamaican Black Power movement which, by the late 1960s, was being led by the middle-class students and was clustered around the University of the West Indies.29 But I would stress the unique way in
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which these external developments were mediated to the rude boy (in Brixton as well as Back O’ Wall), how they were digested, interpreted and reassembled by the omniscient Rasta Logos situated at the heart of reggae music. In spite of Manley and Seaga, reggae remained intact. It was never dirigible, protected, as it was, by language, by colour, and by a culture which had been forced, in its very inception, to cultivate secrecy and to elaborate defences against the intrusions of the master class. Moreover, the form of reggae itself militated against outside interference and guaranteed a certain amount of autonomy. The dialectical process which lay behind the formation of reggae enabled it to escape the limitations of a Western aesthetic; and, if it imposed its own boundaries, then these were never immutably fixed. So reggae reversed the established pattern of pop music30 by dictating a strong repetitive bassline which communicated directly to the body and allowed the singer to scat across the undulating surface of the rhythm. The music and the words are synchronised in good reggae and co-ordinated at a level which transcends meaning and eludes a fixed interpretation. Linguistic patterns become musical patterns; both merge with the metabolism until sound becomes abstract, meaning nonspecific. Thus, on the ‘heavy’ fringes of reggae, beyond the lucid but literal denunciations of the Wailers, Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Ras-Tafar-I, dub and talkover artists condemn the ways of Babylon implicitly, taking reggae right back to Africa, and the rudie d-js (like Big Youth, Niney, I-Roy and U-Roy) threaten to undermine language itself with syncopated creole scansion and an eye for the inexpressible (see the ‘Big Youth lyric which introduces this paper). Language (foreign in the first place if we really want to be retrospective) abdicates to body-talk, belief and intuition; and by definition, reggae resists definition.31 The form then, is inherently subversive, and it was in the arena of form that the Jamaican street-boys made their most important innovations. By concentrating upon another medium (film) I hope to demonstrate how some of these innovations were made possible. The dependence of Jamaican street-styles on models provided by the popular American cinema is stressed by Rolston Kallyndyr. The ‘main points of reference in the West-Indian lifestyles’, he writes, were borrowed from the ‘cheap gangster films and the general bric-a-brac of Western Europe’. Once again, as with the Krays, films (particularly in the gangster genre) provide a vital stimulus and a complete set of ready-made myths, images and expectations which can be incorporated into the subculture and used to define its world. The influence of the gangster film shows itself in the flash and swagger of the urban rude boy, and in the ostentatious displays of solvency (the diamond rings, the limousines, the fedorahs) which were used to signify his success. Moreover, those who excelled in the dare-devil art of ‘tram-hopping’32 received the rudie honours and were given names like Al Capone, Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre; and the stacatto rattle of the machine gun blends with the spikey ska beat of Prince Buster’s ‘Al Capone’. Desmond Dekker, a few years later, sang of 007 and the big-city slickers of shanty-town. But already one can detect a movement away from the turbulent destructiveness of the mainstream gangster film, and by 1969, Dekker could openly refer to this aversion in ‘Israelite’.33 (‘I don’t want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde’). As the Rastafarian mythology, with its insistence on racial unity and its Ethiopian orientation began to predominate, the gangster material was automatically deprived of much of its potency and appeal. The dissonance between fantasy and fulfilment had always been amplified by colour and Prince Buster seems to acknowledge the fact that ultimately he is disqualified from entering that exclusive coterie of crime. Negroes only carry silver trays in the world of Edward G., and, in big Al’s clubs, though the gangsters may move to the moody strains of a late-night blues, the black man who plays it keeps his hands on the keyboard and
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off of the goods. The Prince can only identify with the Hollywood hoodlum up to a point and beyond that he can only shrug and smile. Hence, the mock-heroics and the relentless self-parody. Dilip Hiro defines the point at which this contradiction becomes intolerable (and a rupture with the dominant ideology becomes possible) as that mythical moment in the Tarzan epic when the black audience transfers its allegiances from the white protagonist to the dissident ‘natives’ who constantly oppose him. And it is this moment which is frozen, prolonged and held up for inspection in the Jamaican film The Harder they Come. As the growth of the Jamaican ‘rude boy’ subculture is presented dramatically as personal biography in this film, I feel it deserves special attention. The Harder they Come, which played to packed audiences of West Indians when it was given a limited screening in Britain last year, portrays the desperate life and times of one rude boy (played by Jimmy Cliff ) who arrives in Kingston from the country determined to make the grade. After his failed attempts to break into the rigged record business and equally rigged ganja trade, he turns to the more immediate solution of the young man’s Valhalla. With the pressure building up to breaking-point, Jimmy buys his guns and shoots a few policemen. He poses for the cameras – all pistols and velvet caps – and enjoys a brief notoriety; the success of his record, a deceptively melodic piece loaded with menace, coinciding with the climax of his career as a rude boy. Unable to escape, despite the assistance of a Rasta friend who tries to smuggle him out to Africa (the myth of emigration?) Jimmy is left ‘sitting in limbo’, looking out to sea and waiting for the inevitable violent conclusion. True to form, the film ends with a bloody gun-battle which paradoxically explodes the form itself. For as Jimmy goes down ‘like Bonnie and Clyde’ caught in between savage police cross-fire and slow motion, the action suddenly shrinks onto a cinema screen somewhere in downtown Kingston, and the audience is confronted with its own reactions. The idea of the film within the film is, of course, by no means new but it is used with devastating effect in The Harder they Come. One of the earlier scenes in the film shows Jimmy at the cinema surrounded by raucous rudies who cheer as the obligatory contingent of anonymous cowboys is slaughtered in some spaghetti B-western. As Jimmy, in his turn is shot down in the final scene, this earlier incident is recalled and the hero’s death becomes just another meaningless spectacle thrown on to the screen for our amusement. The laughter and the catcalls of the ‘live’ audience are echoed on the sound track, and the rude boys of Brixton and Birmingham are brought face to face with their own mirror-image. Outfoxed and outraged (so the theory goes and so indeed it does in practice) the audience can no longer escape its own alienation: the laughter falters, catches in the throat, and the catcalls die away. But the resulting cultural deadlock has already been broken elsewhere. For the gangster and the cowboy had only received a temporary and qualified approval34 and the critical reappraisal of Western forms of fantasy inaugurated by the locksmen, enabled the Jamaican black to postulate the existence of an alternative asthetic locked somewhere inside an idealized African past. Reggae provided the all-important key. Thus, the form remains open and each reggae number occupies an arbitrary position on a rhymic continuum. Reggae is directed at the body and as Hiro asserts, dancing is made to serve ‘more as a self and communal expression than as a means of entertainment’ (my own emphasis). Indeed the gulf between perceiver and performer implicit in the concept of entertainment is replaced by a purely qualitative distinction between what Bob Marley calls35 the fantasy (of ‘material vanity’) and the enduring ‘reality’ (of Ras Tafari and reggae). And of course, it is enough to sit in the limbo in between and wait for the boats to come and bring salvation. At least
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Jimmy’s bloody termination is avoided and life can be resumed. The implications of the new aesthetic, then, go beyond the created forms and reverberate along the line of consciousness to orchestrate experience itself.
5. A method in the madness I have chosen to dwell at length on the Jamaican context in which reggae was evolved because that context can be used in an ideal fashion to focus and hopefully to resolve many of the key problems raised by the study of subcultures. Firstly, that crucial moment at which the external determinants of race, class, culture, and biography, converge with the consciousness of the individual and the group to produce that apparently indefeasible enigma – the ‘subculture’ – can, to a certain extent, be isolated in the case of the rude boy and his Rasta ‘bra’. This is possible because colour clarifies at the same time as it complicates the problems facing the sociologist. Certainly it brings a whole range of totally different factors into play which demand serious consideration in their own right. But the subsidiary dimension of colour cuts across and defines the larger dimension of class, and, in many ways, racial distinctions merely overlay basic class distinctions and intensity (dare I say dramatize?) fundamental class conflict. Thus, for the sociologist, colour can serve to illuminate certain cultural processes, which, under normal circumstances remain inaccessible and obscure. To take an example: the furtive acquisition of an alien language and religion by the slave caste in Jamaica exemplifies the osmotic process whereby dominant values are transmitted via the ‘stolen’ channels of communication to the working class. The subsequent mutation of that language and religion demonstrates the dialectical process whereby those values are systematically broken down and reallocated – reconstituting themselves in a totally different form as working-class culture. These two processes are not fixed in time – they recapitulate themselves in the lives of every working-class individual. For instance, the fact that language is essentially ‘stolen’ perhaps accounts for differential linguistic performance (Bernstein’s ‘restricted’ and ‘elaborated’ codes) amongst working-class and middle-class children. Applied more directly to the subject of deviancy, it can be used to counter Walter Miller’s thesis that the delinquent acts of adolescent street-corner groups are gestures of acceptance (of the values of the local parent culture) rather than of denial (of the values of the larger Parent culture). I would maintain that lower-class culture is perpetually recreating itself in its interactions with the dominant class (i.e. on its ‘deviant’ border) and that its integrity depends precisely upon the continuance of this dialectic. The argument sounds, perhaps, a little circular (the ‘which came first’ syndrome) and shifts the emphasis back once more to Albert Cohen’s position, but then sociology is (or should be) a science of perspectives, a study of relativities, and it is particularly important to stress this in the problematic area of subcultural theory. I should like to go on to propose a method whereby these relativities can be stabilized temporarily and for a specific theoretical purpose. The fact that I may seem simultaneously to be justifying a rather suspect methodology will, I hope, not detract from the theory itself. The student who adopts a phenomenological approach to subcultures is faced with a fundamental problem of definition. Whilst the moral faculty of judgement is paralyzed, the intellectual capacity for sympathy expands accordingly (perhaps even proportionately) and the subculture under consideration imperceptibly forms the student’s frames of reference. It perpetuates itself through him and is validated quite simply in the act of being understood. Of course, this is the standard price we pay for the sharply focussed image and the problems of identity seem irreducible and insoluble. The seer stands inside his work, between the lines, as
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it were, as an invisible and unstated set of assumptions. In short, he is his work, and it is not stipulated that he should know himself. In fact, he rarely does. Juliet Mitchell appreciates the difficulty. In Psychoanalysis and Feminism, she undertakes the enormous task of historicizing Freud and his successors. Inevitably, she comes to Laing and tries in her critique to untie the very knot which tied us up in ‘Knots’ (bad puns are, I feel, in the spirit of the thing). She goes on to question the validity of the inversionprinciple which generated a ‘politics of opposites’ (old v young, male v female, gay v straight, black v white, mad v sane) during the 1960s. Her reservations are, I think, wellfounded and her argument is long overdue. The dialectic written into Laing’s work is revived and recreated in the reading, but the author never really declares his part in all this; and, to the extent that Laing remains silent he is being dishonest. He suffers from the revelationist fallacy (contingent upon the religious belief in the unfolding Word) and his work deserves a cautious reception. For all his rich and penetrating insights, Laing has failed to recognize the real problem of meaning, and had loaded off the responsibilities of interpretation on to the reader. He has been swayed by his own rhetoric, and rhetoric is not retroactive – it means what it says, and it says with conviction, but it can never say what it means – it will not define itself. The student of subculture is confronted with a similar temptation. In the absence of a comprehensive theory of cultural semantics, he has no way of evaluating his own work, of finding out what it ‘really’ means unless he adopts the unsatisfactory expedient of becoming what he sees. Although semiology enables him to make tentative decodifications of random cultural signs, he has no way of arranging these in a coherent fashion. Lifted from their syntagmatic chains, his models tend to clash and coalesce in the stratosphere and without a sense of sequence, his paradigms tend to jar against each other. As a result, theory and practice have once more gone their separate ways: the more developed subcultural theories (deviancy amplification etc) revolve around their own axes, whilst the in-depth participantobservation studies pursue their own courses elsewhere. An impasse has been reached – the theorists proceed as though crime is an invention of the press, whilst the ‘workers in the field’ gesticulate angrily at the ivory towers, get lost in their subjects and promptly ‘go native’. By restoring some standard of measurement to the study of subculture, I hope to bring theory and practice a little closer together. Simultaneously it will give me an opportunity to proclaim my presence in this thesis, so that a small part of the subcultural universe can be explored and interpreted without my having to repair to an invisible bank of undeclared suppositions. Basically, the method is an adaptation of the ‘semantic differential’ theory put forward by Osgood and Tannenbaum in ‘The Measurement of Meaning’. The two psychologists claimed that the ‘meaning’ of a concept could be quantified by projecting that concept into a series of bipolar adjectival scales. Meaning was defined as a ‘representational mediation process’ linking sign to significate. This was concretized as the ‘semantic differential’, and used as a device for measuring the direction of association and its intensity (i.e. the method combined controlled association and scaling procedures). Meaning was thus translated into spatial terms and bipolar adjectival scales were selected to represent the major dimensions. Thus, the semantic differential could be used to localize a concept as a point in a Euclidean semantic space and a hypothetical universe of meaning could be charted on a series of graphs. In practice, the method is remarkably simple – a scale is suspended between two adjectives which are diametrically opposed (e.g. good . . . bad) and divided into seven steps. The subject is given a concept (e.g. ‘father’) and asked to assess its value in terms of the scale (i.e. by marking the appropriate gradation with an X).
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where X is the semantic differential
Obviously, this procedure can only be used to delineate a universe of very narrow dimensions indeed. In fact, one feels tempted to assign all concepts to the central neither/nor category. But, if used properly, it can prove more compressive than constrictive, and, as long as we recognize that it is merely an instrument of methodology (and not a whole orchestra) it does offer certain practical advantages. Firstly, it provides a way of objectifying the internal mechanics of meaning (the ‘representational mediation process’) so that the referential milieu in which thought is assembled and judgements are made can be symbolically reconstructed and held up for analysis. (i.e. it helps the writer to know himself). At the same time, it facilitates our understanding of a given phenomenon by affording us an element of control over a limited number of the variables involved in interpretation (i.e. it helps the writer to know his subject). These two functions are, of course, conterminous; but they are not the same – the one defines what the other interprets. Thus the semantic differential allows form to interosculate with content at a level which, for once, cannot escape detection and therefore provides one solution to the problem of meaning which I outlined above. ‘The crux of the method’ as Osgood and Tannenbaum point out ‘lies in selecting the sample of descriptive polar terms’. The terms which I have selected are two disparate but synchronous cultural phenomena – Rastafarianism and the London Gangster Style of the 1960s. As will become evident, I do not claim that these two terms are opposed at all levels of the semantic structure, merely on the plane of aesthetics, and whilst not underestimating the importance of such an opposition, I would not grant it absolute determinancy. In both the studies of the Kray Twins and of the Rastafarian/rude boy subculture I attempted to penetrate and decipher two distinct worlds of meaning. I termed the existential act of ‘totalization’, a peculiarly effective technique of cultural appropriation adopted by the subject to overcome and undermine an unusually constrictive set of external determinations, so that action could become once more conceivable and comprehensible. Whilst Ronnie Kray extended himself through the Firm, the Rastaman converted the rude boy brethren through music – both maintained their positions at the heart of their respective systems. But beyond the original act itself, and the common centrifugal force which disseminated meanings, there are major discrepancies between the two systems. Whereas Ronnie Kray’s self-dramatization and subsequent deification confirmed his imprisonment within those initial determinations, the Rastafarian’s assimilation of the Godhead enabled him to transcend them altogether. Ronnie Kray’s vision was myopic, one dimensional and circumscribed (a system of closure) the locksman’s metaphoric, utopian, and schismatical (a system of transcendence/detachment). Obviously these are fundamental disparities which would seem to force the two subcultures into separate categories which are only tenuously linked (i.e. ‘straight crime’ v ‘drug culture’ subsumed under a major heading of ‘Deviancy’). But it is only by postulating a hypothetical polarity between two ideal-types that larger definitions become possible, and it is on the parameter of aesthetics (more specifically the gangster genre) that such a polarity is most appropriately organised. Thus, Ronnie Kray’s incarceration within bourgeois forms of expression is encapsulated in his response to the gangster film (total identification = total incorporation), whilst the Rastafarian’s ideological break, with the dominant system was
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contingent upon infrastructural innovations at the level of form (i.e. language, perception, music, etc). We can say that the rude boys went through the gangster film during the early 1960s in their search for a subcultural identity (which was ultimately synonomous with a racial identity whilst the Kray Twins remained locked inside it to such an extent that we can talk of their actions as being ‘framed’ or ‘scripted’. Obviously, to stress the ascendancy of intermediary aesthetic determinations without paying equal attention to the adjacent dimensions of class and colour involves a reappraisal of subcultural meaning. From this perspective, subcultures can be seen less as solutions to a specific set of problems (Jock Young’s argument) than as symbolic gestures towards an abstract ‘freedom’. But in practice it merely requires the substitution of one semantic differential for another. Thus the differential response to aesthetic determinations dictates the shape of the subcultural universe at the very moment of its inception. This original response determines the range of possibilities open to the actor once the subculture has been established and predisposes him toward a fairly static set of related choices (i.e. withdrawal and radical political position v inclusion and profit/power within existing economic framework). Thus scaling on the parameter of aesthetics, corresponds to scaling along other dimensions and a graduated commitment to dominant forms of expression overlays (or symbolically intimates) a graduated commitment to the status quo. I am not suggesting that revolutionary theory and practice can be automatically translated into radical form and content (the mistake of Marcuse and May ’68). The rebellion against the limiting effects of form on consciousness ultimately imposes its own boundaries, and militates against revolutionary action by projecting action itself onto a metaphorical plane – by placing the onus on resolution in the individual psyche rather than on revolution through collective solidarity.36 For instance, I would not claim that the incidents at Red Hills and Coral Gardens demonstrate the nascent revolutionary potential of the Rasta movement as a whole. I would merely place those confrontations at one end of a spectrum of possible choices open to the deviant subculture which range from a quasi-revolutionary position on the fringes of society to one of total assimilation at its centre (i.e. Kray’s position). In other words, I am interested in delineating as large an area of an exclusively subterranean universe of meaning as is possible so that a fairly exhaustive range of possibilities can be encompassed. By inserting the crucial element of polarity into the analysis of the paradigmatic relationship between two disparate cultural phenomena, I hope to freeze an essentially fluid situation so that wider meanings can be made available. Throughout this paper I have referred to a ‘vocabulary of style’ but I can see no point in using such a concept unless we can construct coherent sentences with that vocabulary. Without polarity there can be no meaning, and unless cultural signs are organized along lines of opposition (the conflict is arbitrary and therefore theoretically infinite) the language of structuralism just will not communicate. By thus setting up a polarity between two ideal responses to the gangster genre, I hope to show how these terms can be brought to bear on a third situation of subcultural conflict and used to interpret the responses to dominant definitions in a totally different locale. I shall do this in two ways. Firstly, I shall be discussing direct influences (from the East End and Jamaica) upon the subcultures of South London in the late 1960s. I shall then go on to codify and abstract those influences so that they can serve an adjectival function (very Ronnie! rather rasta!) and can thereby be used to describe and evaluate more adequately the various responses of a deviant subculture in a specific part of South London (Fulham) to an intensified interest from above. Thus I shall be using two parallel points of reference – one literal (dealing with direct influences) and the other symbolic (dealing with codified responses). Obviously the second referential system is the more complex – it can be expressed diagramatically thus:
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The bottom half of this diagram needs further explanation which I will supply later. For now, it is sufficient to clarify the advantages to be gained by using this method. Basically, it allows deviant behaviour to be read back if not to its actual source then to an idealization of that source.37 As we shall see, the various groups I shall be dealing with have considerable contact with both black subcultures and ‘straight’ East End villains, but the resulting interaction is by no means straightforward. It cannot be adequately described in terms of direct influence. By presenting the various possibilities open to the Fulham subcultures in an ideal fashion, I hope to provide some kind of shorthand which does not oversimplify that complex relationship and yet manages to communicate in a distilled form, the essential meaning of the chosen response. Thus the capsulated presentation of the symbolic alternatives open to the different South London subcultures does justice to the indirect way in which alien solutions are mediated to the members of those subcultures without losing their original meaning. And even if there is no direct line of communication at all, the model can still serve as an index against which levels of involvement and detachment can be assessed. Lastly, and perhaps most crucially, it allows me to make a science out of subjectivity so that the dialectic which lies behind my observations (which dictates what I have seen and how I have seen it) can be drawn out and itself observed and evaluated.
6. The skinhead interlude – when the stomping had to stop In the preceding account of the development of reggae and rude boy style in Jamaica, I alluded to the formation of an equivalent culture inside the West Indian community in Britain. I shall now expatiate on the context in which reggae was received in South London and shall show how it was used by young blacks to transmute a situation of extreme cultural dependence into one of virtual autonomy. There is no need to reiterate the early history of reggae in this country. I have already mentioned the important role played by Chris Blackwell and Lee Gopthal in the importation of the new music. Gradually as Trojan began to flood the market, ska took over from bluebeat as the steady pulse which set the pace of the black Britons’ nightlife. The era of the African ‘waterfront boys’ which Colin MacInnes describes in City of Spades was definitely on the wane and the days of Billy Whispers were numbered at last, as the Jamaican hustler, pimp and dealer began to come into his own. The music was transmitted through an
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underground network of shebeens (house parties), black clubs, and the record shops in Brixton and Peckham, and Ladbroke Grove which catered almost exclusively to a West Indian clientele. Almost but not quite. As the early music mobilized an undefined aggressiveness and generated a cult of extreme individualism, its appeal was not confined to the members of the black community only. It soon became the theme music of the ‘hard mods’ who often lived in the same depressed areas of South London where the immigrants congregated, and who soon started emulating the style of the rude boy contingent. Thus, they wore the ‘stingy-brim’ (pork-pie) hats and the shades of the Jamaican hustler and even went out of their way to embrace the emblems of poverty which the immigrant often found unavoidable and most probably undesirable. Thus, the ill-fitting ankle-swinger trousers which usually suggest that the wearer has been forced to accept hand-me-downs were echoed in the excessively short Levis for which the ‘hard mod’ showed a marked predilection. Even in 1964, at Margate and Brighton, mods were seen in boots and braces, sporting the close crop which artificially reproduces the texture and appearance of the short negro hair styles, favoured at the time by the West Indian blacks. In 1965, Prince Buster’s ‘Madness’ became something of a craze in some mod circles and was regularly requested at the big dance halls frequented by the South London mods. That liaison between black and white rude boy cultures which was to last until the end of the decade and was to provoke such a puzzled reaction from the commentators of youth culture had begun in earnest. Ska obviously fulfilled the needs which mainstream pop music could no longer supply. It was a subterranean sound which had escaped commercial exploitation at a national level and was still ‘owned’ by the subcultures which had originally championed it. It also hit below the belt in the pleasantest way possible and spoke of the simplicities of sex and violence in a language which was immediately intelligible to the quasi-delinquent adolescent fringe of working-class culture. The developing white ‘progressive’ music was becoming far too cerebral and drug-orientated to have any relevance for the ‘hard mods’ whose lives remained totally insulated from the articulate and educated milieu in which the new hippy culture was germinating. And of course, the B.B.C. was hardly the ideal medium – ska became scratchy and lost all its punch when played on a transistor – there was simply not enough bass. Moreover, the lyrics of records like Prince Buster’s ‘Ten Commandments’ and Max Romeo’s ‘Wet Dream’ were rarely acceptable, and most new releases were immediately classified as unsuitable. Thus, the music remained secret and was disseminated in the Masonic atmosphere of close communal and subcultural interactions. The Ram Jam in Brixton was one of the first clubs in London where white and black youths mixed in numbers; but already the disreputable and violent associations began to accumulate round the new music. There were tales of knives, and ganja at the Ram Jam, and there were more than enough risks for any white rudie prepared to take his life into his hands to step into Brixton, and prove his pilled-up manhood. By 1967, the skinhead had emerged from this larval stage and was immediately consigned by the press to the ‘violent menace’ category which the mainstream pop culture of the time appeared increasingly reluctant to occupy. As the startling flora and fauna of San Francisco were making their spectacular debut along the King’s Road in the summer, Dandy Livingstone, the first British reggae star to gain national recognition, sang ‘Rudy a Message to You’ to audiences in the less opulent boroughs of South London, and rallied his followers around a different standard altogether. The links which bound the hard mod to the rude boy subculture were drawn even tighter in the case of the skinhead. The long open coats worn by some West Indians were translated by the skinheads into the crombie which became a popular article of dress amongst the more reggae-oriented groups (i.e. amongst
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those who defined themselves more as midnight ramblers than as afternoon Arsenal supporters). Even the erect carriage and the loose limbed walk which characterize the West Indian street-boy were (rather imperfectly) simulated by the aspiring white negroes. In clubs like the A-Train, Sloopy’s and Mr. B’s, the skinheads mingled with young West Indians, called each other ‘rass’ and ‘pussy clot’,38 cracked their fingers like thoroughbred Jamaicans with as much panache and as little wincing as possible, talked ‘ ’orses’ and ‘pum-pum’39 and moved with as much studied cool as they could muster. This spontaneous movement towards cultural integration (with the West Indians only; not, needless to say, with the Pakistani and Indian immigrants) was unprecedented but it was not to have any permanent salutary effect on race relations within South London’s working-class communities. For, despite the fact that the skinhead might dance the shuffle or the reggay with a certain amount of style, despite the fact that he might speak a few random phrases of patois with the necessary disregard for English syntex, it was all a little artificial – just a bit too contrived to be convincing. And despite everything, he could never quite make that cultural transition, and when he found himself unable to follow the thick dialect and densely packed Biblical allusions which mark the later reggae he must have felt even more hopelessly alienated. Excluded even from the ranks of the excluded, he was left out in the cold, condemned to spend his life in Babylon because the concept of Zion just didn’t make sense. And even if he could make that sympathetic passage from Notting Hill to Addis Ababa, from a whiteness which wasn’t worth much anyway, to a blackness which just might mean something more, he only found himself trapped further in an irresolvable contradiction. For the rude boys had come of age and the skins were sentenced to perpetual adolescence, and although Desmond Dekker topped the British Charts in 1969 with ‘Israelite’ (a cry to Ethiopia) the brief miscegenation of the 1960s was at an end.40 The ‘Africanization’ (or ‘Rastification’) of reggae which I have already emphasized in the sections on Jamaica, militated against any permanently close contact between black and white youth cultures. Once again, the precise moment at which the search for racial identity produced a significant rupture with earlier patterns of behaviour can be expressed mythically. In an article on the Harambee project in the Holloway Road which appeared in the Sunday Times colour supplement (September 30, 1973), a young West Indian disc jockey based in South London, describes the impact of the record ‘Young Gifted and Black’ on an audience which comprised both black and white rudies: There was that song ‘Young Gifted and Black’ by Mike and Marcia, and when we played it all the skinheads used to sing ‘young gifted and white’ and they used to cut the wires to the speakers and we had some fights and less white people used to come up after that.41 This parting of the ways had been preparing for years outside the dancehalls in the day-time world of school and work. Firstly, as Dilip Hiro points out, the close proximity into which black and white children were thrown at school tended to break down the cruder racial myths. The illusion of white superiority, fostered in the black parents by an Anglicized education in the West Indies, could hardly be supported by their children who were growing up next to their supposed superiors without noticing any appreciable difference either in performance or potential. On leaving school, nonetheless, the black youth was often confronted with open discrimination on the part of prospective employers. As the demand for unskilled labour diminished, the black and white school leavers were thrown into fierce competition for that work which was available, and the white youth, more often than not, was given preference. If the black school leaver was more ambitious and sought skilled
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work, he was likely to be even more bitterly disappointed. A correspondent of the Observer ( July 14, 1968) showed that white youths in deprived areas of black settlement like Paddington and Notting Hill were almost five times more likely to get skilled jobs than coloured youngsters. Michael Barton estimated in an article which appeared in New Society (19 November 1967) that by 1974, one in six of the school leavers in the Inner London area would be coloured and the rivalry has obviously escalated accordingly. The predicament facing the black youth on leaving school, then, made him review his position with a more critical eye than his parents. To the first generation of immigrants from the West Indies, England had promised a golden future, and if that promise had not been fulfilled, there seemed little point in looking elsewhere. In fact to do so would be to admit defeat and failure and so the older immigrant went on working on the buses or queueing up for the dole and kept his bitterness stashed away under his insouciant smile. But the young black Briton was less inclined to shrug and forbear, and the reassessment of the African heritage currently under way in Jamaica and the U.S.A. was bound to provide channels through which his anger could be directed and his dignity retrieved. Thus, the cry of the Rastas for African redemption was welcomed by the disappointed diaspora of South London. Exiled first from Africa, and then from the West Indies to the cold and inhospitable British Isles, the longing for the Healing of the Breach was felt with an even greater poignancy by the dispossessed rude boys of Shepherds Bush and Brixton. Hiro contrasts the new black consciousness of the coloured youth in Britain against the more sober attitude of the West Indian parents in the example of Noel Green, born in London in 1958, whose father Anthony complains: ‘As a young child he wanted to be called an Englishman. But now (in 1969) he considers himself a West Indian and a black person.’ These developments were translated into specifically Jamaican terms and the men of the dreadlocks began to make an incongruous and sinister appearance once more on the grey streets of the metropolis. By 1973, Colin McGlashan could report the bizzare conjunction of Africa and Ealing at the West London Grand Rastafarian Ball, where Rastas, twice removed from the mythical homeland yearned in unison for an end to ‘sufferation’ as giggling white girls danced to the reggae.42 The cult of Ras Tafari appealed at least as strongly to the black youth of Great Britain; as it did to their cousins in Jamaica. If anything it proved even more irresistible, giving the stranded community at once a name and a future, promising the Lost Tribes of Israel just retribution for the centuries of slavery, cultivating the art of withdrawal so that rejection could be met by rejection. All this was reflected in and communicated through the music which had found in Britain an even larger and more avid audience than in its country of origin. Of course, the skinheads turned away in disbelief as they heard the Rastas sing of the ‘have-nots’ seeking harmony, and the scatting d-js exhorting their black brothers to ‘be good in (their) neighbourhood! More odious still to the skinheads was the Rasta greeting of ‘Peace and Love’ which many young rudies adopted (along with the Rasta handclasp). The wheel had come full circle and the skinheads, who had sought refuge from the posturing beatitudes of the pot-smoking hippie in the introverted coterie of the black delinquent young, was confronted with what appeared to be the very attitudes which had originally dictated this withdrawal. It must have seemed as the rudies closed their ranks, that they had also changed their sides, and the doors were doubly locked against the bewildered skinhead. We need only turn back to the mythology of Rastafarianism which I have already attempted to decipher, to see that such an outcome was, in fact, inevitable sooner or later. The transposed religion, the language, the rhythm, and the style of the West Indian immi-
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grant guaranteed his culture against any deep penetration by equivalent white groups. Simultaneously, the apothesis of alienation into exile enabled him to maintain his position on the fringes of society without feeling any sense of cultural loss, and distanced him sufficiently so that he could undertake a highly critical analysis of the society to which he owed a nominal allegiance. For the rest, the Biblical terms, the fire, the locks, and Haille Selassie et al served to resurrect politics, providing the mythical wrappings in which the bones of the economic structure could be clothed so that exploitation could be revealed and countered in the ways traditionally recommended by the Rastafarian. The meta-system thus created was constructed around precise and yet ambiguous terms of reference and whilst remaining rooted in the material world of suffering, of Babylon and oppression, it could escape, literally at a moment’s notice, into an ideal dimension which transcended the time-scale of the dominant ideology which I mentioned in the Introduction. There were practical advantages to be gained by adopting this indirect form of communication, for if a more straightforward language of rebellion had been chosen, it would have been more easily dealt with and assimilated by the dominant class against which it was directed. Paradoxically, dread only communicates so long as it remains incomprehensible to its intended victims, suggesting the unspeakable rites of an insatiable vengeance. And the exotica of Rastafarianism provided distractive screens behind which the rude boy culture could pursue its own devious devices unhindered and unseen. I shall postpone further consideration of the West Indian subcultures in South London until I encounter them again in the more detailed analysis of subcultural patterns in Fulham which I now intend to undertake. Before I proceed to such an analysis, I should like to take this opportunity to once more clarify my methodology. Basically, what follows is a mixture of recollection, participant observation, and observant participation which I have supplemented with a certain amount of material gleaned from local newspapers (the Fulham Chronicle and the West London Observer). Beyond this, I hope to define and interpret the various subcultures as they are being studied according to the methods which have been prescribed.
Notes 1 In ‘Performance and Meaning’. 2 The fulminations of the Black Power Movement, centred in and around the University of the West Indies, soon put paid to this policy, and the law and order police campaign recently launched, and the massive crusade currently under way, show just how completely it has been abandoned. 3 Bland in form if not in content the satirical lyrics of ‘The Sparrow’s’ calypsoes lie concealed inside the deceptively light musical structure. Reggae is intrinsically less acceptable – the form itself is ‘heavier’. 4 Exuma, for example, sing of the Obeah man, duppies (ghosts) and zombies. 5 In ‘Pursuit of the Millennium’. 6 Namely among the unemployed young and the deviant adult population. 7 Cyamande, a British group made up of six Jamaican and two Guyanan musicians play a unique mixture of soul, rock and reggae which they call Nyah Rock and one of their numbers is called Nyahbingh. 8 Is this another example of a ‘flawed fantasy’ creating the conditions of its own realisation? 9 The U.S.A. which provided Jamaica with much of its revenue would be particularly anxious that the flow of drugs from the island be controlled. 10 i.e. I would argue that the believer was himself aware of the symbolic dimension. 11 For example, Michael Thomas mentions a group of Rastafarians who refused to attend a series of lectures on contraception because they saw the course as part of a world wide plan launched by the whites to decimate the black races and render their black ‘queens’ infertile.
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12 Surveys into the number of Rastafarians in Jamaica have produced wildly conflicting results. A government survey characteristically gives a conservative estimate (15,000) whilst Mr. Horace Gordon of the Jamaica Social Welfare Commission made a more generous approximation in 1959 (70,000). 13 Some 20 locksmen and their families have actually emigrated to Ethiopia where they have been granted land by the Emperor. 14 The hippie and the locksman converge at other points: the smoking of grass was a ritual, central to both movements; long hair was the most important single mark of identification, and the Rasta greeting (‘peace and love’) was later adopted by the hippie. 15 In Mirror, Mirror, Rex Nettleford claims this drift towards quietism was accelerated by the excesses of Red Hills and Coral Gardens which turned many locksmen away from violent solutions. 16 This was perhaps the great disappointment of the 1960s (cf. the demise of the hippies, and the Paris students of 1968, also the failure of Laing’s ‘meta-journey’ to really get him anywhere). Rex Nettleford criticizes the emergent Black consciousness in Jamaica for failing to adopt a more rigorous, and analytical approach to African Studies. 17 In ‘Ras Tafari: Cult of Outcasts’, New Society, November 12, 1964. 18 In Brixton, for instance, 80% of the black population came from Jamaica, and the record shops in the area soon began to specialize in bluebeat and ska. 19 Manley also won support in the rural areas where a Holy Roller type of religion still lingers on, by appearing in public carrying a stick which he called ‘The Rod of Correction’ with which he promised to beat out all ‘duppies’ (ghosts), and to drive injustice away. 20 A popular game amongst the Jamaican working class. 21 See ‘Earthquake’ in which Prince Buster challenges a rival to do battle on Orange Street. 22 See every other record of this period. 23 See Niney’s ‘Fiery Foreman meets Smokey Joe Frazier’. 24 See The Pioneers’ ‘Long Shot Kick the Bucket’ about a horse which dies with everybody’s money on it. 25 See ‘54–46’ by the Maytals again (this is the number Toots was given when imprisoned on a ganja charge). 26 Lyrics from ‘Al Capone’ by Prince Buster. 27 From ‘Shanty Town’ by Desmond Dekker. 28 Cunchyman says that the Americans ‘don’t know how to move slow’ (R.S. July 19, 1973) 29 Abeng, the official organ of the Black Power movement in Jamaica, translated Rastafarian ‘metaphorics’ straight into Marxian dialectics. Economic analysis jostled uneasily against the intensely personal testimonies of individual ‘sufferers’ in the columns of the paper. 30 Though ‘heavy rock’ also has an emphatic and hypnotic bass line, there is nothing equivalent to the ‘scat’ in rock. Some modern jazz plays with language at this level but this jazz is produced principally by black musicians (Albert Ayler, Roland Kirk, Pharoah Saunders, John Coltrane etc) 31 In a similar way, the syntax of ‘heavy’ soul obviates the need for lexical meaning. James Brown looks at the relationship between ‘the pronunciation and the realisation’ in ‘Stoned to the Bone’ and gives a catalogue of the various words used to denote ‘mind-power’: (‘vibes E.S.P.’, ‘positivethinking’ etc) but discards them all by discarding language itself: ‘But I call it/What it is what it is’. This tautologous equation is repeated again and again until it synchronizes with the strong, repetitive backing and is eventually absorbed. 32 Jumping on and off moving trams – a fad of the 1940s and 1950s. 33 The first reggae record to reach the number one spot in Britain. 34 The Superfly Harlem hustler is a recent addition to the cabalistic vocabulary of black style which deserves consideration in its own right. Basically, I would argue that, even in the States, this image is used metaphorically (i.e. to signify an abstract cool). James Brown, for instance, presents himself as the ‘Godfather of Soul’ on his new L.P. and demands recompense in ‘The Big Payback’ (presumably for the centuries of the ‘big put-down’). 35 From Rolling Stone (November 3, 1973). 36 What could undermine the subversive potential of reggae more effectively than Prince Charles’ eulogy to West Indian rhythm in The Observer (9 June 1974). In this interview, Charles talks about his innate ‘feeling for rhythm’:
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‘Rhythm is deep in me – if I hear rhythmic music, I just want to get up and dance – that’s one of the reasons why I had such a marvellous time in the West Indies’. 37 For instance, a posture of withdrawal might derive more inspiration from the hippie/beat movement than from the cult of Rastafari. Nonetheless, I have chosen the Jamaican context to represent that response because a) it is intrinsically working-class and the groups I am studying are exclusively working-class. b) it has strong criminal affiliations (ditto above). c) the influence of black culture on those groups is arguably greater than that of the hippie/beat culture. d) due to above mentioned infra-structural innovations, it remains more strictly underground than hippie culture which has ultimately capitulated to dominant definitions. 38 Jamaican swear words that don’t really bear translating. 39 i.e. gambling and women. 40 The skinhead style of course survived into the1970s particularly in the Midlands and the Northern industrial towns but it did not maintain its early strong links with black culture. Skinheads in Birmingham (where race relations have always left a lot to be desired) were often openly hostile to West Indians, and football tended to take over from reggae as the central preoccupation of the skinhead group. 41 Later in the same article, two boys who live at the hostel are reported discussing the finer points of ‘mugging’. Their comments show that they are prepared to make racial distinctions and they refer frequently to ‘suffering’, a key concept in Rastafarianism which seems to be used as an index to the believer’s eligibility for salvation by trial: First boy: ‘We don’t touch our own people’. 42 Colin McGlashan, ‘Reggae, Reggae, Reggae’ (S.T. February 4, 1973).
Bibliography General: Black British, White British: Dilip Hiro, 1971, Eyre and Spottiswoode: London Black British: R.B. Davison, 1966, Oxford University Press: London Mirror, Mirror: Rex Nettleford, 1970, Collins and Sangster: Kingston, Jamaica ‘The Wild Side of Paradise’: Michael Thomas (Rolling Stone July 19, 1973)
Introduction: ‘Performance and Meaning’: Paul Willis (unpublished paper produced by Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies)
Section 3: Pursuit of the Millennium: Norman Cohn, 1957, London ‘The Ras Tafari Movement in Kingston Jamaica’: University College of West Indies Report Various copies of The Daily Gleaner and The Jamaica Times
Section 4: ‘Rudie, Oh Rudie’: Garth White, Caribbean Quarterly, September 1967 Reggae, A People’s Music: Rollston Kallyndyr and Henderson Dalrymple, 1972, Carib-Arawak Publications ‘Reggae, Reggae, Reggae’: Colin McGlashan (Sunday Times, February 4, 1973) ‘Ras Tafari: Cult of Outcasts’: Orlando Patterson (New Society November 12, 1964 ‘Bob Marley and the Wailers’: Interview (Rolling Stone November 3, 1973)
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Section 5: Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Juliet Mitchell, 1974, Pantheon: New York The Measurement of Meaning: C.E. Osgood, G.J. Suci and P.H. Tannenbaum, 1957, University of Illinois Press: Urbana
Section 6: City of Spades: Colin MacInnes, 1957, McGibbon and Key: London
33 On the political economy of black labour and the racial structuring of the working class in England Andy Green Until quite recently, the study of race relations in Britain was limited to three main approaches. There was the study of racism as an ideology. This was often narrowly defined by writers such as Banton1 to include only ‘scientific racism’, i.e. a systematic theory postulating the genetically determinate superiority of one race and the innate inferiority of another. There was the study of racist attitudes, which took diverse forms, most notably the problematic of ‘prejudice’ and the so-called ‘stranger hypothesis’2 which saw racism in terms of individual pathology or innate, transhistorical or ‘natural’ human characteristics. And lastly, by extension, there was the study of discrimination: the individual behaviour that followed from racist beliefs. This last current sometimes approached something like an anatomy of societal discrimination, but the latter was seen largely as the culmulative effect of individual acts of discrimination. The limitations of these idealist approaches have been demonstrated theoretically by Marxists and left Weberians alike. They have been shown to be completely inadequate to the problems of explaining the economic and structural basis of racism, the relationship between race and class, and the role of the state and its institutions in reproducing a racially divided society. It has fallen in the main to Marxists, near-Marxists and left Weberians to analyse the structural basis of racism, the existence of which was illustrated dramatically in the empirical findings in the two P.E.P. reports.3 The latter measured racial discrimination in employment, housing and education as varying between massive and considerable, and their findings have made it difficult for any further serious research in race relations to confine itself to attitudinal factors alone. Since then a growing body of Marxist theory of racially structured societies has emerged, (Hall and Sivanandan on Britain, Castles and Kosack, Nikolinakos and Gorz on Europe, and Wolpe on South Africa,4) which, from an analysis grounded in Marxist theory of political economy, has sought to tackle some of these problems. Some of their work has been subject to criticism within a broadly Marxist and left Weberian terrain. The protagonists in these debates have approached the subject from different theoretical perspectives, but significantly they have addressed the same problems. These might be broadly delineated under four headings: 1 2 3 4
the role of immigrant labour in the social relations of production: the political economy of race. the intersection of race and the class structure. the role of the state and its institutions vis-à-vis race. the role of racist ideologies.
The debates are often very similar to other classical debates in and around Marxism in that,
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at one level of abstraction, they are about the relations of determinacy or relative autonomy that subsist between the three levels of the social formation: the social and economic, the political, and the ideological. Not surprisingly, then, the arguments that are made against certain Marxist theories take familiar theoretical forms. The most important of these criticisms, and those that will be examined in this paper, are put forward by the left Weberian, John Rex, the proponents of the ‘internal colony’ theory, Blaurer and Tabb, and Gideon Ben-Tovim. Their criticisms are similar in each case and, as I will try to show, there is a degree of convergence in their own various theoretical positions. The major criticisms of Marxist theories of race can be schematically represented as follows: 1
2 3
that Marxism operates a class reductionism – in this case that Marxism subsumes the specific forms of racial structuring in various societies under what it takes to be the basic class relations and their fundamental contradiction, that between capital and labour, that Marxism adopts an instrumentalist view of the state whereby the state is seen to act unproblematically in the interests of capital and at its behest, that Marxism treats ideology purely as the expression of class interests, that the analysis of the specific and relatively autonomous mechanisms of racist ideologies is vitiated in a Marxist analysis which is alleged to amount to an economic reductionism. The classic instance of this is said to be the ‘ruling class conspiracy’ theory of ideology, which presents racism as a philosophy propagated cynically by the ruling class to divide the working class and justify the super-exploitation of subordinate racial groups.
The debates are in fact by no means merely set pieces of theoretical contest, although the critiques of Marxism are often made in easy schematic forms which frequently caricature and misrepresent the positions in question. This is true of both Rex and Ben-Tovim, as I will show. However, this does not obviate the fact that the theoretical arguments are vital, that they address the most historically specific and concrete problems in race relations, and that they are in fact advancing our understanding. This paper will argue that, although these critics have put forward very pertinent arguments and forced critical revisions in Marxist theory of race, the subsequent developments that have been made in the emerging Marxist analysis prefigure a theory that is more adequate in many respects than the alternative formulations of its critics. To make the issue clearer I will start with the work of the black American sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox and the criticisms that have been made of it. His major work ‘Caste, Class and Race’5 is quite monumental in its range and often contradictory in its theory. However, it is always made to stand in for Marxist theory of race as a whole and said to represent its quintessential errors. John Rex and Gideon Ben-Tovim both use some of his cruder formulations as an occasion for a vicarious attack on a whole range of Marxist currents, and Rex in particular invariably generalises his criticism of Cox to criticise all Marxist writing on race. Cox’s main errors are seen to be three-fold. Firstly, in the estimation of both Rex and Ben-Tovim,6 his theory of racist ideology is a ‘ruling class conspiracy’ thesis. Ben-Tovim quotes Cox as saying: race prejudice is a social attitude propagated among the public by an exploiting class for the purpose of stigmatizing some group as inferior so that the exploitation of either the group itself or its resources or both may be justified . . . the capitalist exploiter will devise and employ race prejudice when that becomes convenient.
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Secondly, Rex criticises Cox for reducing race to class; for representing the mode of exploitation of blacks in America as typical of that experienced by the white working class and thus failing to note . . . that that exploitation (of the white working class) is essentially the exploitation of free labour in the labour market, whereas the exploitation and oppression of the negro has resort to many forms of compulsion other than purely market ones. Not only did Cox pay inadequate attention to the specificities of racial exploitation, he also avoided the question of the racial division of the working class. This crucial evasion was accomplished on the one hand by stressing the essential unity of the working class ‘by positing an entirely hypothetical future in which the worders of the world will indeed unite’, and, on the other, by explaining away present divisions as the product of a ruling class conspiracy. To Rex, Cox thus utterly ‘fails to explain the actual motivation of poor white racism.’7 Lastly, both authors have criticised Cox for holding to a theory that racism was entirely the product of capitalism, and its rise contemporaneous with it. The latter criticism is quite correct and Cox’s denial of pre-capitalist racism, particularly classical slavery, on the grounds that it was based on an ideology of white cultural superiority not biological superiority, is spurious. As Cox himself points out elsewhere,8 racism can take different idological forms, (at present western European racism takes the ‘cultural superiority’ form most frequently), and different ideological forms can achieve similar effects as necessary conditions for exploitation of various kinds within different modes of production. This particular error, however, is not as critical as the first two which are at the very heart of the problem of theory today. That Cox held to a conspiracy theory of racism is beyond much doubt, so is the convention that, in itself, it is an inadequate explanation of the origins of racism, although from Cox’s standpoint in America of the 1940s9a it had considerable credibility. When applied to the present western capitalist states it is less than half the story. Racism in this present context is both an ideological mechanism, often encouraged by the ruling class for justifying the superexploitation of blacks, and an effect of the particular racial forms in which minorities are exploited; those effects being the fragmentation of the working class, both in terms of its short term material interests and its consciousness. The important point, however, is that for a dominant racist ideology to gain purchase on popular consciousness, it must work on the grounds of real objective divisions within the working class. It was these that Cox was unable to explain and Rex is right to ascribe this to, amongst other things, a theoretical class reductionism on. Cox’s behalf. However, Cox’s class reductionism is by no means a classic case of Marxist economism. In the first place, Cox’s analysis of caste systems in India is quite the opposite of an economism: in fact it is scarcely grounded in economic analysis at all. In the second place, Cox pays considerable attention to analysing the specific, qualitatively distinct, forms of economic exploitation and political oppression suffered by blacks in America. This involves him in extended and complex discussion of, for example, the ideological role of lynching (if one can speak of such a practice as ideological even in one of its aspects). In the third place, Cox is well aware of the racial divisions in the working class (how could he not be) and in his analysis of poor white racism, concludes ‘the poor whites themselves may be thought of as the primary instrument of the ruling class in subjugating the negroes.’9b Divisions in the working class are thus addressed but inadequately explained in terms of ruling class conspiracy theory. That is to say, these divisions are held to be
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artificially manufactured by ruling class propaganda and are not based on any real, objective class divisions. The reason why Cox cannot explain the divisions within the working class adequately, and is thus forced back on to the theory of conspiracy, lies in his analysis of class to which Rex has already pointed. (Although Rex’s summary of Cox’s theory of class is caricatured). Cox’s analysis of class is not a classic economism. His theory of social class is, in fact, an empiricist stratification theory. ‘The social – class gradient is a status continuum. We think of it as including discrete strata only for the purposes of analysis and comprehension.’10 Social class to Cox has no objective definition, let alone at the level of economic and social relations. ‘The population is not objectively differentiated into classes’. ‘Social class is, in fact, what people think it is’. Social class, then, is a continuum of status positions, perceived subjectively, and thus has no objective definition. A social class is not organised and has no collective class consciousness. If social class is defined in this way, there is no problem regarding the relations of the black and white working class. Qualitatively distinct modes of exploitation do not separate them since class at this level is not defined in terms of economic and social relations. Nor do divisions in consciousness have any salience in this analysis, since it does not expect to find class consciousness in social classes. Thus, although Cox is aware of the divisions and qualitative distinctions, they are not held to be pertinent at this level. On the other hand, political class is defined as the organised class, displaying class consciousness. In this theoretical disjuncture between social class and political class, the classic hegelian distinction between class-in-itself and class-for-itself is reproduced. However, Cox does not even follow the Marxist usage of this distinction since he does not define social class according to objective social and economic determinations. Instead, what there is of objective determinacy in his theory, is imputed in Lukacsian fashion to the class-for-itself – the political class: ‘as a function of the economic order, the (political class) has a potential existence, but as a result of agitation, it becomes organised for conflict.’11 A revolutionary class consciousness is thus imputed to the political class, but the basis for this unified consciousness is given very slender objective conditions in the social relations of that class, as social class. Cox’s failure to analyse the divisions in the working class and the basis of white working class racism, is a product of this theoretical disjuncture between social and political class. The concept of social class is emptied of objective conditions, the racial structuring of the social and economic class relations of the working class being consigned to, and lost in, the empiricist plurality of conditions and factors which constitute it. The specificities of the social and economic class relations of blacks are appropriated theoretically only at the level of ‘political class’, and then subsumed under the typical capital labour relation: Here, then, are race relations; they are definitely not caste relations. They are labourcapital-profit relationships, therefore, race relations are proletarian, bourgeois relations and hence political class relations.12 The specificity of the relations by which race and class are ariculated are registered by Cox at the empirical level, but abandoned at the theoretical level of political class. The problem of the racial division of the working class, and that of racism, is, allowed to slip through the gap between the concepts of social and political class. Racial division is seen as the product of the fissure between social and political class; working class racism is merely the failure of the social class to achieve revolutionary consciousness as a class-for-itself – a political class. Thus Cox sees the lesser degree of racism amongst workers in the northern states merely as an index of their higher class consciousness.
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The political consequences attendant on this theoretical disjuncture are clear. The theoretical and political implications of the objective racial divisions in the working class are not analysed, but instead a unity is imputed at the level of political class which is largely abstract, the objective conditions for that unity not being made clear. The politics of race are totally subsumed under the politics of class struggle: ‘racial antagonism is essentially political class conflict.’13 Thus Cox denies the separate interests of the black struggle, and refuses the possibility of black self organisation and black leadership. Blacks in America, he says, will tail-end white leaders, since ‘negroes are auxilliary in the American struggle for power.’14 Whatever the complexities and contradictions of Cox’s work as a whole, Rex’s original criticisms, that Cox reduces race to class relations, does hold. The failure to grasp the specificity of race relations and the precise mode of their articulation to class relations left a theoretical and political lacuna which various theories and political programmes have tried to fill. Rex’s work contains amongst the most important of these theories, but before going on to consider them, it may be revealing to dwell briefly on the work of several other writers who have propagated the notion of the ‘internal colony’. This work provides an interesting juxtaposition to that of Cox, not only because it can be seen as growing out of this critical theoretical absence in Cox’s work, but also because it dates from an America twenty years on from that which Cox wrote about, and a race relations situation considerably changed after the political developments of the Civil Rights Movement and the period of Black Power activism. Robert Blauner, whose article ‘Internal Colonialism and ghetto revolt’ was published in 1969, traces the concept of internal colonialism back to the late 1950s when it was current among black activists.15 It was subsequently more systematically developed in a book called ‘Black Power’ written by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, published in 1967.16 Blauner’s starting point is the inadequacy of the class reductionist viewpoint. He says: ‘Important as are economic factors, the power of race and racism in America cannot be sufficiently explained through class analysis.’17 Through the development of internal colonialism theory, however, he claims it can. The latter’s gives hope of becoming a framework that can integrate the insights of casts, and racism, ethnicity, culture and economic exploitation into an overall conceptual schema.18 By positing a colonial relationship between blacks and whites, it clearly gives a basis, by analogy with national liberation movements, for a programme of autonomous black political organisation. Such was its value to black power leaders. The common denominators between colonialism proper and internal colonialism are seen to be racist ideology, political oppression of blacks by whites, the technological superiority of whites, and white cultural imperialism which, through the period of slavery, destroyed the African culture of the black slaves and continues to subordinate Negro American culture. ‘A common process of social oppression characterized the racial patterns in the two contexts,’ says Blauner, ‘despite the variation in political and social structure.’19 In many ways, the analogy and its extended development in both Blauner’s article and Tabb’s book ‘The Political Economy of the Black Ghetto’,20 provides many useful insights. It concentrates on the specific forms of political oppression and economic exploitation of blacks in the modern metropolis; it draws out the historical origins of modern racism in colonialism and continued pertinence of that history, and has a great deal to say about life in the ghetto in America and its proximate forms in Britain, particularly the forms of social organisation in the ghetto which have provided the material base for a black cultural revival and associated politics, both in America and, more recently, in Britain. However, despite the purchase that the idea of internal colonialism has at the ideological and political level, it does not provide the basis for an ‘overall intellectual schema’ such as
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Blauner proposes. The analogy between the internal colony and the colony proper cannot be sustained when other levels of the social formation are considered (except in certain specific historical situations e.g. South Africa – and these authors are rarely historically specific). The ghetto cannot be considered as a unit apart either geographically, economically or politically in the sense that the external colony is. Whatever the particularities of business in the ghetto, it must be seen as part of the national economy, whereas the metropolis/colony relation is essentially a relation between two modes of production, one in a position of dependence on the other. Similarly, whatever their distinctive character afforded by their location in the ghetto, the public institutions there are part of the national and local state apparatus. When it comes to describing these social and economic relations, internal colonialism is no more than a metaphor. Furthermore, on the crucial question of the articulation of race and class relations, the theory is inadequate. As Wolpe says: ‘The theory of internal colonialism is unable to explain the relationships between class relations and race or ethnic relations. As a consequence, the latter relations come once more to be treated as autonomous and in isolation from class relations’. ‘To this extent, “he adds, ‘there is a close convergence between internal colonialism and conventional race relations theory’.21 If Cox’s work tends to subsume race relations under class relations, and reduce ideological and cultural factors to expressions of economic interest, whilst the internal colony theorists have abstracted race from class relations, and emphasised the autonomy of ideological factors (at the expense of economic analysis), John Rex’s work can be seen as occupying a midway position. His work invariably gives due weight to the specificity of race and cultural relations, whilst not abandoning economic and class analysis. He says in his most recent book: ‘There has to be a theory of the interpenetration, overlap and conflict between class structures and race relations structures’,22 and his writings, taken together, do approach such a theory. In many ways Rex’s project would seem broadly in line with that followed by many modern Marxists,23 who, in an explicit attempt to avoid economic reductionism, attempt to analyse the social formation as a ‘complex unity’ of economic, political, and ideological instances articulated in complex but precise relations of determination and dominance. Rex pays full attention to all these levels and is not oblivious to the importance of their structural inter-relations. In his analysis of racist ideology, he explicitly rejects the idealism of writers such as Banton and subscribes to what is roughly a materialist view, emphasising, in his words, ‘the dependence on these belief systems (i.e. racist ideologies) on underlying structures.’24 He is also resolutely opposed to parsonian functionalism on the grounds that he believes conflict models of capitalist societies to be more accurate than consensus models. All of which, particularly in the light of the solid grounding of his theory in economic analysis, makes it, at first sight, surprising that he takes such pains to distance himself from what he takes to be the Marxist mode of analysis. An immediate explanation for this might seem to be that Rex exaggerates his differences with Marxism as a whole, by ignoring, to his cost, recent Marxist work, to which his theoretical positions are quite close, and concentrates solely on certain economistic currents within Marxism, to which his theory is indeed opposed. That is to say he caricatures Marxism as a whole by taking economistic Marxism to represent all Marxism. This is, as I demonstrated in the case of Cox, the form his debate with Marxism commonly takes. This procedure is certainly confused, but it is no accident. It is symptomatic of the real differences that exist between Rex’s theoretical problematic and all marxisim. The fact is that, although Rex combines elements of a Marxist and Weberian approach, the synthesis is, as Hall points out, ‘secured in an essentially Weberian terrain’.25 The strength of Rex’s position can be seen from his analysis of the South African situation.
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To put it crudely, Rex, because he is not entrenched in the crude eurocentric categories of some Marxist analysis, can demonstrate the specific effects of the racial contradictions in that society, in a way that Marxists have often failed to do. This amounts to a demonstration of the primacy of the racial contradictions with respect to the classic capital/labour contradiction. Rex’s contention is that the latter is a eurocentric category, inadequate to the analysis of a country such as South Africa. It is the stubborn adherence to the primacy of this notion on the part of Marxists which, Rex argues, bedevils their attempts to understand South Africa. Although Rex reaches the position that racial struggle is dominant in South Africa, and that class struggle is strictly subsidiary, he reaches this conclusion without abandoning an analysis of the social relations of production. On the contrary, his argument is based on the assertion that in South Africa there is a dual labour market – one for blacks and one for whites – and two categories of labour: free white and unfree black labour. These are both essential insights about the social relations of production in South Africa, and, as Rex correctly points out, are not easily elicited from a simplistic belief in the invariable primacy of the capital/ labour contradiction. As he says: ‘There are a number of different relationships to the means of production more subtle than can be comprehended in terms of a distinction between owners and non-owners and . . . each gives rise to a specific class situation’.26 Now, such categories can, in fact, be derived from Marxist theory of social relations of production, when the existence of two modes of production within a single state is posited, and such a possibility would not have been anathema to Marx. Wolpe, in fact, develops a theory on just such a proposition, analysing the relations between the dominant capitalist mode of production, and the dependent pre-capitalist mode in the subsistence economy of the reserves.27 It is not my purpose to analyse the debate any further, or to say whether Rex’s or Wolpe’s formulation is the more adequate. The point I am trying to make is that Rex’s method, well grounded in economic analysis, but from a theoretical position well clear of Marxism, has allowed certain insights into the specificity of racial structuring that force important revisions on Marxist theory. Such is the virtue of left Weberianism when it comes to the analysis of the articulation between race and class. The shortcomings become apparent when we consider the western captialist metropolis – in this case Britain. Crudely, the problem is that, whereas it may be fair to post the primacy of the race contradiction over the capital/labour contradiction for South Africa, the same cannot be said for Britain. Sivanandan puts it with characteristic acidity: ‘Marxist theory must adjust itself to the fact that there is in South Africa only one reified class of proles (sic), and they are all black.’ However, ‘the major contradiction in both Britain and America is still the classic capitalist one between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.’28 To be fair, Rex does not analyse the race situation in Britain as though it were South Africa. However, when he opens his early book ‘Race Relations and Sociological Theory’29 with the question as to ‘whether there is not a sense in which “race war” is not a more important central structural and dynamic principle than class war’, there is already a sense in which the answer is implicit in his theoretical problematic. The reason for this is that Weberianism involves a specific form of theoretical pluralism which, when it comes to the analysis of class tends towards a culturalist emphasis on ideological determinations, rather than on social and economic ones. A culturalist reading of the relations between the black and white working class will inevitably tend towards a theory of two, racially distinct, classes. This is because at the ideological level racial division is so dominant within the working class. Rex’s position on race and class in Britain is not, in fact, quite as simple as this. The above describes a theoretical tendency only. What then is Rex’s substantive analysis of the position of blacks in the class structure? His most frequent designation is that of underclass. In classic
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Weberian fashion, he sees classes existing in each of the market situations, and in each of the primary markets: employment, housing and education, he sees the position of blacks as that of an underclass. ‘In a narrow Weberian sense, we may speak of class and underclass in each of the allocative systems, such as employment, housing and education, but class and underclass formation takes place across all these sectors’.30 Rex’s descriptions of the various mechanisms which operate to put most black people at the lowest positions in all of these areas are very comprehensive and often genuinely improve our understand of how institutional racism works. His extensive analysis of the position of blacks in the housing market is probably the most important instance of this. There are, however, two major problems at a theoretical level. Firstly, if there are as many class structures and class struggles as there are market situations, the notion of class loses all its force. It loses all the explanatory power that Marx discovered in the concept by virtue of what he called the ‘force of abstraction’. If we are to talk about different classes in each of the various market situations, then unless we can discover a relation of determinacy between the various markets, and the classes therein, the latter can no longer be thought of as classes, but only as a plurality of status groups. Rex is aware of this problem but says that such relations of determinacy cannot be proved. He claims this with regard to the underclass position of blacks, despite his own empirical demonstration of the replication of that position in each sphere. By way of a nod towards this paradox he says: ‘Although there is more subjective awareness in Britain than in most other societies of the interdependence and unity of various situations of class conflict, it is still the case that actual behaviour is situationally determined, so that there is a multiplicity of separate experience of class conflict’.31 Thus there is no theory of determinancy existing between different market situations. The consequence is a plurality of class structures where class ceases to be a fundamental category. What does it mean to say that class is a fundamental category? This is a crucial point in Marxist theory and one where it is in clearest contradistinction to Weberianism. In Marxism, class is, first of all, defined by the relationship to the means of production. This is itself complex and is not merely a question of ownership or nonownership as Rex assumes. The place of a class ‘agent’ in the social relations of production involves a number of other factors which relate to control of the labour process and the social division of labour in general. It is on the basis of these relationships that class is said to be defined principally at the economic level. That is not to say that it is defined solely at this level. As Poulantzas says: ‘Marxism states that the economic does indeed have the determinant role in a mode of production or a social formation, but the political and the ideological also have a very important role’.32 He goes on: ‘it may be thus said that a social class is defined by its place in the ensemble of social practices’. However, this multi-layered determination of class is not a pluralism as in Weber. It is a complex unity where the principal determinacy lies strictly in the economic relations. There are two main points here: 1) class is a unity, albeit a complex one, involving both relations in production and also those in distribution and the other spheres – Rex’s markets. This is clearly distinct from Rex’s plural notion of class. 2) This unity is constructed in dominance – the dominance of production over distribution, and the economic over the ideological. This is clearly spelt out by Marx in a famous section from Capital vol. III: The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of the production itself and in turn reacts upon the determining element . . . it is always the
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direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers – a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby the social productivity – which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic base – the same from the standpoint of its main condition – due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial divisions, external historical influences etc. from showing infinite gradation and variation in appearance.33 In this quote Marx holds together both sides of the equation. Both the fundamental generative and determining class relations at the economic level, and the specific variations that result from particular empirical factors – most pertinently here – race. It is the latter that Rex grasps most securely – the specific qualitatively disctinct, effects of racial structuring on class. And being a sophisticated Weberian, who traces the connected structural operation of various social phenomena, not least the economic ones, his analysis of the black underclass is by no means a mere empiricist addition of statistical disadvantage in various spheres – it demonstrates correctly ‘that the difference between the minorities and the (white) working class is not simply quantitative but qualitative’.34 Nevertheless, it is still inadequate from a Marxist point of view in that qualitative distinctions are drawn without an adequate prior analysis of the complex structural determinations, principally economic, which constitute class, and therefore an analysis of the working class which reveals its essential structural unity, into which qualitative racial distinctions are wrought. This Weberian refusal of the principal determinacy that lies in the relations of production has a double effect. In the first place, it yields a plurality of class ‘structures’ without any notion of the determinate structure of the whole. Thus, although the class formation is said to constitute a structure, the word structure has little theoretical value since it carries with it no notion of the principles governing that structure. It is merely a descriptive term signifying an indeterminant arrangement of elements. Given this pluralist understanding of structure there follows the second consequence which we might call culturalism-in-the-last-instance. Since Rex denies that there is any underlying determinacy governing the structure, when forced to define a class he falls back upon the culturalist definition of class as class consciousness. This is because amidst this indeterminate medley of class indices, the empirically verifiable existence of class consciousness seems the surest basis on which to define class in such a way that it may contain some kind of generality. This is a characteristic Weberian solution since Weberian methodology does not allow for the possibility of the objective analysis of any social relation outside of the social actor’s own perception of that relation. This of course leads to a theoretical relativism where class is what people think it is. Although Rex’s own methodology allows only for the existence of a plurality of market classes, thus logically pre-empting an analysis of class in general, ‘Colonial Immigrants in a British City’ does not stop at such a pluralism. Here Rex and his co-author, Sally Tomlinson, do attempt a general analysis of the class structure. In order to overcome theoretical difficulties the Weberian concept of the ‘ideal type’ is introduced. There are then said to be two ideal typical ‘classes’ amongst the workers: the white working class and the black ‘underclass’. The ideal typical white worker is portrayed as a labour aristocrat with privileged job security and a healthy share in the benefits of the welfare state. The ideal typical black worker has an inferior position in the labour market and does not participate equally in the welfare deal. This distinction between the white working class and the black ‘underclass’ is
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buttressed by the assertion that they each have a separate class consciousness. Here Rex and Tomlinson introduce their major theoretical innovation – the quasi Marxist concept of an ‘underclass-for-itself ’. The white working class thus has the consciousness of a class schooled in and fattened on colonialism, not only irredemably incorporated into the capitalist system but also ideologically opposed to the black underclass from whose exploitation it benefits. The black underclass has its own ‘underclass’ consciousness formed in the knowledge that it is exploited by the entire white social structure. Although some evidence is given for the distinction between white working class and black underclass at an economic level, the theory rests heavily on the distinctions drawn between black and white class consciousness. This is in line with what I said above about Rex’s inherent tendency toward culturalism. There are several criticisms that might be made of this analysis. Firstly the characterisation of the typical white worker as a ‘labour aristocrat’ is demonstrably false, sharing with much liberal theory a mythical belief in widespread social mobility and ‘embourgeoisement’ together with a complete neglect of the position of women. Secondly, as I will attempt to show in the next section, a class analysis which starts from the economic and social relations of production demonstrates the fallacy of the assertion that blacks from an underclass, outside the working class, whatever the qualitative uniqueness of their position within it may be seen to be. The notion of blacks forming a class ‘outside’ the class structure is in fact, theoretically incoherent. Since the term ‘structure’ is necessarily inclusive, it is only possible to talk of a class ‘outside’ the class structure if the term ‘structure’ is emptied of its theoretical content. This is what happens in Rex’s analysis. This class analysis has serious consequences for the analysis of the politics of race relations. In their chapter ‘working class, underclass and third world revolution’, Rex and Tomlinson present two alternative scenarios for the political future of blacks in Britain. One is ‘optimistic’, the other ‘pessimistic’ and both, I would argue, suffer from the misconceptions of the class analysis which inform them. In the ‘optimistic’ scenario a picture is drawn of the integration of blacks through gradual penetration into the class structure and subsequent equal participation in the ‘welfare deal’. This would be an integration where cultural autonomy would be vouchsafed by vigorous independent ethnic associations and pressure groups. The implication is that with the gradual penetration of blacks into the class structure what they call ‘the race relations problem’ ceases to exist. The false assumption here is that penetration into the class structure would secure social mobility and freedom from exploitation. It is false because the black community is already in the class structure. The exploitation and lack of social mobility from which it suffers testifies to the exploitation of the working class in general. The exploitation of blacks is a particularly intense, racially mediated, form of the class exploitation to which the entire working class is subject. The idea that racial oppression ceases when the minority group enters the class structure is the American myth of race relations – the ‘Irish immigrant to president in three generations’ story – the celebration of social mobility in a ‘free society’ which is a sick joke to the American black. When Rex postulates that Asians have a stereotypical ‘Jewish future’ he is courting this myth. The authors’ description of the process by which this might be achieved is even less convincing. They see the position of black people being improved by ‘decisive action . . . taken with the support of all the major political parties to stop racial incitement, to attack racial discrimination and to give West Indian and Asian descended men and women a sense of citizenship’.35 This, when the current government is contemplating the legal exclusion of many blacks from citizenship. The above line of thought has led one recent critic to complain, with understandable irritation, that this is merely ‘yesterday’s liberal’s program’.
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Indeed, after twenty years of state collusion in racism, the suggestion that current governments will now begin, in a period of deep economic recession, to attack racism with any kind of vigour, seems somewhat naive. It is only possible for the authors to conceive of this because they wrongly view governmental racism as purely a matter of electoral pragmatism. The desire to gain the racist vote may be one factor in government policy on race relations but it would be dangerous to suppose it to be the only one. Racism is also inextricably linked with capital’s search for profit and, as the following analysis will show, racism is still profitable. Without entering into the debate about the relation of the state to capital, suffice it to say that the government is bound to reflect this and is currently doing so with incredible singlemindedness. The refusal of these authors to take stock of the primacy of this relation between racism and capital seriously undermines their understanding of government policy and of the state in general. So much for the ‘optimistic’ scenario. The ‘pessimistic’ version which, it must be said, the authors prefer, predicts the continuing exclusion of blacks from the class structure and the consequent growth of black separatism. Whilst a discussion of such a possibility is a welcome change from old liberal predictions, the theoretical coherence of the analysis put forward here is again marred by the class analysis which informs it. The problem here is the assertion that there is an ‘underclass-for-itself ’. The expression is used to describe the ‘situation of immigrant minorities, who do not share in the welfare deal, but who, instead of forming an inert or socially dispairing social residue, organise and act in their own ‘underclass’ interests, after relating themselves to colonial class positions’.35a,35b and 35c Elsewhere the authors go further and predict the formation of an ‘underclass-for-itself ’ with Black Nationalist politics and forming alliances with the third world against the entire white metropolitan class structure. The authors’ somewhat anecdotal analysis of the political organisation of blacks in Handsworth and elsewhere, however, completely fails to convince that this kind of organisation constitutes the formation of a ‘class-for-itself ’. This is not to say that the recent political initiatives that we have seen inside the West Indian and Asian communities are not significant, nor that autonomous black organisation is not an essential part of a successful strategy. Such organisation, however, seems unlikely to succeed in isolation. The possibilities for black struggle in Britain cannot be understood in isolation from their articulation with generalised class struggle. Working with a theory of a black ‘underclass-for-itself ’ encourages this kind of isolated analysis and can thus only be of limited predictive and strategic value. Rex and Tomlinson’s political analysis is ambigous to the point of being contradictory. Their dizzy oscillation between ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’, integrationalism and separatism provides a sad commentary on their belief that: ‘the institutionalisation of sociology as a discipline makes possible a certain degree of movement between perspectives and hence a move along the road to objectivity’.36 These contradictions do not add up to a liberal integrationalist politics, as some have argued, but there is a danger that, when all is said and done, they resolve themselves into nothing more than a kind of minimalist separatism mixed in with a dose of radical liberal reformism. Both these political tendencies derive, I would argue, from an erroneous class analysis and in particular from a misconception that the authors share with ‘integrationalists’. This is the notion that the problem at the root of racism is that of the exclusion of blacks from the class structure. The argument of this paper is that the ‘problem’ is that of the specific mode of inclusion of blacks in the class structure and the specific racial form of class exploitation to which they are subject. To see it otherwise is to be open to dangerous misconceptions about political strategy. It is not only the false hope of liberal reformism which is dangerous but equally the advocacy of a black separatism
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that is in any case strictly minimalist in its aims. When in ‘Colonial Immigrants . . .’ the authors write: ‘our emphasis is probably toward saying that the immigrant minorities should maintain their independence of the organisation and structures of the working class until they can have full and equal participation with other workers’ (B5L) they are close to saying that blacks should abstain from the traditional struggles of the labour movement and rely instead on ethnic associations and pressure groups. This would be a minimalist and potentially divisive programme. Divisive in that black abstention from trade union struggles would only exacerbate existing splits (and be thoroughly retrogressive, especially in the light of the exemplary role played by the Asian workers in particular, in recent diputes). Minimalist, because it envisages no more than the ‘entry of blacks into the class structure’ and therefore an equality of exploitation with the white working class. Not only is this unlikely to be achieved by such a political strategy, but even if it were, it would signal the end of neither exploitation nor of racism.
Recent Marxist theory 1. The political economic of race In the first part of this paper I examined some of the problems with the early Marxist theories of race, as exampled in the work of Cox, and noted the pertinence of criticisms made of them by Rex and others. I examined the latter’s own alternative formulations. These in turn, whilst addressing the most crucial problems, and in some cases shedding new light on them, were found to be theoretically inadequate, particularly on the question of the articulation of race and class. It was suggested earlier that some recent Marxist studies have approached a more adequate theorisation of this and other issues. The following sections will consider some of this work. There will be three sections: the first will consider the role of black labour in the British economy; the second will reconsider the position of black workers in the class structure; the last section will briefly draw some conclusions from this regarding the role and origins of racist ideology. Marios Nikolinakos has said: ‘The study of racism is a study of its political economy.’37 Well, such a study will not, in itself, be adequate, but it is probably the best point of departure. The following analysis will draw principally on the theoretical work of Castles and Kosack, in their study of European migrant labour, Sivanandan, who has applied a similar analysis to Britain, and Ceri Peach, whose seminal text: ‘West Indian Migration to Britain: a Social Geography’ provides an invaluable starting point for a study of the political economy of black labour in Britain.38 Peach comes to four main conclusions, which are crucial, not only for an understanding of the dynamics of West Indian emigration, but also for an appreciation of how capital benefits from black immigration. These conclusions are that: (a) Emigration from the West Indies after the war was determined primarily by the ‘pull factor’ of labour shortage in Britain, and that other factors such as growth of population in the West Indies, high unemployment, the closure of the American emigration route after the 1952 McCarren-Walter Act, were minor: merely ‘permissive’, not dynamic factors. (b) The rate of migration from the West Indies up until the1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act correlates exactly, even by the quarter, with the labour requirements of the British economy. This suggests what is probably a tendency in all emigration that is
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primarily not political but economic in origin. Namely, that it is extremely sensitive to the availability of employment in the country of immigration, a tendency arguably more effective in regulating immigration than legislative controls of the sort we have seen in the last twenty years. (c) Black immigrant labour not only solved the problem of labour shortage but ensured the most advantageous distribution of labour for capital whereby blacks became employed in those jobs which white workers were unwilling to fill. (d) The distribution of black settlement in Britain shows a tendency for blacks to settle in areas of labour demand, but also a counter tendency by which they settled predominantly in areas of decreasing white population. Thus, both economically and residentially, black immigrants acted as ‘replacement population’, going into nongrowth industries and settling in towns with declining white population and almost invariably, of course, in declining inner city areas. Capital requires not only that the labour supply should match total demand, but also that it should be distributed according to where it is needed. Black immigrant labour thus not only provided the crude labour power for which the economy had such a thirst, it also provided it where it was most needed. The occupational distribution of these early black immigrants is well summed up by Sivanandan: ‘The jobs which “coloured immigrants” found themselves in were the largely unskilled and low-status ones for which labour was unavailable or which white workers were unwilling to fill-in the textile and clothing industries, or as waiters, porters and kitchen hands.’39 That picture of the occupational distribution of the early immigrant workers largely pertains today and is manifested with even greater clarity in all European countries operating a migrant labour system. In France, Germany and Switzerland the occupational concentration of migrant workers is even more pronounced than in Britain. In France 30% of all migrant workers are employed in the construction industry, and 28.4% of migrant women in domestic service. In Switzerland 1 in 5 migrant women are employed in hotels or catering and an astonishing 40% of all factory workers are migrants. For Germany, Castles and Kosack conclude: ‘Foreign workers tend to be particularly overrepresented in industries like plastics, rubber and asbestos and earth, stone, ceramics and glass where working conditions are unpleasant, or in industries like textiles and clothing where pay is low.’40 The overall conclusion of both Sivanandan and Castles and Kosack, that immigrant workers are vastly overrepresented in unpopular jobs with bad conditions and low pay, is backed up by the findings in the two P.E.P. reports based on research done in the early 1960s and early 1970s respectively, however it would seem that occupational concentration is less pronounced in Britain probably due to greater penetration gained through longer average length of settlement. As far as job status is concerned, the P.E.P. reports conclude that blacks are vastly overrepresented proportionally to whites in unskilled and semi-skilled manual work, vastly underrepresented in white collar work and at supervisory and managerial levels, but increasingly well represented in skilled manual work. As far as earnings are concerned, not only are blacks concentrated in low paid jobs, but their earnings comparative to whites in similar jobs are also unequal. Smith concludes in the second P.E.P. report: ‘The overall earnings of minority men are lower than those of whites . . . white men at higher levels earn substantially more than minority men at the same level; at the middle levels the difference is smaller but still marked; at the lowest levels minority men and white men earn the same. However, in order to achieve this equality of earnings, minority men at the lowest levels have to do far more shift work than white men, because their jobs are intrinsically much worse paid.’ For women he concludes:
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There are numerous other spheres in which blacks are disadvantaged and the quantative measurement of this is not really dispute. The two P.E.P. reports represent the most comprehensive statistical analyses to date. To summarise then, Deakin, from what is by and large an ‘integrationalist’ and not a left perspective, and who by his own admission always seeks to err on the side of caution in his estimates, concludes that discrimination varies between substantial and massive. His own summary of disadvantage relating to various aspects of employment alone will stand in for further statistics, the implications of which are by now fairly familiar: The minority groups are more vulnerable to unemployment than whites, they are concentrated within lower job levels in a way that cannot be explained by lower academic or job qualifications; within broad categories of jobs they have lower earnings than whites, particularly at the higher end of the job scale, they tend to do shift work . . . but shift work premiums do not raise their earnings above those of whites, because their jobs are intrinsically badly paid; they are concentrated within certain plants, probably those which have started to employ them because of a labour shortage at some time in the past, and they have to make about twice as many applications as whites before finding a job.42 Such, at an empirical level, is the position of black workers in the British labour market. This description, however, barely begins to deliver a complete explanation of the role of immigrant workers in the economy and the means by which capital profits from their labour. It is not just that black labour solves the problem of labour shortage and facilitates the most beneficial distribution of labour power. Nor is it just a matter of black workers providing cheap labour and therefore higher profits, although this is also often the case, particularly in workplaces that are not properly unionised. The advantage for capital go further than this. Firstly, black labour is not only cheap but the cost of its social reproduction is also low. Jones and Smith in their book ‘The Economic Impact of Commonwealth Immigration’ have estimated that: ‘The average immigrant received about 80% as much (in terms of state welfare) as the average member of the indigenous population in 1961, and the figure seems likely to be 85 to 90% by 1981.’43 This is due primarily to the fact that, for first generation immigrants, the cost of education and training has been paid for by the home country. In addition to this, blacks resident in British receive less from state welfare because they tend to live in decaying inner city areas, use underfinanced school and hospital services, and generally benefit less from council housing. Another important factor, although this is, of course, subject to gradual change, is the particular age structure of the black community, which ensures a high proportion of working people in relation to dependents, either not working or doing unpaid work. In Britain, 90% of black men are economically active compared with 77% of white men. 74% of West Indian women do paid work compared with 43% of white women.44 The situation is, of course, even more extreme in Europe where the ratio between working migrants and ‘non-working’ dependents is even greater. In 1970, 90% of immigrant workers in Germany were not accompanied by their families.45 This situation is very beneficial for the balance sheet of state revenue, although more so in Europe than Britain. For the
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immigrant population, not only is state welfare per capita low, but, proportionally, the number paying tax is high compared with that of the white working class. Given both these factors – the low average cost of black labour and the low cost of the social reproduction of its labour power – Nikolinakos has argued that the immigrant worker produces a higher rate of surplus value than the indigenous worker and is thus highly beneficial to capital, the latter always seeking new ways to counter the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.46 Technically speaking, this proposition is dubious since surplus value is only produced at the point of production and is neither produced in the service sector, where many blacks work, nor augmented by any spin off effects from a reduced load on state expenditure. However, we can make two propositions: firstly, that blacks on average do more ‘unpaid surplus labour’ than whites, and therefore, in Carchedi’s terms, suffer greater ‘economic oppression’.47 Secondly, that the national economy derives extra benefits from the use of black labour because of the lower costs to state revenue. In addition to this, it has been cogently argued by Castles and Kosack that other benefits accrue to capital by virtue of the fact that black labour both allows the survival of labour intensive industries, which would otherwise go bankrupt were it not for the availability of cheap immigrant labour, and secondly, where it is advantageous to capital, aids the latter in increasing the capital intensity of production, and thus increasing the rate of exploitation. Asian workers have been particularly instrumental in this process by virtue of their willingness to do shift work, often the unpopular permanent night shift, which allows continuous operation of machinery and thus justifies the capital outlay involved in mechanisation. According to Smith: ‘19% of black workers do night shift as against 9% of whites.’48 The wool industry provides a classic example of both these phenomena. Ailing from the strength of foreign competition and shortage of labour in the late 1950s, it survived bankruptcy only through the availability of cheap immigrant labour at a time when it could not afford to capitalise, only later, when capital was available, to buy labour saving machinery which could be kept in constant production by, once again, immigrant workers who were willing to work on the permanent night shift.49 The net effect of these various tendencies is, without doubt, highly beneficial to capital and the national economy as a whole. Castles and Kosack conclude that migrant labour was a decisive factor in the boom experienced by Swiss and German capital in the 1950s and 1960s. Deakin, referring to Britain, concludes with characteristic caution that: Immigration has on balance proved beneficial to the economy. While the effects are closely matched, it would seem that the greater mobility and flexibility of the immigrant population, coupled with the lower burden of demand placed on the social services, are decisive . . . it has led to a rise in the general standard of living of the domestic population and upgrading of the domestic population in the occupational hierarchy. Such are the quantifiable benefits accruing to capital through the use of immigrant labour. They seem to justify the assertion that the majority of black workers form a super exploited strata of the working class, if we understand this term in a broadly descriptive, not technical, sense. They also demonstrate conclusively that capital derives particular benefits from the specific role that black workers perform in production, and, therefore, from those mechanisms, whatever they may be, that put blacks in that role. This account would not be complete without some discussion of those mechanisms. The mechanisms by which social agents are distributed into their particular places in the production process are complex. They include the role of the educational system and all those apparatuses and ideologies that reproduce the social division of labour in its specific
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contemporary form. This is not the place to consider these complex questions. What cannot be overlooked here, however, is that legislation which directly affects the position of immigrant workers, as enshrined in numerous immigration acts since the first restrictions were imposed on Commonwealth immigration in 1962. It is appropriate to consider this here, because it is by means of this legislation that some of the beneficial economic effects, considered above, have been maximised. It is Sivanandan’s thesis that all the major immigration acts since 1962 have served the specific needs of capital.50 In brief the theory is this: the system of migrant labour, such as that which operates in Germany is the most effective form of exploiting immigrant labour in Western European capitalist countries. This is so because: 1
2
3
It ensures the perfect match of labour supply to demand through the regulating mechanism of immigration control. It ensures the availability of a reserve army of labour that can be drawn in and expelled from production (and often the country) as required. This reserve army thus acts as a buffer mechnaism to allay the harmful effects of a slump-boom economy. It minimizes state expenditure on the social production of labour power by admitting an already educated adult labour force when it is required, but at the same time restricting to a minimum the entry of unprofitable dependants. Through its draconian nationality laws, it makes migrant workers highly prone to exploitation. Lack of civil rights and the threat of deportation often force migrant workers to take a low profile in union struggles. Castles and Kosack have clearly demonstrated the profitability inherent in this system as it operates in Germany and Switzerland.51, 51a
Sivanandan’s argument is that consecutive British legislation on immigration represents a linear progression towards this kind of ‘contract labour’ system. In this he is quite correct. The 1971 Act which limits the entry of non-patrial i.e. black, Commonwealth immigrants to entry to do a specific job, in a specific place, for a specific length of time, has indeed reduced the status of the black immigrant to that of a migrant. As Sivanandan puts it: ‘There is no such thing as a “Commonwealth immigrant” anymore. There are those who came from the Commonwealth before the 1971 Act came into force ( January1973) but these are not immigrants they are settlers, black settlers. There are others who have come after the Act; they are neither settlers nor immigrants, they are simply migrant workers.’52 In fact, the finishing touches are yet to be made. The likelihood is that they will be in the near future when the new Tory laws on nationality and immigration will probably abolish British subject status for black Commonwealth immigrants, deprive many of their franchise, and totally put an end to permanent settlement for migrants. It is the case, therefore, that those factors which make migrants as opposed to settlers particularly prone to exploitation, are now secured in British legislation; whereas formerly, as Sivanandan points out, it was racial prejudice that stood in for European style nationality laws to subordinate blacks, that racial subordination is now fully enshrined in law, as well as in racialist practice.53 This is, at it were, the last piece of the jig saw. The pieces are all in place and the whole anatomy of superexploitation is revealed. In fact things are not quite as simple as that. This, not because this ensemble of legal and economic mechanisms is not successful in promoting the superexploitation of blacks in Britain, and yielding greater profit for capital and general advantage to the national economy. It is. But rather because in solely analysing the way in which legislation on
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immigration has facilitated the superexploitation of blacks, it does not give an adequate account of the complex relations between the state and capital on the issue of immigration. This is not the place to attempt a full analysis of this relationship. Nevertheless some points must be raised, since it is on account of the above thesis that Ben-Tovim has charged Sivanandan with holding an ‘instrumentalist’ view of the state, whereby the latter is seen to act purely in the interests of capital.54 In reality, despite the inherent economic logic in the legislative drift toward a migrant labour system, this legislation has not perfectly represented the needs of capital. State legislation has, necessarily, reflected other, political, interests as well. Sivanandan is, of course, fully aware of this. He sees the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act primarily as a result of racist political pressures which had been mounting ever since 1958, and the Notting Hill riots, not least in the right wing of the Tory party. However, he also argues, and this is less acceptable, that the anti-immigration interests of the racist political lobby coincided then with the interests of the economy, which had no further need for unskilled immigrant workers. This is highly debatable for two reasons: firstly, despite rising unemployment, continuing localised labour shortages did, most probably, make unskilled immigrant labour attractive and necessary to various sections of industry. Secondly, if less immigrant labour was required than hitherto, it did not require legislative control to achieve this reduction. As Peach points out, primary immigration would probably have dropped in any case as a result of diminishing labour demand. Hugh Gaitskell opposed the contrals in the Commons in December 1961 on these grounds, and the fact that not all the vouchers available in the first two years following the Act were taken up, suggests that both he and Peach were right. Primary immigration was dropping and did drop without the aid of controls. What the threat of controls did was to cause a panic wave of secondary immigration to beat the ban. This was far from being in the interests of capital, since secondary immigration, consisting of dependants less likely to work, is not so easily put to profit. There has always been a certain lack of fit between strictly economic interests and dominant political interests when it comes to immigration. This can be shown both historically and in the anomalies and contradictions inherent in the current situation. An interesting historical parallel to the 1962 situation can be found in the behaviour of the post war labour Government in respect of immigration. At that time Britain was faced with a major labour shortage that made immigration vital. However, far from turning immediately to the obvious source of reserve labour in the Commonwealth, the Government first prevaricated over Polish settlement, and when that was conceded, only admitted West Indians with extreme reluctance. In 1945 the prime minister was sending letters to displaced poles in this country urging them to ‘return home’ and it was not until the Polish Resettlement Bill of February 1947, that a sizeable number of so-called ‘European voluntary workers’ were let in.55 When the Empire Windrush arrived with 400 Jamaicans aboard in 1948, the reaction on the part of the Labour Government seems to have been one of mixed anxiety and embarrassment. As one Labour ministry official put it: ‘It may become extremely embarrassing politically if at a time of shortage there should be nothing but discouragement for British subjects from the West Indies while we go to great trouble to get foreign workers.’56 The message was loud and clear. All immigrants were undesirable, even when indispensable, and black subjects were more so than white ‘aliens’. If economic necessity won through in the end and inaugurated a period of ‘laisse-faire’ immigration, it did not do so automatically and the strength of racist opposition provided a political force that was only marginally outweighed by economic expediency. The same conflict is apparent in the 1960s and 1970s. Immigration laws have been
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consistently refined to produce the most exploitable form of migrant labour, but at the same time, racist opposition to immigration has been such that numbers have been restricted further than was consistent with fully exploiting this system. The fact is that high unemployment by no means abolishes the need for immigrant labour. This is because there is still localised shortage, despite high unemployment, due both to the geographic immobility of indigenous labour, and its reluctance to do certain low paid and unpleasant jobs. Thus the ‘Unit for Manpower Studies’ in a report on ‘The Role of Immigrants in the Labour Market’, whose main concern is the likely effect on industry of the reduced availability of immigrant labour to do certain jobs, concludes that (and this is in 1976): Even if the average level of unemployment over the next few years is rather higher than in the 1960s and this first half of the 1970s, the reduction in immigration . . . could still result in problems in some sectors in which an appreciable proportion of the unattractive jobs are filled by immigrants.57 It goes on, interestingly, to draw a parallel with the situation in the 1930s when, even with up to 3,000,000 unemployed, Irish workers were able to find work in unpopular jobs without any difficulty. Some industrialists must have read with alarm the recent report in the American magazine ‘Time’, which quoted a top, but alas unnamed, Tory politician as saying that the Government intended to reduce immigration to 5,000 per year in the next two years and subsequently to nil. The current situation is, then, quite contradictory. Now that the Government has legislated for a full migrant labour system, and when capital still stands to benefit from it, it decides, on the basis of a purely political racist interest, not to use that system. No doubt it will be solved by the entry of EEC workers, since, despite the right to unconditional entry, those workers will not come to Britain where wages are lower than in other European countries. If this is the case, they may be forced to concede a certain level of black Commonwealth migrant labour entry. However, for the moment, the political interests are dominant over the economic ones, and they are not entirely congruent. In short, although state legislation on immigrants has been, by and large, tailored to serve the interests of capital, this has been possible only within certain prescribed political limits. Economic interest would have called for full migrant labour legislation from the beginning, but the political ideology of Commonwealth paternalism forbade this. Economic needs did not call for such tight control, but political racism was overiding. Now that migrant labour legislation has been completed it is too late for capital to harvest those very special financial fruits which it allows, and on which German capital glutted itself in the 1950s and 1960s, because political factors now militate against allowing further entry. In fact, to indulge in very bleak speculation, it seems that the only solution which would both allow the full exploitation of migrant labour, and sufficiently placate the racist lobby, would be the repatriation of black settlers and their replacement by white migrants. It is to the thin end of this wedge that Sivanandan refers when he talks about ‘induced repatriation’ in his most recent pamphlet entitled ‘From Immigration Control to Induced Repatriation’. To conclude, to say that state legislation on immigration has been tailored to serve the interests of capital but only within certain political limits, is to qualify Sivanandan’s analysis but not to deny its central importance. The essential determining logic behind the legislation has been an economic one. Where the legislation has been contradictory this has largely been due to political limitations, most notably in the form of the anti-immigration lobby, which itself has grown on the experience of social problems which were themselves
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‘thrown up’ by the economic exploitation of black labour. To say as much is to agree with Ben-Tovim that, as regards race, ‘state policy is the site of contradiction and struggle’, but to disagree with him on the nature of those contradictions. The state is not merely the arbiter of contradictions between the interests of capital and the anti-racist demands of the liberal left, as Ben-Tovim tends to represent it. The influence of this anti-racist lobby, although important in the debates of the 1976 Race Relations Act, has been, over the last twenty years, largely eclipsed by the power of racist reaction. Furthermore, if the dominant interests were those of capital and the racist lobby, these should not be seen as opposite or unconnected forces. Although the demands of the racist lobby are not identical with those of capital, they grow on and are partly determined by the form in which capital exploits black labour. The primary task of the state, then, has not been that of arbitrating between opposite forces, racist and anti-racist, but of managing the contradictions between the process of economically exploiting the black minority, and containing the social consequences of that exploitation, manifested in social conflict where the most powerful political force is white racism. To see the primary contradictions thus, is not to deny altogether the effectivity of anti-racist politics, but to attempt to assess the exact balance of forces; a balance which has resulted in a series of laws on race whose overwhelming cumulative effect has been to legitimate racialist practices and not to eradicate them. To see the role of the state in this way is not to hold an instrumentalist view as Ben-Tovim claims (although the account here is, of course, over simplified), but rather to see the contradictions in the role of the state as the product of the articulation of various forces, ideological, political and economic, which are relatively autonomous but which are, nevertheless, determined in the last instance by the economic. Ben-Tovim’s stated position in the article: ‘The Struggle Against Racism etc.’ was that of the ‘relative autonomy’ of the political and the ideological: ‘We reject then, the framework of “total autonomy” ’, he says. However, in that article there was a continual slide towards an idealism whereby racism is seen as an autonomous ideological force. Hence the utopian stress on the possibility of educating people out of racist attitudes. In a more recent article written in conjunction with John Gabriel,58 a drift into a ‘total autonomy’ position is manifest. ‘Racism’, they say ‘is primarily a democratic and ideological issue . . . the concept of race and racism may only be understood as the product of theoretical/ideological practices that subsequently (my stress) intervene at the level of the economy’. If such were the case racism would not be half the problem that it is, and if the foregoing analysis of the political economy of race demonstrates anything, it surely shows that such is not the case. 2. The articulation of race and class Earlier in this paper I considered the ways in which various writers on race relations have theorised the relationship between race and class. Two writers in particular were considered. Cox, albeit via a complex theoretical route, was found, in the end, to operate an unacceptable class reductionism. Rex, on the other hand, whilst attending to many of the specific features of racial structuring that were lost in Cox’s theory, was found to have an essentially Weberian notion of class which posits a plurality of market class structures and class struggles. This lead to a designation of blacks in Britain as a distinct underclass. This analysis was said to be problematic for two reasons. Firstly, it failed to define the essential basis of class in the social relations of production, and in so doing denied the basic economic determinacy which establishes the concept of class as a fundamental category; a category distinct from the empiricist notion of ‘status’ groups and the pluralist Weberian notion of market classes.
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Secondly, as a result of this theoretical problematic, class became defined, in the last instance, according to the culture, way of life, and political consciousness of the group in question. This was seen as a tendency towards a culturalist definition of class in terms of class consciousness. The classic exposition of this position is that given by E.P. Thompson in the preface to The Making of the English Working Class: ‘Class happens when some men, as a result of common, experiences, . . . feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different (and usually opposed to) theirs.’59 This does not involve a complete abandonment of economic determinacy, (Thompson goes on to talk of the class experience as ‘largely determined by the productive relations’), but it does involve a crucial subordination of these objective economic determinants, a dominant stress on cultural factors. The result, as we saw with Rex, was, in this case, the proposition that black people in Britain form a separate class: an underclass. The crucial question is whether or not we are really justified talking of such a separate class in relation to the dominant contradiction within western capitalist societies which, as has been suggested, is still that between capital and labour and not that between races. What light have recent Marxist debates shed on this problem? In fact, there has been little extended and systematic analysis of the position of blacks and migrant workers in the class structures of western capitalist countries, despite considerable recent work on, for instance, the position of white collar workers. Sivanandan’s seminal discussion of the role of black workers in production only yields a category of sub-proletariat which is left somewhat vague. The journal ‘Black Liberator’ settles for the term ‘subproletarian stratum of the working class’ which seems to have it both ways; and Castles and Kosack, on the grounds of traditional Marxist definitions, refuse these options and talk, instead, in terms of a ‘lower stratum in the working class.’ However, there is, in the writings of recent Marxists, such as those mentioned above, an emerging theoretical framework which promises a more adequate analysis of this question. I shall try to outline the main points here and indicate the general trajectory of this new work. The first point to make is that people of West Indian and Asian descent in Britain are overwhelmingly concentrated in manual jobs. According to the 1966 census, 67.4% of New Commonwealth men were in manual jobs against 54.5% for the population as a whole. Only 15.4% of New Commonwealth men were in jobs that were either managerial, professional or supervisory, compared with 23% for the whole working population. Then, 42.3% of New Commonwealth women were in manual work, as against 29% of the population as a whole.60 Therefore, when we talk about the class position of black workers in Britain, we are talking about that of the overwhelming majority who are either in manual work or in non-manual work that is neither managerial nor supervisory in any real sense. Of this majority of black workers, a disproportionate number (in relation to whites) are placed in unpopular jobs, with either bad conditions, low pay, and high proportion of shift work, or all three. So much is clear from my earlier analysis of the role of black workers in the economy. Coupled with other factors, such as bad housing and living in deprived areas with poor welfare facilities this undoubtedly suggests the existence of a situation whereby a large proportion of black people occupy the position of a lowest stratum in society. An analysis which deduces class position, or more accurately, ‘status’ position, in terms of the addition of various indices of social disadvantage would, no doubt, see this as evidence of the existence of a distinct black ‘underclass’ or ‘subproletariat’. However, as Castles and Kosack correctly point out, this postulates that ‘immigrant workers have a different
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relationship to the means of production from that traditionally characteristic of the proletariat’, whereas in Marxist terms: All workers, whether immigrant or indigenous, manual or non-manual, possess the same basic characteristics of a proletariat: they do not own or control the means of production, they work under the direction of others and in the interests of others, and they have no control over the product of their work.61 From this basic premise Castles and Kosack go on to describe the division of the working class into two strata: ‘The indigenous workers, with generally better conditions and the feeling of no longer being at the bottom of society, form as higher stratum. The immigrants, who are the most underprivileged and exploited group of society, form a lower stratum.’ (They argue that the position of black settlers in Britain is substantially the same as that of migrant workers in Europe, since both are equally subject to discrimination, ‘superexploitation’ and a barrier against social mobility. Although there are important differences in the forms of discrimination against blacks and against white migrants, and different degrees of generational social mobility in different contexts, as far as the present class structure is concerned, this comparison is valid.) They go on to elaborate on these two strata by analysing the political and ideological divisions within the working class to which, they argue, immigration has contributed. The analysis is probably too cut and dried. It ignores the position of white women workers, and wrongly suggests all white workers are part of this upper stratum. However, their insistence that it is a question of strata within the working class, and not one of separate classes, is correct. If the working class is defined as the class of wage labourers, who do not own their means of production, who neither control the labour process nor exercise supervisory functions in the social division of labour, thus falling on the manual side of the mental/manual division within the ideology of the social division of labour, then the majority of black workers must be part of this class. Their position within it is one of degree; that is to say they occupy the lowest positions, suffering the highest degree of economic exploitation (in as much as they do on average more unpaid surplus labour) and having the least degree of control over the labour process. However, this does not go far enough. It might be said that it deals only with the quantitative aspects of the position of black workers, ignoring the ways in which they are exploited in qualitatively distinct ways. In terms of the social relations of production there are two particular areas in which the exploitation of black workers is qualitatively distinct. Firstly, (this only applies to some black workers in Britain), migrant labour is in some senses not completely ‘free’ labour. Migrant workers do not have free mobility in the job market in the sense that white workers and immigrants with unconditional residence do. This is not simply a matter of discrimination by employers or unions, although the latter is related to it. It is by virtue of restrictions imposed by immigration laws. Migrant workers cannot change jobs without permission, they rely on their employers’ recommendation for renewed work permits which increases their dependence on them. They do not have full civil rights. They can be deported without trial for offences contrary to the public good, or for overstaying, and in some countries lack the right to vote, do jury service, take public office, or even (in France) stand as union officials. All but the last of these civil deprivations will probably apply to some blacks in this country if the Tories abolish British subjecthood as they have promised. These factors, according to Andre Gorz, achieve: ‘the “denationalisation” of decisive sectors of the working class, by
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replacing the indigenous proletariat with an imported proletariat which leads a marginal, cultural existence, deprived of political, trade union and civil rights.’62 This tendency is most marked in Europe, where it clearly undermines trade union strength, but is increasingly relevant to Britain also. This can be understood as part and parcel of the way capital seeks to lower the price of labour power. The second major qualitative distinction in the mode of exploitation of blacks lies in their function as part of the reserve army of labour, and an analysis of this also helps us to locate their class position. To Marx capital ‘forms a disposable reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase in the population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.’63 Marx saw this reserve army as ever more important to capital as its labour requirements were altered through one technological revolution after another. It also functions to depress the value of labour power, creating greater competition for jobs and undermining union bargaining power. The manner in which the reserve army of migrant labour acts as a shock absorber to a slump – boom economy was analysed above. Women and black youth are both increasingly important to this reserve army. As a recent MSC report has shown, the unemployment rate for West Indian youth is four times as high as the national average.64 And as Veronica Beechey has shown in an article entitled: ‘Some Notes on Female Wage Labour in Capitalist Production’,65 married women are also particularly ‘suitable’ to perform the functions of the reserve army. Since they are not generally paid a ‘family wage’, they can be used to lower the value of labour power; they can help capital in the ‘dilution’ of skilled labour, in the general process of technological deskilling, and when capital no longer needs them, they can be easily expelled from production because they ‘have a world of their own, the family, into which they can disappear when discarded from production, without being eligible for state benefits, and without appearing in unemployment statistics’. Much of this applies equally to migrant workers, who can not only be expelled from production, but also from the country, when their labour is no longer needed. The precise nature of the reserve army and the function it performs has been the subject of many debates which are too complex to rehearse here. Three points, however, should be noted in passing. Firstly, the absolute size of the reserve army is increasing and its role becoming more important. Recent estimates put the likely level of unemployment for 1980 at 5,000,000.66 Secondly, the class position of both women and black people in general is becoming increasingly modified by their role in this reserve army. Thirdly, the growing size, changing role and new composition of this reserve army, will have decisive effects on the political role of this class fraction. There have recently been various important debates around the political role of the young black wageless or ‘work-refusers’ which have been well summarised by Hall et al. in the last chapter of ‘Policing the Crisis’.67 Without entering into these here, it should be noted that Hall et al. clearly demonstrate both the importance of this fraction in the theoretical analysis of the class position of black workers, and the fact that the Marxist concepts of ‘reserve army’ and ‘lumpenproletariat’ are both important and yet in need of refinement to account for the present situation. The above arguments only begin to deliver a rigorous class analysis of the position of black workers. They do, however, demonstrate three things. Firstly, that black workers cannot be thought of as in anyway marginal to the working class. (Black workers represent 14% of manual workers in Britain. Immigrants represent 14% of manual workers in Germany, 25% in France and 35% in Switzerland.)68 They perform crucial roles for capital within the process of production which put them in a central position in terms of the exploitation of
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labour by capital. Secondly, their labour plays a crucial role in the current changes that are affecting the labour process and the consequent restructuring of the working class. 1 2
3
4
They facilitate the further mechanisation of industry and the rising organic composition of capital. They are agents in the consequent process of deskilling whereby as Marx said: ‘The special skills of each individual factory operator vanishes as an infinitessimal quantity before the science, the gigantic forces and the mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism.’ That this process is unrolling with gathering momentum as a result of new micro-technology, is dramatically illustrated by both Braverman and Clive Jenkins in recent works on changes in the labour process.69 They play a critical role in the reserve army of labour, one of whose functions is to depress the value of labour power and thus counteract the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Castles and Kosack argue that the use of immigrant labour has checked the rise of wages for unskilled work and therefore tended to maintain differentials between skilled and unskilled workers. The entry of immigrant workers has allowed the upward mobility of a sizeable proportion of the white working class.
The precise form taken by these changes in the labour process and the consequent restructuring of the working class obviously requires a great deal of further investigation. So too does the precise role played by black labour in these complex processes. The above arguments are thus somewhat tendential. However, what is clear, is that those aspects of the class position of black workers which I have considered to be qualitatively distinct are tied up with these general tendencies. Therefore, although it is specifically ‘racial’ mechanisms which distribute blacks as class agents into these roles, mechanisms which require analysis in their own right the analysis of these economic roles should be keyed into those theories about changes in the labour process and the restructuring of class relations which are central to recent Marxist analysis. Lastly, the political and ideological splits within the working class which have attended the presence of black workers, are not the product of a racism as an autonomous ideological force, either in the form of the bourgeois press, National Front propaganda, or as an inherent ethnocentrism or colonial mentality in the British working class. These racist ideologies take root because they are grafted onto sectional class interests which are the product of objective conditions attendant on the restructuring of the working class, in which black workers have been a crucial element. These divisions are many. Gorz has talked of the deepening ideological gulf between mental and manual labour which the use of immigrant labour has enhanced by allowing the promotion of many of the indigenous working class into tertiary and technical activities. This, he says, has served to: ‘deprecate the social and economic value of manual work and manual workers as a whole, to deepen the separation between manual work and technical, intellectual and tertiary work’.70 Castles and Kosack argue that there are two sides to the political divisions to which these objective economic divisions give rise. Firstly, they argue that the upward mobility afforded to sections of the indigenous working class by virtue of the use of immigrant labour, has encouraged an individualism amongst them which eschews collectivist politics and gives some sections ‘the consciousness of a “labour aristocracy” which supports or acquiesces in the exploitation of another section of the working class’. The growing strength of white collar unionism and the progressive politicised role currently played by unions such as
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NUPE, suggest that the situation is somewhat more complicated than this. As Poulantzas has shown, whilst some sections of the middle strata or ‘new petit-bourgeoisie’, for instance higher technicians and engineers, are gravitating politically towards the bourgeoisie, other groups, such as ‘lower professional’, clerical and service workers, are becoming increasingly proletarianised and turn politically toward the working class.71 Further work needs to be done on this question of the articulation of racist ideologies with the consciousness of different groups of workers. Castles and Kosack’s second point, however, carries much more weight; this is that amongst semi-skilled and unskilled workers there is a high level of racial division. This is no doubt partly because the pressure of the reserve army has created greater competition for these jobs, undermined union bargaining power, and held back the rise in wage levels. Thus Castles and Kosack conclude: ‘The main roots of working class prejudice towards immigrants are to be found in these relationships of competition.’72 Working class racism, then grows on a material basis: on the experience of sectional class interest. The major division, and one which is rapidly growing, is that between the reserve army of the part-time employed, the irregularly employed, most notably composed of women and blacks, and the employed, fighting to protect their jobs, wage levels and skills. It is here that racism finds some of its most fertile soil. The above arguments, although they require considerable elaboration, do seem to warrant the original assertion that an analysis of the class position of black workers should start from an analysis of their specific place in the social relations of production, seeing those specific relations as ones that constitute black workers as a fraction or stratum within the working class, and not as a group either marginal to it or forming a class apart. The political and ideological divisions which seem to set blacks as a class apart should be seen as a product of the articulation of racist ideology to the objective divisions within the working class which capitalism reproduces in the same moment as it reproduces the unity of that class in relation to capital. To be quite clear, the foregoing analysis of the economic class position of black workers does not constitute a full analysis of their class position as a whole. Such a claim would rightly be called economistic since class must be established according to its representation at all levels of the social formation, not merely at the economic level as here. As economic analysis is the necessary but decidedly not sufficient condition of a full class analysis. It is a necessary condition because without it we cannot explain the social formation as a whole, as a complex unity of the various instances, economic, political and ideological, each with its own relative autonomy, but which, nevertheless, exist in relations of determinancy which are, as Althusser would say, ‘structured in dominance’. In the same way, without this ‘necessary’ condition, we cannot explain class ‘as a theoretical whole’ – as a complex but determinate unity, not a Weberian plurality. I have concentrated on the economic not only because for these reasons it is the correct point of departure, but because it is here that we can see where Marxism and Weberian culturalism part company. To achieve any kind of theoretical clarity it is necessary to define the boundaries of different methodologies, and particularly so here where Marxist and left Weberian theories continually circle and prey over the same intermediate and grey terrain of the ‘relatively autonomous’, yet when they swoop pick up what are essentially different theoretical animals. There is a limit point where culturalism and Weberianism break with Marxism and that point is reached when black workers are said to constitute a separate class outside the working class. The limit point theoretically for Marxism, beyond which it becomes something else, is the insistence on the determinacy of the economic in the last instance. The above argument has been conducted with this theoretical demarcation in view, not in the interests of methodological dogmatism, but in order to achieve some kind of theoretical
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clarity: a base on which to build the necessarily complex full analysis. It is an attempt to begin with correct abstractions so as to approach the concrete which is, as Marx says, ‘concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence the unity of the diverse’. To approach this concrete it was thought necessary to begin with identification of economic class, which is to begin with those abstractions which Marx thought to be the necessary points of departure. However, to define the class position of blacks, even at the economic level, requires the recognition of the specific racial structuring of the social relations of production. Bearing in mind Rex’s justified criticism of economistic Marxist analysis, whose notion of the social relations of production is too narrow, and which ignores the specificity of racial structuring, I have tried to outline, albeit schematically, an expanded notion of the social relations of production which accounts for the qualitatively distinct mode of exploitation to which black people are subject. This allows us to see black people as occupying a class position with a distinctive set of economic functions in relation to capital. These functions are part of the mechanism by which capital exploits labour as a whole, and their particular forms are shaped by the general tendencies by which the labour process is changed and the working class restructured in the course of the continued processes of capital accumulation and the class struggles which attend it. According to these economic determinations, then, black workers were said to form a distinct stratum or fraction within the working class. The reasons why this is nevertheless not a sufficient condition of class analysis are several. Firstly, although the existence of class depends on the necessary existence of class places (necessary, that is, for capital), it also depends on the distribution of class agents into these positions. The analysis of the political economy of black labour clearly demonstrates the necessity for capital of the existence of those class places and the functions they perform. The superexploitation of this class fraction is clearly in the interests of capital. However, that does not mean that this is automatically achieved. The achievement of that economic process depends on the distribution of class agents into those places. Although economic forces exercise some determinacy on this process, it would be the purist functionalism to say that because capital has certain needs, the conditions for the fulfillment of these needs are automatically reproduced. There are a number of mechanisms, institutional and ideological, that tend to reproduce the social division of labour that is necessary for capital, but these institutional and ideological mechanisms all possess their own relative autonomy, and are subject to class struggle. As regards the distribution of blacks, there are a large number of essential mechanisms, which apart from the immigration laws themselves, I have not been able to analyse in detail and can only list here: 1 2 3 4 5
The educational system and its ancillary services – careers advisory, educational welfare etc. Other state organisations that are involved in the socialisation of black youth – social services, the probation service, employment agencies and the police. The black family and the cultural life of the ethnic community, which should include the material conditions of life in the black community as effected by housing allocation etc. The media and the ideological role it plays in the particular socialisation of black youth. Discrimination by employers, and the frequent collusion of trade unions in this.
It is only by virtue of all these mechanisms that the class distribution of blacks is secured, and that only within the limits set by class struggle. In each of these sites, racialism operates
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in particular ways and is informed by various types and degrees of racist discourse. An analysis of the class position of black workers would clearly not be complete without an investigation of those racialist mechanisms by which the position of blacks in the social division of labour is reproduced. Although this is traditionally Weberian terrain, where Rex in particular has done his most important work, it has not been ignored by Marxists. Castles and Kosack have done extensive work on housing and education, and Hall et al. have conducted a excellent analysis of the role of the media in the orchestration of racist ideology within a whole repertoire of authoritarian ideologies. However, there remains a great deal of work to be done here. It is necessary to demonstrate concretely the determinacy exercised by the economic and social relations of production over the state apparatuses which serve to reproduce these relations, and the specific position of black workers within them. The spheres of housing and education are crucial in this respect and the study of them is essential for an understanding of the specific racial mechanisms of class distribution. Secondly, the analysis of the class position of black workers is not complete without further consideration of the ideologies which promote the racial division of the working class. It was said that these racial ideologies grow on, and are to an extent the product of, objective divisions, and the experience of sectional class interests within the working class. This is true but not entirely sufficient. For one thing it is not merely a question of white working class racism, but also a question of the consciousness of black workers whose experience is perceived through the prism of race. Secondly, to understand the depth of racial divisions within the working class, we need to understand not only the specifics of sectional class differences, but also the general political influences that shape these into particular ideologies, not only the politics of race, but also the current themes of national political debate, and what has been called the emerging ‘authoriarian popular consensus’. 3. Implications for a theory of the role and origins of racist ideology This section will concentrate on racism within the white working class in Britain, drawing out the implications that the analysis of the political economy of race and racial structuring has for an understanding of racism. The main contention here is that racism amongst the white working class grows on the experience of sectional class interests; that racist ideology provides the syntax through which different interests and social problems in general are understood and articulated. Racism is part of what might be guardedly called the popular ‘common sense’ on the problems of bad housing, unemployment, and crime. To call it ‘common sense’, is not to give it any more credibility, but to underline a point that has often been missed by commentators of all sorts, that racism is a popular ideology, by now deeply embedded in the consciousness of large sections of the working class. Analyses of racism that concentrate solely on fully fledged philosophies of ‘scientific racism’ are dangerously missing the point, since, whilst such philosophies have generally been confined in Britain to the fascist fringe since the war, (although there have been periodic academic revivals in, for instance, the work of Eyesenck et al. and more recently in sociobiology), a popular racism that has no need of such pseudo-scientific supports, has been growing with increased momentum. The notion of ‘common sense’ is also important because it can help demonstrate, as it did in Gramsci’s usage, the fact that ideologies grow on differential class and gender experience; that there is no uniform ideology in general, neither in the form of some homogenous social cement, mysteriously ‘secreted’ (as Althusser would have it) out of the pores of the social formation in its monolithic entirety, nor in the form of a complete world view imposed on us
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from above by the organs of the ruling class. This is important in considering racism, because the ideologies that it entails are clearly appropriated in ways that are both class and gender specific. The incidence of racism clearly varies within different classes73 and racist ideologies are transparently constructed to appeal to the interests of different class and gender combinations. The most notorious historical example of this is, of course, Nazism, which in its rise to power employed a demagogic repertoire that attempted to appeal to all classes and both sexes in different ways, and must rank, apart from anything else, as the most utterly contradictory ideology of all time. The issue here, however, is complex because, although racist ideologies are shaped differently to appeal to different groups, racism as a whole functions, in many cases, as the weld that binds contradictory ideologies, as a focus that simplifies complex issues and provides explanations of social problems that seek to transcend class issues in the grand themes of nation and race. This was the case with German National Socialism and is also true, to some extent, of contemporary fascism and popular racism. Lastly, to concentrate on the ‘common sense’ aspect of racism is to avoid a conspiratorial view of the origins of racism. The working class is not duped by the cunning of ruling class propaganda into holding racist ideas. Although the media has often played a considerable role in fostering racism, we have no need of recourse to conspiracy theories to explain this. The media can only fan the flames of racial tension so effectively because that tension exists so concretely in the everyday experience and conditions. If the general theoretical orientation outlined above is correct, then the crucial question is how, precisely, are racist ideologies articulated with sectional class interests; how do they become common sense? This is crucial politically since to disentangle this knot we must first know how it has been tied. It is also a crucial site of the theoretical argument about the nature of determinacy existing between the racially structured economic and social relations and racist ideology. This paper has argued for the central importance of the structural basis of racism, and a focus on sectional class interests issues from this belief. However, the relation between racist ideologies and the racial structuring of economic relations is clearly dialectical. In stressing the grounding of racism in the experience of sectional class interests I am suggesting that racism is both the product of economic relations – those relations that allow class to be structured in a racially segmented form and give rise to the sectional class interests that are read through race – and also that it is an agent or mechanism through which the racial structuring is achieved. That is to say, racism is an ideology which ensures the distribution of blacks into these specific class positions, both facilitating and in some cases ‘justifying’ their superexploitation. In the more conventional language of race relations literature, Castles and Kosack put it this way: The relationship between discrimination and prejudice is a dialectical one: discrimination is based on economic and social interests and prejudice originates as an instrument to defend such discrimination. In turn, prejudice becomes entrenched and helps to cause further discrimination.74 It is not, then, a question of prejudice existing as a pre given essence, in the nature of human psychology, which, as Ben-Tovim puts it subsequently intervenes at the level of the economy.75 Racism cannot be abstracted from its social and historical context in this way. It can only be understood as the product of, and instrument by which, the racial structuring of social relations are achieved, and that in its particular form at the present time. Racist ideology does have its own relatively autonomous internal logic, its own mode of intellectual
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production, but this is not dreamed up in the heads of isolated racist ideologues. The conditions of the development of these ideologies exist in the experience of social conditions which result from the racial structuring of society and they only become a real material force in that they perform certain functions in the social struggles around these conditions. Looking at racism in terms of competing interests is nothing particularly new or controversial in one sense. Both Rex and Castles and Kosack, for instance, talk of racism as arising out of relations of competition over scarce resources. This, however, can mean various things and have implications that I would wish to avoid. For instance, it could be used to imply that racism is inevitable since there has always been competition between workers over jobs, housing and other resources. I would wish to argue that the existence of this market competition does not make racism inevitable, just as, historically, the existence of competition between the employed and the unemployed, the skilled and the unskilled etc. did not invariably give rise to divided working class consciousness. On the other hand, it used to be common amongst those on the left to talk of racism as a mere irrational reflex to poor material conditions, an arbitrary scape-goating reflex given a racist inflection by the imposition of racist interpretations from above. This view dangerously underestimates the tenacity of racist beliefs, it ignores the internal logic of the racist interpretation and the compelling obviousness of its diagnosis. It is within these parameters, and with these reservations in mind, that I think the problem of the articulation of racist ideologies and sectional class interests should be explained. I cannot explore these arguments concretely here, in any depth, but it may be worth sketching out some of the areas which seem important. Housing is clearly a key issue, but having said nothing about that so far, I will concentrate instead on questions around employment which I have said something about. If we are to look for sectional class interests here, there are three main questions to be answered: 1 2 3
How has immigration affected unemployment? How has immigration affected wage levels and trade union bargaining power? How has immigration affected differentials and the dilution of skilled labour?
The familiar racist tropes: ‘blacks take our jobs’, ‘blacks are cheap labour’, ‘we can’t have blacks here, they’d lower the tone’, represent interpretations of these problems. There is not enough evidence to say much about the last two of these except to repeat that the use of immigrant labour may have reduced the potential hypothetical wage levels for manual work and therefore served to reinforce differentials. Whether this is the case or not, these problems have clearly been taken up by racists. The question of immigration and unemployment is probably the most revealing. One of the most common arguments against immigration is that it increases unemployment and a frequent complaint against black people by white workers is that they take our jobs. Now, although black immigrants have in the main acted as a replacement work force, taking jobs that white workers would not do, it is clear that in some areas of employment, black workers are competing with white workers for the same jobs. This competition is perceived by white workers as threatening, despite the fact that the game is fixed in that black applicants, subject as they are to discrimination, offer somewhat unequal competition. What competition there is, is greatest for unskilled jobs and the fact that racism is most common amongst unskilled workers (see note76) gives weight to the argument that racial hostility is tied up with this feeling of competition. However, none of this explains why competition between workers for jobs, competition that exists between workers of all races, ages and
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sexes, should give rise to racism in particular. In the same way, with unemployment, the Government might be blamed for failing to provide jobs, or any section of the population might be blamed for providing the ‘excess population’. In fact, it is most commonly black people that are blamed. On the level, the reason why this interpretation is made is because it is simple and appeals to immediate experience. At a common sense level, it appears that any reduction in population size would reduce unemployment, and that, therefore, to stop immigration is the obvious answer, since the British, that is the white British, ‘must come first’. To prove that immigration is not responsible for unemployment requires a more abstract analysis, one in fact that, to be convincing, must draw on Marxist concepts. Merely to point out that every year emigration exceeds immigration does not answer the question to a people schooled in the imperialist philosophy that says population size is a problem, we should export it to the colonies. The real answer lies in the fact that capitalism requires a reserve army, and, whilst we live under capitalism, we will suffer unemployment to a greater or lesser degree, during economic recessions at least. It is unthinkable, that under capitalism, a reserve army would not frequently be created, whether to be drawn from immigrants, or indigenous white men or women. And so it was, that during the post war period, when neither indigenous white women or men could create a sufficient pool of reserve labour, capital inevitably allowed immigration in one form or another. Far from it being the case that immigration has been the cause on an increase in white unemployment in fact the reverse is true. As Deakin has argued, since black workers are more likely to be the first to be laid off, and therefore suffer higher levels of unemployment than whites, their presence in fact protects white workers against redundancy. The black reserve army acts as a cushion, a shock-absorber, for the blows of the slump-boom economy. What is more, the high mobility of black labour offsets regional unemployment to some extent. All of which disproves the racist view, but has taken a page to explain and would not be likely to convince many white workers, whose painful experience of redundancy and unemployment have been neatly rationalised by the daily repetition of tidy racist slogans. The problem is well illustrated by Miles and Phizacklea, who, in their study of racist beliefs among the white working class of Willesden, conclude that they (these racist beliefs) are an attempt to understand and explain daily experience, while the real reasons for the both the socioeconomic decline and New Commonwealth immigration are to be found in much more abstract and longstanding social and economic processes which cannot be grasped in terms of daily experience.77 The racist interpretation gains in plausibility because of its direct reference to daily experience. However, this is not all, because, for racism to appeal to this experience, it must do so by homing into that ideology by which experience is understood, not only where it relates specifically to race, but into its general framework. It is here that it becomes necessary to look more generally at the whole repertoire of explanations in the dominant ideology and to see how racism meshes with them. Certainly, the ground for racist interpretations of unemployment is prepared by specifically racist myths propagated by the media. Newspaper headlines like ‘Migrants Here Just for the Welfare Handouts,’ ‘Asians Flood Warning’, ‘One in every Five Babies Born is Black’ (in fact 1 in 20), carry a large responsibility for the widespread belief in total myths about the size of the immigrant population and the consequent antipathy towards immigration. (A recent survey found that 47% of people thought that there were more than two million blacks in Britain, and 24% that there were more than
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five million. (The correct figure is more like 1¾ million.)78 But the ground is also prepared by more general themes in the dominant ideology. To say that the general ideological climate, created by the current political rightward shift, is conducive to racist ideology is perhaps to state the obvious. It is nevertheless worth pointing out how the current themes within dominant ideology make specifically racist interpretations of particular issues more likely. For instance, on the question of black people and unemployment, it might be shown how anti-welfare, anti-public spending sentiments encourage the equation of blacks and ‘welfare scroungers’ and how anti-statist beliefs encourage hostility to race relations legislation and promote the belief that the state ‘puts blacks before us whites’. Racism, then, does grow specifically on the perception of sectional class interest. But the deep penetration of racist ideology does not just result from the simple plausibility of the explanations it offers for specific social problems, but also from the credibility it gains from the way it insinuates itself into a more elevated ‘general view of things’. In ‘Policing the Crisis’ Hall et al. demonstrate how blacks have been identified with all the major themes of what they call the growing ‘popular authoritarian concensus’. Themes like ‘Law and Order’, ‘the declining inner city’, ‘subversion’, the ‘crisis of national identity’. Race has served as a focus for many of these issues. In order to understand the strength of popular racism we must both analyse the way it addresses specific issues, growing on perceptions of specific conflicts of interests and explore the way it is amplified through this symbiosis with those more general ideological themes currently peddled by the right with such notorious success.
Notes 1 2
See Banton: The Idea of Race. Banton, M.: ‘The Stranger Hypothesis’, Race vol. 15 no. 1. Patterson, S.: Dark Strangers: A Study of West Indians in London. 3 Deakin, N.: Colour, Citizenship and British Society. Smith, D.: Racial Disadvantage in Britain. 4 See below for references. 5 Cox, O.C.: Castle, Class and Race, a Study in Social Dynamics. 6 Rex, J.: Race, Colonialism and the City. : Race Relations in Sociological Theory. Ben-Tovim, G.: ‘The Struggle Against Racism . . .’ in Marxism Today. 7 Rex, J.: Race, Colonialism and the City. 8 ‘The rationalizations of the exploitative purpose which we know as race prejudíce are always couched in the ideology of the age’ in Caste, Class and Race. 9a Cox demonstrates clearly the systematic way in which the American ruling class fostered racism through the media. 9b Cox, O.C.: Caste, Class and Race. 10 ibid. 11 ibid. 12 ibid. 13 ibid. 14 ibid. 15 Blauner, R.: ‘Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt.’ Social Problems 16. 16 Carmichael, S., and Hamilton, C.: Black Power. 17 Blauner, R.: ‘Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt’. 18 ibid. 19 ibid. 20 Tabb, W.: The Political Economy of the Black Ghetto. 21 Wolpe, H.: ‘The Theory of Internal Colonialism’ in Beyond the Sociology of Development. 22 Rex, J. and Tomlinson, S.: Colonial Immigration in a British City: A Class Analysis. 23 I am thinking of the work of Louis Althusser and his followers. The pioneering work in this area
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is that of Althusser’s most important essay: ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ in For Marx. Rex, J.: Race Relations in Sociological Theory. Hall, S.: ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance’. Rex, J.: ‘South African Society in Comparative Perspective’ in Race, Colonialism and the City. Wolpe, H.: ‘Capitalism and Cheap Labour in South Africa: from Segregation to Apartheid’ in Economy and Society vol. 1 no. 4. 28 Sivanandan, A.: ‘Race, Class and Power: An Outline for Study’ in Race vol. 14 no. 4. 29 as above. 30 Rex, J.: Colonial Immigrants in a British City. 31 ibid. 32 Poulantzas, N.: Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. 33 Marx, K.: Capital. Vol. 111. 34 Rex, J.: Colonial Immigrants in a British City. 35 ibid. 36 ibid. 37 Nikolinakos, M.: ‘Notes on an Economic Theory of Racism’ in Race vol. 14 no. 4. 38 Castles, S. and Kosack, G.: Immigration Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe. Sivanandan, A.: ‘Race, Class and the State: the Black Experience in Britain’ Race and Class Pamphlet no. 5. Peach, C.: West Indian Migration to Britain: A Social Geography. 39 Sivanandan, A.: ‘Race, Class and the State’. 40 Castles, S. and Kosack, G.: Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe. 41 Smith, D.: Racial Disadvantage in Britain. 42 Deakin, N.: Colour, Citizenship and British Society. 43 Jones, K. and Smith, A.D.: The Economic Impact of Commonwealth Immigration. 44 Reference unknown. 45 Gorz, A.: ‘The Role of Immigrant Labour’. 46 Nokolinakos, M.: ‘Notes on an Economic Theory of Racism’. 47 Carchedi, G.: On the Economic Identification of Social Classes. 48 Smith, D.: Racial Disadvantage in Britain. 49 See Cohen and Jenner: ‘The Employment of Immigrants: A Cast Study Within the Wool Industry’. Race vol. 10. 50 Deakin, N.: Colour, Citizenship and British Society. 51 Sivanandan, A.: Race, Class and the State. 51a See chapter entitled: ‘Union Policies and Industrial Disputes’ in Castles and Kosack: Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe. 52 Sivanandan, A.: ‘Race, Class and the State. 53 ibid. 54 Ben-Tovim, G.: ‘The Struggle Against Racism . . .’ 55 See account in Foot, P.: Immigration and Race in British Politics . . . 56 Quoted in: ‘The Post War Conjuncture’ Clive Harris. 57 The Unit for Manpower Services: ‘The Role of Immigrants in the Labour Market’. 58 Thompson, E.P.: The Making of the English Working Class. 59 Unit for Manpower Studies: ‘The Role of Immigrants in the Labour Market’. 60 Castles and Kosack: Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe. 61 Gorz, A.: ‘The Role of Immigrant Labour’. 62 Marx, K.: Capital. Vol 1. 63 Manpower Services Commission: ‘Youth and Work’. 64 Beechey, V.: ‘Some notes on Female Wage Labour in Capitalist Production’ in Capital and Class no. 3. 65 See Institute of Manpower Studies Research and Cambridge Economic Planning Group Research both summarised in Jenkins, C. and Sherman, B.: The Collapse of Work. 66 Hall et al.: Policing the Crisis. 67 Gorz, A.: ‘The Role of Immigrant Labour’. 68 Jenkins and Sherman ibid. Braverman, H.: ‘Labour and Monopoly Capital’. 69 Gorz, A.: ‘The Role of Immigrant Labour’. 70 Poulantzas, N.: Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. 24 25 26 27
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71 Castles and Kosack: ibid. 72 See Rose, E.J. et al.: Colour and Citizenship. For an account of the research of Dr. Mark Abrams which analyses levels of discrimination for different social groups. 73 Castles and Kosack ibid. 74 Gabriel, J. and Ben-Tovim, G. in: ‘Marxism and the concept of racism’. 75 According to Dr. Abrams in Rose, E.J. ibid. 76 In Miles and Phizacklea ed.: Racism and Political Action in Britain. 77 Abrams, M. ibid.
Bibliography Political economy Allen, S. ‘Immigrants or Workers’ in Race and Racialism ed. Zubaida (1970) Beechey, V. ‘Some Notes on Female Wage Labour in Capitalist Production’ in Capital and Class no. 3. Autumn (1977) Beetham, D. ‘Transport and Turbans’ IRR/OUP (1970) Braverman, H. ‘Labour and Monopoly Capital’ Monthly Review (1975) Burawoy, M. ‘The function and reproduction of migrant labour: comparative materials from South Africa and the USA’ American Journal of Sociology no. 5. (1976) Castells, M. ‘Immigrant workers and class struggles in advanced capitalism’ Race and Class xvii (1975) Castles, S. and Kosack, G. ‘Immigrant workers and class structure in France’ Race vol. 12 no 3 (1971) Castles, S. and Kosack, G. ‘Immigrants: West Europe’s industrial reserve army’ New Society vol. 22 no. 530 (Nov. ’72) Castles, S. and Kosack, G. ‘The function of labour immigration in Western European capitalism’ New Left Review (1973) Castles, S. and Kosack, G. ‘Immigrant workers and class structure in Western Europe’ OUP/IRR (1973) Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies Group Women take issue Hutchinson (1978) Counter Information Service ‘Racism: who profits’ Report no. 16. Counter Information Service ‘The new technology’ Report no. 26 Cohen, R. and Harris, C. ‘Migration, capital and labour process’ CCCS State group seminar paper (1977) Cohen, R. and Jenner, P. J. ‘The employment of immigrants: a case study in the wool industry’ Race vol. 10 Elger, T. ‘Valorization and “deskilling”: a critique of Braverman’ Freeman, M. and Spencer, S. ‘Immigration Control, Black workers and the economy’ British Journal of Law & Society vol. 6 no. 1 (179) Gorz, A. ‘The role of immigrant labour’ New Left Review no. 61 Harris, C. ‘The post war conjuncture’ James, S. ‘Sex, race and class’ Race Today (1975) Jenkins, C. and Sherman, B. ‘The collapse of work’ Eyre Methuen (1979) Jones, K. and Smith, A.D. The economic impact of Commonwealth immigration Cambridge University Press (1970) Jowell, R. and Prescott-Clarke, P. ‘Racial discrimination and white collar workers in Britain’ Race vol. 11 no. 4 (April 870) Manpower Services Commission ‘Youth and work’ MSC Dept. of Employment (1978) Manpower Services (unit for) ‘The role of immigrants in the labour market’ Dept. of Employment (1976) Miles, R. and Phizacklea, A.A. ‘The TUC and black workers 1954–1973’ in Working Papers in Ethnic Relations no. 6 (1977)
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Miles, R. and Phizacklea, A. ‘The TUC and black workers, 1974–1976’ British Journal of Industrial Relations vol. 16 no. 2. Nikolinakos, M. ‘Notes on an economic theory of racism’ Race vol. 14 no. 4. Nikolinakos, M. ‘Notes toward a general theory of migration in late capitalism’ Race and Class vol. xvii no. 1. Obregon, A.G. ‘The marginal role of the economy and the marginal labour force’ Economy and Society no. 4 (1974) Patterson, S. Immigrants in industry IRR/OUP (1968) Peach, C. West Indian migration to Britain: as social geography OUP (1968) Radin, B. ‘Coloured workers and British trade unions’ Race vol. 8 no. 2 (1966) Revolutionary Community Group ‘Imperialism racism and the State’ Revolutionary Communist no. 9 Rimmer, M. Race and industrial conflict Heinemann (1972) Sivanandan, A. ‘Race, class and power: an outline for study’ Race vol. 14 no. 4. Sivanandan, A. ‘Race, class and the State’ Race and Class pamphlet (1976) Sivanandan, A. ‘From immigration control to ‘induced repatriation’ Race and Class pamphlet no. 5 (1978) Sivanandan, A. ‘Imperialism and disorganic development in the silicon age’ Race and Class vol. xxi no. 2 Tabb, W. ‘The political economy of the black ghetto’ New York (1970) Wolpe, H. ‘The theory of internal colonialism’ in Beyond the sociology of development ed. Oxaal et al. RKP (1975) Wolpe, H. ‘The white working class in South Africa’ Economy and Society vol. 5 no. 2 (1976) Wright, P. The coloured worker in British industry IRR/OUP (1968)
General theory and other studies in race relations Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. Reading Capital NLB (1970) Althusser, L. For Marx NLB (1977) Banton, M. The coloured quarter Cape (1955) Banton, M. Race relations Tavistock (1967) Banton, M. The idea of race Tavistock (1977) Ben-Tovim, G. ‘The struggle against racism . . .’ Marxism Today ( July 1978) Ben-Tovim, G. and Gabriel, J. ‘Marxism and the concept of racism’ Economy and Society (1978) Billig, M. Fascist: a social psychological view of the National Front Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich (1978) Blauner, R. ‘Internal colonialism and ghetto revolt’ Social Problems no. 16 (1969) Bogdanor and Skidelsky The age of affluence Macmillan (1970) Carchedi, G. On the economic identification of social class RKP (1977) Carmichael, S. and Hamilton V. Black power Cape (1968) Cesaire, A. ‘Discourses on colonialism’ Monthly Review N.Y. (1972) Coard, B. How the West Indian child is made educationally subnormal by the British school system New Beacon (1971) Cox, O.C. Caste, class and race: a race: a study in social dynamics Modern Reader paperback (1970) Clark, K. Dark ghetto N.Y. (1970) Cleaver, E. Soul on ice Cape (1969) Deakin, N. Colour, Citizenship and British Society Panther (1970) Dummett, A. ‘The law of citizenship and nationality Immigrant Voice Supplement JCWI (1979) Dummett, A. A portrait of English racism Penguin (1973) Edgar, D. ‘Racism, fascism and the politics of the National Front’ Race and Class pamphlet no. 4. Fanon, F. Wretched of the earth Grove Press (1963) Foot, P. Immigration and race in British politics Penguin (1965) Gamble, A. The Conservative nation RKP (1974) Gramsci, A. Selections from the prison notebooks Lawrence and Wishart (1976)
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Hall, S. et al. Policing the crisis Macmillan (1978) Hall, S. ‘Race and moral panisc in post war Britain’ BSA public lecture (1978) CCCS Hall, S. ‘Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance’ Mimeo for UNESCO CCCS (1979) ‘Pluralism, race and class in Caribbean society’ ‘The political and economic in Marx’s theory of classes’ in Class and class structure Ed. Hunt, A. Lawrence and Wishart (1973) Harris, D.J. ‘The black ghetto as colony: a theoretical critique and alternative formulation’ Review of Black Political Economy vol. 2 no. 4. Hiro, D. Black British, white British Modern Reader (1973) HMSO British nationality law Green paper (1977) Jeffcoate, R. Positive image: towards a multiracial curriculum Chameleon Books (1979) Malcom X (with assistance from Alex Haley) The autobiography of Malcom X Penguin (1978) Mandel, E. Late capitalism NLB (1972) Marx, K. Capital Vol 1 Penguin (1976) Miles, R. and Phizacklea, A. ed. Racism and political action in Britain RKP (1979) Moore, R. Racism and black resistance in Britain Pluto (1975) Nairn, T. The break up of Britain NLE (1977) Patterson, S. Dark strangers: a study of West Indians in London Penguin (1965) Polland, S. ‘The development of British economy’ Poulantzas, N. Classes in contemporary capitalism Verso (1978) Prescod, C. Review of ‘Colonial immigrants in a British city’ Race and Class vol xxi no 2 (1979) Rex, J. Key problems in sociological theory RKP (1961) Rex, J. and Moore, R. Race, community and conflict: a study of Sparkbrook IRR/OUP (1967) Rex, J. Race relations and sociological theory Weidenfeld and Nicolson (1970) Rex, J. Race, colonialism and the city RKP (1973) Rex, J. and Tomlinson, S. Colonial immigrants in a British city: a class analysis RKP (1979) Rose, E.J. et al. Colour and citizenship OUP (1969) Smith, D. Racial disadvantage in Britain Penguin (1977) Thompson, E.P. The making of the English working class Penguin (1968) Thompson, E.P. The poverty of theory Merlin (1978). Wallace, M. Black macho and the myth of the superwoman Clader (1979) Walvin, J. ‘Black and white. The negro in English society: 1555–1945’ Wilson, A. Finding a voice. Asian women in Britain Virago (1978) Zubaida, S. et al. ed. Race and racism Tavistock (1970)
34 Multicultural fictions Hazel Carby
Introduction What I have attempted to survey, in the following pages, are elements of the discourse of multiculturalism. The links between these elements are neither obvious, nor part of a logical progression although each element does, to some extent, assume its relationship to its next stage, unproblematically, in its implied reader. From the generalities of National social policy addressing local policy, from educational theories addressing curricula change in schools to teachers, classes and sets of texts. The universalised application of aims that ultimately have the classroom at their core. Trying to consciously disrupt this process I have found to be difficult, but necessary. Working from the apex of the triangle down through an ever expanding area to the subject or audience at the base can limit analysis to being critical of the links already provided by the terms of debate. As a teacher in the East End of London in a multiracial school it was easy to acknowledge that yes, you, your classroom, your relationships were being addressed but it was impossible to relate the terms in which multiculturalism was and is being formulated to the circumstances of the classroom situation. As a preliminary to further work I wanted to establish who was speaking what to me as a teacher and what was being assumed about the ultimate recipients, the students themselves. I have, thus, tried to make each element of the multicultural debate problematic not just in terms of its relationship to other elements but also the internal contradictory nature of the aims of each part. The dissertation, therefore, does not flow through State Policy, educational theory, educational interventions to texts, nor is it intended that it should. What I am questioning is the curious silence about, avoidence of, or inadequacy in, addressing Racism. The conflicts and contradictions that are absent that lead to the following absurd dialogue Schools: Black students: Schools: Black students: Schools:
We’re all equal here. We KNOW we are second-class citizens, in housing, employment and education. Oh, dear. Negative self-image. We must order books with Blacks in them. Can’t we talk about the Immigration Laws or the National Front? No, that’s politics. We’ll arrange some Asian and West Indian Cultural Evenings.
It may sound contradictory to say that what unifies is what is absent but I have tried to address this silence. The refusal to acknowledge the effects of an institutionalised racist
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society means that multiculturalism is limited to plastering over cracks. I hope the concluding section on language begins to formulate the basis for an analysis of all the questions that this paper raises but hasn’t answered.
Multiculturalism in its context 1. Multiculturalism and the state The era of the educational expansion and curricula innovation of the sixties and early seventies has been replaced by an atmosphere of retrenchment and defensiveness. The Labour Government’s ‘Green Paper’ on Education regretted the neglect of ‘the building blocks of education’ and appealed for a concentration on ‘the basic skills of literacy and numeracy’. Methods of National Assessment are being investigated by the A.P.U. and are seen by teachers as potentially threatening to their autonomy and ‘professionalism’. Both major political parties agree on the need for educational economic restraint. ‘Resource constraints were not always taken into account during the period of rapid development of the curriculum and in teaching methods that occurred in the last decade; they must be borne in mind in any proposals for the future’ (Green Paper, 1.18). However, an aspect of the curriculum that is regarded as a source of growth and innovation by the State, Educational Institutions, teachers’ organisations and teachers themselves is the concept of multiculturalism. A motivating force behind this need for change is educating for a more democratic society. ‘Unequivocally the commitment is to all. Just as there must be no second-class citizens, so there must be no second-class educational opportunities’ (I.L.E.A. 1977). The need for multicultural education is not merely regarded as an ideal but seen as practically necessary in constructing the society of the future. Ours is now a multiracial and multicultural country, and one in which traditional social patterns are breaking down . . . Our educational system is adapting to these changes. The comprehensive school reflects the need to educate our people for a different sort of society, in which the talents and abilities of our people in all spheres need to be developed and respected; the education appropriate to our Imperial past cannot meet the requirements of modern Britain. Green Paper, 1.10–1.11. The reference back to ‘our Imperial past’ situates the need for change in the historical context of a ‘natural’ and evolutionary development and implies an inevitable progression where ‘traditional social patterns breaking down’ disguises the antagonism, conflict and contradiction present in this process. An essential component of the multicultural curriculum is presented as being a reflection of ‘our need to know about and understand other countries’. Present and future society is seen as being ‘complex’ and ‘interdependent’ where many of Britain’s problems require international solutions. A relationship is made between complex, international but interdependent economic and political problems and policy through social policies, here specifically educational, to the classroom. Schools should ‘. . . tackle with sustained enthusiasm the problems of children from other cultures or speaking other languages and make a microcosm of a happy and co-operative world’ (Foreword).
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The principal mechanism in this logic is reflective; that a classroom can be a microcosm of society. But it is also causitive; that the creation of ‘happy and co-operative classrooms’ will have an effect on the wider society, aiding, in fact, the creation of a ‘happy and co-operative’ world. This portrayed relationship between schools and State policy needs to be made problematic for a number of reasons. The ‘Green Paper’ and the I.L.E.A. Report are official documents voicing the interests of the State, its institutions and that of its representatives. These interests are presented as being identical to those of its citizens. A consensus is assumed of interests, problems and solutions. One of the linguistic methods by which this shared identification of interests is secured is the continual use of ‘our’ and ‘we!’1 Inherent contradictions and conflicting interests, economic, political and social within and between racial, sexual or class groupings are contained by, and subsumed under, an apparent unity of interests. The philosophy is essentially pluralist, ignoring inequalities or an institutionalised differentiation of interests. Apparent unity means that the social construction of inequality cannot be raised for questioning and investigation. For example, increasingly rigid Immigration Laws specifically designed to limit Black entry to Britain are not in the interests of the Black community. But these laws, as other instances of Institutionalised Racism, such as Police harrassment, inequalities in Housing and Employment etc., actually construct certain racial groups as more equal than others. These institutional ‘actualities’ belie the shared ‘National Interest’ that the ‘Green Paper’ addresses. Within this context of the wider implications of social, political and economic Racial policy it becomes ludicrous to assume that schools can counteract, and eventually eradicate, that complex phenomenon Racism. The document implicitly accepts that increased knowledge, that schools as institutions can convey, can educate for a different type of society without regard to any structural changes in the present social formation. Predominantly, in the multicultural debate, all issues, whether economic, e.g. the overrepresentation of Black youth in unemployment statistics or of a socio-political nature concerning equality of opportunity or the development of varying talents and abilities, become centrally focussed around Black educational failure. . . . There is some evidence that disproportionate numbers of people from ethnic minority groups are low achievers in terms of educational standards, have low expectations and aspirations, and lack confidence in the education system which itself appears not fully to take advantage of the vitality and richness to be derived from a multicultural society. I.L.E.A., 1977 The ‘problem’ is thus pre-defined as being that of the ethnic minorities themselves. Support for the multicultural approach is wide. From the D.E.S. and the I.L.E.A. to teachers’ organisations such as the National Association for the Teachers of English (N.A.T.E.) and the National Association for Multiracial Education (N.A.M.E.) to regional groups such as All London Teachers Against Racism and Facism (A.L.T.A.R.F.). With the exception of a recent draft discussion document, produced by the latter organisation, which is addressed at a later stage, there is little debate about what is understood by the concept, multiculturalism. It appears to be generally accepted within debate as a ‘good’ and necessary educational approach. But, before proceeding to an analysis of what this concept is, it is necessary to examine the variety of terminology between these educational bodies and present in the
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documents they produce. Multicultural, multi-ethnic and multiracial are frequently used as interchangeable descriptions and lead to gross generalisations and a lack of cultural differentiation. A non-controversial definition could describe Race as referring to . . . a group that is socially defined on the basis of physical criteria. A similar concept, often confused with race, is ethnic group which too is socially defined, but on the basis of cultural criteria. Because cultural differences often accompany physical differences, there is a strong tendency to lump physical and cultural differences under the team ‘race’. Jones, 1972, p. 117 Within this definition belief in the superiority of one’s own ethnic group would be ethnocentrism. However, what this definition lacks, and what is frequently absent in the educational usages of these terms, is any concept of hierarchy, either between or within racial and ethnic communities. The interchangeable nature of these terms within educational debates is indicative of assumptions of cultural autonomy. First, an indigenous cultural autonomy is assumed present into which other cultures can be integrated, ignoring any class or gender differences, in favour of a National homogeneity. Generalisations are then made, in the same manner about Caribbean and Asian cultures. There is, therefore, no concept of dominant and subordinate national cultural differentiation, either indigenous or migrant, and an absence of the recognition of the existence of racism as it relates to the possession of control, authority, influence over other groups, and forms of resistance. The logic of multiculturalism is deceptively simple. A multiracial, multi-ethnic society should reflect or represent cultural diversity in its schools. This is, of course, an absurd view of culture, a nationalist one. It lumps the ‘values’ and the ‘assumptions’ of working class culture, the ideas and interests that come out of the working class British, together with those that emerge from Britain’s imperial history and high cultural artefacts. Dhondy, 1978 It is not the opinions of racial and ethnic minorities that is voiced through multiculturalism. Nor are official documents or educational theories about the multicultural curricula addressed to them directly. Rather, racial and ethnic minorities are the object of discussion, predefined as constituting ‘the problem’. The audience is the white middle-class group of educationalists that have to contain/deal with the ‘problem’. I wish to illustrate these general terms of reference more specifically by referring closely to a publication ‘Positive Image, Towards a Multiracial Curriculum’ by Robert Jeffcoate. This book is a recent (1979) publication and has been widely reviewed. ‘Issues’, a twice-termly paper produced by N.A.M.E. acknowledges that this book will be widely read and used by student teachers, teachers on in-service training courses and displayed in Teachers’ Centres. The book stems from work completed for the Schools’ Council project on Multiracial Education which has not yet been published because of its controversial nature. It examines general theoretical issues as well as focussing upon the curriculum changes within one discipline, English.
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It is interesting also because Robert Jeffcoate writes not just from the point of view of an educational theorist but also as a practising teacher. The multiracial curriculum he describes is the one implemented in his department in a school in the West Midlands. 2. Multiculturalism from theory to practice Robert Jeffcoate argues for a combination of three justifications for the multiracial curriculum: ‘. . . racial minorities are entitled to expect that their cultures will be prominently and positively represented in the school curriculum’ ( Jeffcoate, 1979 p. 26). He approves that, in the United States, this notion is enshrined in Federal and State Legislation and comments ‘. . . in this country, perhaps because the debate about race has been confounded with the debate about immigration, it has yet to secure a firm purchase’ (p. 26). The next justification ‘. . . rests on the traditional view that one of the school’s tasks is to present its pupils with an accurate picture of the society, and world, in which they are growing up; unquestionably other races and cultures are important elements in this picture’ (p. 26). And finally, ‘. . . a curriculum which is multiracial involves pupils in more stimulating, interesting and challenging learning experiences than one which is not’ (p. 26). The author rejects the justification for a multiracial curriculum ‘. . . premised on the assumption that British Society suffers from an endemic malaise, racism, which has acquired the status of a cultural norm and moulds children’s attitudes’ (p. 26). Robert Jeffcoate dismisses this mode of thought as ‘pathological’ and ‘tendentious’ and liable to result in ‘heavily authoritarian’ teaching. There are many problems here. First, racial or ethnic minority groups have no autonomous control over any part of the multiracial curriculum, or, consequently, how their cultures are to be ‘prominently and positively’ represented in the school curricula. Indeed, Robert Jeffcoate does not find it necessary, in his book, to consult the views, opinions or publications of the various black community groups engaged with educational issues. To feel that debates about race are ‘confounded’ with debates about immigration is to ignore their structural and historical inter-relationship. The economic and political forms of exploitation and dominance of Imperialism used ‘race’ as a mechanism. Now, in the late seventies, a different form of colonialism is being experienced within the ‘Mother Country’ of that colonial system. The nature of the relationship has changed, specific to the two historical moments but race is still ‘the issue’. For example, White immigration, in the ‘commonsense’ parameters of immigration as ‘issue’ has become disregarded as the immigration policies of successive governments are designed to prevent non-whites from entering Britain. It is quite clear who the ‘them’ refers to when ‘we don’t want any more of them’ is spoken. In effect the word ‘immigrant’ has become synonymous with ‘Black’. It is not, therefore, merely that the issues of races and immigration have become confounded with each other but that Immigration Laws and the consensus over the presentation of this whole area of debate is, profoundly, racist. Robert Jeffcoate does not acknowledge how institutionalised racism, whether the above or in housing, employment or in education can, and does, effect the curriculum of a school and the attitudes of pupils. To objectify, as a curriculum aim, the promotion of racial self-respect and inter-racial understanding Robert Jeffcoate feels would threaten the autonomy of pupils, arguing that it is for them to determine what they should be. Isolating the individual ignores the collective struggle to gain racial respect that has to be fought and won. To adopt a
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positive anti-racist stance Robert Jeffcoate defines as authoritarian, whilst he, he states, is ‘a child-centred progressivist’.2 Robert Jeffcoate parallels the position of minority race children with that of working-class children in relation to the culture of the school which, being synonymous with the culture of the dominant middle-class, is likely to disparage the language, expectations and behaviour that the working-class child brings to the school.3 Minority race children, he argues, are liable to be in an even more acute position. The purpose of the multiracial curriculum is to ‘rectify these omissions, imbalances and inequities’. That representatives of these minority communities should be involved in this process is rejected by Robert Jeffcoate in the most ethnocentric manner. He feels it ‘extremely unlikely’ that the mode of rectification would be ‘entirely acceptable’ to representatives of racial minorities because ‘They will not share the school’s view that all children have an inalienable right to choose their own career and determine their own beliefs, values and ways of life’ (p. 38). To support what is, in fact, a totally unsubstantiated generalisation, Robert Jeffcoate cites the attendance of Muslim children at Quran schools, to learn the tenets of Islam, as an example of an ‘uncritical’ educational experience. An experience placed in opposition to attendance at a British school which is described as being not ‘. . . learning facts or items of faith but on being creative and critical, on forming their own opinions and making their own decisions’ (p. 38). The implications in this sort of comparison are deeply disturbing. First, the author is assuming, through the use of generalities, that the teaching of minority race or ethnic group cultures from within these cultures are experienced as a process of indoctrination. The example he uses is specifically religious, a particular system of beliefs and practices that are a part of cultural experience, not its whole. There is a distinct ‘them and us’ division, in which the ‘reader’ is assumed to be one of ‘us’, that ignores the maintenance of articles of faith in all religions, including those of indigenous groups cf. Judaeic, Roman Catholic, C. of E. etc. Though not equating two similar types of experience he affirms the British school as embodying ‘Freedom of Choice for the individual’, and by inference that representatives of racial and ethnic minority groups will not agree with this principle. The school is then, in Robert Jeffcoate’s view, an institution that can isolate the individual from being a member of a social group and give priority to individual experience. This ignores social, political and economic determinations on the school as institution and the class, gender or racial positions of the subjects within that institution. The processes which constitute the power to determine success or failure cannot, therefore, be accounted for in this philosophy other than at the level of individual success or failure. Excluded also, from examination, are the processes of the construction of subject identities and distinctive class, gendered or racial forms at a cultural and symbolic level as well as at an economic and structural level. As an educational theorist and teacher, Robert Jeffcoate maintains a peculiarly contradictory position between acknowledging that, ‘The school’s duty is to ensure that its philosophy, policies, curricula and so on are such as to enable and accommodate as many choices as are feasible . . .’ and recognising the need to qualify ‘feasible’ by adding ‘The bounds of feasibility will be marked out by the values the school believes will be integral to its own culture, to its concept of the good life . . . pushing its pupils in certain directions rather than others . . .’ (p. 39). In practical terms, these ‘certain directions’ involve discussions over material designated ‘suitable’ or ‘unsuitable’ for use in a classroom. Within the context of a multiracial
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curriculum Robert Jeffcoate cites misrepresentation of cultures and races as grounds for the exclusion of texts from school use. He gives two examples of History books. The first ‘The Illustrated Book about Africa’ is condemned for misinformation about the Mau Mau movement in Kenya, and overtly celebrating Imperialist superiority. Contrasted with this is Longman’s ‘Discovering Africa’s Past’ by Basil Davidson. Robert Jeffcoate places the latter in a position of extreme opposition to the former, quoting a passage concerning the same period of Kenyan history. This account places the Mau Mau movement in the context of the strong opposition of White settlers to Kenyan Independence. These two text books are condemned by Robert Jeffcoate as being equally biased without acknowledging the effect of his own point of view on the relationship between the two representations of events. Indeed, the reader is expected to assume a natural neutrality in the exercise of his decisions. The educational purpose of engaging ‘children with an accurate picture of the world, both its past and its present’ escapes analysis as a critical perspective. Questions concerning how ‘accurate’ is to be defined and ‘bias’ detected are left to the exercise of professional judgement. In summarising the aims of ‘Positive Image’ it would seem that the cornerstone of Robert Jeffcoate’s theory and practice is the optimistic belief that the multiracial classroom ‘. . . can become a place where pride in race is affirmed, and where inter-racial friendship and understanding are celebrated’ (p. 122). Almost identical to the desire of the Green Paper for ‘a microcosm of a happy and co-operative world’. Being dismissive towards ‘all the tensions and animosities, all the negative and divisive outside pressures’ leads Robert Jeffcoate to a naive and simplistic methodology. Perhaps the cover of the book is an effective metaphor for the argument between its covers. What is being suggested is that the complexities of racism can be reduced to a simple binary principal. That, like photographic images, held by images of Blacks, whether self-images or images held by Whites, can be reversed through prominent and positive representation. This representation is to be embedded in a multiracial curriculum which will have effectivity in isolation from the ‘outside world’. Where ‘. . . the kind of racial slurs . . . traded in the playground (are) not traded in the classroom’ (p. 63). 3. Educational interventions It is important to see multiculturalism as an educational philosophy and practice in relation to other teaching approaches and strategies. Debate about a multi-racial curriculum has proceeded in ways rooted in previous debates concerning working-class educational failure. Theories of deficiency and deprivation that led to the creation of Educational Priority Areas, channelling increased resources to inner-city, working-class schools, is a form of ‘positive discrimination’. This is also to be found in the Race Relations Act, 1976, obliging local authorities to take positive action to promote equal opportunities. In relation to education, ‘The Act quite specifically permits positive discrimination policies in education in favour of ethnic groups’ (I.L.E.A., 1977). It is a form of ‘social engineering’. Education is seen as having a central role forging a new egalitarian society. In the sixties the intention was to eliminate the reproduction of class inequities. Multiculturalism is grafted on to this approach as a way of promoting tolerance between social groups and, thereby, producing a society that displays an equilibrium among races as well as between the classes. The school is seen as having a crucial role, therefore, in containing the effects of racism and the resulting sense of resentment. Deprivation theories place the cause of failure in the child rather than in the education
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system itself. All causitive factors have the failing pupil at their centre. The urban environment, poor living conditions, a family structure regarded as inadequate etc. The schools’ role is one of compensation; compensating for all these inadequacies seen as present in the student. For example, linguistic deprivation theories of the working-class child applied also to the Black child whose language becomes regarded as not adequate for learning processes. Increased resources are required for remedial provision. Essentially, the argument is for a more intense application rather than a structurally different form of an education system. Enthusiasm for multiculturalism also comes from teachers who support ‘progressive’ approaches to teaching methods. Arguing for increased resources, progressive ideologies additionally state the need for curriculum innovation. Stressed is the importance of relevance in order to capture the interest of reluctant students, hoping that this will encourage, in them, more positive attitudes towards school. At the core of the progressive approach are questions of discipline and control. That the curriculum should be child-centred, rather than imposed, relevant to the students’ ‘actual’ and expected way of life. Robert Jeffcoate summarises the debate in terms of whether the function of the school is to transmit or transform culture. Transmissionist approaches he sees as attempting to pass on to the next generation a cultural heritage defined by criteria of intellectual excellence. But the progressive transformationist pedagogy would imply the emergence of a new common culture which critically evaluates the ‘cultural heritage’. Progressivism has had a particularly influential effect on the teaching of English. Themes and projects, related to student ‘experience’ on topics such as ‘Adventure’, ‘Friends and Enemies’, ‘Journeys’, and ‘Survival’, have been introduced to provoke student interest, and educational publishers produce anthologies thematically organised. It is very easy to graft onto this approach a theme such as ‘Minorities’. Emphasis, in child-centred progressivism lies heavily on forms of individual, creative expression, even where working in groups is encouraged because, paramount, as Robert Jeffcoate states, is the preservation of freedom of choice for the individual. Group work is seen as a method for sharing what is still regarded as individual forms of expression, talking, listening, reading, writing; the construction of the social subject is not examined. This is reinforced in the examination syllabi where even Mode 3 C.S.E.s require an individualised, creative response. In relation to ‘problems’ of discipline and control, progressivism still resorts to concepts of individual failure. Having provided an ‘interesting and stimulating’ curriculum, any student lack of a positive response is still their failure. Progressivism does not adequately engage with school ‘counter-cultures’ with forms of collective resistance. Pressure for a multiracial curriculum frequently stems from fears of resistance and indiscipline from Black students (though the introduction of material representing minority ethnic cultures can, and often does, cause rebellion among indigenous students). Present recommendations from various London Boroughs for the introduction of disruptive units to be attached to schools is cited as proof for the need for multiracial curricula as it appears that these units would deal with a disproportionately high number of Black students. Curricula innovation in this framework can be regarded as a form of social control. The cuts in spending on education have particularly affected schools in run-down working-class areas – areas where the majority of Black children are to be found. These we know are the schools that already face difficulties such as lack of resources, a high turnover of teachers, poor buildings, inadequate classrooms and an overly high
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teacher-pupil ratio. Even with the best intentions, such schools have little hope of catering sympathetically for the needs of their Black pupils. Forced to teach large groups under these conditions the task of the teacher inevitably becomes one of control and discipline rather than education. O.W.A.A.D., 1979 Linked to questions of ‘relevance’, multiculturalism is supported by teachers who feel that a positive sense of one’s cultural and social identity will encourage students to tackle learning difficulties with more confidence and, hence, with more likelihood of success. The work of Bernard Coard has been of influence in this pedagogic approach. He analysed (1975) the tendency for children who have poor cultural knowledge to reject their ethnic identity and that children who do reject the cultural identity are seen by their teachers as behavioural problems in the classroom. It is this strand in educational theory that has led to much work searching for a ‘Positive Image’. Literary and media representations are held to be of particular influence. However, there are two problematic tendencies in this concept of reversal of images. First the failure/ problem, the negative self-image, is still centred in the individual student and second, the process is seen as reflective rather than a series of re-presentations and the construction of social identities is not addressed. The ‘discourse’ of multiculturalism is situated within an increasingly racist social, economic and political climate. It is centrally part of ‘Blacks are a social problem’. This correlation characterises immigration Laws, most re-presentations of Black situations in the media and predominates in social thinking and attitudes as well. This ‘social problem’ equation dominates the present historical and social context and multiculturalism, in being concerned to ‘deal with the problem’ shares the same determinations as the Immigration Laws: to prevent an increase in the ‘social problem’. They are both aspects of the same debate, that of ‘Race’. The discourse of multiculturalism should, therefore, be viewed as a sub-discourse of the wider discourse of Race and Race Relations. It is necessary to ask; who are the socially constituted speakers and initiators of the social practice of the discourse? Clearly, they are not the ethnic minorities themselves but the representatives of dominant social forces to whom ‘Blacks’ are a problem. Concrete political and economic conditions and contradictions that face both Black and White alike are not addressed but are contained within and deflected by the concept of multiculturalism. If the State, the educational authorities and inspectors of schools are serious about what they say, it will mean that teachers will have to examine what working-class values and culture are, and begin to feed into the curriculum the primary facts of working-class life – the struggle against the ownership of wealth and distribution of wealth in a capitalist society. If I, as a teacher, want to represent black culture, black values, histories, assumptions, life styles of the people I am paid to school, I am determined to start from the fact that young blacks fight the police, they refuse dirty jobs, their forms of cultural gathering always brings them into conflict with the rulers of this society, their very music, professed philosophies and life styles, contain in them an antagonism to school and to society as it is. Dhondy, 1978
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Approaches to the deconstruction of multicultural forms 1. Fictional texts The teaching of English as a subject discipline is traditionally seen as incorporating two major concerns. The area of knowledge and skills, language instruction, and an expressive domain of human creativity. In Robert Jeffcoate’s multiracial curriculum he places the use of fiction in the latter category, arguing that in its use with students there are no predictable correct or incorrect outcomes; that the use of fiction is to do with forming one’s own opinions and conclusions. Multicultural fiction becomes important in reflecting the multiracial nature of society. Robert Jeffcoate cites the importance of minority race pupils encountering ‘people like themselves’ in fiction. This type of ‘reflective’ theory can be subjected to a number of serious criticisms. With regard to the presentation of other races Robert Jeffcoate’s approach is to assume that books with Black people in them reflect them ‘as they are’ in a ‘real world’ outside of the text. The social and historical context in which that text is produced, distributed and then circulated and used in schools is unrelated to the text itself. The nature of Black experience present in the text needs to be critically examined as a form of representation, a particular construction of Black experience within a specific social and historical context. Multicultural book-lists of recommended fiction are rarely differentiated in this way, including those recommended for use in ‘Positive Image’. I wish to examine, in some detail, one of the fictional texts that Robert Jeffcoate recommends for use with first year secondary school pupils in the context of the wider theme of ‘Home and School’ and to question the nature and form of its representation of a Black family in Britain. ‘The Trouble with Donovan Croft’ by Bernard Ashley a White ex-headmaster, won the Childrens’ Rights Workshop Award in 1976. Very popular as a multicultural text it is recommended for use in multicultural catalogues and booklists and has wide distribution, being found in Children’s sections of public libraries, school libraries, classroom libraries, English departments and Language Reading Centres. Donovan is Black, and, as is apparent from the title, is the source of the ‘trouble’, a stereotypical representation of Blacks as incompetent. Donovan has to be fostered with a White family when his mother returns to the West Indies to nurse her sick father. Donovan’s father is presented as being unable to cope alone, necessitating his son being placed in the care of the Chapman family. The ‘problem’ which forms the focus for the plot is that Donovan won’t talk, to anyone, from the time of his arrival. The Chapman’s are presented as efficient, capable and caring. Though carefully portrayed as ‘non-racist’ this attitude is paternalistic and at times very patronising. Mr and Mrs Chapman are opposed to two characters displaying racist attitudes; Mrs Parsons, a next door neighbour and Mr Henry, a school teacher. Throughout the novel it is the Chapman’s who defend ‘the Black viewpoint’ in their own terms. Neither Donovan or his father, are ever seen to defend themselves. Justification for the ‘rights’ of the Croft’s to receive help, when in trouble, is voiced by Mrs Chapman. ‘The father’s paying for his keep. But even if he wasn’t, they’ve lived here for twelve years, and Donovan was born here. So really he’s as British as you and I’. Mrs Parsons looked offended.
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‘Besides, his parents pay rates and taxes just like us, so they’re entitled to some of the benefits when they need them’ Ashley, 1976, p. 12 This attempt to improve Race Relations emphasises integration as assimilation, to negate the fact of a black skin. ‘They are just like us really’ is evinced as proof of Black humanity. Mrs Parsons is presented throughout as an eccentric, extreme in her style of dress, speech and manner. A character created as not ‘normal’ as ‘unreasonable’ isolated her racist attitudes as extreme and unreasonable. Even her cat is sickeningly given the name ‘Nigger’ to emphasise the extraordinary nature of her racism. Consequently, when Mrs Parsons voices accusations of ‘uncivilised’ and ‘Bleeding the country dry’ and ‘acting as if they own the place’ she is dismissed as a ‘small minded bigot’. Her complaints do not deserve of an adequate answer within the terms of the text because her behaviour, generally, puts her beyond the norm of reasonable people. Mrs Parsons is ultimately disowned, outcast, with the comment ‘You make me ashamed to be White, . . . bloody ashamed’ (p. 157). Thus racism is constructed not as arising within a context of specific historical and material conditions but as a psychological abnormality. The ‘they’ of Mrs Parsons vehemence has no voice of its own. The paternalistic and, ultimately, patriarchal defence of ‘those who cannot take care of themselves adequately’ parallels the Imperialistic relationship of ‘Mother Country’ to colonies. When racism is practised by a representative of authority, Mr Henry, Keith and Donovan’s form teacher, the incident is serious enough for male intervention. Being hit and called a ‘stupid Black idiot’ warrants a visit by Mr Chapman to the school. Shouting over a garden fence is the domain of the female characters, but across a Headmaster’s desk, the province of the male. Racism from a figure of authority is not open to the attack seen as appropriate for a neighbour. Mr Harper’s position is not open to question, authority must be maintained. Mr Chapman asserts that ‘We won’t do much good by getting a teacher into trouble. But I want your word, Mr Roper, that nothing of the sort will ever happen again’ (p. 107). The question of the racist abuse of authority is suppressed by the word of the ultimate authority within the school and the status quo is re-established. Racism is therefore constructed as an exception. Mr Roper is as eccentric a character as teacher, as Mrs Parsons as neighbour. The incidents of racism are isolated exceptions to the normal progression of events. Racial prejudice appears as abnormal mental aberrations of individuals, institutionalised racism is absent. The individualisation and isolation of racism as ‘incidents’ are presented as being resolvable at the level of the individual. Social conflict and contradictions are suppressed. The ‘real enemy’ is presented as being ignorance: Mrs Parson’s ‘small mind’, Mr Roper being unaware of the fact that Donovan can’t talk. An ignorance capable of being eradicated by additional knowledge. The two Black characters, Donovan and his father, are constructed as socially incompetent. Their inadequacies are represented as deserving of the ‘readers’ sympathy, appealing to a wider sense of paternalism. Donovan and his father are ‘a problem’ to the Social Services originated by the return home of Mrs Croft. Upon arrival at the Chapman’s, Donovan refuses to get out of the car, causing consternation to Mrs Chapman and the social worker. Mr Croft forgets to pack him any pyjamas. Donovan causes Keith to argue and subsequently fight with his friends because Donovan needs so much of Keith’s attention to take care of him. Having been hit, Donovan runs away from school resulting in a complete disruption of the time-table as classes are organised into groups to search for him. He inadvertently breaks Keith’s favourite toy, disappoints and eventually exasperates everyone who attempts to
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encourage him to talk. Throughout, Donovan is represented as deprived, emotionally deprived of the love of his parents and, therefore, pathetic. ‘The moist channels of undried tears on Donovan’s cheeks were swelled by two large tear drops. Welling up from the sad depths of his eyes they trickled down to his jaw and wet the front of his tee-shirt’ (p. 84). He wished he could die. During those long days in the flat, pining for his mother, waiting for his father, he had felt so much alone and unwanted that his confidence in other people – even those he loved – had been slowly eaten away, as acid eats away at an ailing battery. p. 88 The only relationship that Donovan establishes is with a guinea pig. Both become images of utter helplessness. Donovan is frequently found crouched in corners in fear, like an animal and is fed and tended, behaving ‘obediently’ with automatic responses like a domesticated pet. Mr Croft is also described as a victim, a victim of circumstances always out of his control. On the occasion of a carefully planned and prepared visit to Donovan, it is Mr Croft who spoils the occasion. He is late due to a non-starting car and heavy traffic and the dinner dries up in the oven. Unable to re-establish a relationship with his son, Mr Croft is also described in animalistic terms. ‘During the meal, Mr Croft watched his son like a hawk. He almost devoured him, watching for a sign, listening for a sound, creating an atmosphere at the table about as relaxed as that at a formal banquet at Buckingham Palace’ (p. 161). All positive efforts at helping Donovan are initiated by the Chapmans in opposition to Mr Croft’s helpless inability to be close to his son. It is in response to an accident to Keith that Donovan finally speaks. At the end of the book it is Keith who has finally penetrated Donovan’s disillusion, The heartache, ‘. . . went when he did things with Keith, when Keith wanted him to be around, when Keith talked to him and said good things. Then Donovan began to feel alive again, a part of the world’ (p. 183). But, this relationship is one of dependence, Donovan dependent upon Keith as Mr Croft is dependent upon the Chapmans for initiating meetings with his son, the Social Services for fostering him. Robert Jeffcoate provides a specific context for this book. It is present in his first year course on the theme of Home and School to present a ‘positive image’ of Black people to the pupils in his class. But in the context of this particular pedagogy what is being taught? That there is a passive dependence of Black upon White. The absence of a Black voice in the text emphasises the isolation of the Croft family in the White world of the story and their position as objects of charitable pity and patronage. Robert Jeffcoate feels strongly that books should not be used to ‘change childrens’ attitudes’ and emphasises that it is for them ‘to determine what to make of the books they read’. This attitude is premised upon the isolation of the classroom; the establishment of a ‘classroom culture’ separated from ‘outside’ tensions and social forces. Determinations upon the attitudes students bring to the books they read in the classroom are ignored as are the reconstructions of dominant ideological relationships within the texts themselves. Racist stereotypes within texts have effectivity only because they relate to the social, economic and political processes whereby ideological representations become and remain dominant. We should not, as teachers, feel that we can separate the construction of ‘reader’ from the ideological construction of the text, or, from the specific and determinate ways that we use texts within an educational context.
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2. Language The language of the dominated group becomes inaudible; just as physical attributes, gestures and mannerisms go unseen. At a certain stage of its development, the language of a dominated group is unheard. Boone, 1979 The official discourse of multiculturalism is predominantly the White middle-class ‘speaking’ about ethnic and racial minorities. The voice of opposition is effectively silenced in favour of the ‘National Interest’ or ‘our common humanity’. Reproduced in the teaching practice of the classroom, as the microcosm of the ‘happy and co-operative world’, struggle over which group’s interest is to define the ‘common interest’, is negated. The ‘childcentred’, ‘progressive’ pedagogy of Robert Jeffcoate operates within limits defined by his White, male, middle-class liberalism though this is presented as a neutral and balanced perspective for decision making. A mechanism that constructs an apparent unity of interests is the use of ‘standard’ language forms which subordinate, or contain, inherent contradictions through a limitation of available meanings. The work of Voloshinov takes language activity as a social activity and sees a language system in relation to this social activity, not as formally separate from it. In his insistence on the active creation of meanings, meaning becomes, necessarily, a social action dependent upon a social relationship. Rather than ‘expressing’ an individual consciousness, Voloshinov argues that language is that consciousness, taking shape and being materially in signs but created by organised groups in the process of their social interaction. Voloshinov equates ideology and signs by stressing that whenever a sign is present so is ideology. The socially constituted speakers and initiators of the social practice of the discourse of multiculturalism are not the ethnic and racial minorities themselves. In the construction of this discourse the shared language of the socially constituted group, the language that embodies its social practices excludes the language and alternative set of meanings of subordinated groups, the subjects of the discourse. However, Voloshinov does not see a language sign as an equivalent or reflection of an object or quality that it expresses: it is not fixed in this way. The relation between the formal element and the meaning, obviously, has to have an effective nucleus of meaning in order to be understood. But, as this relation between the formal element and the meaning develops from social activity, from continuing social relationships, this nucleus of meaning will, in practice, be a variable range according to the variety of situations in which it is used. It is this variable quality that Voloshinov refers to as ‘multi-accentuality’ that militates against an unquestioned acceptance of fixed meanings, of correct or ‘proper’ interpretations, and allows for an examination of struggles over meanings between dominant and subordinate groups. Much work on non-indigenous dialect usage by racial and ethnic groups has followed that of William Labov in attempting to establish the credentials of dialect. To insist upon its effectivity for communication and to counter accusations of ‘poor speech’ reflective of ‘poor ability’. This emphasis, necessary to counter linguistic fallacies, has had an unfortunate consequence in the concentration upon language as a system separate from its social activity and the construction of meanings. Viv Edwards (1979) painstakingly describes the grammar, morphology and syntax of what she refers to as West Indian Creole. Though she does acknowledge that there is more than
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one form of Creole, Creole as a language system is compared with standard English as a language system and differences in structure demonstrated. Having established Creole as an effective medium of communication and learning Viv Edwards then investigates how the use of Creole can/does interfere with the acquisition of standard English, implicitly placing Creole as a deviation from the ‘norm’. The argument then moves into the realm of attitudes. Expectations that West Indians speak English, even if defined as a ‘lazy’ or ‘poor quality’ form of it, means that it is not felt necessary for teachers to have a knowledge of the structure of Creole, in order to teach standard English, as it would be regarded if Creole had the status of a separate language. It is at this level of attitudes towards West Indian dialects that the argument is weakest. Concentration on an impersonal system neglects the process of the changing nature of words and forms. Language becomes purely convention. The synchronic is prioritised over the history of a language; the latter becoming purely a matter of grammatical or syntactical influences rather than a process of struggle over meaning between differing groups in hierarchical relationship to each other. In Viv Edwards’ analysis the social, political and economic systems of slavery and colonialisation have consequences for language at the level of structure only; as an instance of linguistic diversity. The extent of linguistic diversity in the early days can be illustrated by a description of Jamaica in the mid eighteenth century. There were speakers of Creole ‘Negro English’ who had been settled on the island for sometime; newly imported Black slaves speaking various African languages; ‘coloured’ freedmen and poor Whites who would have spoken a variety of English nearer to standard English; recently arrived indentured servants speaking regional dialects of English; planters and merchants who spoke English with a ‘Jamaican accent’, and finally, expatriates speaking upper class English. Obviously the situation varied from island to island but it gives some indication of the influences at work. Edwards, 1979, p. 19 The relationship of power and control between these various groups remains unexplored and unrelated to forms of imposition, oppression and resistance in language. In the same way the language of multiculturalism calls upon the identification of a plurality of interests that are structurally unequal, politically, socially and economically. It becomes necessary to extend from Voloshinov’s analysis to explore the active construction of meanings within and between dominant and subordinate groups. It is not enough to counter accusations of inadequacy in forms of non-standard English with affirmations of dialect linguistic efficiency. What needs to be approached is how these superior/inferior attitudes are inscribed in and through the social relationships between dominant groups, whose language has become the ‘norm’ or standard form against which other forms are measured, and the oppressed groups using these latter forms. A concrete example of this would be the way that White British authors (Ashley 1976), (Kilner 1979) represent the dialogue of Jamaican characters in terms of absences from standard English; the dropping of word endings etc., that bears no relation to the way Jamaican children would either write or speak their own dialect. Frequently, these representations appear ridiculous and are nonsense to Jamaican dialect speakers, and all other children, but it does have the effect of reinforcing the ‘superiority’ of the standard English used in the rest of the narrative. However, just to argue as Viv Edwards does that these attitudes of superiority towards
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standard forms can be accounted for through lack of knowledge is not satisfactory either. Clearly, there is a demonstrable ignorance but to assume that increased familiarity with dialect forms, by White teachers, educationalists, and I include White authors of childrens’ fiction, will change racist attitudes and consequently racist social relationships is naive. . . . it has become historically evident that a new linguistic-cultural problematic is shaped when oppressed groups find themselves under the necessity of speaking not only (or only partly) their own language but the language of another dominating group. Boone, 1979 This accords with Frantz Fanon’s (1965) analysis of the cultural development of formerly colonised groups, which moves from an unqualified assimilation of European forms through a search backward to the discovering of old legends and pre-colonial memory towards a culture which is revolutionary in form and registers present struggles. It is within the first category that we can place the pressure for the recognition of multiculturalism by the Examination Boards. (T.E.S. 13/10/78). ‘O’ level English syllabi it is argued should reflect the nature of multi-ethnic, multiracial Britain by the inclusion of works by established West Indian and Asian authors. But established means works regarded as ‘literary’ within the norms of the dominant British literary tradition, its forms and values; the writing of the authors of Fanon’s first phase. Having assimilated British literary conventions it is easy for these authors to be assimilated, in turn, within the dominant literary tradition. Various cultural forms are encompassed in Fanon’s second phase, for example, the Rastafarian Movement and the search for and recognition of African ‘roots’ present in the U.S., the Caribbean and Britain. Whilst agreeing with the framework of Frantz Fanon’s cultural analysis it is also necessary to add that I do not share his evolutionary perspective of these phases as sequential. In Britain, in the present conjuncture it is useful to see all three elements present in tension with each other. The task of analysis that Bruce Boone sees as being necessary is to provide an adequate account of the oppositional content of the language of an oppressed group, which he describes as a ‘coded’ language and then tracing the historical stages by which such oppressed groups become able to speak their own language without disguise. The fiction of Farrukh Dhondy reconstructs a tension between dominant forms and oppositional struggle. His most recent collection of short stories Come to Mecca (1978) has been awarded the Collins/Fontana Book Award for Multi-ethnic Britain and as such is placed within mainstream publishing. Using the bleak landscape of racial conflict and confrontation in London the stories question the relationship of Black youth to social institutions; to the Police, the National Front, Socialist organisations and to the Educational system. A struggle over meanings, a linguistic, political struggle is a recurrent theme. ‘About your sweatshops, your factories, Nu Look’. Shahid looked puzzled so Betty said, ‘We call them sweatshops because the labour is sweated labour’. She was anxious to explain. ‘When I sweat I always take a bath, not like English people’. ‘You’ve got me wrong. The factories are filthy and dingy, all of this area’. ‘My cousin’s factory is very clean’, I said. ‘You must be joking’, Betty said, ‘I’ve seen some of them’. ‘He never jokes with ladies’, Shahid said. Dhondy, 1978, p. 18
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This struggle over whose definition of terms is central and in each story the struggle over meanings is related to the hierarchisation of social relationships. The language of these groups now develops as an expression of political practice and, on the site of each individual within the group, fights out a battle against the dominating group linguistically as much as politically. Boone, 1979 Using dialect to exclude the teacher is an experience of which teachers in multiracial schools must be aware. But its significance as a form of resistance and its oppositional nature remains unacknowledged. Robert Jeffcoate quotes the use of Creole as a ‘secret code’ when one of his pupils writes on the classroom board, ‘Sir is nosey about Black people’s language’ (p. 81). But he does not recognise this statement as part of a political and linguistic struggle in which his relationship to power and authority is inscribed within his own use of standard forms. It is important that we recognise that language is not just the site of inter-racial linguistic, political struggle but registers the struggle of all oppressed groups. Bruce Boone, from whom I have quoted extensively is concerned with an analysis of Gay language and its relationship to the literary tradition in the United States. In Britain, multicultural research does not subject standard English forms to the same sort of scrutiny that is applied to Creole. It is merely accepted unquestioningly as the yardstick against which deviation is measured, whether sympathetically or critically. Thus, meanings, actually limited within relationships of power and control, appear to appeal to a wide, shared common-sense; ‘the National Interest’, ‘our common humanity’. The present struggle around the available meanings of ‘work’ can provide a concrete example. In Learning to Labour (Willis, 1978) the working class, White ‘lads’ develop distinct ways of talking and acting. They reject ‘jobs’, defined in the dominant, middle-class terms of the school as qualifications and knowledge. ‘For “the lads” all jobs mean labour: there is no particular importance in the choosing of a site for its giving’ (Willis, 1978 p. 101). The struggle over meanings is active, crucial to the development of the counter-school culture under investigation. But political linguistic struggle is not limited to class or racial position. Sex and gender determinations articulate with class, patriarchal and racial relations in the ideological and economic subordination of women within processes of production. Consideration of this wider context means that standard linguistic forms and their common-sense construction of an apparent unity can no longer be taken for granted as an unquestioned norm. We need to create a framework for trying to analyse to what extent,
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when repressed languages are heard, they are distorted or reshaped by dominant modes in an active social relationship of struggle. The terms of multiculturalism negate this recognition of active struggle and resistance in favour of a passive integrationism. Writing that focusses upon the linguistic as political, Fanon’s revolutionary, fighting culture is produced and distributed outside of the formal publishing system. Bogle L’Ouverture Publications L.T.D. held a policy committed to the publication of writing stemming from the experience of ‘struggle and resistance against the fascists’ attacks on us in this society’. These forms of cultural opposition cannot merely be incorporated into a pluralist multiculturalism. What is needed is a form of analysis which ‘. . . explains languages as the praxis of a social group, the outcome of a historically situated, materially located group interaction. It will be an analysis that supplements and specifies Voloshinov’s’ (Boone, 1979).
Appendix Bourgeois blacks: the American way? The portrayal of Blacks in fiction as a social problem, as culturally deficient and deprived, as ‘poor Blacks’ has been the subject of much critical analysis in the U.S. MacCann and Woodward 1977 From the work available in paperback children’s editions in England it is apparent that there is a move away from the representation of the ‘poor Black’ from a broken home, living in an atmosphere of crime, desolation and neglect to the representation of Black middle-class families. Merely to portray Blacks as middle-class, as opposed to living in poverty, could be said to be a form of ‘cultural conformity’, a more sophisticated bourgeois ‘tokenism’. However, I do wish, briefly, to refer to three of these books to contrast with most mainstream British publications and to illustrate the presence, in the former, of a concern with the political in institutional and structural relationships. The plot of The Basketball Game, Julius Lester (1977) is primarily concerned with adolescent male sexuality within a relationship between a teenage Black boy and teenage White girl. Their relationship is not isolated from the social context in which it occurs, a context concerned with the experience of segregation and White violence. Allen’s father, a minister, Rev. Anderson makes a self-conscious decision to buy a house in a White middle-class area. Having moved, the response of all the White neighbours is to erect ‘For Sale’ signs, seeing a Black incursion into the neighbourhood as a threat to property values. Though, as Rev. Anderson acknowledges ‘Much as I paid for this house, ain’t no way they gon’ tell me a White person would’ve had to pay that much’ (Lester, 1977 p. 20). Julius Lester consciously reverses dominant images, defining White in relation to Black, for example. He makes explicit structural relationships of power, not only at an institutional level but also at the point of the ‘personal’ relationship and refuses the individualised solution to wider social contradictions. The Friends by Rosa Guy (1977) is about a relationship between two teenage girls. Set in Harlem, Edith is coping with her family after the death of her mother and subsequent disappearance of her father. Edith becomes ‘protector’ of Phyllisia, who newly arrived from the West Indies faces resentment at school. Through this relationship Phyllisia has to face the mythology she has weaved of her own and her father’s middle-class ideologies.
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An incident with a racist teacher constrasts sharply with the incident in ‘Donovan Croft’. It is neither excused nor suppressed, as it is in the latter and is met not with passive acceptance but active resistance. A Harlem revolt clearly establishes the nature of the relationship between the Black community and the Police and it is this wider, institutional nexus of relationships that makes it impossible for Edith to approach the forces of ‘law and order’ when her father disappears. A fear that is substantiated when the Police shoot Edith’s brother Randy. Nobody’s Family is Going to Change by Louise Fitzhugh (1978) won the Children’s Rights Workshop Other Award in 1976, the year following Donovan Croft. This book is important because it not only encompasses notions of Black struggle but also a collective resistance on the part of adolescents against forms of parental domination. Perhaps its most unique aspect, however, is the book’s exploration of the patriarchal relationship between father and daughter and a questioning of the roles of sister, daughter, wife and mother, through Emma’s increasing awareness of the Women’s Liberation Movement. The increasing literary and media presence of the American Black and her/his position within American society is influencing Blacks in Britain in ways that I can only speculate about at present but intend to research further. In terms of their use within the classroom it is important that these books do not represent racism as instances of individual aberration, or capable of individual resolution, but as an ideology that informs and structures social, political and economic relationships.
Notes 1 See J. Donald ‘Green Paper: Noise of Crisis’ in Screen Education, Spring 1979, No. 30, pp 13–49 for an exploration of the relationship between the linguistic and the institutional. 2 I refer more closely to ‘Progressivism’ as a teaching approach in a later section, Educational Interventions. Here its significance lies in its use as the only alternative to authoritarianism. 3 The similarity between certain approaches to multiculturalism and deprivation theories applied to working-class children is explored further in Educational Interventions.
Bibliography Useful bibliographies Edwards, V. K. (1979), The West Indian Language Issue in British Schools, London, R.K.P. pp. 156–163. Verma, G. K. and Bagley, C. (1975), Race and Education Across Cultures, London, Heinemann, pp. 345–355.
Primary sources Boone, B. (1979), ‘Gay Language as Political Praxis’ in Aronowitz, Brenkman, Jameson (eds), Social Text, vol. 1, no. 1, Madison, Coda Press, pp. 59–93. D.E.S. (1977), Green Paper, ‘Education in Schools’, (Cmnd. 6869), London, H.M.S.O. Edwards, V. K. (1979), The West Indian Language Issue in British Schools, London, R.K.P. Fanon, F. (1965), The Wretched of the Earth, London, MacGibbon and Kee. I.L.E.A. (1977), ‘Multi-Ethnic Education’, Joint Report of Schools Sub-Committee and Further and Higher Education Sub-Committee, London, Waterloo (01351). Jeffcoate, R. (1979), Positive Image, Towards a Multiracial Curriculum London, Writers and Readers Publishing Co-operative.
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Voloshinov, V. N. (1973), Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, New York, Seminar Press.
Secondary sources A.L.T.A.R.F. (1979), Multicultural Education and the Fight Against Racism in Schools, (London, A.L.T.A.R.F.). Coard, B. (1971), How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal by the British School System, London, New Beacon Books. Coard, B. and Bagley, C. (1975), ‘Cultural Knowledge and Rejection of Ethnic Identity in West Indian Children in London’, in Verma, K. and Bagley, C., Race and Education Across Cultures, London, Heinemann. Davies, T. (1978), ‘Education, Ideology and Literature’ in Red Letters, no. 7, London, C.P. Literature Journal. Dhondy, F. (1978), ‘Teaching Young Blacks’, in Race Today, May/June, London, Race Today Collective. Donald, J. (1979), ‘Green Paper: Noise of Crisis’ in Donald, J. (ed), Screen Education, Spring, No. 30, London, S.E.F.T. Finn, D., Grant, N. and Johnson, R. (1978), ‘Social Democracy, Education and the Crisis’, in C.C.C.S. On Ideology, London, Hutchinson. Hall, S. (1978), Racism and Reaction in C.R.E, Five Views of Multiracial Britain, London, C.R.E. Labov, W. (1973), ‘The Logic of Non-standard English’, in Keddie, N. (ed), Tinker, Tailor . . . The Myth of Cultural Deprivation, London, Penguin. Laishley, J. (1975), ‘The Images of Blacks and Whites in the Children’s Media’, in Husband, C. (ed), White Media and Black Britain, London, Arrow. N.A.M.E. (1979), ‘Positive Image Negative Effect’, in Issues in Race and Education no. 21, London, N.A.M.E. O.W.A.A.D. (1979), ‘Black Women and Education’, unpublished conference papers. Verma, G. K. and Bagley, C. (1975), Race and Education Across Cultures, London, Heinemann. Willis, P. (1978), Learning to Labour, London, Saxon House.
Fictional bibliography Children’s paperbacks Ashley, B. (1977), The Trouble with Donovan Croft, London, Puffin, (Gt. Britain, 1974). Dhondy, F. (1978), Come to Mecca, London, Fontana, Lions. Fitzhugh, L. (1978), Nobody’s Family is Going to Change, London Fontana, Lions, (U.S.A., 1974). Fox, P. (1972), How Many Miles to Babylon, London, Puffin, (U.S.A., 1967). Guy, R. (1977), The Friends, London, Puffin, (U.S.A., 1973). Kilner, G. (1979), Jet, a Gift to the Family, London, Puffin, (Gt. Britain, 1976). Lester, J. (1977), Basket Ball Game, London, Peacock, (U.S.A., 1972). Thøger, M. (1972), Shanta, London, Puffin, (Denmark, 1961).
Alternative publications: Available from: Black Ink Collective ‘Black Ink’ (plays, prose and poetry) ‘The School Leaver’ by Michael McMillan ‘Wasted Woman, Friends and Lovers’ (plays, prose and poetry). Bogle L’Ouverture ‘Ammunition’ Sam Greenlee
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‘At School Today’ Accabre Huntley ‘Dread Beat and Blood’ Linton Kwesi Johnson ‘Blood in the Streets’ Cecil Rajendra ‘The New Caribbean Man’ P. D. Sharma I.L.E.A. English Centre ‘Small Accidents’ Sabir Bandali ‘Jamaica Child’ Errol O’Connor ‘Jealousy’ Steve Drummond ‘My Life’ Mohammed Elbaja ‘In the Melting Pot’ Chelsea Herbert
35 The organic crisis of British capitalism and race: the experience of the seventies John Solomos, Bob Findlay, Simon Jones and Paul Gilroy
We are witnessing and passively acquiescing in a quiet but hardly bloodless revolution. The induction of general social disorder, uncensored crime and personal negligence have replaced more warlike conduct as the painless way to undermine the stability of the state. James Anderton The combined assault on English identity and values is neither planned nor fully understood by its participants; its roots often lie deep in the unconscious. Its main force stems from the lack of coherent opposition. Too many people are frightened off by accusations: ‘racialist’, ‘elitist’ or simply ‘old-fashioned’, which make cowards of nearly all. Alfred Sherman
Introduction The central theme of this book is that the construction of an authoritarian state in Britain is fundamentally intertwined with the elaboration of popular racism in the 1970s.1 The aim of this introductory chapter is more modest. It offers a framework for examining the relation of ‘race’ to British decline, and attempts a periodization of state racism during the seventies. We hope to provide a more detailed morphology of these transformations in future work.2 The parallel growth of repressive state structures and new racisms has to be located in a non-reductionist manner, within the dynamics of both the international crisis of the capitalist world economy, and the deep-seated structural crisis of the British social formation. This idea links the various chapters which follow. Some aspects of it have already been developed by others,3 but the argument is far from complete. What concerns us, therefore, is not to outline a theory of racist ideologies, but to scrutinize the political practices which developed around the issue of race during the seventies. We have chosen this approach for two basic reasons. First, we believe that it is not possible to understand the complex ways in which state racism works in British society without looking closely at the ways in which it is reproduced inside and outside state apparatuses. Second, we feel that it is not possible to see racism as a unitary fixed principle which remains the same in different historical conjunctures. Such a static view, which is common in many sociological approaches, cannot explain how racism is a contradictory phenomenon which is constantly transformed, along with the wider political-economic structures and relations of the social formation.4 The function of this chapter is twofold – first, to introduce at a more general, and therefore theoretical level, themes which will be covered later on, and second, to explain the way in which certain key concepts have been used. In the second and third sections we shall attempt to analyse, albeit briefly and schematically, some of the main shifts in the relation
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between the various types of state intervention and the wider organic crisis. Although a number of recent Marxist studies have analysed the deep economic roots of the present crisis, we think that this is only part of the story. This is why we emphasize the organic nature of the crisis, meaning by this that it is the result of the combined effect of economic, political, ideological and cultural processes. A full historical account of these issues has not been attempted in this book, partly because we feel that this is one area where the recent revival of Marxist political economy has made a substantive contribution.5 Nevertheless, as a contribution to this debate, we will introduce some discussion of race around which a fuller historical account may be constructed. In the fourth and fifth sections we attempt to show how official thinking on violence, law and order, and race has been closely connected. We establish the origins of these interconnections in debates about violence which began in the sixties and argue that they have assumed a particularly sharp and pernicious form during the seventies. This is because race has increasingly become one of the means through which hegemonic relations are secured in a period of structural crisis management. Although as Chapters 2 and 8 emphasize, we see race as a means through which other relations are secured or experienced, this does not mean that we view it as operating merely as a mechanism to express essentially non-racial contradictions and struggles in racial terms. These expressive aspects must be recognized, but race must also be approached in its autonomous effectivity. Racism as it exists and functions today cannot be treated simply from a sociological perspective: it has to be located historically and in terms of the wider structures and relations of British society. The historical roots of racist practices within the British state, the British dominant classes, and the ‘British’ working class, go deep and cannot be reduced to simple ideological phenomena. They have been conditioned, if not determined, by the historical development of colonial societies which was central to the reproduction of British imperialism.6 This process generated a specific type of ‘nationalism’ pertinent in the formation of British classes long before the ‘immigration’ issue became a central aspect of political discourse.7 We are arguing for a conception of racism which is historical rather than sociological. Just as Marxist accounts of the historical links between the specific political structures concentrated in the ‘capitalist state’ and the course of capitalist development have emphasized the dynamic nature of political relations, so we would argue that the links between racism and capitalist development are complex, and conditioned by the specific socio-political circumstances in which they function. We want to emphasize that ethnic and racial forms of domination are shared not by exogenous mechanisms, but by the endogenous political economic forces which are dominant in the specific societies under study.8 It follows from this basic proposition that racial forms of domination do not develop in a linear fashion but are subject to breaks and discontinuities, particularly in periods of crisis which produce qualitative changes in all social relations. This is how we see the period of the seventies in Britain.
The reorganization of the international division of labour and black workers in Britain It is important to situate the question of racism in Britain today in a broader international context.9 Although these links are often ignored in studies of ‘race relations’ we refuse to study them at our peril. A recent report from the OECD is worth mentioning in this respect, since it points out in a very clear way the need for ‘supporting policies’ to be instituted to help out national states facing acute social problems. The message contained in this report was tellingly summarized in a Financial Times leader called ‘Searching for consensus’:
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Not only the pre-summit row over U.S. interest rates, but also the eight days of street fighting in London, Liverpool and Manchester, have shown that consensus, whether on the international stage or at home, is becoming in dangerously short supply.10 It should be made clear that what happened in Britain over the period 1979–81 cannot be reduced to some immutable laws of history which apply to every society at every point of time. Such a reduction avoids difficult problems by attributing the type and direction of the changes occurring to an outside force, some inevitable determinant of all social relations. It is as methodologically distant from a critical Marxist account as the liberal-democratic pluralist framework which dominates the research on race relations in Britain.11 In opposition to it, we suggest that while the specific forms of racism which exist in Britain today have been shaped by endogenous political-economic forces, they have also been transformed in ways which can only be understood as the result of the qualitative changes in Britain’s international position over the last three decades. Although the disarticulation in labour demand and supply in most European countries since 1973–4 has shown how fragile the position of migrant workers really is,12 there is a much longer history of decline which underlies the experience of these workers in the period after 1945. Indeed, from a longer-term perspective ‘the end of the migrant labour boom’13 does not look as surprising as it may have done a few years back. The reproduction of racial and ethnic divisions has been a central feature of accumulation in the post-war period precisely because of the requirement that labour from the colonies and other peripheral economies be used to reorganize the main industrial sectors of the advanced industrial economies. This is a proposition which has received strong support from a number of historical and sociological studies of specific societies,14 and from a theoretical perspective.15 But it has tended to be used as a mechanical model of explanation, with the assumption that it is applicable to every situation, and therefore very little advance has been made in substantiating historically the variable patterns of absorption and exclusion of migrant labour as they have taken shape in the main European societies. We still have no clear idea of how a ‘historically-concrete and sociologically-specific account of distinctive racial aspects’16 can help us to develop a more critical perspective towards the analysis of racism and its modalities in late capitalism. The elements of such an approach exist in abstract formulations but the process of applying them to concrete situations in an experimental fashion has hardly begun. Take, for example, recent advances in developing critical accounts of how, in their specific modalities, imperialism, the state and the restructuring of the labour process have shaped the articulation of the different levels of the accumulation process.17 A number of these approaches, notably those of the debate on the state, have been usefully applied to the study of migration and the processes through which the segmentation of the working class takes place. Yet no attempt has been made to link such studies to issues such as racial/ethnic divisions, which have tended to be consigned to the study of ideologies rather than political economy. Because of this neglect, the field of race has been dominated by narrow sociological studies, and no grounded attempts to locate it within a political economy framework have materialized. The reorganization of the international division of labour has only belatedly been analysed from the perspective of its implications for migrant workers, although a number of general accounts of a shift from ‘labour-import’ to ‘capital-export’ strategies have been written.18 Such accounts have, however, not been balanced by a parallel attempt to draw out the mediations between the international environment and the operation of individual
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nation states. A few illuminating remarks have been made by Stuart Hall,19 Immanuel Wallerstein,20 Sivanandan21 and Marios Nikolinakos.22 But their accounts have tended to remain at too general a level of abstraction to be directly applicable to the contemporary transformations of the politics of migration and ethnic/racial divisions. What they do suggest, however, is the need to apply criteria of historicity and of combined though uneven development to the study of ethnic/racial patterns of domination in late capitalism. Wallerstein, in his historical account of capitalist development, argues correctly that Marxists have too often failed to locate racial, national, or regional divisions materially, and consigned them all too simply to the ubiquitous super-structure. He himself proposes that such divisions are not exogenous but endogenous to the rearticulation of nation and class which capitalist development brought about: The development of the capitalist world-economy has involved the creation of all the major institutions of the modern world: classes, ethnic/national groups, households, and the ‘state’. All of these structures postdate, not antedate, capitalism; all are a consequence, not cause. Furthermore, these various institutions in fact create each other. Classes, ethnic/national groups and households are defined by the state, and in turn create the state, shape the state and transform the state. It is a structured maelstrom of constant movement, whose parameters are measurable through the repetitive regularities, while the detailed constellations are always unique.23 This conception of the interplay between the state and the reproduction of ethnic/racial differences is important because it situates the operation of the international context within the complex reality of the political and economic forces in each national formation. Moreover it firmly locates the capitalist state as a central mechanism for the articulation and reproduction of such divisions. It thus problematizes both narrow sociological models which take the nation state for granted, and reductionist frameworks which only ‘explain’ race through displacing it on to economic forces. In his work on mugging, and the position of race and class in the Caribbean, Stuart Hall has developed a similar account of how the reproduction of hegemony is not a stable process but is constantly reshaped and undermined by the operation of the wider socio-economic structures.24 It would be against the line of thought developed in this book to think that these general arguments are directly applicable to the complex history of black labour in Britain, both before and after 1948. A number of mediations have to be introduced if we are to analyse how the patterns of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ of black workers have been transformed over time. Certainly a global view of labour migration is important if we are to break down the idea that racism is an ‘aberrant epiphenomenon introducing a dysfunction into the regular social order’.25 It is also a means by which one can counter what has been called a ‘loss of historical memory’ and understand the way in which the imperialisms of the past and present secure the transformation of racist practices. According to Stuart Hall the development of racism as a political force has to be understood sui generis: It’s not helpful to define racism as a ‘natural’ and permanent feature – either of all societies or indeed of a sort of universal ‘human nature’. It’s not a permanent human or social deposit which is simply waiting to be triggered off when the circumstances are right. It has no natural and universal law of development. It does not always assume the same shape. There have been many significantly different racisms – each historically specific and articulated in a different way with the societies in which they appear. Racism
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is always historically specific in this way, whatever common features it may appear to share with other social phenomena. Though it may draw on the cultural and ideological traces which are deposited in a society by previous historical phases, it always assumes specific forms which arise out of the present – not the past – conditions and organisation of society. . . . The indigenous racism of the 60s and 70s is significantly different, in form and effect, from the racism of the ‘high’ colonial period. It is a racism ‘at home’, not abroad. It is the racism not of a dominant but of a declining social formation.26 This is an argument which will be developed at length, and with reference to concrete issues, later on. But from the perspective of this section it is important to emphasize the issue raised in the last sentence, about the specificity of the sixties and seventies – the period of decline and restructuring. In the context of black settlement in Britain this conceptualization allows us to locate the shaping of racial segmentation in the labour market, residential segregation, legislation to control immigration, and the policing of black working-class areas, as related aspects of organic crisis in the present period. Racisms structure different areas of social life. It is the development of new forms of racism in a phase of relative decline that a materialist analysis of the current situation must explain. In broad terms, the post-1948 experience of black workers in Britain can be periodized according to three phases: (a) the period of immediate response by the state to the wave of black settlement, leading up to the control of immigration strategy promulgated by the 1962 Act; (b) the articulation of various policy packages to deal with the ‘problems’ which were seen as associated with a black presence, e.g. in education, the social services, employment, which dominated official thinking up till the early seventies; (c) a period of ‘crisis management’ which has operated since the early seventies and which prioritizes the option of control and containment of forms of black resistance against racial domination. These phases cannot be said to be discrete, and there is clearly a case to be made that there was a fair amount of overlap between them. Nonetheless, it seems useful to think of the post-war period as one of contradictory changes in the economic and political forms of racial domination, rather than as one of linear patterns of sociological integration.27 This periodization is also helpful because it elucidates links with changes in other aspects of social life, and with the transformation of Britain’s economic position in the international arena. During the latter two periods, as public concern has focused increasingly on the complex definition of social problems and the management of the crisis, we have seen quite fundamental redefinitions of the racial dimension of politics and a reshaping of the national and urban political economy. Although these processes must be given some degree of autonomy, it is still possible to look at the mechanisms which have secured an articulation between the different levels. In rejecting reductionist forms of analysis we do not believe that it is at the same time necessary to construct race as a completely autonomous factor, with no relation to other areas of social reality. We contend that the international context, the material reality of a ‘declining social formation’, and subsequent transformations in the role of the state, have contributed to the form and trajectory of racisms which have in turn, shaped these relations during the seventies. The following sections concentrate on these issues, and introduce the main themes which govern the concrete historical analyses presented in the rest of the book.
Racism and authoritarianism in the seventies The period which this book covers cannot easily be abstracted from what went on before or, more importantly, from the developments which we are witnessing in the first phase of the
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eighties. Yet there is little doubt that the seventies was a period of major changes in a number of areas, not least in the political field, which will have profound implications for the position of black people in British society. The struggles around the policies of the Conservative Government during 1971–4, the breakup of the ‘unity’ of the Labour Party during the late seventies, the series of expenditure cuts imposed by both Labour and Conservative administrations, the massive rise in unemployment since 1976, and the imposition of a neoconservative politics since 1979, may all seem to be issues which are only tangentially related to race as such. But they all have to be looked at as part of the wider politico-economic environment which has conditioned the ways in which race has been experienced.28 Take for example the role of the state in its various attempts to control vital areas of the economy, social welfare expenditure and the repressive apparatuses. All of these changes have been shaped by the uneven development of political and economic relations during the seventies, and also by changes in the balance of the state apparatuses themselves. Economic policies have been framed around the various stages of the developing organic crisis of accumulation which Britain experienced during this period. But they have also been shaped by a variety of political struggles and other factors which cannot be reduced to a simple reflection of the accumulation processes. The history of ‘the cuts’ in state expenditure, an uneven process which went through various stages throughout the seventies, illustrates these twin processes,29 as does the articulation of legal mechanisms in the field of industrial relations to the management of organized labour.30 We shall discuss later how both policing and the ‘race-relations industry’ have undergone a parallel process of restructuring. Most late capitalist states have gone through a period which Poulantzas and others31 have defined in terms of two shifts: first, a progression from the interventionist state of the postwar period to the technocratic state of today, which not only acts to meet the needs of processes of production and reproduction but is a constituent element of these processes; and second, the articulation of more specific and organized forms of politically orchestrated domination in every field of social life, and the development in embryonic form of a state authoritarianism. This analysis is of course abstract and is not meant as an explanation of what has actually happened to every national state formation. As an analytical tool, however, it can be productive, at least in trying to make sense – from a theoretical perspective – of what has actually happened in Britain over the last decade, and although this approach has been criticized for being determinist, this criticism does not hold for all the applications of this model to concrete situations.32 Against the back-drop of the fundamental changes which the last two decades have wrought on the political realm, it is important to analyse such developments theoretically as well as historically. The first problem with using a term like authoritarianism is that it carries a conspiratorial connotation. Although it should be clear from the concrete analyses of specific state agencies which are contained in later chapters that such a viewpoint could not be further from our own, it may be a useful exercise to state our theoretical distance from it here. We see the period of the seventies as one in which there was a rapid development of rational forms of direct state control as opposed to more indirect forms of social control. In other words, it is the articulation of an ‘all-pervasive state regulation of social and economic processes’,33 rather than partial and intermittent forms of state intervention, which characterizes this period. This has been shown in relation to race-relations legislation by John Lea, who argues that even in the sixties there was a shift in emphasis from integration to social control.34 In a wider theoretical and comparative framework this has also been substantiated by the work of Poulantzas, Offe and Habermas.35 Offe argues that the current form of the state can best be characterized by the term the ‘crises of crisis management’:
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Such a definition predisposes one to favour a processual concept of crisis. Crises, then, are developmental tendencies that can be confronted with ‘counteracting tendencies’, which means that the outcome of crises is quite unpredictable. Moreover, this processual form of crisis concept has the advantage of making it possible to relate the crisis-prone developmental tendencies to characteristics of the system; in other words, such developmental tendencies need not be seen as catastrophic events of contingent origin.36 In addition, this model allows us to see the specific nature of the state’s role today, which is by no means monolithic. Just as the economic crisis of the seventies has taken a unique form – stagflation – so state authoritarianism is a novel phenomenon in capitalist democracies (though as a tendency it has a long history), corresponding neither to the normal liberaldemocratic state form, nor to fully exceptional forms like Fascism. Democracy has not been recomposed on a new basis, but neither has the crisis been resolved through the wholesale elimination of democracy. What we have seen, as Poulantzas puts it, is: Intensified state control over every sphere of socio-economic life combined with radical decline of the institutions of political democracy and with draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called ‘formal’ liberties, whose reality is being discovered now that they are going overboard.37 This schematization of the recent history of the state serves to demonstrate that as hegemony becomes contested, in its various sites of operation in civil society and state, power becomes more concentrated and centralized as the dominant bloc seeks to insulate itself from popular struggles. Since the state is structured by the capacity of one or several classes to realize their specific interests, it is to be expected that policies will not be uniform, but result from a sometimes contradictory series of decisions and non-decisions taken to meet perceived or real dangers. Because political authority in late capitalism is structured so that it selects specific outcomes from an infinite number of possibilities, the state is able to construct a hierarchy of ‘political needs’ that have to be dealt with. In the case of the restructuring of the social services and the nationalized industries in the period since 1971, what we have seen is not a uniform reduction of levels of expenditure but a hierarchical ordering of priorities in relation to the twin axes of ‘reducing inflation’ and ‘increasing profitability’. Of course, this process has not taken place in a linear manner but has taken shape through a series of negotiations and retreats which have involved shifts and relocations in the formulation of ‘needs’. The state has not been totally successful in its attempt to harmonize contradictory social and economic processes. We can see this from its growing interventions in the processes by which crisis is ideologically constructed. The state which in 1945 presented itself in the guise of a more humane and socially responsible capitalism, has been pulled into the processes of crisis management. Ravaged by a crisis it cannot control, it is in a sense boxed in, between the inner limit of inadequate response and the outer limit of excessive response. The case of unemployment is a clear example of how this politicization of the state tends to over-flow from the political system as such. The state responds to the issue of unemployment reactively rather than positively: it attempts to prevent a ‘problem’ from becoming too ‘serious’ rather than to actually produce solutions. This has produced fresh contradictions within the state itself:
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This tendency for the state structures to become ensnared by the processes which they themselves set in motion has a long history – but what makes it so pervasive in the current situation in Britain is an overall historical legacy of economic failure and social disintegration. It is this relative paralysis of the state and the fracturing of mechanisms of social control which has produced a new articulation between the state and racism today. But before we examine this in detail, it is necessary to say something more about the ways in which the sharpening of the crisis, and its articulation to more precise and extensive forms of intervention, has been experienced at the ideological level. We have argued that the current phase of restructuring the state has to be looked at against the background of the intractable and organic nature of the crisis facing British capital, and that the difficult relationship between class power, class conflict and political forms must be understood from a perspective on the international nature of the crisis and the specific ways in which it is reproduced in Britain. These observations point to the fact that the state cannot rely on some simple form of economic intervention to overcome it. This is confirmed by the ways in which neo-conservative ideologies are shifting the locus of crisis causation to the social and political sphere, and by the general inability to develop policies which allow Britain to ‘live within its means’.39 Precisely because ‘depression, inflation or other disasters can bring down a government’,40 the organizing principles underlying state intervention cannot ignore the need to maintain the conditions of accumulation, but neither can the state ignore for long the necessity to organize consent. The problem of how to negotiate a balance between economic needs and legitimacy has become the central issue of neo-conservative thinking. Thus according to Lord Hailsham: The symptoms of our malaise may be economic, may show themselves in price rises, shortages and industrial disputes. But underlying the symptoms is a disease which has destroyed democracies in the past, and the causes of that disease are not economic. They are moral and political and constitutional, and in order to cure it we must reorganise them as such.41 The simplicity of this argument is a bit misleading: the medical metaphor not only betrays a fear of the depths of the British crisis, it also indicates a suspicion of the social elements which make up the society. The economic crisis is seen as a symptom with much deeper roots in the social fabric of the ‘nation’. So, on the one hand, we have to look at the metaphors which make the crisis comprehensible and, on the other, the periodization of the elements of the crisis as such. One of the threads which connects the progression from more secure forms of political regulation and technocratic control is the position of ‘race’ and the practices which it has generated in the experience of crisis. This is why we need to see how the politico-social field has been structured by shifts in material and ideological relations which have constructed race as a pertinent, political force. Precisely because the state has extended its areas of functioning to cover ‘moral’, ‘political’ and ‘constitutional’ issues, it has become possible to bring about a racialization of state policies in all areas of social life. We shall see that labour
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market policy is not the only area in which the issue of race has taken on a central role in planning. The restructuring of the state is not disconnected from the contradictions immanent in and between structures, neither does it have a predictable outcome. It is part of an ongoing struggle to impose cohesion in the face of contestation. The substantial transformations of the state during the seventies are not simply an outcome of the changes in the economy. To say this would be to confuse long-term tendencies with the immediate causes of change within the state. So it is important to see that the crisis which Britain faced during the seventies, and faces today, is a crisis of hegemony, an ‘organic crisis’ to use Gramsci’s terminology.42 Its content is not reducible to a cyclic economic crisis in the traditional sense, or a ‘crisis of the political system’ in the narrow sense. It consists rather of profound changes in the balance of forces, in the class struggle and in the configuration of the class alliances. It is visible in the emergence of new social forces and a specific representation of these changes in the form of crisis management within the state itself. This is demonstrated by recent work on the reorganization of state policies during the seventies which43 discusses the complex ways in which the recognition of Britain as a ‘declining social formation’ has affected the development of official responses to real and perceived problems. It is important to understand, therefore, that in terms of both its ideological construction and its material functioning, the state itself is becoming a factor in the reproduction of the organic crisis. Consequently, it is difficult to substantiate the idea that the state can act as a liberaldemocratic arbitrator sorting out problems and providing remedies for dysfunctions. This is clearest in the field of economic interventions, and the protracted battle to restructure the relation between the state and the economy which has taken place over the last two decades. It can also be viewed in the areas of education, urban and social policy.44 Here too the state is increasingly having to cope with a situation which requires a transformation of its own powers to deal with changes in society as a whole: it is in this sense that it is wrong to see the incipient form of authoritarianism which is taking shape as a ‘strong state’, since it is the outcome of a dialectical interplay between changes in the political field as well. Following arguments developed by Poulantzas, Jessop and Foucault,45 we see the seventies as a period during which the following tendencies become manifest (though it should be emphasized that they have by no means reached maturity). First, there has been a rapid concentration of political power in the executive coupled with confusion over the roles of executive, legislative and judicial powers. this has entailed constant intrastate wrangling over the competence of apparatuses associated with these power centres. Second, the decline in the role of bourgeois political parties and the ideological basis on which these parties were founded has accelerated. Third, the political freedoms which have been associated with the ideology of liberal democracy have been severely qualified. This has required shifts in the ideological and repressive apparatuses of the state, but also a reorganization of what Foucault has called the ‘micro-physiology of power’ or symbolic force. As Poulantzas argues: We know that the process corresponds to a considerable redeployment of the legal-police network, which, in a new form, duplicates, props up, supports and extends the capillary diffusion of the circuits of social control: the power of the police, preliminary administrative investigations, control by the various measures of assistance and surveillance, interpenetration of these circuits and the police apparatus . . . centralisation of files and intelligence thanks to advances in electronics, duplication of the official police by private surveillance networks. In a certain sense, this involves a lifting of the traditional boundaries between the normal and the abnormal (i.e. supposedly ‘anti-social’ elements); thus,
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These transformations cannot be documented in detail here. But it is sufficient in this context to point out that the history of policing and legal relations in the seventies substantiates the claims made by Poulantzas and Foucault. We have witnessed not a simple extension of repression, but a recomposition of relations of power at all levels of society.47 Although the more overt forms of ‘social control’ are orchestrated by the police, it is important to note that the whole of society is constituted as a field of social relations structured in dominance. What were once tendencies have taken institutional form during the last few years. Political debates over the July 1981 uprising have introduced a new range of possible outcomes which demand reassessment of the balance between social control and reform. However, given the objectives of this book we shall not analyse this question further in the abstract. Instead we shall attempt to show the mechanisms through which the presence of black people in Britain has become constructed ideologically as a national problem, thereby rendering them subject to specific and intense forms of control and repression. These themes must be related to the ways in which the developing organic crisis has been expressed as, and defined by, a ‘crisis of race relations’. The power of racial symbols and signification has had a profound impact on how the ‘crisis of society’ is perceived.
Political violence, law and order and the ‘enemy within’ The construction of race as a ‘problem’ has not come about by evolutionary means. It has emerged from a whole series of events: struggles, breaks, and discontinuities48 which have characterized the development of organic crisis. Before we move on to the specific ways in which race articulates or does not articulate to specific phases of the crisis, we must comment on the ideological axis of these struggles – law and order. In a recent discussion of the policing of the working-class city Phil Cohen argued that: ‘The current crisis in the policing of the working class city has become a crisis of legitimacy for the bourgeois public realm as a whole.’49 The experience of the various debates over the growth of a violent society, the breakdown of law and order, and the erosion of trust in legitimate order demonstrate this. Since the sixties, these debates have functioned less as a way of actually changing the situation, i.e. by getting rid of the problem, than as a way of negotiating a more fundamental contradiction: the apprehension of crisis itself.50 The concern with violence and law and order is easier to understand if we avoid a simple social control model, and see political and legal institutions as arenas in which the balance between social classes is constructed.51 It would be a mistake to interpret popular concern with violence and law as a simple diversionary measure designed to secure legitimacy by creating a ‘false consciousness’. As we have argued above, the development of common-sense images of social phenomena is best understood from a historical perspective, since they are always discontinuous and contradictory. This is because we treat ideology as a material relation which is both determined by and reacts upon the wider social relations. We therefore distance ourselves from manipulative conceptions of ideological relations and emphasize the need to understand the links between ‘popular’ concerns and the everyday experience of reality. This is how we see the function of ideologies of race and law in the context of the present crisis.52 The detailed
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account of the changes in police practices over the last decade has been left for a later chapter, but a few preliminary remarks are necessary at this stage. The sixties provided a complex of new issues which has rightly led people to see them as a watershed in the development of British society.53 It is striking how in this period ‘violence’, ‘law and order’ and ‘permissiveness’ became central features of the discourses of all political parties and of the media, eventually being articulated in common sense as threats to ‘British’ society.54 In his discussion of the role of the media in the representation of violence Chibnal periodizes the sixties in the following way: The notion of the ‘violent society’ is to be seen to result from the convergence of a criminal violence theme, originating in the mid-sixties, and a political violence theme which developed a few years later.55 The construction of these themes in political discourse is only partly reducible to the role of the media; we must relate them to transformation in the wider politico-economic framework. In this perspective, the sixties represent what Gramsci called a condensation of contradictions at all levels of society. This placed violence, permissiveness and later race on the agenda of popular politics. This was also the period in which the post-war consensus over the role of the state in economic and social policies began to break down. It presents a clear example of a crisis of hegemonic relations at the political level.56 As Stuart Hall and his colleagues have shown, although the sixties are sometimes represented as the high points of the ‘permissive society’, they are also a period which saw important changes leading to greater separation of decision-making from popular control, and a shift towards an authoritarian response to so-called ‘threats’ to society. ‘Permissiveness’ in this sense was a double-edged development, which contained the seeds of authoritarianism even within a liberal discourse. It was one aspect of a new popular politics which defined both ‘the people’ and their desires: ‘permissiveness’ was not what ‘the people’ wanted. The period of Wilsonism from 1964 to 1970 is perhaps the most interesting from this angle, since it is also during these years that race became a core theme in wider political discourse. The ‘Wilson experiment’, with its detailed plans for transforming the economy, developing further social provisions, and bringing Britain through a new technological revolution, has always been difficult terrain for political historians of the left.57 It was, after all, a period which the left had welcomed as the dawn of a new era in 1964, and which ended in a dismal defeat in the 1970 election. It seemed to represent the end of the road for the postwar model of social-democratic change, and yet, ironically, it confirmed the fact that the basic dilemmas which Britain faced could not be overcome by the implementation of technocratic models from the top. The Heath Government learned this bitter lesson when in 1971–3 it attempted to run the country on the basis of a concerted attack on the ‘power’ of the trade unions.58 But it was Wilson’s earlier failures which introduced the notion that ours was not simply an economic problem, but a deep malaise which had taken root in the whole of society. The idea that ‘the nation’ is diseased and slowly destroying itself is not new; it has been a recurrent theme in British political discourse. What was new in the sixties was that the threat came to be conceptualized as the ‘enemy within’ rather than a model of subversion from without.59 This shift had profound implications for the way black people were perceived, and it reverberated right across the political field. The period 1964–70 witnessed three developments which had brought it about: (a) a growth in forms of extra-parliamentary
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organizations, particularly among the young, which were outside the traditional channels of political participation, e.g. the student movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, and on a wider scale the development of mass-based youth subcultures,60 (b) the development of rank-and-file movements within the trade unions which took up a more combative position in both traditional trade union struggles and in wider political issues;61 (c) from 1969 the situation in Northern Ireland developed in the direction of a fundamental polarization between the Catholic and Protestant communities, and the British army was used directly as a mechanism of control.62 Each of these developments had its own specific impact. At a more general level, the categories of crime, sexuality and youth were the raw materials from which the image of the violent society63 was constructed. These three issues can be used to organize thinking about the transformations that took place in the sixties, and which were to condition how the theme of ‘enemies within’ would develop in the seventies. The threat posed to the nation by trade union ‘militants’64 emerged into popular politics during the sixties. Its growing resonance reflects the development of class struggle during this period, particularly when compared to the long boom from 1948 to 1963. More than that, it embodies the decline of the hegemonic political institutions of social democracy, which had achieved a relative class peace during the immediate post-war period. Political representation of the Seamen’s Strike of 1966 and the struggles over the reform of trade union legislation during 1968–9 are two clear cases of this process, which is also visible in numerous localized cases.65 The general trend is clear: Time and again, in the succeeding decade, the class struggle was to be reconstructed, ideologically, in these terms: the conspiracy against the nations; holding the nation to ransom; the stark contrast between the subversive clique and the innocent worker and his family – the seducers and the seduced.66 The unspoken meaning of this discourse on trade unions was that they had come to exercise too much ‘power’ and, in doing so, to threaten the legitimacy of the state itself. These ideas governed the electoral campaigns of 1970 and 1974 (‘who rules the country?’). They have also been a crucial element in the appeal of neo-conservative ideologies in the late seventies. However, terms such as ‘militants’ and ‘agitators’ have become vehicles for a more generalized phobia about who the ‘enemies of society’ actually are. The fundamental move away from the social-democratic consensus was not limited to the field of working-class struggles. It involved strategic shifts at a number of other levels, including the role of parliamentary institutions, the bureaucracy, the police, and the local authorities. The breakup of the post-war coalition demanded a wholesale rethinking of the function of democratic institutions. This was urged on by the fear that ‘too much’ democracy could lead to an overload of demands on a state already weakened by both the period of relative economic instability, and the disturbances experienced in the later sixties. In a double sense the years leading up to the seventies were a time of transition: Politically, in Britain, as elsewhere, the 1968–69 period represents a watershed: the whole fulcrum of society turns, and the country enters, not a temporary and passing rupture, but a continuous and prolonged state of semi-siege. Its meaning and causes, then, and its consequences since, have been neither fully reckoned with, nor liquidated. The political polarisation which it precipitated fractured society into two camps: authority and its ‘enemies’.67
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This ‘prolonged state of semi-siege’ extended far beyond the shores of Britain, and indeed in the period 1968–70 it took on a more virulent form in countries such as France and Italy. But the oppositions were the same, as the well-known report of the Trilateral Commission on The Crisis of Democracy makes clear: Everywhere one discovers a complete dissociation between the decision-making system, dominated by traditional and often quite rhetorical political debate, and the implementation system, which is the preserve of administrative systems quite often centralised and strong, but usually even more irresponsive when they are centralised and strong. This dissociation is the main cause of political alienation among citizens. It continually nourishes utopian dreams and radical postures and reinforces opposition to the state.68 Despite numerous appeals to the good old ‘common sense’ which the British are supposed to believe in, the fear that political violence (i.e. opposition to the state) would be a reality for some time to come was shared by the major political forces. Their responses differed, but the fear remained the same. The beginning of the seventies saw not only the self-recognition of a society firmly caught in the grip of ‘violence’, but general fears of a further slide into lawlessness. The stark choice was between authority and disorder, and there were calls for immediate action. The prevention of further violence, and the comforting realization that even within the existing political structures the limits to change were not firmly set, became the guiding principles of a moral backlash against ‘liberalism’ and later on against the ‘socialism’ of the Labour Party.69 The crisis of the British way of life came to be seen as pervading the economy, social welfare, the schools, the prisons, on the streets, and above all the family. Everywhere there were moles at work. Commenting on ‘the red badge of revolution that is creeping across Britain’ after the Angry Brigade trial, the Evening Standard for once gave form to the hitherto amorphous threat: These guerrillas are the violent activists of a revolution comprising workers, students, trade unionists, homosexuals, unemployed and women striving for liberation. They are all angry. . . . Whenever you see a demonstration, whenever you see a queue for strike pay, every public library with a good stock of socialist literature – anywhere would be a good place to look. In short there is no telling where they are.70 This siege mentality shaped the seventies, in much the same way that the fear of the future had helped to construct the image of violent society in the sixties. Even as the crisis took shape, a new range of political possibilities had been created by the realization that these enemies could not be countered by traditional methods. A new range of strategies and of political outcomes developed with the awareness that the consensus which had been taken for granted for so long had broken down. During this period, transformations in the form of state power were secured through a political discourse which emphasized the drift of British society into ‘violence’ and ‘disorder’ as a way of securing and reordering the relative balance between the ideological and repressive roles of the state. This is particularly true of the ways in which the policing role came to be defined but it was also a clear tendency in the fields of industrial relations, social welfare, and race relations. Both the Heath Government from 1971–4, and the period of the Labour Government (1974–9) saw a popularization of these themes. Though there was simultaneously a marked increase in the level of racist violence against black
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communities – particularly in the form of ‘Paki-bashing’ – the ‘violent society’ and the consequent threat to the existing order of things was not redefined by these crimes. The issue of the day became ‘political violence’ rather than the ‘criminal violence’ of the train robbers and Kray twins. There was a concerted attempt to counteract the tendency for political action to take a ‘violent’ form. In his study of these developments, Britain in Agony, Richard Clutterbuck provides a clear statement of this position: The 1970s were agonising years for the British people, who felt frustrated, humiliated and insecure. By British standards they were exceptionally violent years. Economic performance was dismal. British society, instead of drawing together as it has more often done in past crises, seemed to become more cantankerous, less generous and less compassionate.71 From an explicit social control perspective, Clutterbuck moves on to explore the relation of merely criminal violence to its subversive counterpart: Political violence should be treated more seriously than criminal violence, not only because it has a more arrogant motivation, but also because it affects the lives of more of the community. . . . Crimes of violence have increased alarmingly and, for robbery with violence and rape, the courts will send a man to jail for several years. But some magistrates seem to regard political violence as more morally forgivable than violence for personal gain.72 He attempts to rationalize a perceived change in the ‘social basis’ of violence during the seventies.73 This required commensurate shifts in official discourse and in the legal-police apparatuses which proceed to counter the danger of ‘violence’ being used to change the nature of society. Clutterbuck’s notion of political violence is predictably elastic. It includes various forms of dissent which, by their very nature, involve physical contact with symbols of authority, but which are not intrinsically violent nor illegal, for example picketing, demonstrations etc. Hall et al. have shown in their study of ‘mugging’74 that changes in the use of language can be indicative of wider shifts in the balance of power in society. The passing of notions like the ‘violent society’ and ‘the breakdown of law and order’ into common parlance reflected transformations in the form of authority, political participation and social relations which undermined the legitimacy of the state. This process has taken place while the system has been under severe pressure to ‘deliver the goods’.75 These shifts, more than anything else, conditioned the development of the crisis of political authority which Britain experienced in the seventies. The battle lines between ‘society’ and its ‘enemies’ were more clearly drawn by the end of the seventies than they had been for decades. This was because responses to the crisis had taken a specific course, with hegemony being secured on the basis of ever more loose definitions of the ‘enemy within’. The cause of the crisis was constructed through ideas about externality and criminality which supported a view of blacks as an ‘outside’ force, an alien malaise afflicting British society. It was a short step from seeking to explain the crisis through the unions, to linking the unions with violence and terrorism.76 By the mid-seventies it was possible to present blacks as the main danger to society. Anything could be blamed, so long as it was not capitalism itself. This is a common feature of all legitimation crises:
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Official discourse on law and order confronts legitimation deficits and seeks discursively to redeem them by denial of their material genesis. Such denial establishes an absence in the discourse. This absence, the Other, is the silence of a world constituted by social relations, the reality of which cannot be appropriated by a mode of normative argument which speaks to and from its own self-image via an idealised conception of justice.77 The processes by which this ‘denial’ came to operate by racial differentiation constitute the main concerns of this book. We aim to show how the material conditions which have reorganized state racism over the seventies are deeply rooted in the present, and gain power from the ways in which the organic crisis of British capitalism is being experienced. This is the argument we want to outline in the last section of this chapter.
Making sense of the crisis: the centrality of race In the wake of the election of the Conservative Government in 1979 an important official debate has taken place about the position of black people in Britain.78 In Hansard one can find many humorous, and some not so humorous, attempts to produce watertight definitions of exactly who is ‘British’ and who ‘is not’. It is important that we are clear what such debates are about: they are an aspect of a much broader attempt to bring some kind of order into a society which is widely perceived to be falling apart. They are part of a struggle to ‘make sense’ of a conjuncture where all that is good and wholesome seems to be under threat.79 It should be no surprise that the management of ‘good race relations’ has assumed a central and expressive role in the context of this deep-seated crisis. For what is seen to be at stake in the arena of race is the survival of the existing order of things. Alfred Sherman, a key figure among right-wing ideologists, has articulated these fears: The imposition of mass immigration from backward alien cultures is just one symptom of this self-destructive urge reflected in the assault on patriotism, the family – both as a conjugal and economic unit – the Christian religion in public life and schools, traditional morality, in matters of sex, honesty, public display, and respect for the law – in short, all that is English and wholesome.80 The convergence of these fears around the idea of a threatening black presence (always codified as ‘immigration’) cannot be reduced to economic factors. Economic decline preceded popular acknowledgement of crisis, and the expulsion of blacks as a solution to national problems has a long history in British political thought. There is a lot to learn about how material conditions in urban areas have been affected by the crisis, how youth have been affected by unemployment, etc. But none of these areas can properly be understood if we do not acknowledge the ways in which ‘race’ is used to construct explanations and therefore consent, where crisis management is the goal of popular politics. There is no one-to-one correspondence between the ‘crisis of race’ and the economic crisis. Yet race is always present, whether the issue under discussion is the growth of unemployment, the role of the police in inner-city areas, or the recent ‘riots’ in a number of major cities. The complexity of this signification demonstrates that the history or racisms in British society cannot be grasped by a simple formulaic reduction of races to some immutable economic base. There are many political/historical factors which condition the relation of race to the current crisis; all need careful study. The specific circumstances which have
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generated a new racism are not the result of autonomous racial conflicts any more than they are the outcome of some abstract laws of capitalist development. The contextualization of racism today demands analysis of both the racial and non-racial elements which constitute the complex totality within which it functions: At the economic level, it is clear that race must be given its distinctive and ‘relatively autonomous’ effectivity, as a distinctive feature. This does not mean that the economic is sufficient to found an explanation of how these relations concretely function. One needs to know how different racial and ethnic groups were inserted historically, and the relations which have tended to erode and transform, or to preserve these distinctions through time – not simply as residues and traces of previous modes, but as active structuring principles of the present society. Racial categories alone will not provide or explain these.81 The new morphology of racism which has developed in the seventies needs to be located against the background of these social relations, which have been drastically reorganized by overall conditions of crisis. In every field of social life there is talk of a crisis, whether it be a temporary fiscal problem or a much deeper crisis of confidence in the existing order. As far as ‘solutions’82 are concerned, there is a tendency for ad hoc interventions to be proposed, only to be superseded by new ‘problems’. The crisis is insoluble. In this context, race relations have become the central aspect of attempts to orchestrate politically – and therefore to manage – the effects of organic crisis. We must locate the pertinence of ‘race’ within this hegemonic struggle and assess its articulation by and with the processes which secure economic, ideological and political power and domination. A few tentative propositions follow as to how this should proceed. The first point is that the term ‘articulation’ needs to be used precisely: as a concept which means that race joins together the various elements of the organic crisis and the ways in which they are experienced, but also that it gives expression at the political and ideological levels to specific forms of control aimed at black people.83 The meshing of these two meanings can be most clearly seen in relation to issues of rising unemployment, cuts in welfare expenditure, the crisis of the local state, and the reorganization of the forces of law and order. It can be seen at work in the common-sense neo-conservatism of Sir Keith Joseph, who has been known to explain the relative decline of the inner cities and some regions ‘through’ race.84 Popular representation of the recent ‘riots’ in Bristol, Brixton and July 1981 shows how racial and therefore cultural conflict systematizes and ‘explains’ both what is happening, and what might happen in the future.85 In any discussion of unemployment, for example, race ‘slips’ in, whereas ten years ago the issue would have been ignored. Keith Middlemas, a critical Tory thinker, expresses some of these linkages very clearly: What will Britain look like after even three years of 2 million unemployed? Divisions, which for half a century governments have tried to abolish will show nakedly, between the two geographical Englands, with Scotland, Wales and North Ireland on the periphery, like the Italian Mezzogiorno, between those in work and unemployed; between the mature and the young, between white and black.86 The seamless location of ‘white and black’ among a wide variety of other divisions shows the way in which the crisis of the seventies was lived through race. By situating race amidst the new realities of structural change and economic uncertainty that characterize the present
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conjuncture, it also provides a glimpse of the meaning of what we have called the new racism. The quotation from Middlemas reflects one of the main strands of thinking about race in the seventies. It places a number of seemingly ‘non-racial’ phenomena on a par with race; with the implication that a solution to the problem of the divisions between white and black must be sought in the wholesale transformation of the wider conditions which produce and maintain consensus. The other strand in the dominant approach to ‘race’ in the seventies has been to present the ‘race problem’ as comprised of the black communities themselves. The earlier quotation from Alfred Sherman is a good example of how this argument operates, as is the following from the Nationality Bill debate: On the issues dealt with by the Bill we are in the grip of forces which, because of the large influx of immigrants into Britain, we now seem unable to control. Racial violence is occurring with increasing frequency. The British people are sick at heart about it all. We badly need honest and forthright politicians to express their feelings without fear of being condemned on moral grounds.87 This image of forces beyond the control of ordinary ‘British people’ is a recurrent theme in neo-conservative racist ‘theory’, particularly since it fits in with the common-sense notion that ‘enemies within’ – subversive moles – are undermining the structures of society. It connects with common-sense ideas about why racial ‘problems’ arise by identifying ‘racial violence’ as a result of an illegitimate alien presence. The unseen ‘illegal’ immigrants are central to this political discourse. Their very illegality ensures that the British resentment which perpetrates violence on ‘Pakis’ is scarcely more than rough justice provoked by foreign interlopers. In the context of mass unemployment, deindustrialization, and major outbreaks of social violence, old-style ‘Powellism’ was not an adequate mode through which the crisis could be rendered intelligible. The late seventies saw a transformation of racist ideology which took account of these new realities, and provided a more adequate though nonetheless racist interpretation of what was happening. Those reworkings have taken place along two main lines. First, there has been a consistent attempt to pin down the dangers posed by specific groups of the black population: the illegals, the young, the militants, the unemployed, and even the white traitors who identify with an ‘alien culture’.88 This involves recognition of the ‘deep social problems’ revealed by black poverty, as well as a concerted attempt to control the antisocial disruption which is considered to be a consequence of the encounter between ‘deprivation’ and pathological ‘immigrant’ cultures. Second, a reworking of the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘citizen’ has taken place which aims to deny even the possibility that black people can share the native population’s attachment to the national culture – God, Queen and country. This presents the common-sense logic of repatriation or ‘re-emigration’: The United Kingdom is the national homeland of the English, Scots, Welsh, Ulstermen. . . . They wish to survive as an identifiable national entity . . . they have been willing to work, suffer and die for it. By contrast, for the jet-age migrants, Britain is simply a haven of convenience where they acquire rights without national obligation.89 In crisis conditions, these ideas accord with a mythology which has very deep roots in English popular culture. The essence of this culture has, after all, depended on a kind of historical forgetfulness which reworks the whole meaning of ‘Britishness’ in powerful images
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of the purity of nation, family and way of life, now jeopardized by the alien, external wedge. For this culture, even the imagery of the ‘enemy within’ has a particular resonance in terms of race. Subversion is un-British. The overall context of a society rapidly becoming conscious of its own shortcomings, of an entropy of political thought, and the consequent need to ‘pull together’ in order to survive made the issue of race an important signifier of the crisis. This may be clearer now that the post-Bristol ‘riots’ have placed the issues of race and political violence explicitly on the political agenda. But the roots of the inferential interconnections go much deeper than the recent events. For over a decade now, race has been situated, primarily through the discourse of Powellism, as a specific social problem which has been imposed from outside.90 As the bastard children of Empire set up ‘camps’ in the heartlands of the mother country, a degree of internalization has been forced on the reluctant Briton. The blacks are now a home-grown problem. They are in Britain but not of Britain. Since the first signs of disturbances in major inner-city black areas, the response of the state has been (a) to prepare the police forces to deal with ‘the fire next time’, and (b) to inject fiscal resources into the depressed areas to help with specific social problems by initiating schemes to deal with what are seen as the ‘causes’ of increasing violence and a breakdown of law and order. This is not crude monolithic state strategy, and these two elements of a response have not always been successfully integrated, nor been applied equally in every case of locally centred ‘race’ disturbances. At a macro-level, however, one should not underestimate the extent to which the preventive/ameliorative measures are being backed by a steady strengthening of security forces. Where admitted, this has been presented as an insurance measure, rather than the frontline of defence. But, since the 1979 police riot in Southall, it should be clear that this insurance policy is flexible if not tactical. A leading political commentator on The Sunday Times recently assessed the risks of the present situation in the following way: What are the risks to British society? It is fanciful, no doubt, to envisage brown shirts and red brigades coming out on the streets. It may be tendentious to predict that Britain might join these nations whose most successful members must protect themselves and their population behind barbed-wire and armed guards. All this is no doubt a worst-possible scenario. But it is one the government should be thinking about.91 The reality of the ‘worst-possible scenario’ is precisely what has concerned the state over the last few years. Of course there is still an important gap between Powellism, the extreme right, and state racism – but with the concept of ‘humane repatriation’ looming ever more centrally in official thinking on race it need not be conspiratorial to talk of a shift in the balance of state responses from amelioration to repression. At the level of everyday practices the oppressive aspects of the state’s role have been felt throughout the seventies: by black youth, by black workers engaged in industrial disputes, and at the territorial level by whole black communities.92 What has happened over the last period, particularly since 1976, is a qualitative strengthening of these repressive measures. This has been demonstrated time and time again by numerous official and academic studies,93 as well as in the anger of blacks themselves. These moves can only partially be explained by the tendency for racism to show a close relation to the tempo of crisis management. Race must be given its own autonomous
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effectively in any account of the present; it makes every black person a priori a suspect, a potential criminal, a potential agitator. During the series of ‘riots’ from early 1980 to July 1981 the fixing of a number of ‘causes’ to these events within official explanations, located race as one variable among others, including social, economic and local issues.94 Yet within the popular consciousness, and not just the media, the issue of race came to occupy the central role in common-sense accounts of why the riots have taken place in specific areas. The press coverage of the events took a number of forms, some of which will be looked at more carefully later on in the book. But there can be no denying that race, even at the level of metaphor, was a crucial variable in explanations of the Bristol, Brixton and the July 1981 ‘riots’.95 When Enoch Powell asked in a House of Commons debate ‘in which town or city does the honourable Gentleman (Mr Whitelaw) expect the next pitched battle against the police to be fought?’, he did not need to make the race dimension overt for everybody to understand what he meant.96 Coverage by the Daily Mail, Sun, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph during July 1981 needs no elaboration. Even the more ‘liberal’ views of The Financial Times and Guardian place race supreme among numbers of other factors as the common denominator of the riots.97 The Financial Times, for example, under the banner headline ‘Outbreak of an alien disease’, reflected on the events in a typical manner: Like an epidemic of some alien disease, to which the body politic has no immunity, street riots have erupted in different parts of England during the past ten days. . . . It is in a way all the more disturbing that there are so many conflicting explanations of the past week’s violence. Riots in different towns seem to have been sparked off by rather different factors: in Southall by racial fear and racial hatred; in Liverpool perhaps by a tradition of lawlessness and rivalry between police and idle, frustrated youngsters; in Manchester apparently by imitation of their Liverpool neighbours; and perhaps worst of all, in parts of London, by what appears to be pure criminality and greed. For if there are so many forces which are capable of sending hundreds of youths onto the rampage – youths of all races, and living in relatively prosperous areas such as London, not just suffering from desperate deprivation – then the problem of restoring order and respect for law may be all the greater.98 It is worth taking note that this ‘alien disease’ theme is shared by openly racist political groups, which have given it an extra edge by greater emphasis on the cure – repatriation.99 However, even when the social problems of unemployed or poor inner-city people are discussed rather than the ‘immigration problem’ per se, racial signification and explanations gain the upper hand. It should be understood that there is no necessary contradiction between the institutions of the welfare state, and the intensification of social control required by crisis management. The details of the police response to this situation will be discussed later, but it is useful to outline the state’s political responses to the post-Bristol situation. After the Southall events of April 1979, the crisis management approach to race has taken two forms. One, generally associated with the Labour Party, the Liberals and a section of the Conservative Party, prioritizes ‘social engineering’ experiments aimed at improving the urban environment as well as strengthening law and order; a second, which is upheld by the majority of the Conservatives and the fringes of the political right, holds that law and order must come first, and that any reforms should proceed through the due process of law.100 In the House of Commons debate on Civil Disturbances held on 16 July 1981 the basic features of these approaches were presented in some detail.
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It is important to avoid a binary counter-position where at the level of political strategies there is either a conspiratorial attempt to control black people or a policy of social reform.101 For throughout the sixties and seventies race-relations legislation has been neither completely ‘progressive’ nor ‘socially controlling’. It reflected both a reform and a control element, which attempted to secure the ‘problem’ of race as part of an overall political agenda. It is in this complex, and ultimately contradictory, way that the response to the growing activism and self-organization of black people is likely to develop over the next decade. As such it is likely that it will also be subject to contradictory outcomes.102 Nevertheless, it is important to look seriously at the popular alternative which is being advocated by the right in Parliament and by racist organizations on the streets; that is, the issue of repatriation. The discourse of repatriation is rooted in the reality of the present crisis, even though some elements of its ideological construction have been carried over from the past. It has been restructured and reorganized by the materiality of the employment crisis, by the thematization of violence, and by the rapid decline of inner-city areas. The pivot of this rearticulation is the location of ‘racial problems’ as historical invariables to the extent that remaking history itself becomes a method of ideologically constructing the need for repatriation. The ‘facts’ are taken as given because the last two decades are supposed to have ‘proved’ that as the black population grew, violence and disorder became the order of the day. Traces of black life have been removed from the British past to ensure that blacks are not part of the British future. It is precisely the weight of this history which allows Powell to penetrate the walls of official thinking even when his ‘solutions’ are specifically rejected. After the July 1981 riots he spoke of the inevitability of ‘civil war’ if the black population rose in line with his predictions.103 In rebutting both the Conservative and Labour strategies he voiced an alternative view of causation: The Government and the House will not be serving the country unless they address themselves to the ultimate reality, the ultimate cause, the sine qua non, without which what we have witnessed and are witnessing could not and would not have happened. . . . [Mr Hattersley] gave three causes – poverty, unemployment and deprivation. Are we seriously saying that so long as there is poverty, unemployment and deprivation, our cities will be torn to pieces, that the police in them will be the objects of attack and that we shall destroy our own environment? Of course not. Everyone knows that, although those conditions do exist, there is a factor – the factor which the people concerned perfectly well know, understand and apprehend, and which unless it can be dealt with – unless the fateful inevitability, the inexorable doubling and trebling, of that element of a population can be avoided – their worst fears will be fulfilled.104 We have quoted this argument at length because it is important to note the ways in which even when race is not mentioned in so many words, it is the ‘element’ which cements common-sense notions of why violence is increasing, and why the existing order is under stress. Powell’s idea of an ‘ultimate cause’ intersects with popular racist notions at the level of everyday experience and becomes a central means of explaining why the country is ‘going to the dogs’. Repatriation is not a political strategy that can be put into large-scale practice at this particular time, not least because blacks will not countenance it. As the task of policing and managing black working-class areas becomes even more difficult, calls for a final solution to the ‘problem’ of race are likely to increase. Sections of the Conservative Party have already
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debated the appropriate financial inducement. But the outcome of these struggles cannot be judged from here. Options for state responses to the ‘alienation of black youth’ supposedly revealed by ‘the riots’ are already taking shape. It would clearly be false to argue that the state will respond simply through either greater repression or ameliorative measures of social control. There is a strong element of both these approaches in proposals being considered in policy-making channels.105 The unsteady terrain on which the police have been operating has already led to a reworking of their tactics in inner-city areas.106 No doubt, in time, we shall see the development of policies for all areas of social life which aim to control and contain the ‘social’ problems which government policies have done much to reproduce.107 Piecemeal responses should not be seen as the guiding principle of all the state’s actions in this field. It is incorrect to maintain a modified pluralist framework, whereby each of these responses is seen as liable to negotiation on its own terms, e.g. the current attempts to reform policing and the development of ‘new’ policies for the inner-city areas. The transformations in the role of the state are structural, and should not be confused with the ad hoc policy alternatives which appear in the political arena. The fundamental reworking of state policies which took place in the sixties, and accelerated during the seventies, secured a new balance of hegemonic relations, a tendency which we have called authoritarian statism. It is foolish to think of the state as some kind of immobile object which suddenly awakens to the riots, and could be swayed either way by sound arguments. Such a situation, if it has ever existed, is not the one which confronts us today. We are faced with a state that is in the process of fundamental change, which cannot be reduced to a conscious will, and which is the outcome of complex determinations at all levels of British society. The restructuring and strengthening of state racism in the current period has been periodized and punctuated by the operation of racist practices and by the contradictory effects of crisis management. The aftermath of the recent ‘riots’ undoubtedly represents a watershed in the development of state racism, but we should avoid the temptation to think about it in outdated categories. The response of the state to the perceived and real ‘dangers’ of this period will take novel forms which cannot be understood through a simple dichotomy of reform/repression. We are likely to see policies which display a fluid combination of preventive and repressive options, which will be moved one way or the other according to the balance of forces. The accelerated pace of development in the ‘race-relations industry’ over the past few years is therefore a sign of things to come, as is the intensified policing of working-class black areas. This is why the choices of resistance and struggle which black communities are making must not be fitted into narrow models of political action which assume that liberal-democratic forms of government are the only forms possible in late capitalism. They must be seen for what they are: a response which has been conditioned by popular racism, state racism and the intensity of the racist attacks against black communities in many inner-city areas.108 The everyday struggles of blacks against the racism of capitalist command are the ground on which the state and its agencies will attempt to develop mechanisms of containment and counter-insurgency. They also supply ‘facts’ from which new elements of racist ideologies will be constructed, at the level of official discourse and on the streets. They raise issues which have a wider importance than the immediate scope of the struggles themselves. As Stuart Hall remarked, in his account of the recent riots: The police-black front is the front line: policing and the drift into authoritarian social control are front-line issues. Nevertheless, responding to the riots is not a matter of defending civil rights or of ‘being nice to black people’. Rioting and civil disorder grow
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John Solomos, et al. out of and reflect back on what is happening to the working class as a whole and to society as the crisis cuts into the latter at all levels. The riots are only the outward, if dramatic, symptoms of this inner unravelling of our social, political and community life.109
In this wider, deeply social sense, the long-term implications of recent events are likely to be profound. They show that the articulation of race to the organic crisis has resulted in important contradictions for the state, which will sharpen as the crisis involves more and more groups in the front line. The problems this poses for the state are being assessed within various state agencies, with the help of the race-relations industry. The left has hardly attempted to sift the complex issues involved, let alone think about them. Yet without carefully working through the issue of race and crisis, it is inconceivable that they will come up with an adequate response to the development of repressive policies, and popular authoritarianism.
Conclusion: stepping into the eighties Whole histories remain to be written about the experience of black workers in this country. In this book we aim to produce some elements of that history, which we hope will form a basis for further research. Because of our deep dissatisfaction with the dominant approaches to ‘race-relations theory’, which tend to concentrate on either narrow empirical studies or descriptive interview surveys, we have attempted to locate our own work within a broader theoretical framework which derives much from recent Marxist discussions on the nature of contemporary capitalism. We are aware that this approach has its own problems, but we feel it to be a necessary step in the current context of debates on racism. Broadly speaking, there are four conclusions which can be drawn from our discussion so far, some of which will be elaborated in the chapters which follow. The first step in breaking down the dominant conceptions of ‘race relations’ is to locate histories of racism firmly within a framework which establishes that it is reproduced by endogenous politicaleconomic forces, not by exogenous mechanisms. Second, it is important to see that the changes in the form of racism during the seventies were forged in the crucible of the struggles waged by black people against the patterns of domination imposed by the manner of their incorporation into the relations of production, as well as by the practices involved in their political and cultural forms of resistance. Third, we have argued that although the ways in which the ‘crisis of race relations’ has been conceptualized cannot be separated from the general crisis of hegemony which has afflicted British capitalism, it would be wrong for analysis to stop there. We need to analyse race in terms of its specific forms at different periods of time in order to see how it articulates – or not – with other social relations. Fourth, we argue that in a context of emerging authoritarianism and a strengthening of repressive agencies, there is little hope that reformist strategies will fundamentally improve the material conditions which confront black people in their daily struggle to survive in British society. The full development of these arguments is beyond the scope of this book, but we do believe that individual chapters have developed them to a sufficiently high level to sponsor new areas of concrete investigation and to illuminate a number of important phenomena articulated to the structural position of black people in the dominant social relations. We would not claim to have ‘finished’ this discussion, but it does seem to us that the questions we raise need to be considered more seriously than they have been in the past. If this discussion
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takes place we will have served a useful role in sensitizing others to an understanding of both the deep roots of racism in Britain, and the need to move beyond simple reform in order to overcome racism. This is why in the midst of the depressing story we tell, we feel able to maintain some optimism about what can be achieved if the oppressed organize to change the conditions of their daily existence. The experience of the black masses during the decade of the seventies has alerted us to what underlies the superficial appearance of the British state: namely that the normal processes of political authority, when they cannot proceed by co-operation, proceed through confrontation, and, at a higher level, through the state’s orchestration and legitimation of repression. This is a very dangerous time, and those who are interested in transforming the material conditions of contemporary capitalism must not mistake a situation of crisis for the collapse of capitalist relations of domination. As Friedrich Pollock once remarked, albeit in a different historical context: ‘What is coming to an end is not capitalism but its liberal phase’.110 This may be a more fruitful way of looking at current realities than the rather dubious attempts to develop modes of political action which are premised on the continued existence of a liberal-democratic state.
Acknowledgements In writing this chapter we have incurred a number of debts which we would like to acknowledge. Apart from helpful discussions over a number of months with other members of the group, we have benefited especially from detailed discussion with Robin Wilson and Errol Lawrence. Robin Wilson co-operated with us in the early stages of writing this chapter. Outside the group we would like to thank the following for various types of support and help: Martin Barker, Ann Walters and Mike Cowen. In addition the late Neil Williamson was instrumental in helping us develop some ideas expressed in the chapter. Christine Dunn and Rose Goodwin were helpful in typing successive drafts with patience. In addition our common enthusiasm for West Bromwich Albion was important in showing us the value of good teamwork. Given the nature of recent political developments it is important to note that the final version of this chapter was completed in July 1981.
Notes and references 1
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On the links between racism and authoritarianism the classic texts are those of Stuart Hall and his colleagues, in addition to the work represented by the journal Race and Class. But see the following for a general outline of these positions: S. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis (Macmillan 1978); S. Hall, ‘The law’s out of order’, Guardian, 5 January 1980; A. Sivanandan, ‘Race, class and the state’, Race and Class, vol. 17, no. 4 (1976), pp. 347–68. We envisage this work developing along a number of axes, which are difficult to specify at this stage. But, in particular we would like to look further at the historical background of black workers in Britain, the complex morphology of legal-administrative organization of race relations, and the development of common-sense racism in the context of crisis management. For a summary presentation of the basic aspects of Hall’s approach see: ‘Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance’, in UNESCO, Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris 1980). In addition a useful intervention in this debate has been made by G. Carchedi in his: ‘Authority and foreign labour: some notes on a late capitalist form of capital accumulation and state intervention’, Studies in Political Economy, no. 2 (Autumn 1979), pp. 37–74. Here we should not be seen as arguing that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the transformation of racism and the changes in the wider economic framework. But we would wish to maintain that there is a relationship between the two and that this involves relations of determination. In this sense we would take issue with the approach popularized by Hindess and
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John Solomos, et al. Hirst which relies on a notion of necessary non-correspondence. In the field of race this is associated with the work of John Gabriel and Gideon Ben-Tovim. An outline of this approach can be found in their article on: ‘Marxism and the concept of racism’, Economy and Society, vol. 7, no. 2 (1978), pp. 118–54. An outline of these debates can be found in: John Urry, The Anatomy of Capitalist Societies: The Economy, Civil Society and The State (Macmillan 1981). But for more critical accounts see: E. Wright, Class, Crisis and the State (New Left Books 1978); B. Jessop, ‘Recent theories of the capitalist state’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 1 (1977), pp. 353–73; H. Gintis and S. Bowles, ‘Structure and practice in the labour theory of value’, Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 12, no. 4 (1981), pp. 1–26. These issues are usefully discussed by: K. Post, Arise Ye Starvelings: The Jamaican Labour Rebellion of 1938 and its Aftermath (The Hague 1978); P. S. Gupta, Imperialism and The British Labour Movement (Macmillan 1975; W. R. Louis, Imperialism at Bay 1941–1945: The United States and the Decolonisation of the British Empire (Oxford University Press 1977). See: R. Benewick, The Fascist Movement in Britain (Allen Lane 1973). For a longer historical perspective see: D. A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians (Leicester University Press 1978). For a detailed analysis of this argument see: Hall, ‘Race, articulation and societies’, particularly pp. 336 ff. This is an argument developed in greater detail in: J. Solomos, ‘Urban social policies, migrant workers and political authority’, in J. Solomos (ed.), Migrant Workers in Metropolitan Cities: A European Perspective (North Holland Press 1982). The Financial Times, 11 July 1981. In the field of race the pluralist framework tends to be an underlying theme in most debates rather than a conscious theoretical effort. But precisely because it remains unspoken and relies on common-sense notions of the relations of power in our society its tendency is to foster debates about the role of policy changes which take the possibility of reform for granted. In this sense it fits into the traditional pluralist power framework, albeit with a racial dimension. For criticisms of the pluralist paradigm see: R. Benewick, ‘Politics without ideology: the perimeters of pluralism’, in R. Benewick et al. (eds.), Knowledge and Belief in Politics (Allen and Unwin 1973); W. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (D. C. Heath 1974). See: Carchedi, passim; S. Castles, ‘Structural racism: ethnic minorities in Western Europe’, paper prepared for World Council of Churches Programme to Combat Racism, 1980. R. Cohen, ‘The end to the migrant labour boom’, Newsletter of International Labour Studies, no. 10 (April 1981). Two of the main studies are: S. Castles and G. Kosack, Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe (Oxford University Press 1973); G. Freeman, Immigrant Labour and Racial Conflict in Industrial Societies (Princeton University Press 1979). M. Nikolinakos, ‘Notes towards a general theory of migration in late capitalism’, Race and Class, vol. 17, no. 1 (1975), pp. 5–17; M. Castells, ‘Immigrant workers and class struggles in advanced capitalism: the West European experience’, in R. Cohen et al. (eds.), Peasants and Proletarians (Monthly Review Press 1979). Hall, ‘Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance’, p. 336. All of these debates are very complex and it is not feasible to take account of them in detail within the terms of reference of this book. But in specific cases we have referred to these debates to support our own analysis of events during the seventies. A useful attempt to apply some of these theoretical advances historically can be found in: M. Reich, Racial Inequality: A Political-Economic Analysis (Princeton University Press 1981). For a summary presentation of these arguments see: F. Froebel et al., ‘The world market for labour and the world market for industrial sites’, Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 12, no. 4 (1978), pp. 843–58; A. Sivanandan, ‘Imperialism and disorganic development in the silicon age’, Race and Class, vol. 21, no. 2 (1979), pp. 111–26. Hall, ‘Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance’, passim. I. Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy (Cambridge University Press 1979), particularly Part 2. A. Sivanandan, ‘Imperialism and disorganic development in the silicon age’. M. Nikolinakos, ‘The new dimensions in the employment of foreign workers’ (Berlin 1975). I. Wallerstein, ‘The state in the institutional vortex of the capitalist world economy’, unpublished paper 1980, pp. 3–4.
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S. Hall, ‘Pluralism, race and class in Caribbean society’, in UNESCO, Race and Class in Post-Colonial Society (Paris 1977). D. Lecourt, ‘Marxism as a critique of sociological theories’, in UNESCO, Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris 1980), p. 284. S. Hall, ‘Racism and reaction’, in Commission for Racial Equality, Five Views of Multi-Racial Britain (CRE 1978), p. 26. The notion that the racism of the seventies is historically specific is important to our own understanding of what we have come to see as the ‘new racism’. We would also wish to place special emphasis on Hall’s remarks concerning links between the present and cultural and ideological traces from the past. This forms the subject matter of part of the next chapter. This is a view which we attempt to substantiate in a number of chapters in this book and one which needs much more work done on it. This is because in general the development of a racerelations sociology during the last decade has relied on notions of society which are liable to sociological investigative techniques, thus pushing historical and structural issues into the background. Where historical and political analyses do make an entry into the debates they do so either in a minor way or they tend to be narrow case studies of specific issues. Although we do not claim to have redressed this situation, it is important to stress that this is the area on which much more serious and critical theoretical work remains to be done. S. Hall, ‘The whites of their eyes: racist ideologies and the media’, in G. Bridges and R. Brunt (eds.), Silver Linings: Some Strategies for the Eighties (Lawrence and Wishart 1981). I. Gough, The Political Economy of the Welfare State (Macmillan 1979). On the history of state attempts to orchestrate trade union reform in the sixties and seventies see: L. Panitch, Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy: The Labour Party, The Trade Unions and Incomes Policy 1965–1974 (Cambridge 1976); L. Panitch, ‘Profits and politics: labour and the crisis of British capitalism’, Politics and Society, vol. 7, no. 4 (1977), pp. 477–507. N. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (New Left Books 1978), especially Chapters 1 and 2; C. Offe, ‘The separation of form and content in liberal democratic politics’, Studies in Political Economy, no. 3 (Spring 1980), pp. 5–16. This is the reply we would make to the arguments put forward by Paul Hirst and Barry Hindess, and taken up by a number of other writers. See: B. Hindess, ‘Democracy and the limitations of parliamentary democracy in Britain’, Politics and Power, no. 1 (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1980); M. Prior (ed.), The Popular and the Political: Essays on Socialism in the 1980s (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1981). C. Offe, ‘Political authority and class structures: an analysis of late capitalist societies’, International Journal of Sociology, vol. 2, no. 1 (1972), p. 78. J. Lea, ‘The contradictions of the sixties race relations legislation’, in National Deviancy Conference (ed.), Permissiveness and Control (Macmillan 1980). A good summary of the shifts in modes of social control, using the theoretical framework of Habermas and Offe in particular, can be found in: J. Keane, ‘The legacy of political economy’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, vol. 2, no. 3 (1978). The impact of Poulantzas’s work is clear in the work of Adam Prezworski who provides an illuminating account of the transformations of the state in his: ‘Material bases of consent: economics and politics in a hegemonic system’, Political Power and Social Theory, vol. 1 (1980). See also: V. Burris, ‘The structuralist influence in Marxist theory and research’, Insurgent Sociologist, vol. 9, no. 1 (1979), pp. 4–17. C. Offe, ‘Crises of crisis management: elements of a political crisis theory’, International Journal of Sociology, vol. 6, no. 3 (1976), p. 32. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, pp. 203–4. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, p. 214. The articulation of these themes over the period of the seventies and the construction of the Thatcher strategy are closely related. Some of the important contributions to the debate about the post-1974 experience, and also the post-1979 experience, of austerity policies are discussed in: C. Leys, ‘Neo-conservatism and the organic crisis in Britain’, Studies in Political Economy, no. 4 (Autumn 1980), pp. 41–64; L. Panitch, ‘Trade unions and the capitalist state’, New Left Review, no. 125 (1981), pp. 21–44. This is an argument which was developed at length in: C. Lindblom, Politics and Markets (Basic Books 1977). More recently it has been debated and further developed by: G. Therborn, ‘Enterprises, markets and states’, unpublished paper 1975; C. Offe, ‘The attribution of political status
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John Solomos, et al. to interest groups’, in S. Berger (ed.), Interest Groups in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press 1980). As reported in The Times, 3 December 1973. Gramsci develops this concept in the Prison Notebooks and applies it in a number of historical contexts, particularly in relation to Italy. For a full discussion of the origins, development and usefulness of this concept see: C. Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and The State (Lawrence and Wishart 1980), especially Chapters 2, 3, and 6. On the overall issue of the reorganization of the state in Britain see: N. Johnson, ‘Quangos and the structure of government’, Public Administrations, vol. 57 (Winter 1979), pp. 379–96; D. Coates, ‘Politicians and the Sorcerer: the problems of governing with capitalism in crisis’, in A. King (ed.), Why is Britain Becoming Harder to Govern? (BBC Publications 1976). The comparative aspects of this process are analysed in: D. Coombes and S. A. Walkland (eds.), Parliaments and Economic Affairs (Heinemann 1980). On these links see: M. Castells, ‘Urban crisis, political process and urban theory’, in City, Class and Power (Macmillan 1978). Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism; B. Jessop, ‘Capitalism and democracy: the best possible shell?’, in (ed.) G. Littlejohn et al., Power and the State (Macmillan 1978); M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (Harvester 1980). Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, pp. 186–7. This is an argument which has been taken up by Alain Touraine in his: The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements (Cambridge University Press 1981). In this work Touraine attempts to look at the implications of these shifts for the development of social movements within the contemporary context and thereby attempts to widen the issue to cover oppositional forces. These breaks are dealt with in somewhat more detail in the later chapters, but it may be useful to comment briefly on the whole notion of discontinuous histories. This way of thinking through the complex levels of determination involved in any specific historical conjuncture has developed as a measured response to economism within Marxist theory. But it cannot as yet be said to have been fully articulated, since in some contexts it has tended to be used simply as another way of saying that reality is ‘complex’. To leave the issue at this level would be to accept a more or less relativist approach, which cannot tell us very much about actual mechanisms of determination. What we have attempted in this book is to use the idea of discontinuous histories in a concrete manner to explain how race articulates to the organic nature of the crisis. P. Cohen, ‘Policing the working class city’, in National Deviancy Conference/Conference of Socialist Economists, Capitalism and the Rule of Law (Hutchinson 1979), p. 136. For an account of this crisis and the ways it was experienced at the level of official thinking see: S. Blank, ‘Britain: the politics of foreign economic policy, the domestic economy and the problem of pluralist stagnation’, International Organisation, vol. 31, no. 4 (1977), pp. 673–722; B. Jessop, ‘Corporatism, parliamentarism and social democracy’, in P. Schmitter and G. Lehmbruch, Trends Towards Corporatist Intermediation (Sage 1979). On the issue of negotiation in relation to moral and legal relations see: P. Corrigan, ‘On moral regulation: some preliminary remarks’, Sociological Review, vol. 29, no. 2 (1981), pp. 313–37. On the wider issue of the collective negotiations between capital and labour see: C. Offe and H. Wiesenthal, ‘Two logics of collective action: theoretical notes on social class and organisational form’, in M. Zetlin (ed.), Political Power and Social Theory, vol. 1 (Jai Press 1980). This is the argument which Paul Gilroy develops in the chapter on policing, where he attempts to show the kind of options which the repressive apparatuses are opening up for handling working-class black communities. For a concise account of the transformations which led to this conception of the sixties see: S. Hall, ‘Reform and the legislation of consent’, in National Deviancy Conference, Permissiveness and Control (Macmillan 1980). Detailed accounts of these processes can be found in: Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, especially Chapters 8 and 9. But see in addition: S. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (Martin Robertson 1980). S. Chibnall, Law and Order News (Tavistock 1977), p. 75. The best account of this breakdown can be found in: B. Jessop, ‘The transformation of the state in postwar Britain’, in R. Scase (ed.), The State in Western Europe (Macmillan 1980). These issues are discussed in some detail in: J. Solomos, ‘The political economy of energy policy
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in Britain’, unpublished D. Phil. thesis, University of Sussex, February 1980, especially Chapters 3 and 4. On the chronology of the Heath experiment see: A. Barnett, ‘Class struggle and the Health Government’, New Left Review, no. 77 (1973), pp. 3–41. The orchestration of this shift has to be located firmly within the state itself because it is within its own apparatuses that the technocratic world view of a Britain rejuvenated by the application of ‘new technologies’ arose and took shape. In addition, however, one must bear in mind that during this period the legitimacy of social democracy had yet to be seriously brought under question. See the various accounts of youth and other subcultures that are contained in: S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds.), Resistance Through Rituals (Hutchinson 1976); J. Clarke et al. (eds.), Working Class Culture (Hutchinson 1979). For a comparative account of these transformations in the role of unions see: C. Crouch and A. Pizzorno (eds.), The Resurgence of Class Conflict in Western Europe Since 1968, 2 volumes (Macmillan 1978); S. Berger, ‘Politics and antipolitics in Western Europe in the seventies’, Daedalus (Winter 1979), pp. 27–50. These developments are carefully analysed in: P. Bew et al., The State in Northern Ireland 1921–72: Political Forces and Social Classes (Manchester University Press 1979). See: Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, passim; Chibnall, Law and Order News, passim. Also see the discussion in Chapter 2. In a number of specific contexts the themes of trade union ‘militants’ and ‘race’ have been connected, notably in the struggles at Grunwick and Imperial Typewriters. But clearly both these themes have operated in an autonomous manner as well, even when the specific ways in which they have been presented have produced wider resonances. What is likely to happen, however, as levels of black unemployment reach a higher peak is that the industrial struggles waged by black workers in defence of jobs will take on a more general form. For a careful account of all these struggles see: Panitch, Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, p. 238. ibid., p. 238. The Trilateral Commission, The Crisis of Democracy (New York University Press 1975). Jessop, ‘Corporatism, parliamentarism and social democracy’. As quoted by: T. Bunyan, The History and Practice of the Political Police in Britain (J. Friedmann 1976), p. 47. R. Clutterback, Britain in Agony (Penguin 1978), p. 19. ibid., p. 311. The treatment of ‘violence’ in relation to recent ‘race riots’ is an example of this trend, and we discuss the specific meaning of these developments in Chapters 2 and 6. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, Chapters 8, 9, and 10. For a discussion of the general tendency of late capitalist states to ‘deliver the goods’ and the ensuing political contradictions see: A. Melucci, ‘The new social movements: a theoretical approach’, Social Science Information, vol. 19, no. 2 (1980). This accusation was made by Margaret Thatcher in the build-up to the 1979 election when she said: ‘In their muddled but different ways the vandals on the picket lines and the muggers in our streets have got the same confused message – “we want our demands met or else” and “get out of our way, give us your handbag or else” ’. Speech in Birmingham, 19 April 1979. F. Burton and P. Carlen, Official Discourse: On Discourse Analysis, Government Publications, Ideology and the State (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1979), p. 138. It is important to note however that the terms of the debate have not remained constant since the 1979 election, and that the process of the criminalization of black youth has progressed much further now. In this sense the argument of Burton and Carlen quoted above is too narrow. What should be looked at is not really official discourse but social discourse. The latter term is more amenable to the study of how ideologies change over time. A. Sherman, ‘Britain’s urge to self-destruction’, The Daily Telegraph, 9 September 1979. Hall, ‘Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance’, p. 339. In fact the relationship between ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ is not as discrete as we have made it sound. For example the implementation of policies through state agencies often results in the
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John Solomos, et al. articulation of new problems, or at least new aspects of old issues. This is because the actual mechanisms and manner in which specific policies are implemented feeds back into the definition of what issues policy-makers should concentrate upon. This is why in much of contemporary neo-conservative thinking we find a simple reversal of the Keynesian formula: the state is now the cause of capitalism’s problems and not its saviour. The reasons why such views develop do not concern us here, but it is important to emphasize that these notions are not abstract ideological shifts but outcomes of material practices which question whether the state can actually solve the problems which it aims to do. Such a ‘suspicion’ of the state has very wide implications, which have hardly begun to be considered. This formulation of articulation owes much to the discussion in: Hall, ‘Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance’. An example of this was his speech reported in the Guardian on 24 January 1980 under the headline ‘Joseph blames decline on immigrants’. A wider discussion of the role of the media as definer of specific discourses about race, and particularly black youth, can be found in Chapter 2. K. Middlemas, ‘Unemployment: the past and future of a political problem’, in B. Crick (ed.), Unemployment (Macmillan 1981), p. 151. This line of thinking is close to some strands of ‘wet’ or ‘traditional’ Conservative thinking, and Middlemas himself is a reputable historian of the British state and its development in the twentieth century. Moreover he is in the intellectual vanguard of attempts to reconnect the Conservative Government to its ‘roots’, by which is meant the idea of an all-class alliance. Although it is by no means a popular view in terms of current Conservative policies it is by no means out of order to think that it may become more popular at a future moment of failure. House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 4 June 1981, Column 1180, Mr Ivor Stanbrook. He goes on to refute the charge that the Bill is racist by arguing that it is simply an accident of history that it affects black people: ‘Most people in Britain happen to be white-skinned. Most of those who would like to become British citizens happen to be black-skinned’. The issue of ‘identity’ in this sense was a clear theme in the various debates on the 1981 Nationality Bill: House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 3 June 1981, Columns 931–90. The interventions by Enoch Powell and the reply by John Tilley are particularly interesting. See also: R. Behrens and J. Edmonds, ‘Kippers, kittens and kipper boxes: Conservative populists and race relations’, The Political Quarterly, no. 52 (1981), pp. 342–7. A. Sherman, ‘Britain is not Asia’s fiancée’, Daily Telegraph, 9 November 1979. The classic studies by Paul Foot are still a good starting-point for situating this issue: Immigration and Race in British Politics (Penguin 1965); The Rise of Enoch Powell (Penguin 1969). More generally see: G. Ben-Tovim and J. Gabriel, ‘The politics of race in Britain; 1962 to 1979’, Sage Race Relations Abstracts, vol. 4, no. 4 (1979), pp. 1–56. M. Crawford, ‘Sir Geoffrey’s great gamble’, The Sunday Times, 30 March 1980. The extension of forms of control at the territorial level has been a common theme in many working-class communities (see Cohen, ‘Policing the working class city’), but the racialization of these forms of control has also been extensive over the sixties and seventies. See: Institute of Race Relations, Police Against Black People (IRR 1979); for the early developments see: D. Humphrey, Police Power and Black People (Panther 1972). The case of Lambeth has been one which has been most extensively studied. See for example: London Borough of Lambeth, Final Report of the Working Party into Police/Community Relations in Lambeth (London Borough of Lambeth 1981). But we try to show in this book the pattern is both much more extensive and deeper than is generally appreciated. This is clear for example in the way in which policies aimed at ‘helping’ black youth have been formulated. See for example: Commission for Racial Equality, Ethnic Minority Youth Unemployment (CRE 1980). L. Wood, ‘Where work is a black white issue’, Financial Times, 23 March 1981. But the exact fixing of the various determinants will be discussed later when we consider the development of specific policy alternatives. The usage of ‘race’ in explanations of the ‘riots’ should not be seen in isolation from the wider usage of racially based common-sense ideas about why the crisis of the seventies took specific forms. Even when discussion of the riots has been limited to local cases the national issues have fed into these debates. See for example the coverage of the Brixton riots in the South London Press from 14 April to 16 April 1981.
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96 House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 6 July 1981, Column 26. In this debate Powell’s views received strong support from a number of back-bench Conservative MPs although they were generally dismissed by the Cabinet, who adopted a mixture of a social problems approach with assurances of strong support for the police. In his speech in this same debate for example Whitelaw expressed both a call to study the ‘social reasons’ for the violence and the need to act firmly against ‘mindless violence in our society’. 97 This is not a book which aims to provide a specific account of the ‘riots’ since the Bristol events of 1980, but we have attempted to look at some of the connections between these events and the issues which concern us. Nevertheless a specific analytical account of the themes developed in the media would be a useful example of how the articulation between ‘race’ and ‘crisis’ is transformed when political legitimacy is questioned and forms of resistance grow on the streets. This theme will be discussed in detail by Bob Findlay in his Ph. D thesis on ‘Race and the media: a redefinition of the problematic’. 98 The Financial Times, 11 July 1981. 99 The history of the various right-wing movements and their attempts to link up the themes of race with repatriation is summarized in: M. Billing and A. Bell, ‘Fascist parties in post-war Britain’, Sage Race Relations Abstracts, vol. 5, no. 1 (1980), pp. 1–30. The various right-wing movements are also analysed on a regular basis in the anti-Fascist magazine Searchlight. But the resonance of the repatriation theme has a much wider resonance than the right-wing movements, as is shown in: P. Gilroy, ‘Managing the “under-class”: a further note on the sociology of race relations in Britain’, Race and Class, vol. 22, no. 1 (1980), pp. 47–62. 100 This division parallels the wider policy divisions within the Conservative Party about the orientation it should take to counter the dangers of ‘greater state control’ and ‘lawlessness’: contradictory divisions whose ideological roots have a long and complex history. 101 The inadequacy of pure control theories which ignore the historical basis of contradictions has been demonstrated in: G. Stedman Jones, ‘Class expression versus social control? A critique of recent trends in the social history of “Leisure” ’, History Workshop Journal, no. 4 (1977), pp. 162–70. 102 Some of these contradictions are analysed in: G. John, In the Service of Black Youth, National Association of Youth Clubs (NAYC 1981). 103 House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 16 July 1981, Column 1414. The exact phrase which Powell used in the Debate on Civil Disturbances was: ‘Inner London becoming ungovernable or violence which could only effectually be described as civil war’. He saw this as the inevitable result of the growth of the black population in the inner-city areas. 104 House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 16 July 1981, Column 1416. 105 In the area of youth unemployment, for example, the ameliorative actions of the state have to some extent taken precedence in the immediate response of the state. But at the everyday level the role of the police remains strong and there is a clear attempt to strengthen the technical forms available to the police. 106 See two clear reports about the Brixton events and the July ‘riots’ which summarize and critically situate the development of police practices: ‘Brixton: new facts emerge’, State Research Bulletin, no. 24 (June–July 1981); ‘The July riots’, State Research Bulletin, no. 25 (August–September 1981); ‘Riot control: a new direction?’, State Research Bulletin, no. 25 (August–September 1981). 107 This is already clear in the aftermath of the massive rise in unemployment from 1979 to 1981 and the cuts in social expenditure which have been put into practice. The attempt to control the ‘social problems’ aspect of these policies is one which will take a number of forms, including a reconstruction of the possible options of resistance which are open to oppositional groups. For an elaboration of this theme from a theoretical perspective see: C. Offe, ‘The separation of form and content in liberal democratic politics. 108 We would emphasize in this context that the question is not one which can be thought of in narrow class terms, with race added on as an extra dimension to unchanged fixed concepts. Rather it is important (a) to rethink the basis and unity of the concepts themselves and (b) to conceptualize the politics organized around black communities in their own autonomy. This is also a debate which goes beyond race as such, since it has implications for how we think through the history of working-class movements in general, and their complex articulation at all levels of society. For discussions of these issues see: A. Prezworski, ‘Proletariat into a class: the process of class formation from Karl Kautsky’s The Class Struggle to recent controversies’, Politics and Society, vol. 7, no. 4 (1977), pp. 343–402; S. Bowles and H. Gintis, ‘The Marxian theory of value and
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heterogeneous labour: a critique and reformulation’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 1, no. 2 (1977). 109 S. Hall, ‘Summer in the city’, New Socialist, no. 1 (September–October 1981), p. 7. 110 As quoted in: B. Brick and M. Postone, ‘Friedrich Pollock and the “primacy of the political”: a critical re-examination’, International Journal of Politics (Fall 1976), p. 7.
36 Just plain common sense: the ‘roots’ of racism Errol Lawrence
I’ve learnt something that I’ve known all along, that black people and white people can get on very well as individuals. It’s when they get into groups, when they become afraid, when the herd instinct takes over, that trouble starts. Lord Scarman [Ideologies] work most effectively when we are not aware that how we formulate and construct a statement about the world is underpinned by ideological premisses; when our formulations seem to be simply descriptive statements about how things are (i.e. must be), or of what we can ‘take-for-granted’. Stuart Hall
Introduction This chapter deals with the racist ideologies that form the cement of that structural configuration we have referred to as the ‘new racism’. We have indicated that we do not agree with the school of thinking which views racism as ‘prejudice’, and ‘prejudice’ as the inevitable outcome of something which is mythically conceived of as ‘human nature’. Neither do we believe that racist ideas are the mere ‘relics’ of a distant imperial past, which are out of place in a ‘modern industrial society’. Racist ideologies, as we have argued in the preceding chapter, are an organic component of attempts to make sense of the present crisis. The fear that society is falling apart at the seams has prompted the elaboration of theories about race which turn on particular notions of culture. The ‘alien’ cultures of the blacks are seen as either the cause or else the most visible symptom of the destruction of the ‘British way of life’. Common-sense images of the ‘family’ play a crucial role here since the ‘family’ is seen as the fundamental unit of society; it reproduces culture. Just how deeply the rot is thought to have set in is revealed in the renewed concern with its functions and with the responsibilities and duties of parents. For this reason we preface discussion of common-sense racist imagery with an exploration of the more generalized common-sense images of the ‘family’. In the third section of this chapter, we go on to look in more detail at the specific images of the black ‘family’, where we have been concerned in particular to examine the ways in which the ‘problems’ that black people are thought to pose for white society and indeed for themselves, are situated within the organization of black households. Our concern to note what is specific about racism in the present, though, does not mean that we consider Britain’s imperialist past to be irrelevant. On the contrary, we feel that, among other things, it provides important clues as to how racist ideologies have come to be
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such a tenacious feature of the common-sense thinking of the white working (and other) class(es). The past is alive, even if transformed, in the present. Accordingly, in the second section of the chapter, we explore the historical ‘roots’ of racist ideologies. This has, hopefully, prevented us from falling into the kinds of reductionist argument which see these ideologies as a ploy perpetrated by the ruling power bloc in order to divide the working class. In our view the more developed racist ideologies are popular precisely because they succeed in reorganizing the common-sense racist ideologies of the white working class, around the themes of ‘the British nation’, ‘the British people’ and ‘British culture’ – themes which explicitly exclude black people. Certainly, this has had the effect of strengthening the mechanisms where by the working class is reproduced as a racially structured and divided working class,1 but to view this process simply in terms of the machinations of the ruling bloc is to be blind to popular politics and struggles. This is why we have decided to begin our discussions with common-sense racist and other ideas and to leave our discussion of how the more organized racist ideologies intersect common sense, until last. Finally, although we know that some of our readers will already be familiar with the way we are using the term ‘common sense’ here, others will not be. What follows immediately is a short detour explaining somewhat crudely how our understanding of the term differs from popular usage. We hope that those who are familiar with the arguments will bear with us.
Common sense The term ‘common sense’ is generally used to denote a down-to-earth ‘good sense’. It is thought to represent the distilled truths of centuries of practical experience; so much so that to say of an idea or practice that it is only common sense, is to appeal over the logic and argumentation of intellectuals to what all reasonable people know in their ‘heart of hearts’ to be right and proper. Such an appeal can act at one and the same time to foreclose any discussion about certain ideas and practices and to legitimate them. Common sense has not always occupied such a pre-eminent position, neither has it always been so easily equated with good sense. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci traced its development as a concept from a term particularly favoured by ‘the 17th and 18th century empiricist philosophers battling against theology, to its subsequent usage as a confirmation of accepted opinion rather than its subversion’.2 He characterized common sense thinking as ‘eclectic and unsystematic’ in the way in which it accumulated contradictory knowledges within itself. Common sense, he argued, is strangely composite: it contains elements from the Stone Age and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of the human race united the world over.3 The contradictory nature of common sense means that it should not be thought of as constituting a unified body of knowledge. It does not have a theory underlying or ‘hidden beneath’ it,4 but is perhaps best seen as a ‘storehouse of knowledges’ which has been gathered together, historically, through struggle.5 As a way of thinking and in its immediacy, common sense is appropriate to ‘the practical struggle of everyday life of the popular masses’. It is one of the contradictory outcomes of the division between mental and manual labour under capitalism. Yet, while common sense embodies the practical experience and solutions to the everyday problems encountered by
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the ‘popular masses’ throughout their history, ‘it is also shot through with elements and beliefs derived from earlier or other more developed ideologies which have sedimented into it’.6 The practical struggle of everyday life refers not simply to that ‘perennial struggle against nature’ but to class struggle – the struggle for the power to decide, in the present conjuncture, for example, where the social costs of economic recession are to be borne. The new restrictions on organized labour, the deliberate creation of unemployment and the other attempts by the present Government to reorganize the production process, are not policies that can be pursued willy-nilly. Consent for them has to be continually won. It is within this process of winning consent and in the decomposition and recomposition of alliances between the ruling bloc and ‘sub-altern classes’,7 by the granting of economic concessions to those classes (which do not however touch the essential interests of the ruling bloc), that the subordination of the ‘popular masses’ is ideologically and practically secured. The securing of ‘hegemony’ by the ruling bloc, though, is not a once and for all victory. The situation is rather a ‘negotiated truce’ between hegemonic cultures of the ruling bloc and the ‘corporate’ cultures of the subordinate classes;8 while the general ideas of the society are defined within the hegemonic cultures and form the horizon of thought about the world, this does not mean that the thought of the subordinate classes is wholly given over to ideas derived from elsewhere. Common sense also contains ‘more contextualised or situated judgements’ which are the product of their daily lives. The sometimes oppositional and always contradictory nature of this thought is captured quite neatly by Stuart Hall et al. when they point out that ‘it seems perfectly “logical” for some workers to agree that “the nation is paying itself too much” (general) but be only too willing to go on strike for higher wages (situated)’.9 The class struggle, as is indicated by these contradictions, is fought out on one level within common sense. In order that it may remain in the position of command, the ruling bloc needs to ensure that the ‘good sense’ of the subordinated classes – those situated judgements – does not become elaborated into a coherent, alternative and generalized set of ideas and practices. Of importance here is the continuing success of the ruling bloc in gaining acceptance for the equation between an essentialist view of human nature and the social relations generated historically under capitalism.10 This equation operates so as to ‘effectively discount the possibility of change and to “naturalise” the social order’,11 by obscuring the historical struggles that have produced the present configuration of social forces. Through the mechanism of this ‘naturalization process’ the social construction of, for example, gender roles is collapsed into the biological differences between the sexes. In common-sense terms, historically and culturally specific images of femininity and masculinity are presented as the ‘natural’ attributes of females and males. Whilst we should not forget that these dominant definitions are contested, we must also remember that they are embodied within the dominant institutional order and are inscribed within the social relations of everyday life. This ‘massive presence’ has the effect on the one hand of disciplining the subordinate classes in practice and on the other hand of giving these common-sense ideologies their ‘taken-forgranted’ character. Keep it in the family The family is a crucial site in the construction of common-sense ideologies and has a particular relevance to our concerns here. Within common sense, it is portrayed as the crucial site for the reproduction of those correct social mores, attitudes and behaviours that are thought to be essential to maintaining a ‘civilized’ society. The family is after all the place where ‘primary socialization’ takes place and where ‘culture’ is reproduced. It is in the
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domain of the family that children are supposed to learn ‘right from wrong’, the basic dos and don’ts that will inform their future behaviour. It is here also where girls first learn the duties and functions associated with womanhood and motherhood and where boys learn the responsibilities and privileges accruing to the ‘man of the house’. The family then is seen as the site in which self-discipline and self-control are ‘knocked into’ childrens’ heads and in which relations of authority and power are internalized. It is important to recognize that the common-sense image of the kind of family which is to fulfil these crucial tasks is that of the nuclear family, where father goes out to ‘work’ while mother remains at home to attend to her household ‘duties’ and rear their 2.2 children. Obviously then mother’s role is a vital one, since apart from looking to hubby’s ‘needs’ in order that he may be mentally and physically prepared to win their daily bread, she must also see to it that the ‘kids are brought up properly’. Within common sense women do not exist as women, they exist only as actual or potential wives and mothers. These are their ‘natural’ roles. And it is the ‘good homes’ provided by the ideal wife/mother that produces the well-adjusted children who will become the model citizens of tomorrow. The family here is seen as the ‘natural’ outcome of the biological differences between the sexes; men and women were quite literally ‘made for each other’. Monogamous marriage as encapsulated in the familiar movie image of primeval man and his mate, is similarly seen as arising out of these natural differences as indeed are the familial roles of mothering and fathering. This view of the family’s natural structure and role has a particular place in the assessment of both individual and group behaviour. Where the ‘normal’ family will generate the correct ‘moral social compulsions’ and ‘inner controls’, ‘criminal’ or ‘immoral’ behaviour will be seen as the outcome of an inadequate upbringing or even in some cases as the result of an abnormal family life.12 But of course these images are not naturally given. There is a history to their development which is obscured by the ‘naturalization process’. As Michèle Barrett has recently pointed out, people have not always thought about the family in this way. The particular form of household arrangement which the common-sense images refer to arose at a particular time and under specific circumstances and represents the ‘specific historical achievement of the bourgeoisie’. The fact that this view of family life is popularly accepted as the ‘natural form of household organization’ attests to the bourgeoisie’s success at securing at an ideolological level ‘a hegemonic definition of family life: as “naturally” based on close kinship, as properly organized through a male breadwinner with financially dependent wife and children, and as a haven of privacy beyond the public realm of commerce and industry’.13 The sedimentation of this piece of ideology into common sense has probably, as Barrett argues, been of benefit to capital by providing a ‘motivation for male wage labour and the “family wage” demand’. It has undoubtedly also provided further legitimation for male demands in the household. Nevertheless it seems to be reasonably clear that although working-class households may approximate the ideal arrangement, they are organized differently and according to their own needs. Where the working class adopted, as it has increasingly in the twentieth century, a similar form, it is much more as an adaptation to its own particular circumstances (the organisation of work patterns, the move towards consumerism, the lowering of the birth rate) rather than as a simple acceptance of the bourgeois model.14 As we have already argued, it is consistent with common-sense thinking for working women to subscribe to its image of the family and yet acknowledge that their households are not arranged in this way. It is likely, for example, that they go out to work though at the
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same time feel guilty about not being at home with the children. The idea that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’ has of course generated a particular concern for the fate of ‘latchkey’ children. At another level it has proved to be a fertile area of research within the sociology of education, yielding an abundant crop of theories about the inadequacies of working-class home life and culture, which seek to explain the ‘failure’ of working-class children at school.15 Here, the common-sense ‘logic’ which expects that failings in home background will be reproduced in the academic failures of the children is given a ‘scientific’ validity and once again it is the role of the mother that is thought to be particularly significant. The family, though, has also been a favoured site for the construction of conservative ideologies. In this instance the common-sense logics have been transformed and extended to include not just a concern with the connection between ‘falling standards’ within the family and the evident moral degeneration of the nation’s youth, but the more general ‘threat to law and order’ as well. During the battles between black and white youth and the police in July 1981, this vexed question was posed with an urgency and insistence that bordered on panic. Merseyside’s Chief Constable Kenneth Oxford appears to have set the ball rolling when he asked with seeming incredulity, What in the name of goodness are these young people doing on the streets indulging in this behaviour at that time of night? Is there no discipline that can be brought to bear on these young people? Are the parents not interested in the future of these young people?16 Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw, in Liverpool on a flying visit to survey the debris, concurred with these sentiments and stressed the ‘considerable responsibility on parents to keep their children off the streets in these difficult circumstances’.17 Fleet Street obviously felt that Oxford and Whitelaw had got to the ‘heart of the matter’. The floodgates opened. ‘And after the problem children looting in Liverpool’, the Daily Mail (8 July 1981) asked in outraged voice, ‘the question is DON’T THEIR PARENTS CARE?’ This was followed by a front-page story which dismissed unemployment and ‘racial tension’ as possible contributory factors, preferring a scenario in which questions ‘about our sanity in letting them become a nightmare’ could be raised. The improbable scenes of parents in the courtroom seeming ‘no more concerned than parents waiting to see the maths master [sic] on Speech Day’, and the ‘authentic’ voices of the working-class parents of ‘ten to 14’ year-olds (‘Well, you’ve got to let them have their play, haven’t you? There’s only the streets.’ ‘We were out ourselves, having a jar, so how the hell could we know what he was up to?’), form the telling backdrop of parental ‘irresponsibility’ to the reporter’s regurgitated homilies. Even ‘yobbism’, it appears, ‘has its fashions’, and ‘these past nights (in Toxteth) have been more about criminal greed’ than anything else.18 The following day amid the general clamour for Whitelaw to ‘READ THE RIOT ACT’ and following Prime Minister Thatcher’s televised broadcast reminding us that ‘a free society will only survive if we, its citizens, obey the law and teach our children to do so’,19 the Daily Express ran a special double-page feature. ‘Are the young really protesting’, it asked, ‘or are they sowing the first seeds of anarchy?’ The Express then produced a ‘cross-section of the people who might have some sort of answer’ – answers which, however, were all conveniently alike. We heard again of the ‘copy-cat’ violence; that ‘parents must take a firmer hand’; and were given a picture of the ‘sad’ top policeman who informed us that the police force would ‘never be the same again’. Jill Knight, Tory MP for Edgbaston and infamous amongst
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the black community for her proposal to ban West Indian house parties,20 put her finger on the pulse of this apparently generalized feeling. Good parents, she intoned, ‘teach discipline and restraint. Bad ones . . . find it easier to give a child what he [sic] wants rather than face the battle of wills.’21 ‘Bad parents’ produce ‘delinquent children’ who are responsible for the rising ‘crime rate’. As a solution, Knight proposes that parents be encouraged to relearn their ‘natural’ roles and in this connection she suggests that ‘the mothers of very young children’ be offered ‘tax incentives and bonus benefits’ in order to persuade them to stay at home. Similar proposals have been made before by the present Government’s ministers and would appear to be part of a ‘package’ of mooted state interventions in this area. The Guardian, for example, had informed us some time ago that, ‘The Government is considering amending the law to give the courts greater and clearer powers to bring home to parents their responsibility for their children’s behaviour’22 (our emphasis). The youth of today The events which followed this article must have made such considerations appear particularly relevant. The large-scale confrontations in Bristol, Brixton and then ‘nationwide’ indicated the heightened tempo of political struggle and in the process raised the anxieties about ‘youth’ to a new level of visibility. Ever since The Times coverage of the 1958 race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill, the media had shown a distinct tendency to ‘map’ social unrest involving young people – particularly where racial conflict was evident – ‘directly into hooliganism, teenage violence, lawlessness and anarchy’.23 This undoubtedly made it easier to locate the genesis of ‘mob violence’ within the ailing institution of the family, but still left a problem of how society was going to deal with the new situation. Whitelaw’s ‘short, sharp shock’ treatment was one way devised to contain this new breed of ‘young criminal’, though it was not designed to meet the challenge of large-scale disorder. Like the ‘gun-courts’ which followed the police offensive against the ‘passive’ Asian residents of Southall (1978), and the ‘stiffer sentences’ handed out to ‘muggers’ throughout the seventies, it was more an indication of the desire for revenge than a long-term solution. The police, on whom the main burden of maintaining ‘law and order’ fell, could in the case of the black communities continue and even intensify their already brutal and intensive ‘saturation policing’ methods, though not without harvesting the bitter fruits of their efforts.24 More recent events have shown that the contestation of such methods by black youth has reached a new pitch of purpose and effectiveness as they have learned the lessons of the past; while the extension of ‘tough policing’ to include growing sections of the white working-class poor will provoke a similar combative response. In the aftermath of July’s insurrections, the police may well get the full ‘riot gear’ for which they have been clamouring so long; but as they continue to remind us, this is likely to undermine even further their already tarnished helpful ‘British bobby’ image. In this context, the idea that bad ‘parenting’ causes ‘riots’ performs a number of different but related ideological tasks quite apart from its dubious explanatory power. It legitimates repressive ‘counter-measures’ being taken by the police, for as Chief Constable Oxford put it, ‘If the parents are not going to pick up their responsibility and apply a discipline, it means that I have got to do it to protect the community at large.’25 It also suggests possible solutions of which Jill Knight’s is only one. Here the anticipated beneficial effects of ‘strengthening the family’ square nicely with making the official unemployment statistics look a little healthier. On the other hand, badgering the parents to resume their ‘rightful duties’ would, if they comply, involve them also in the arduous task of policing their own
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offspring. From the other end, the ‘youthful’ end, we should consider whether the Government’s deliberations about ‘making punishment fit the parent’ are not indicative of an attempt to reconquer the semi-autonomous space which successive generations of youth have marked out as their own. The age at which parental responsibility ceases is certainly not made clear at this stage of the Government’s considerations, but the interventions that have already been made in this area (the raising of the school leaving age, the MSC’s youth opportunities programmes) are perhaps illustrative of a more general trend towards an increased supervision of young people. None of these shifts and proposals is without its attendant problems, however, as the rejection of YOPs by large sections of youth reveals. There are growing indications as well that women will not allow themselves to be quietly ‘sent back home’, while it is by no means obvious that working parents’ ideas of ‘discipline’ equate simply with those of Thatcher or Oxford. Not in front of the children It is precisely at this point that common-sense notions require to be, and often are, ruptured. The common-sense assumptions about ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’, particularly the age at which young people can be accepted as having ‘minds of their own’, suffused most accounts of the July upheavals. When Whitelaw asked, from the pages of the Daily Telegraph, ‘What were these children doing in riot [sic]?’, no one was expected to suggest that he might be begging the question – except perhaps for the ‘Trotskyites’, ‘feminist extremists’ and other assorted ‘left-wing loonies’ whom the Telegraph regularly singles out for gratuitous abuse. ‘Childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ tend to be viewed in our society as inflexible, universal categories, with the idea of ‘youth’ referring to that area of transition between these two apparently fixed states. However, while this area may be defined with the greatest clarity in law, it appears consistently hazy in practice. The varying ages at which young people may legitimately begin to work, vote, marry, or engage in sexual intercourse demonstrate this confusion and the difficulty of implementing these general rules is visible in ‘youth’s’ connotations of rebellion and conflict. The idea of ‘youth’, though, like that of ‘retirement’ is not simply a reference to some objective natural state of being, it is a social construction which has its origins in the capitalist division of labour. For this reason, workers and their employers have predictably tended to have very different ideas about the age at which it is desirable for young people to begin to sell their labour power in exchange for wages. In Britain this issue was at the centre of long and bitter struggles which have only been resolved relatively recently, and the campaign to restrict child labour is not easily separated from a whole complex of working struggles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It dovetails not just with the struggle for popular education but also with the battle for a shorter working day which was initially focused around the hours worked by children. Their health, and the safety hazards they were subject to, are exemplified in the plight of the chimney sweep’s climbing boys. Children were, it seems, considered cleaner and more efficient than the mechanical alternatives. We need to recognize then that the very rules which today prevent children from working before they are ‘old enough’, acknowledge at the same time their potential capability as workers. We must remember also that the processes of transition from girl to woman, boy to man, pocket money to wage packet, immaturity to maturity have changed, developed and appeared differently through history as a result of economic and political shifts. In the present period our view of child labour is restricted to the representations of Third World countries where pre-capitalist relations of production persist, or where children may learn a
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family trade under an older relative’s guidance.26 Indeed such images are explicitly defined against the ideas about how things ought to be in a ‘modern, civilized’ country like Britain and underpin the sense of moral outrage about parental irresponsibility. In our society, children are expected to act ‘like children’, that is, ‘childishly’. They are viewed as thoroughly dependent upon adults and in constant need of supervision and discipline. ‘Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.’ The image of youth, on the other hand, is that of a carefree, irresponsible state prior to the ravages of ‘adult’ concerns. It is a period in which the ‘child’ metamorphoses into the fully-fledged ‘adult’ and a time of life thought to be characterized by the existence of ‘highlycharged emotions’, psychological instability and idealistic naïveté. Precisely because it occurs within a period of transition, juvenile gaiety is held to be easily transformed into an equally ‘youthful’ violence and disregard of the adult world. This dual picture has been at the heart of ‘youth’ since the generation gap was first invented, and the threat of violence, the role of music in youth subcultures and the carefree, happy-go-lucky connotation invite comparison with the common-sense racist images of ‘the West Indian’.27 The distinction between ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ played an important part in the reporting of the July confrontations. The consternation of the Daily Mail’s reporter was directed towards the presence of ‘ten to 14’ year-olds in and around the skirmishes, rather than at the older ‘yobs’ from whom he evidently expected nothing else. The Daily Telegraph (and most other dailies) thoughtfully averaged out, at 14 years, the ages of the ‘24 juveniles’ arrested in Toxteth on 7 July, while Whitelaw demanded to know why children in the ‘age group 9 to 16’ were in the ‘riot’. Clearly if you were around 14 – or is it 16, or older? – you had no right being in a ‘riot area’, though by implication if you were older than this then presumably you did! Obviously, readers were meant to think that these children were ‘too young’ to understand. They were after all only children. To be sure there may well have been people at the scenes who were not fully aware of the significance of their actions or who were merely taking advantage of the situation; but it is by no means clear that the ‘children’ necessarily fell into this category. Nevertheless, the strategy of dwelling on the presence of the ‘children’ no doubt made it easier to ‘report’ on the events and to concentrate the mind on what was at issue; the apparently imminent collapse of our ‘free society’ under the onslaught of these ‘problem children’, ‘yobs’ and ‘criminals’. It also worked to add another layer of illegitimacy to violent resistance and pushed to one side any concerns, other than those focused on the state of the family, with the underlying social conditions which produced such a response.
Common-sense racist ideologies The linkages that are made between the ‘inadequate family’, ‘criminal youth’ and the ‘cultures of deprivation’ that are thought to sustain them, form an important element in the common-sense images of black people. In this case, however, the ideas combine with a common-sense racist imagery which encompasses all blacks. Where the common-sense images of the white family and white youth are naturalized through reference to the genderspecific ‘natural’ roles, attributes and characteristics of women and men, the images of black families and black youth are the outcome of a kind of double naturalization. Blacks are pathologized once via their association with the ‘cultures of deprivation’ of the decaying ‘inner cities’ and again as the bearers of specifically black cultures. This is not just a matter of ‘ethnocentric’ English commentators misunderstanding black cultures and misinterpreting black family life. The hegemonic definition of family life that has been secured by the
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bourgeoisie was not, we suspect, organized simply around themes that were ‘internal’ to England, but was like other notions about what it means to be English, ‘forged in relation to the superiority of the English over all other nations on the face of the globe’.28 The common-sense notion of the family, and its place within bourgeois ideology as the ‘cornerstone’ of all societies, may indeed be ‘ethnocentric’; more important though is the idea that the family is the ‘cornerstone of our (British) society’. We can get a hint of how this universal yet exclusive definition of family life may have been shaped by racist ideologies from, for example, what the eighteenth-century historian Edward Long had to say about the likely social effects of the continued importation of blacks. We must agree with those who declare, that the public good of this Kingdom requires that some restraint should be laid on the unnatural increase of blacks imported into it. . . . The lower class of women in England, are remarkably fond of the blacks, for reasons too brutal to mention; they would connect themselves with horses and asses if the laws permitted them. By these ladies they generally have numerous brood. Thus, in the course of a few generations more, the English blood will become so contaminated with this mixture, . . . as even to reach the middle, and then the higher orders of the people. . . . This is a venomous and dangerous ulcer, that threatens to disperse its malignancy far and wide, until every family catches infection from it.29 The threat to the English ‘race’ comes across clearly in this onerous passage. In Long’s view the ‘nature’ of female sexuality is such that they cannot be expected to contain themselves. They must be restrained, disciplined by law and no doubt by other unspoken means. One can detect as well the vestigial remains of racist ideas directed against the ‘lower class of women’ but despite his obvious disdain for them he still implicitly distinguishes them from black women. They can, indeed must, be ‘saved’; if not in order to ‘breed’ for the ‘race’, then to prevent its degeneration. Black ‘blood’ is the ‘infection’ which the ‘lasciviousness’ of these women ‘threatens to disperse’. It is not simply the ‘numerous broods’ that are the result of their liaison with the equally lascivious black man, that is the issue. The more important point for Long is that this ‘mixture’ will ‘contaminate’ the ‘race’ with the blood of blacks, who are ‘by nature inferior’. What is more, no family could escape infection, not even those of the ‘higher orders’. The ‘race’ would disappear and with it ‘our society’ and ‘civilisation as we have known it’. When dipping into the bowels of history like this it is tempting to view racist ideologies as having been constructed only by the Edward Longs of the past, solely for the purposes of rationalizing slavery, indenture and colonialism. Clearly there is something in this. Long and others did put forward arguments in support of these relations of production and domination, stating quite categorically that this was the ‘natural’ state of affairs. Long, for example, wrote of these historical relations in terms of the ‘three ranks of men [sic] (white, mulatto and black), dependent on each other, and rising in a proper climax of subordination, in which the whites hold the highest place’.30 But the racist ideas that are being drawn on and reworked here have a history which goes back beyond the period of English imperialism. Some of these ideas had been associated with earlier relations of production throughout Europe. Others were romanticized, mythical and in some cases ancient ideas associated with those ‘far off ’ places and peoples of Africa and Asia – tales of great riches; of powerful and exotic Queens and Emperors; tales of bizarre animals and even stranger customs. It would be a mammoth task to attempt to trace these ideas back to their historical ‘roots’ and then to reconstruct the subsequent histories of their gradual elaboration – paying attention to their
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complex articulations within specific historical social formulations – into the anti-black racist ideologies we are familiar with today. Needles to say, we have not attempted such a task here. What we have thought it useful to do though is to explore some aspects of this history, tracing particularly the gradual sedimentation of these ideas into common-sense thinking. In deepest Babylon In an article which explores the beginnings of capitalist development, Cedric Robinson31 raises some issues which are pertinent to the present discussion. He argues that there was a radical discontinuity between the bourgeoisies of the sixteenth century and the earlier ‘bourgeoisies’ associated with the merchant towns of the Middle Ages. The ‘new’ bourgeoisies were, he says, ‘implicated in structures, institutions and organisations which were substantively undeveloped in the Middle Ages’; and he criticizes the idea of ‘evolution’, suggested by the phrase ‘the rise of the middle class’, as being an illusory image ‘unsupported by [the] historical evidence’. In his view, one of the outcomes of the economic decline of Medieval Europe, ‘marked in a final and visible way by social disorders (peasant rebellions) much more profound than the territorial wars’, was the shifting of the focus of trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. The city, the point of departure for the earlier bourgeoisies and their networks of long-distance travel and productive organisation proved incapable of sustaining the economic recovery of those bourgeoisies. . . . The absolutist state, under the hegemony of Western European aristocracies, brought forth a new bourgeoisie.32 The nub of Robinson’s argument, as we see it, is that the economies within which capitalism begins to develop were not ‘national’ economies but rather political economies bounded by ‘absolutist’ states. While this structural feature cannot be said to have determined capitalist social relations, it did nevertheless shape them in profound ways, and ideologies associated with earlier feudal relations were preserved and transformed in the new situation. The transformations of ‘racist’ ideologies directed against the ‘lower orders’ are a case in point. Robinson recalls that In the Middle Ages and later the nobility, as a rule, considered themselves of better blood than the common people, whom they utterly despised. The peasants were supposed to be descended from Ham, who, for lack of filial piety, was known to have been condemned by Noah to slavery.33 These ideas, like the racist ideologies that were to be constructed out of them in a later period, were grounded in notions about the significance of difference. The European nobility were, quite often, not drawn from the same ‘ethnic’ and cultural groups as the ‘common people’. Robinson notes that the practice of drawing army volunteers ‘from the least “national”, most nondescript types, the dregs of the poorest classes’, was not something that was peculiar to the organization of standing armies. This is merely the ‘best documented form of a more generalised pattern of structural formation and social integration’, which in later periods would be extended to include the new industries, shipping and agriculture.34 Sections of the bourgeoisie and the emerging proletariat were drawn as much from other lands as from parts of the particular state, and as we know the slave labour force would be brought from ‘entirely different worlds’. Robinson maintains though that the significance of
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‘immigrant’ labour in the developing capitalist economies has remained largely unanalysed, partly because of the uncritical use of the ‘nation’ as a unit of analysis. However, the nation as such did not yet exist and the ideologies of the nation which were to attempt to bind the disparate groups and classes together, were not elaborated until after the capitalist mode of production had already begun to produce. Initially, at least, ‘The tendency of European civilisation through capitalism was thus not to homogenise but to differentiate – to exaggerate regional, subcultural, dialectical differences into “racial” ones.’35 The enslaving of Africans and Asians, the use of Asians as indentured labour, and the particular forms of racist ideologies that were constructed to rationalize such activities, were not peculiar to capitalism but rather would appear to have their ‘roots’ firmly embedded in earlier forms of organization of labour within European societies.36 Of course, Robinson’s account presents its own problems not least of which is his tendency to equate capitalism with trading activity. This has the effect of precluding any discussion of what is specific about capitalism, namely its ‘mode of production’, and in terms of his concerns prevents him from examining in similar detail the class struggles that created the necessary conditions for capitalism, by ‘freeing’ labour in order that relative surplus value could be extracted from the efforts of the labourer.37 Nevertheless, he does point to a potentially fruitful area of enquiry, which if made more specific to the English case should shed considerable light on the ‘peculiarities of the English’, and guard against the temptations of ‘economic reductionism’. Although Robinson’s arguments are suggestive of the longevity and depth of ideological racist mechanisms in European cultures, it seems clear that other elements have been worked in during later historical periods, to produce specifically ‘anti-black’ racist ideologies. Winthrop D. Jordan for example, argues that the literary evidence from the Medieval period and after shows a clearly delineated ‘colour symbolism’. ‘Black was an emotionally partisan color, the handmaid and symbol of baseness and evil, a sign of danger and repulsion.’38 The opposition between Black (evil) and White (good) was not merely a poetic device but, suggests Jordan, was actually an integral part of their view of themselves, though it is not clear in his account how far this was a common theme outside of those involved in the production and reproduction of the literate culture.39 Again from the journals that have been left by those literate people involved in the first excursions to the west coast of Africa, it was the fact of blackness that was the salient feature of Africans and it was the idea of black Africa that filtered back to and became established in England. It was an image though that carried with it decidedly negative overtones in an English setting. According to a pre-sixteenth-century version of the Oxford English Dictionary, to be ‘black’ was to be ‘Deeply stained with dirt; soiled, dirty, foul. . . . Having dark or deadly purposes, malignant, etc.’40 The thought that some of the world’s people could have ‘black’ skin was, apparently, disconcerting enough to generate a long and convoluted debate about the possible origins of such a condition. One writer in 1578 argued that ‘the most probable cause to my judgement is, that this blacknesse proceedeth of some naturall infection of the first inhabitants of that Countrey and so all the whole progenie of them descended, are still polluted with the same blot of infection’.41 The writer speculated that the cause of this original infection was Ham’s disobedience to his father Noah. This explanation, as we have seen, had been used in a slightly different way in earlier times. In the eighteenth century, the question was still being hotly debated. A certain John Atkins, writing in 1735, confessed to being ‘persuaded [that] the black and white race have, ab origine, sprung from different-coloured first parents’. He conceded though that his argument was ‘a little Heterodox’ at the time.42 This preoccupation with the colour of the African’s skin does not mean, of course, that
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racism is an unfortunate accident of history – the outcome of a meeting between people with a ‘black’ skin and a ‘fair’ skinned people with an already developed and largely negative body of ideas about blackness. The cap had to be made to fit before the Africans could wear it. Jordan notes that many travellers were well aware of the range of skin complexions, amongst Africans, which were later to be included under the single rubric of blackness; but perhaps more telling is the way in which the term ‘black’ comes to include Indians, Arabs and other non-white peoples. By the eighteenth century, according to Wylie Sypher, the British were in the ‘habit of calling yellow, brown, or red people “black” ’. The ‘noble African’ was not distinguished, even by anti-slavery writers, from the ‘noble Indian’.43 This practice of almost literally ‘tarring’ all non-whites with the same brush, is indicative of the fact that racist ideologies have not simply been organized around differences in skin ‘colour’. Of equal importance was the European view of the religious and cultural practices of those peoples. The early European travellers, explorers and intrepid entrepreneurs did not stumble upon the docile and ignorant ‘tribal’ peoples so beloved by film-makers. They were confronted instead by the powerful and complexly organized social, political and economic systems of the Hindu and Islamic states. If they wanted to do business, then they would have to pay a no doubt grudging respect to the existing structures of power.44 But this did not generate anything so ‘tolerant’ as a notion of ‘cultural relativity’; rather the religious, legal, political and cultural practices of these societies were viewed more or less uniformly as ‘heathen’. This characterization should be seen in the context of a Europe in which the Christian Church was even then busy trying to eradicate all alternative ‘pagan’ forms of worship. The fact that, in their view, such practices were the norm elsewhere, ‘proved’ to the Europeans and particularly the English that these people were ‘barbarians’ despite the apparent sophistication of their societies. God was definitely not on their side. The ‘Saracen infidels’ who had in an earlier period occupied the ‘Holy Land’ and defeated the English and other European powers in many a bloody ‘crusade’, had ensured that the Islamic religions would be familiar enough. In the case of Africa, however, even though the Islamic Empires of the west coast were an obvious political and military fact, it was the other indigenous nonIslamic, non-Christian religious practices that came to be associated most clearly with the continent. Indeed many commentators argued that what the Africans practised could not be regarded as religion at all.45 The dominant image of the African was that of the primitive ‘savage’ rather than the ‘heathen barbarian’. One outcome of this was the image of the ‘noble savage’, close to ‘nature’ and free of the cares and responsibilities thrust upon one by ‘civilization’. This image of innocence coexisted with its opposite, the ‘violent savage’; ungodly, depraved, subhuman, almost ‘like a wild animal’ – a being who is the antithesis of ‘civilization’. Indeed within Christian cosmology this being was transformed into a ‘devil’ whose black skin on the outside was merely a visible sign of a greater darkness within. As one eighteenth-century ‘scholar’ put it, [Africans] in colour so in condition are little other than Devils incarnate . . . the Devil . . . has infused prodigious Idolatry into their hearts, enough to relish his pallat and aggrandize their tortures when he gets power to fry their souls, as the raging sun has already scorcht their cole-black carcasses.46 This was not simply the ravings of a lone racist lunatic, or even of a small ‘lunatic fringe’. Jordan, for example, has argued that the linkages that we can see being made here, between evil blackness, ‘disobedience’ (to God) as a reason for the ‘curse’ of blackness, and ‘carnal
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copulation’ as evidence of a fall from grace, represented a projection onto the African of the bourgeoisie’s own anxieties about their role as entrepreneurs in the burgeoning capitalist developments that threatened to disrupt their social order. It was the case with English confrontation with Negroes then, that a society in a state of rapid flux, undergoing important changes in religious values, and comprised of men who were energetically on the make and acutely and often uncomfortably self-conscious of being so, came upon a people less technologically advanced, markedly different in appearance and culture. From the first, Englishmen tended to set Negroes over against themselves, to stress what they conceived to be radically contrasting qualities of color, religion, and style of life, as well as animality and a peculiarly potent sexuality.47 Doubtless there was pressure of this sort on the bourgeoisies, to ‘make sense’ of their exploitative activities, but it is equally clear that the ideas they drew on for these purposes did not spring unbidden into their heads. The cultures of the ruling bloc had long since become infused with racist images, but as we have already pointed out, what is not so clear is the extent to which these images were also shared by the subordinate classes. The kinds of detailed histories which have chronicled the shifts and transformations in the racist ideologies and practices of the ruling blocs have not been undertaken in the case of the subordinated classes, and it is perhaps for this reason that the ‘race riots’ in 1919, in which massed groups of whites attacked the black communities in Liverpool, Cardiff, London and elsewhere in Britain, appear as such ‘unique’ events at that point in British history.48 In fact though, given the context in which they occurred, such events were hardly surprising. The immediate post-war years were a period of intense insurrectionary and revolutionary struggles, with their different histories, but which must have gained some encouragement from the successful October 1917 revolution in the USSR. Certainly, several commentators in England at the time of the ‘race riots’ were quick to spot the connections. An editorial in the Liverpool Daily Post, for example, warned that Careful and common-sense handling of the colour disturbances is necessary if . . . [they are] . . . not to turn into an Imperial problem. There would be unfortunate possibilities of mischief if any idea gained ground in India and Africa that the attitudes of the [rioters] reflected British attitudes.49 This fear of rebellion in the colonies, however, had as much to do with the already visible signs of resistance to colonialism as it did with possible reactions to the riots. Bomb blasts in Egypt in March 1919 signalled the existence of an insurrectionary movement there, while in June of that year uprisings were reported in Kurdistan. In India throughout the summer, ‘constitutional agitation was followed by a massive strike (involving 200,000 workers) in the Bombay cotton mills’. ‘Riots’ were also reported in Belize, Trinidad, Guyana, and Sierra Leone, while further ‘disturbances’ took place in the Belgian Congo, Panama, and Costa Rica. This was also the year in which black people in South Africa began a campaign of ‘passive resistance’ to the Pass Laws and of course, closer to home, the continuing struggle for Irish independence was a constant reminder to the ruling bloc of the difficulties involved in maintaining control over the Empire. In Britain too, the natives were in restive mood. The temporary war ‘boom’, which had proved a lifeline to many British industries hitherto wallowing in the pre-war economic stagnation, was now at an end. The few blacks who had been lucky enough to find work in
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the munitions and allied industries during the war years were dismissed, and in this industries were aided and abetted by white workers who refused to work with blacks and trade unions which insisted that whites should be employed first. The Liverpool Courier, 11 June 1919, estimated that 120 black workers in Liverpool had been dismissed because of the refusal of white workers to work alongside them and reported the case of an Indian, who having served four years in the Navy, was fired with 24 hours notice from his job on a Mersey river-hopper and told, ‘you were quite efficient but there are 11,000 demobilised soldiers to be reinstated and they must have first chance’.50 Needless to say with British industry ‘contracting at an alarming rate’ these and many other demobbed soldiers were destined to remain unemployed for some considerable time. This did not stop the Labour Party though from supporting such racist practices, in Parliamentary debate. Apparently they were ‘guided in that direction by the amazing belief that the working class was necessarily white’.51 The response of whole sections of the white working class to economic and social crisis was not to assail the citadels of power, but armed with a decidedly racist interpretation of the causes, they rounded on people who were suffering even more than they were – the black communities in their midst. One element of the common-sense racist ideologies of this period, which was linked to the seemingly perennial argument that blacks ‘take white jobs’, was the idea that blacks had benefited by not taking part in the war. Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. Blacks were recruited in their thousands from the colonies, even though they were required to fight in specially created separate black units. At the same time the 2500 ‘black British’ volunteers were barred from combat duty and consigned to their ‘age-old role of being beasts of burden for their white masters’.52 Indeed in 1918 at Taranto in Italy, black soldiers of the West India Regiment ‘violently revolted against racist restrictions promulgated by the British War Office. . . . Eight battalions – some eight thousand troops – were disarmed; from fifty to sixty were arrested, charged with mutiny and sentenced.’53 The mutiny lasted several days during which time 180 black sergeants of the Ninth Battalion sent a petition to the Secretary of State for the Colonies protesting against military racist practices. But the dominant ideological element and the reason most often quoted as the ‘cause’ of the riots was white ‘resentment’ about relationships between white women and black men. The image of the African as sexuality personified is an ancient one and as both Walvin and Jordan note, has been current in English thought at least since the fifteenth century. Obviously for many of the early adventures and gold-hunters who were members of a culture within which the human body signified the temptations of lust, the sight of scantily clad Africans must have conjured up all of the Catholic horrors of sin and depravity, hell and damnation. In any case it seems to have been but a short step from these original visions to a view of Africans as akin to animals in terms of their sexuality. The very fact that they appeared to be unashamed of their nudity would merely have served to reinforce that view. We have already noted the equation between ‘blackness’ and ‘sin’ and have seen a sample of Edward Long’s views on miscege-nation. The racist ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while drawing on these earlier images of ‘blackness’ and the attendant threat to English nationhood, also broaden them out to include the threat to Empire and white superiority. One ‘serious publication’ in 1889 railed against the apparently common practice of exhibiting African men at Earl’s Court. The images here were of ‘raw, hulking and untamed man-animals’ who were being ‘corrupted by unseemly attention from white girls’.54 An article in a 1917 edition of Titbits, however went further. Some years ago we used to have large bodies of natives sent from Africa on military
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service or in some travelling show, and it was a revelation of horror and disgust to behold the manner in which English women would flock to see these men, whilst to watch them fawning upon these black creatures and fondling them and embracing them, as I have seen dozens of times, was a scandal and a disgrace to English womanhood. How then is it possible to maintain as the one stern creed in the policy of the Empire the eternal supremacy of the white over black?55 These images manage to convey, at one and the same time, the idea of the docility yet bestial sexuality of the ‘untamed man-animals’, but it is the seemingly rampant sexuality of English womanhood that threatens to undermine white manhood and the Empire at a stroke. For the white working class, on the other hand, even though such scribblings may have touched a raw nerve in their feelings, the ‘problem’ was of a different order. It was black men who were ‘rampant’. To be sure a white woman seen ‘stepping out’ with a black man was likely to be verbally and physically assaulted but it was black men who were fundamentally to blame. Not only were they ‘taking our jobs’, they were ‘stealing our women as well’. The newspapers and magazines may have reinforced public opinion, but they certainly did not manufacture it.56 The common-sense racist imagery of the white working class which we have illustrated here was shaped by their involvement in Britain’s imperialist expansion. Without wishing to prejudge the issue, there are a number of areas where we feel that further research might yield valuable information on this history. Certainly those periods in which race becomes a salient feature of British politics require further investigation. (We are thinking here, for example, of Elizabeth I’s 1596 communiqué telling her Lord Mayors to send ‘blacks forth of the Land’ and the repatriation of some blacks to Sierra Leone in 1787.) Similarly, the various histories of the working class that have been written, have been written largely without reference to black people. At the moment, then, it is not clear whether white workers merely colluded in racist practices at work, or whether they actively instigated them. As we have seen white workers were, by the beginning of this century, quite prepared to organize against blacks; but how were they implicated in the order of ‘The Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen’ of London (October 1731),57 which stated that ‘no Negroes shall be bound Apprentices to any Tradesman or Artificer of this City’? What was their reaction to this piece of news? The contradictory outcomes of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century struggles for popular education must also have a bearing here. Obviously, the mere fact that the expansion of ‘schooling’ was carried out under bourgeois rather than proletarian hegemony, would not of itself explain the prevalence of racist ideas amongst the working class. Nevertheless ‘schooling’ is an important site in which relations of dominance and subordination are reproduced,58 and as such would be one more place where racist ideologies coming ‘down from the top’ could become embedded in working-class common-sense. How many generations of little white children, for example, have been encouraged to pity or despise the ‘poor little black children’ at the other end of the Empire? And what would they have made of the ‘little black Sambo’ stories with which they were entertained? The ‘end of Empire’ Traces of the ideas we have been exploring are to be found today at the centre of the commonsense imagery of black peoples and black cultures. Some of these have almost certainly sedimented into common sense from the earlier, more developed racist ideologies; others
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have undoubtedly been created within imperialist social relations, by the subordinate classes themselves. Although such images, whatever their source, are cross-cut by other contradictory images about the essential equality of all people, for example, they nevertheless tend to pull popular opinion towards racist interpretations and understandings. Black cultures are still likely to be viewed as ‘primitive’ in comparison to British ‘civilization’, though this does not mean that black cultures are necessarily viewed as being the same. Asian cultures are at least thought to exhibit a degree of development and cohesion which is not generally associated with African cultures. Indeed, Africans are often thought not to have possessed cultures as such, that is not until the British came along and ‘civilized’ them. Within commonsense thinking Africans are viewed as having been in a state of childlike ‘innocence’, while Asians might at best be credited with having emerged into a state of adolescence. The relative ‘underdevelopment’ and poverty of many ‘Third World’ countries is of course not viewed as the outcome of centuries of imperialism and colonial domination, but rather is thought to be expressive of a natural state of affairs, in which blacks are seen as genetically and/or culturally inferior. The naturalization of the differences between these cultures and English culture helps to ‘explain’ why Asians adhere to ‘backward’ religions and ‘barbaric’ customs, it also helps to ‘explain’ the ‘superstitious’ and ‘primitive’ beliefs and customs of Africans. There is an important sense as well though, in which such ‘distinctions’ as are made are only the icing on top of the racist cake. Whether they are called blacks, browns, coloured, darkies, nig-nogs, or Pakis makes little real difference, since in one essential – their apparent alienness – they are ‘all the same’. In popular discourse they can, and frequently do, double for each other. The ‘slave-figure’, for example, ‘is by no means limited to films and programmes about slavery. Some “Injuns” and many Asians have come onto the screen in this disguise’.59 Racist ideologies in the post-war period, however, are not simply a rehash of old ideas. The two core images of colonial peoples, as children needing protection or as the equally immature ‘brutal savage’, gain new meanings and inflexions in the period of decolonization. Harold MacMillan, for example, referred to decolonization as ‘the development of the nations to which we already stand in the relationship of parents’ and maintained that ‘like all parents, we would like to see our children take after us.60 This was not a view that was confined to the ‘right’ of British politics; on the contrary, it held a position of central importance in the attitudes of both major political parties. Both parties were adamant in their opinion that their own political and cultural system was superior to all others, that they had a civilizing mission, and that what was British was best. This not only influenced their attitudes to the colonies but also their attitudes to independence. Challenges to British rule were interpreted as challenges to ‘civilization’. Independence or ‘self-government’ was something to be bestowed; it was presented as a gift that could only be given after a period of preparation, after the conditions had been created for a ‘stable’ and ‘responsible’ government. The whole debate about the ‘end of Empire’ was suffused with this general attitude of paternal superiority; the talk was all of ‘trusteeship’, ‘standards’, ‘conditions’, ‘building up’, ‘guidance’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘granting’, and is aptly summed up in a statement by Arthur Creech Jones, Labour Colonial Secretary in 1948: ‘The central purpose of British colonial policy is simple. It is to guide the colonial territories to responsible self-government.’61 This statement was to become a basis of future policy for both Labour and Tory politicians. But while Labour and Tory politicians shared certain common assumptions about independence, there were also real differences. Sections of the Tory Party went along with notions of the innate inferiority of colonial people in a way that Labour politicians, because of the democratic and egalitarian strands of Labour Party philosophy, did not.
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In the event, and despite the consensus in British politics about the necessity of a ‘long period of preparation’, the pace was set by the various nationalist movements within the colonies. The first batch of countries to gain self-government were the Asian colonies, India, Ceylon and Burma. With India there had indeed been a long period of preparation, although Churchill’s query about Powell – ‘who was that young madman who has been telling me how many divisions I will need to reconquer India’62 – illustrates how difficult it would have been for a war-torn Britain to hold onto India in the face of a strong and determined nationalist movement. John Strachey summed up the problems the British faced in Asia. If the British had been unyielding and had not gradually introduced parliamentary institutions into India during the last forty years of British rule, the nationalist movement must have organised itself in a revolutionary form; it must have become a nationalist junta, like Kuomintang in China, or more probably in contemporary conditions, a communist party.63 It was against this background that India was granted self-government, but shortly after Mountbatten – with ‘Divide and quit’ as the slogan – had ‘guided’ the country to independence, it erupted into violence. This must have provided additional fuel for those who were arguing that ‘self-government leads to anarchy’. Malaya though was the trickiest problem for Britain as she tried to extricate herself from the Asian portion of her Empire. Britain’s stake in Malaya’s lucrative rubber plantations clearly needed to be defended but Britain’s projected vision of independence was hotly contested by Malaya’s large and active Communist Party. In this struggle we begin to see the elaboration of a ‘communism equals barbarity’ image – the beginnings of the new cold/hot war psychology – which is underpinned by the wartime/post-war representations of the Japanese. The boost given to the African nationalist movements by Indian independence raised the tempo of independence struggles in the African colonies. The British looked on in shocked surprise as each successive nationalist movement, at some stage or another, became involved in violent confrontations with their erstwhile ‘masters’. These struggles, particularly in the areas of white settlement in Central and East Africa, gave rise in Britain to new images of savagery and barbarism, with the Mau Mau movement in Kenya being taken as the perfect example of what would happen when the ‘children finally left home’. As Fanon has pointed out, Mau Mau was characterized by a refusal to compromise with conciliatory blacks; hence most of its ‘victims’ were black, not white. However, Fanon maintained that it was this refusal to compromise which really terrified the Europeans.64 The Economist, 17 January 1953, put its finger on Britain’s anxiety when it argued that, ‘the whole incident underlines how baffling and intractable is the political future of colonies with several races, especially where the dominant race is in a tiny minority’. This statement should be viewed alongside the Tory arguments against the 1948 Nationalities Act, where in support of their kith and kin in Africa they argued that ‘Africans were Africans whether they are black or white’. We should also remember that in 1948, despite Britain’s labour shortages, West Indians were being discouraged from entering Britain by Tory and Labour MPs alike. In its issue of 21 March 1953 The Economist again returned to the theme of Mau Mau. Mr Blundell’s explanation is that the Kikuyu have been compelled to try to assimilate 2,000 years of Western ideas of progress in 50 years, and that their minds have suddenly rebelled. The Mau Mau, he feels, is sheer atavism. If he should be right, it points to a disturbing conclusion for other parts of Africa.
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The attitudes and language which surround the ‘Suez crisis’ are further illustration of the depth of British anxiety over Africa. Nasser is reputed to have said to the British, ‘May you choke to death on your fury’. Morrison responded to Nasser’s actions and speeches by claiming that ‘it is not a civilised . . . way of conducting business’. Sir Robert Boothby’s statement though was more revealing. The rabid nationalism which is now developing is reactionary and atavistic – a revolt against the demands of the modern world and of life itself . . . [Nasser’s language] is the language of Hitler and the rule of the jungle; and if we were to allow him to get away with it, it would be a most damaging blow to the whole conception of international law.65 Britain of course lost this particular battle and found herself isolated in the international community with the USA, the USSR, and the UN opposing her actions. The idea, though, that struggles for independence were threats to ‘civilization’ and the arguments by means of which struggles against domination could be represented as their opposite – namely as struggles to dominate in ‘Hitler-like’ fashion – lived on to find renewed expression in the 1960s and 1970s. As Hall puts it, Primitivism, savagery, guile and unreliability – all ‘just below the surface’ – can still be identified in the faces of black political leaders around the world, cunningly plotting the overthrow of ‘civilization’.66 Of course it was precisely in this moment of decolonization that, because of labour shortages in England, immigration from the colonies and ex-colonies gained momentum. The way that the notion of race differences is posed in the present period owes a great deal to attitudes engendered throughout Britain’s imperial past and to the way nationalist movements are portrayed in the period of decolonization. The imperial past in no way determines the shape of contemporary racism, but the attitudes of superior/inferior, responsible/ irresponsible, mother/children, barbarism/civilization, etc. provide a reserve of images upon which racists and racism can play. It helps explain the specific way racist ideas are formed in the British (as opposed to the American) context. The image held of those black people already settled in England in the late forties is of interest here. On 2 July 1949, for example, The Picture Post enquired ‘Is there a BRITISH COLOUR BAR?’ and found to their evident surprise that indeed there was. Probing the possible consequences of this, The Picture Post informed its readers that because all colonial coloured people, of whatsoever origin or class, have been brought up to think of Britain as ‘The Mother Country’, they would not only resent the ‘British colour bar’ but ‘a deep emotional illusion (would be) shattered for them as well’. With an argument that was later to become the bedrock upon which the future edifice of ‘race relations’ was constructed, the article went on to say that for West Indians in particular the disillusion would be most severe. This was because, the West Indians . . . no longer have the tribal associations and native language which can still provide some fundamental security for the disillusioned African. The West Indian disillusioned with Britain is deprived of all sense of security. He [sic] becomes, quite understandably, the most sensitive and neurotic member of the coloured community, and may be inclined to drift into bad ways.
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The article also raised fleetingly the spectre of communism which as we know is already being linked in this period to barbarism. What is interesting about this argument is not so much the view that ‘many coloured people look to Communism to release them from their social humiliation’, but that in the case of ‘coloured’ people, this represented a ‘strange emotional leap’. This image of black political activity as ‘emotional’ rather than considered clearly parallels the characterizations of the various nationalist movements. As we shall see, it is also a hint about the dominant way in which black struggles in Britain throughout the sixites and seventies were to be conceptualized. It seems necessary here to consider working-class attitudes to the ‘end of Empire’. We have argued that there is by this time a bundle of racist images about blacks which have sedimented into working-class common sense, or else have been generated by the working class in its experience of imperialism. Undoubtedly though, in situations of conflict there is a sharpening of the racist imagery. The recruitment of working-class people into the armies that fought the initial ‘imperial wars’, the two world wars and which went to put down the ‘restless natives’ in the period of decolonization, must have had effects upon their consciousness of the differences between themselves and their various enemies. Knowledge of the Empire was therefore necessarily partial and incomplete. George Orwell, for example, in England Your England, commented as part of a different argument that, ‘in the working class this hypocrisy takes the form of not knowing the Empire exists’.67 After World War II there was certainly a general disinterest in colonial affairs amongst a fairly large section of British society. Hugh Dalton remarked in 1947, at the time of Indian independence, ‘I don’t believe that one person in a hundred thousand in this country cares tuppence about [India] so long as British people are not being mauled about out there’.68 Dalton would appear to be speaking for most people here for according to the Government’s Social Survey Unit investigations, in 1948 51 per cent and in 1951 59 per cent of the population could not name a single British colony.69 As if to illustrate the point one reader of The Picture Post responded thus: ‘How does a negro come to have an old English name like Smith? Has he not adopted it for the sole purpose of gate crashing?’70 In post-war Britain, then, it seems that there was very little chance of creating strong feelings in favour of maintaining an Empire. While the jingoism of the Boer War may have shown itself again in the jingoism of World War I, the attitudes of World War II about the fight for ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, which were so important in generating nationalism in Asia and Africa, seem to lead to a general attitude in Britain of ‘give them their independence if that’s what they want’. This does not imply that the racism of the colonial period is not carried over into the new period. Certainly there is in this attitude the air of resignation of parents who know that their child is ‘too young’ to leave home but who compromise with a ‘well we won’t stand in your way, but don’t come running to us when things go wrong’. More generally, we need to separate out two strands of thought: on the one hand there is an agreement to end colonial rule, but on the other there is a residual set of attitudes accumulated during the imperial period around the idea of child/savage. These attitudes were reinforced in the period of decolonization. The period immediately after decolonization is also important, for it is at this moment that ‘not knowing the Empire exists’ becomes ‘official’. From the late fifties onwards the question of ‘race’ is viewed as an essentially ‘external’ problem, ‘foisted on English society from outside’. Hall has already identified this response to the ‘end of Empire’71 and the consequent refusal to acknowledge the imperial past. Politicians of the left and the right have persistently debated the question of ‘race’ as though the ‘problem’ began with the black immigration of the fifties and sixties. This ‘profound historical forgetfulness’ provides exactly
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that space within which the racist ideas from the imperial past can be elaborated anew. Their starting-point is with the idea that ‘they (the blacks) have no right to be here’ and since this is the case we need only allow ‘a few to come in’. Another letter in response to The Picture Post’s ‘colour bar’ article indicates the direction in which racist ideologies were to develop. After arguing that ‘colour mixing’ would be ‘distasteful to the average person’, the writer went on to offer a solution: I believe the best solution is to prevent any large number of coloured people taking up permanent residence in this country. Why import a social problem where one did not previously exist?72 Winds of change? Of course the images of the primitive, childlike savages who might ‘turn nasty’, at any moment and who in any case have no place in a ‘civilized’ society, are not the only images to have been carried over and reworked. Images of black sexuality are also still massively present. Think of the way, for example, in which the supposedly impartial TV cameras unerringly find their way to those ‘quaint’ and ‘exotic’ ceremonials where they can get their close-up of the naked bosoms of African women. Think as well about the ‘slave-girl’ in James Bond type movies, who even more than her white counterpart is rarely anything but sexually available. Of course this view of Africans and their Caribbean and American sisters and brothers has reached its fullest and most vicious expression in the USA, where the rape by slave owners of their female slaves has prompted the elaboration of the myth of African women as always ready and willing to satisfy the carnal longings of men. The attentive reader will have noticed that the arguments and feelings about miscegenation, discussed earlier, were aimed at preventing white women from sleeping with black men. Nothing was said about the rape of enslaved black women even though it was a regular occurrence in the colonies at that time. Indeed even such amicable relationships as were entered into freely by black women and white men were not thought worthy of a mention. One popular explanation for this (more popular in the USA than here) is that white men viewed white women as their property and that their image of their own masculinity was somehow bound up with this ‘ownership’. Since both black women and black men were quite literally his property and in any case considered inferior, he could use them as he wished – which of course he did. Black women were used sexually and, along with black men, as ‘beasts of burden’. In this scenario then, sexual advances towards white women by black men would be viewed as attempted theft of white mens’ ‘property’, masculinity and indeed, as we saw with Long, of their ‘race’. The argument is then extended to include the ‘free’ black man. Here, black men aware of the damage they can do to the ‘master’ have developed a peculiar lust for white womanhood. We would not wish to argue for or against this view at the present time but we note that in its extension to include the consciousness of black men it assumes too readily that black men have necessarily internalized the white man’s view of things. Indeed it suggests that the racists have got a point. Black men are after ‘white flesh’ after all! Another way of explaining the apoplexy generated by the thought of sexual relations between white women and black men, which would avoid some of the above pitfalls, would be to examine more closely ideas about the role of women as the reproducers of the ‘race’ and seventeenth/eighteenth-century beliefs about paternity. Long’s comments, for example, expressed a desire not just to control the sexuality of white women but also to control their fertility. In his view they should ‘breed for the race’, that is produce white children. White
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women who bear ‘mulatto’ children have ‘failed in their duty’ and have also ‘polluted’ the race by introducing into it ‘inferior blood’. But there is something else going on here as well. If we think for example of the plight of the European woman, in numerous Western movies, who is taken off by the ‘injuns’, it is clear that the woman herself is regarded as ‘polluted’ by sexual contact with them. She will never be ‘the same again’ and in the eyes of the cowboys who have so gallantly ‘rescued’ her she is viewed with evident distaste. Such a woman is regarded as ‘worse than a whore’ and therefore, no longer sexually available. Furthermore, she is certainly not of the right ‘stock’ any longer, for breeding fine upstanding members of the ‘race’. Her whole child-bearing potential then is ‘lost’ to it. The rape by the slave master of his female slaves though is interpreted in quite a different manner. While any offspring will still be considered ‘half-breeds’, ‘half-castes’, ‘mulattos’ or whatever, they were never, in any case, potential members of ‘the race’, since their mother was black. Further no shame of ‘pollution’ attaches itself to the white man in the way that it does to the white woman, presumably because he can ‘cleanse’ himself in a way that a woman – in the passive ‘feminine’ position as a ‘receptacle’ – cannot. Indeed there is a sense in which the white man can congratulate himself on introducing some ‘superior blood’ into the ‘inferior’ black race. The experience of John Griffin, a white reporter who, in the early sixties, travelled through the southern USA posing as a black man, serves to illustrate the point: He told me how all of the white men in the region craved coloured girls. He said he hired a lot of them both for housework and in his business. ‘And I guarantee you, I’ve had it in every one of them before they got on the payroll.’ . . . ‘What do you think of that?’ ‘Surely some refuse?’ I suggested cautiously. ‘Not if they want to eat – or feed their kids,’ he snorted, ‘If they don’t put out, they don’t get the job. . . . We figure we’re doing you people a favour to get some white blood in your kids.’73 We have not as yet worked these ideas through fully and our comments on this matter are provisional. Nevertheless, we do feel justified in suggesting that these ideas, or ideas like them, are a part of today’s common-sense racist beliefs. As Folarin Shyllon commented, ‘in Britain today, the question is never: Would you allow your son to marry a black girl? It is always: Would you allow your daughter to marry a black man?’74 Although there is a definite connection between the elaboration of these ideas and the enslaving of African people, this does not mean that these are applicable only to people of African descent. On the contrary they are applied to all black people regardless of their origins. To be sure, there are differences between the common-sense views of African and Asian sexuality; for example, Asian humanity is not called into question in the same way. The common-sense view of the sexuality of Asian women is at first sight contradictory: it would be strange if no associations were made between Asian women and the idea of the ‘exotic’ sexual practices contained in such works as the Kama Sutra, but this appears to cut across the deeply held view of the ‘passive’ Asian woman walking three steps behind her domineering and sometimes brutal ‘lord and master’. Here the idea of Asian women as having ‘secret knowledge’ about sex is combined with a suspicion that she is not sexually available to men other than her husband. Her very ‘passivity’ is thought to be a reflection of her upbringing, geared to her learning to accommodate and please her future husband. This notion, working in conjunction with the absolute power of the male to elicit her compliance and mediated through the image of the
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lithe and sinewy gyrations of the ‘belly-dancer’, works so as to produce a composite image of a smouldering sexuality – ‘full of Eastern promise’ – waiting only to be fanned into flames by the most potent masculinity. Of course in the ‘real world’ such power does not reside exclusively with the Asian male and in later chapters we will be considering the ways in which these views of black women generally as ‘erotica’, of Asian women as passive and of Afro-Caribbean women as well suited to laborious tasks, structure their experience of work in England at the present time.75 We will content ourselves for the moment with a brief look at some of the other commonsense racist images which are important today in the elaboration of racist ideologies. We mentioned earlier that Asian humanity is not questioned in the same way as is the humanity of Africans and their descendants. Yet of the black communities settled in England it is Asians who tend to be viewed as the most alien. Doubtless this has something to do with the idea that Afro-Caribbean people have been ‘given’ English culture, even if their ‘innate inferiority’ has caused them to debase it. The full weight of Asian ‘alienness’, though, comes out in ideas about food – not just in the way in which food is prepared and cooked but also what is (thought to be) eaten. The stories from white neighbours about the ‘constant smell of curry’ emanating from next door are well known, as is the peculiarly British distaste for the smell of garlic. But it is the association in the popular mind between the Indian (and Chinese) restaurants and the disappearance of the neighbourhood cats that prompts particular feelings of horror. Language, however, is a key element in lending coherence to the various other images. While it has taken the English a long time to recognize that Afro-Caribbeans speak a different language and not merely a form of ‘bad English’, no such tardiness was possible with regard to the Asian communities. The important point is not that Asians speak languages that are dissimilar to English, but the fact that this is perceived as evidence of inferiority. Common sense tends to make a leap from the recognition that English is not their first language to the feeling that they are incapable of speaking English. This is brought out quite clearly in the popular practice of speaking to ‘foreigners’ in a way that suggests that they are children or imbeciles or both; as though speaking to them in pidgin English somehow aids understanding! Indeed the stand-up comic only has to affect an Asian or ‘West Indian’ accent to raise a laugh, and of course language in particular and ‘race’ in general have become popular themes in situation comedies. It is frequently argued that these jokes normalize the presence of blacks in British society, and that they demonstrate a certain degree of acceptance. However, it is difficult to know how racist (and sexist) jokes can be funny unless you share the underlying assumptions. As Hall has already argued, the same old categories of racially-defined characteristics and qualities, and the same relations of superior and inferior, provide the pivots on which the jokes actually turn, the tension-points which move and motivate the situations in situation comedies. The comic register in which they are set, however, protects and defends viewers from acknowledging their incipient racism. It creates disavowal.76 We should also consider the way in which the successful presence of black people in sport and entertainment is handled. Within common sense, such roles are only fitting for blacks, since these roles provide an outlet for the expression of their ‘natural’ rhythmic and athletic qualities. A study of the representations of black sports personalities would be most revealing. Consider for example Frank McGhee’s description of Thomas Hearns (former WBA welterweight champion). After giving us the comments of Hearns’s physician that Hearns
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‘knows only how to fight’ and ‘he is a physical freak’, McGhee goes on to tell us that ‘he has enormously muscled arms, so long he could almost scratch his knees without bending’77 (our emphasis). We have little doubt that McGhee would disavow any racist intent here but the question remains of why is it this description rather than another which springs into his mind? This is not an isolated incident; in the same edition of the Daily Mirror, we are treated to the spectacle of (Vivian) ‘Richards the Killer’ . . . ‘assaulting Warwickshire’s attack’. It is not enough to argue that these writers do not have racist intentions; as Hall says in relation to the ‘joke tellers’, the circumstances in which such descriptions are produced and read are ‘conditions of continuing racism’ over which the writers have little control.
Common sense and the black family Before we go on to discuss in more detail the elaboration of neo-conservative racist ideologies during the seventies, it seems appropriate to examine some of the more novel features of common-sense imagery about blacks and particularly how they have been represented in the media in this period. We aim to emphasize the way in which black cultures and more specifically black households have been constructed as ‘problem categories’ posing difficulties for themselves and for society at large. It is especially important to recall the ‘collective amnesia’ of the British people which underpins current thinking about ‘race’ and which supports the notion that the problems have been ‘imported’ by blacks themselves. The Sun in a feature article about ‘Black Britain’, for example, situated the problems in this way: Many of the black people who have chosen to build their future in Britain accept bad housing, poor education, unemployment and insults. They regard it as the price they pay for coming here. Some of them are even grateful. But young blacks are not. They did not choose to be born in Britain.78 The theme of ‘youth’ which we discussed earlier is clearly one reason for the present position of the ‘family’ as a crucial site of the ‘class struggle in ideology’, but if ‘youth-in-general’ have raised anxieties about the strength of the social fabric, black youth – particularly of the ‘alienated’ kind – have been seen as specifically prone to indulge in crime, violence and other subversive activities. Such common-sense racist ideologies that have been elaborated to ‘explain’ the struggles of young blacks, in school and elsewhere, are a clear instance of where common-sense images of blacks are secured via that double naturalization process we spoke of earlier. First they are ‘young’, with all that that means, but second they are young blacks, ensnared in the ‘deprivations’ of their home/cultural background. To begin with there is the ‘fact’ that black families tend to be larger than the average white family. This is considered the ‘natural’ consequence of the Afro-Caribbean’s sexuality and the power that Asian men wield over Asian women. There is the further notion here that neither group bothers to use contraception, either because ‘they don’t understand’ or because religious strictures and taboos forbid such practices.79 This view is summed up in that popular slogan, ‘they breed like rabbits!’ For the Asian communities, this is thought to be compounded by their extended family/kinship system – ‘overcrowding’ is seen as a direct product of their predilection for being together. The real problem of poor and inadequate housing – a consequence of racist practices – is therefore something they have brought on themselves. It is not these practices in themselves that are thought to constitute the main problem for
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British society, but the fact that such practices are being continued ‘here in Britain’. This view turns in part on the notion that British culture is inherently superior to all others. Thus the ‘meeting’ of the cultures on British soil is felt to put undue ‘pressure on the [black] family’ and to undermine their ‘traditional ways’. The children are viewed as the agents of change in this process. They go to school with white English children, imbibe certain aspects of British culture and are said to be influenced by the greater ‘freedom’ of their white peers. Naturally enough, so the argument runs, they would like to enjoy such ‘freedoms’ as well, but this introduces tensions and stress into their home life and may even bring them into conflict with their ‘traditionalist’ parents. Asian parents are thought to face ‘the gentle revolt of their children’ against Asian cultural practices. Arranged marriages are presented as a specific site of conflict, particularly for Asian girls who apparently yearn to adopt the ‘permissive’ customs of the English. They ‘want to uncover their legs and wed boys they choose, not partners arranged for them by their families’.80 The ‘freedom’ to marry the partner of your choice is of course one of those cherished British freedoms which marks out British culture as ‘superior’. From this point of view, the institution of arranged marriage, in which it is assumed that the girl has no say in who she marries, is indicative of the inherent ‘barbarity’ of Asian cultures. At the same time, it fits in with the common-sense image of the Asian household as being hierarchically organized with a despotic male at the apex, who rigidly circumscribes the activities of the children – especially the females. Numerous TV documentaries and newspaper articles have taken up the theme of the ‘inevitable casualties’ produced by the conflict between tyrannical Asian parents with archaic ideas and their Anglicized offspring who ‘only want to do what any normal British girl does’. Thanks partly but not solely to their efforts, the girl who is hustled into a premature arranged marriage with someone ‘twice her age’ whom she had never met; the girl who commits suicide because her parents wouldn’t allow her to marry ‘the boy she loved’; and the girl who is bundled back to the Asian subcontinent at the first sign that she is ‘going British’, are all commonplace images of the plight of Asian girls. Such imagery adds further layers of respectability to Whitelaw’s claim to ‘have had many letters’ and serves to underpin the view that, on the Asian fiancé issue, the present Government is on the side of the girls against their religious and tyrannical parents. It also assumes that white English girls have complete freedom of choice in whom they marry, conveniently glossing over possible class-based determinations and even the frequently obstructive role of the parents. Similarly, the complex negotiations involved in arranging a marriage and the differing ways different communities and parents have of going about it, remain unrecognized within the commonsense view. For Asian girls, the amount of choice they have over who they marry varies a lot from one Asian community to another, and from one Asian family to another. Some parents are more strict than others, just like some White English parents exercise more control over their children than others.81 We should emphasize at this point that these common-sense notions, like common-sense ideologies generally, are not just carried around in peoples’ heads. They are embedded within actual material practices. In schools, for example, Asian girls are often ‘automatically excluded from whole areas of extra curricular activities’ on the grounds that ‘their parents will object to their daughters mixing with boys’. In a similar way careers advice for Asian girls is frequently structured around notions about the ways in which their future lives will be circumscribed. They are not, for example, advised about further education because it is
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assumed that their parents have something else – namely arranged marriage – in mind for them.82 In the case of Afro-Caribbean families, the problem is posed in a similar but slightly different way and revolves around the way in which the parents ‘discipline’ their children. Apparently ‘West Indian families . . . have to adapt to permissiveness in Britain. Traditionally West Indian parents are much stricter with their children.’83 Here, the tensions arise not because these children want to ‘adopt Western dress’ and marriage customs, but because they want to be allowed to stay out late like ‘the white children they meet’. Furthermore, they ‘fail’ at school because they are unused to the ‘permissive’ regime of British schools which supposedly runs counter to the strict discipline of the home. Predictably, in this view, the children react violently. They ‘throw off ’ the ‘strict traditional upbringing’ and ‘run wild’. We are not surprised then when the Sun tells us that Afro-Caribbean parents want ‘stricter discipline for their children in school and at home’. The Sun’s case is strengthened by the way it uses the remarks of blacks themselves – especially community leaders – to state the case. The idea that Afro-Caribbean youth are throwing off their ‘strict traditional upbringing’ is attributed to Courtney Laws as is the argument that ‘they do not respect the black leadership. We cannot control them’.84 We should reiterate here a point made earlier in connection with equating working-class ideas of discipline too straightforwardly with the views of the police or Tory Party politicians. Statements made by black people in the context of black struggles against racism in schools and outside do not necessarily have the same meanings as they do in the context of bourgeois ideology.85 Of course we are not saying that Laws doesn’t mean what he says; rather we are arguing that the context in which the Sun chooses to place his quote alters its meaning. Perhaps we can illustrate this point better by looking in more detail at what happened when another ‘community leader’ attempted to talk through the media about these issues. Barbados-born Mr Jeff Crawford, senior community relations officer for Haringey, was reported in the Daily Express (22 April 1981) as telling ‘his people’ to ‘get your kids under control’. Crawford’s remarks, repeated that night on BBC’s Nationwide, were in response to the confrontation the previous Bank Holiday Monday night between black youths and the police at Finsbury Park. He was keen to distinguish between the earlier events in Brixton and what he called the ‘mindless violence’, perpetrated by ‘a gang of lawless black youths just off their heads’, on his patch. Whatever the validity of such a distinction, it is clear that his comments about the AfroCaribbean family’s contribution to those events was meant to apply more generally. In an apparently ‘angry’ manner he told the Express reporter that: ‘When the West Indians first came to Britain social workers and some left wingers described black parents as too Victorian, too disciplinarian and as a result of this they lost confidence and lost the battle for their children’s minds.’ These remarks were meant to point to the common-sense racist assumptions which lay behind social work and other institutional practices, but it would appear that the Express was more intrigued by the link that he established between lack of familial control and gangs of ‘lawless black youths’. Crawford’s argument that the racist criticisms and practices of social workers, ‘some left wingers’ and teachers had undermined black parental authority, was eclipsed behind the more familiar common-sense image of the clash between two cultures. It was this ‘understanding’ (whereby the authority of black parents is undermined by contact with the more permissive English cultural mores, and where the resulting mix produces the preternatural black youth bent on violence) which the Express emphasized. Using Crawford’s own words the Express headlined the story in order to reveal the threat: ‘These social workers and teachers helped to make a handful of black Frankensteins and now white society is afraid of them.’
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Crawford’s intervention and the handling of it by the Daily Express would appear to furnish both an interesting case study on how not to present an anti-racist argument and an indication that common sense can be made to cut both ways. In his account, lack of black parental authority is the result of earlier racist interventions by social workers etc., and this at least provides a counter to the argument that Afro-Caribbean children ‘run wild’ because their minds can’t cope with the ‘permissive’ regime of British schools. However, it is precisely because Crawford’s arguments rest upon common-sense assumptions about the family and the link between the family and the activities of ‘youth’, that the Express is able to appropriate his anti-racist remarks for its own racist purposes. Of course the fact that his remarks suggest that racism is the outcome of individual actions also fits in nicely with the Express’s own views on the harm caused by ‘do-gooders’ and ‘left-wing agitators’. Much of the concern about Afro-Caribbean ‘youth’ is in reality a concern about the activities of the male children. The Sun’s middle-page feature, which we examined above, does however make Afro-Caribbean ‘girls’ visible even if in this case visibility is not to their benefit. Predictably the Sun chose to focus upon the incidence of unmarried mothers within the Afro-Caribbean community. This image may be thought to contradict the image of a ‘strict traditional upbringing’ and therefore undermine the common-sense characterization of the Afro-Caribbean family. The Sun though manages to resolve these contradictions by reference to common-sense images of black women’s sexuality: the parents remain unconcerned when their daughters become pregnant because ‘traditionally a West Indian girl proved her womanhood in this way’. Given the centrality of the mother in commonsense images of the family, it is not difficult to see how this image can act as another means of ‘explaining’ the behaviour of young Afro-Caribbeans. Not only does the absence of a ‘father-figure’ suggest a lack of discipline in the home but, more importantly, AfroCaribbean mothers will presumably pass on such ‘cultural traditions’ to their offspring. Similarly, the fact that many Afro-Caribbean mothers have to go out to work in order for their families to survive, easily gets translated into the argument that they are neglecting their children. The resultant ‘maternal deprivation’ then ‘explains’ the ‘violence’ of the children. The common-sense image of the Asian mother is similar. She is portrayed as isolated from the beneficial effects of English culture because her movements are circumscribed by custom, and she therefore invariably fails to learn English. She is viewed as particularly prone to superstitious beliefs and, being more traditional than the other members of her family, is also more ‘neurotic’ in her new urban setting. We will discuss this imagery in more detail in Chapter 7, but it is is worth nothing here how the Asian mother is presented within such imagery as the main barrier to the integration of her children into the ‘wider-British society’. Finally, we ought to consider the connections that are continually drawn between blacks and crime. Belated recognition of the scale of Fascist violence and a reluctance to concede the extent of police malpractice, when it comes to policing the blacks, form part of the context in which black resistance comes to be viewed as criminal activity. As one reporter said of black peoples’ combative response to Fascist activity in their communities, ‘stonethrowing Asians and West Indians hardly improve race relations’ and in any case, he adds, ‘stone-throwing’ is quite simply ‘illegal’ regardless of the circumstances.86 In much the same way as the earlier nationalist movements were viewed as the aggressors attacking ‘civilization’, black people here are viewed as the aggressors standing in the way of an improvement in ‘race relations’ by ‘over-reacting’ to the ‘power crazed Nazis’ who parade through their communities. They are expected, of course, to leave their protection to the police! The idea that blacks are ‘too sensitive’ and walk around with a ‘chip on their shoulder’ is
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popular enough. Underlying it is the view of blacks as inherently ‘emotional’ and liable to react with violence at the slightest provocation. As we have seen the Afro-Caribbean family is viewed as being unable to contain the wilder impulses of its children, particularly since their parents’ efforts at control have been undermined by British permissiveness. In this view the fact that Afro-Caribbeans are unused to such laxity produces children who are undisciplined, with little respect for authority and particularly prone to extreme violent emotions and behaviour. This, and the popular image created by the media of these youths as ‘muggers’, serves to legitimate police repression of the Afro-Caribbean community in the public mind. Asian crime is seen as being much more internal to the community, either in the form of violence in the family – a product of the male’s tyrannical power – or else in the harbouring of ‘illegal immigrants’ within the extended family/kinship network. All Asians are therefore ‘suspect’, a view which sanctions ‘fishing raids’ into their communities and places of work. Asians are viewed as the ‘passive’ members of the black communities but young Asians, particularly the boys, are thought to be just as prone to violent outbursts as their Afro-Caribbean ‘cousins’. Thus the contradictions between the view that Asians are ‘passive’, yet also, like all ‘natives’, inherently violent, and the knowledge that they are more than prepared to defend themselves and their communities against Fascists and the police alike, is partially resolved in common-sense thinking in two ways: first, by the notion that Asians keep themselves and their ‘violence’ to themselves, and second, by attributing any ‘violence’ outside of their communities to ‘young hotheads’, thereby mapping it into the more general problem of ‘youth’. The common-sense images and ideas about ‘blacks’, ‘youth’ and ‘the family’ that we have been examining and attempting to draw together do not, of course, exist in anything like so coherent a fashion in ‘reality’. Common sense is unsystematized, inconsistent and contradictory. Although sections of the media do take up these themes, rework them and re-present them to ‘the public’, this is a selective and ‘patchy’ process and serves more to ‘revamp’ and ‘up-date’ common sense than to organize it. Such activities provide common-sense legitimations for repressive measures directed against blacks (the ‘mugging’ scare for example) and the ‘recycling’ of common sense in which they are involved provides fertile terrain for the cultivation of more ‘theoretical’ racist ideologies that seek to bring coherence to common sense. In the final section of this chapter we trace the contours of such ideologies in the present conjuncture, pointing as we go to the connections with and intersections of common sense.
Racist ideologies This section will not deal with the racist ideologies of the organized Fascist movements. This is not because we believe that they are a ‘lunatic fringe’ with little support in the country. On the contrary, their ideas on ‘race’ do have a popular appeal and they have succeeded to some extent in defining the terms of the debate about immigration and ‘race relations’. However, their strategy on race is an alternative to rather than an extension of the bipartisan strategy of the state. For the time being, popular racist opinion has been appeased by the speed and severity of the state’s initiatives on the ‘race issue’, which have been carried through regardless of who was ‘in power’. Furthermore the Conservative Party itself has provided an organized forum for the expression of racist ideas. Indeed in recent years, and as an organic component of its strategy for dealing with crisis conditions, it has provided the platform for the elaboration of a racist ideology which is probably more credible than the more ‘instrumental’ and conspiratorial Fascist alternative.87 It is this ideology that we aim to examine here.
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There is a link between the development of this racist ideology and the post-war forgetfulness which obscured the historical connections between England and her colonial Empire. As Hall puts it, ‘The very definition of “what it is to be British” – the centrepiece of that culture now to be preserved from racial dilution – has been articulated around this absent/ present centre.’88 At another level the impetus for its elaboration can be found at the point where the Butler/Gaitskell consensus cracks to reveal not ‘one nation’ working together so as to expand the ‘economic resource-pie’, with everyone getting a larger share, but an increasing chasm between rich and poor.89 Martin Barker explains: The Tory party has had to sell its ideology of limitless human wants and the need for economic growth. But when the crucial prop of that One Nation stance was kicked away by recession, the liberal Tory ideology went into crisis.90 A question of culture The form of Conservatism that emerged out of this crisis contains, as one leading element, a particular view of ‘race’ which is articulated around the differences between English culture and the cultures of black people. Its novelty lies not so much in the ‘newness’ of the ideas as in where the emphasis is placed. The current crop of racist ideologues are concerned to distance themselves from any notions that blacks might be inferior, though they do not always find this easy, as we shall see. Alfred Sherman, for example, who as the Daily Telegraph explains, ‘sees mass immigration as a symptom of the national death wish’, argues that even while ‘at considerable cost’ Britain was trying to cater for her own ‘disadvantaged’, It simultaneously imports masses of poor, unskilled, uneducated, primitive and underurbanised people into the stress areas of this country where they are bound to compete with the existing urban poor for scarce resources.91 (Our emphasis) A little later he tells us that ‘immigration was bound to import problems’92 (our emphasis). Sherman is one of the more hard-nosed of the ideologues and his disdain for black people shows through. What is more important, however, is the suggestion that the blacks brought the ‘problems’ with them. His argument is not that they came into the most rundown areas and worst-paid jobs, but that because of their cultures they are not able to surmount these initial ‘difficulties’. Indeed their cultural practices actually generate more problems. We can understand this shift in emphasis better if we go back to one of Enoch Powell’s early speeches. As far as he was concerned, the problem was neither the alleged ‘harassment’ of whites by their black neighbours – of which he gave vivid examples – nor the high black birth-rate. These things were merely symptomatic. The real problem was the growth within English society of alien communities with alien cultures. To suppose that the habits of the mass of immigrants, living in their own communities, speaking their own languages and maintaining their native customs, will change appreciably in the next two or three decades is a supposition so grotesque that only those could make it who are determined not to admit what they know to be or not to see what they fear.93
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According to Powell, the ‘rivers of blood’ will flow not because the immigrants are black; not because British society is racist; but because however ‘tolerant’ the British might be, they can only ‘digest’ so much alienness. This rather cannibalistic metaphor is instructive for (at least) two reasons. First, it fits in well with the assumptions of assimilation. If blacks could be ‘digested’ then they would disappear into the mainstream of British society. They would no longer be visible or different, and therefore no longer a problem. On the other hand there is also the inference – given the context in which such language crops up – that this alien food will not agree with a British stomach used to less ‘exotic’ fare. Consequently we can expect the violent ejection; the ‘vomiting’ up and out of ‘all those ethnic lumps of Empire which Mother England agreed to bring home and swallow’.94 This idea, that the black cultures are not just different but so very foreign as to cause much discomfort in ‘mother England’s’ digestive tract, is one point at which this racist ideology intersects with common-sense racism. Blacks are alien, aren’t they? and because they are alien it is simply common sense that Britain can only assimilate a small number. We said earlier that the current racist ideologues are concerned to distance themselves from notions of racial superiority, which, though implied, are seldom explicit in their arguments. At one level this is because such talk is not necessary. Once the argument has been couched in terms of ‘alien cultures’, common-sense racism can be relied upon to provide the missing inflexions. At the more ‘abstract’ level, however, the ideology is not at all secure at this point. It needs other ingredients. Ivor Stanbrook MP gives us a clue: Let there be no beating about the bush. The average coloured immigrant has a different culture, a different religion and a different language. This is what creates the problem. It is not just because of race.95 (Our emphasis) Most of this is familiar by now, but while it may not be ‘just because of race’ it seems clear that ‘race’ does have something to do with it. A little later Stanbrook lets the cat out of the bag: ‘I believe that a preference for one’s own race is as natural as a preference for one’s own family’96 (our emphasis). ‘It’s only natural’ In the section on ‘common sense’ we argued that the idea of ‘human nature’ held an important place in common-sense thinking generally, and in particular we pointed to the bourgeoisie’s success in securing, ideologically, the notion of the nuclear family as the only ‘natural’ unit of household organization. We also suggested that these ideas and ideas about ‘race’ were linked only tendentially within common sense, since this mode of thinking is inherently eclectic, unsystematic and contradictory. The new conservative ideology ‘rediscovers’ these ideas about human nature – the ‘natural’ family and so on – and represents them as the key to a resolution of ‘the nation’s’ problems. Here, what are only tendential links within common sense are presented as though necessarily connected. They form an organic unity. Barker’s work is useful in this respect. He argues that while the ‘New Toryism’ is strongly individualistic in that it ‘demands a new contract between the individual and the nation’, we must be wary of equating it simplistically with liberalism. Liberal individualism and the new Tory individualism are not the same thing. He explains thus:
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He goes on to point out how these ideas have been harnessed to underpin the present Government’s monetarist solutions: ‘Thatcher herself blamed the decline in just about all standards one could name on “our having stripped the family, the fundamental unit of society, of so many of its rights and duties”.’98 It is possible to see connections between this view and the current redefinitions of sexuality (for example, in the anti-abortion movement)99 and morality (for example, Mary Whitehouse’s ‘moral crusade’). It is also possible, needless to say, to see connections between these developments and the elaboration of a ‘new’ racist ideology. The family is seen to transmit traditions and generate loyalties (amongst other things), at least within the immediate family. It is the family’s role in reproducing a certain sort of culture, a certain ‘way of life’, that makes it ‘the fundamental unit of society’. Not only is the ‘family’ structure of the black communities seen to be different; it also, as Powell and others tell us, reproduces different cultures. Blacks are different and recognized as such not just (or even) because they have different features and/or complexions, but primarily because they have different cultures, different ‘ways of life’. R. Page tells us what this means: ‘It is from a recognition of racial differences that a desire develops in most groups to be among their own kind; and this leads to distrust and hostility when newcomers come in.’100 Groups, then, develop a racial consciousness based upon their racial similarity (defined as shared ‘way of life’) which is akin to a ‘herd instinct’. What is more, through the family, this racial consciousness generates loyalty to the herd and distrust of and hostility towards other ‘herds’. The important point to note here is that this ‘herd instinct’ is presented, as we saw in Ivor Stanbrook’s speech above, as a ‘natural’ evolutionary development. Thus far we have been furnished with reasons for initial antagonisms between groups, but we may even at this late stage want to argue that surely it’s only a matter of time before familiarity leads to ‘understanding’ of each other’s cultures and the peaceful coexistence of the different cultures in a ‘multicultural’ society. Looking through the various writings and speeches of the ideologies, though, it does seem that they have seen this argument coming. What gives this ideology its particularly nasty twist is the yoking of the cart of biological culturalism to the rogue horses of the ‘nation’ and ‘nationhood’. The ‘alien wedge’ The links that have been made between ‘human nature’, the family, culture and the nation have not been forged without a great deal of ‘ideological work’ that, as Barker puts it, ‘requires some re-writing of history’. It also requires that class and gender divisions are obscured. Thus Norman St John-Stevas argues for a thousand-year continuous and uninterrupted development of the ‘dominant culture’;101 a notion which erases the history of myriad peoples who have invaded or migrated to Britain at the same time as it ignores class exploitation and the subordination of women. Powell appears to be equally ignorant: ‘The Commonwealth immigrant [he argues] came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another’102 (our emphasis). The importance of the ideological construction of a homogenous nation and national
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culture, is made clear by Sherman whom, given current events, not even Powell can match for sheer audacity. The United Kingdom is the national home of the English, Scots, Welsh, Ulstermen (and those of the Southern Irish who retained British Identity after their fellow-Irish eventually rejected it).103 (Our emphasis) Here, England’s domination and suppression of neighbouring peoples is transformed into something that approximates a family quarrel. Whatever one may think of the methods of struggle adopted variously by the Scottish Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, the IRA (or earlier, the ‘Southern Irish’) it does not appear convincing to describe these struggles for a measure of independence as exercises in retaining or rejecting ‘British identity’. Nevertheless it does give us a clue to the particular form of nationalism being propounded by these ideologues. Sherman says it best. He argues that ‘nationhood . . . remains together with family and religion man’s main focus of identity, his roots’. At this point the ‘herd instinct’ of the group becomes a national consciousness and produces a particular ‘national character’, reflected in the way of life, political culture and political institutions no less than in culture. The difference between the social and political institutions in this country and those in the Indian sub-continent, the Caribbean or Africa – or for that matter Russia or China – reflect this national character among other things.104 ‘National consciousness’ forms the basis of an ‘unconditional loyalty’ to and ‘personal identification with the national community’.105 The blacks are ‘alien’, they have a different ‘national character’ and it follows from this that they can never attain the crucial element of a British national consciousness. Their loyalty to Britain is suspect and this makes them a threat. To the bona fide British, as Sherman defines them, Britain’s ‘history, institutions, landmarks are an essential part of their personal identity’106 (our emphasis) and it is this umbilical cord that makes Britain not just a ‘geographical expression’ that can be wished away, but ‘the national home and birthright of its indigenous peoples’.107 The territory of Britain is as much a part of the British as their culture; indeed their culture appears as a kind of dialectical relationship between the ‘herd’ and its territory. Their defence of this space is in this scheme of things only ‘natural’. It is in this context that we can begin to understand the metaphors of warfare that riddle much of the writings of the ideologues. Powell, for example, argues that the black communities are not merely ‘numbers’ of people but ‘detachments of communities in the West Indies, or India and Pakistan encamped in certain areas of England’.108 These military metaphors, as with the metaphors of consumption we looked at earlier, suggest their own solution – repatriation – but the ideologues do not stop here. They go on to give reasons as to why this is the only tenable solution. On the one hand, if the British have this peculiar relationship to their territory then it follows that the blacks must have a similar relationship with their ‘natural environment’.109 It would then be in their interests to send them back. On the other hand their presence is experienced as an attack upon the very person of the British, an attack upon their ‘national identity’. That is why they have ‘genuine fears’110 about their culture, their ‘British character [which] has done so much for democracy, for law, and done so much throughout the world’,111 being ‘swamped’ by people with alien cultures. Should these
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‘genuine fears’ not be assuaged, then the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ of the ‘herd’ will reassert itself with disastrous consequences. National consciousness like any other major human drive – all of which are bound up with the instinct for self-perpetuation – is a major constructive force provided legitimate channels; thwarted and frustrated, it becomes explosive.112 This gives the ‘peculiarities of the English’ a distinctly new and gruesome twist. More to the point repatriation is the ‘natural’ solution to a ‘natural’ problem. We should point out here that this argument contains a particular, not to say peculiar, idea about citizenship as well. As Sherman tells us, ‘residential qualifications’ by themselves do not confer ‘membership of the nation’ any more than they give the recipient ‘a sense of responsibility towards it’. This is because, according to him, national identity depends upon race. It is not so much a matter of where you were born as it is a matter of the culture into which you were born. This means that Asian and Afro-Caribbean migrants have an identity with and ‘loyalty’ to somewhere other than Britain. In ‘many cases’ they apparently ‘bring with them anti-British attitudes’.113 These different ‘identities’, ‘loyalties’ and ‘anti-British attitudes’ are then reproduced, through their cultures, in their children – even if they were born here. Since ‘citizenship’ in this view is ‘designed to reflect membership of a nation’, all those blacks who are at present ‘British citizens’ can quite easily lose that status overnight. To paraphrase Sherman, ‘the Law giveth and the Law taketh away’.114 The ‘self-destructive urge’ We have tried throughout this section to indicate specific points at which the new racist ideology intersects with common sense. We have also stressed its connections with other aspects of a new conservative philosophy. We would like to conclude by pointing to one final ‘site’ where it intersects with common sense and where its implications are broader than its immediate threat to the black communities. The specific ‘site’ we are referring to is the relationship of dominance and subordination between the ruling bloc and the working class. The ‘anti-intellectualism’ within working-class common sense which, Hall et al. argue, is a recognition of that relationship, is represented in the new racism as ‘the conflict between the instincts of the people and the intellectual fashions of the establishment where British Nationhood is concerned’.115 The idealogues do not seek to shatter the relationship of dominance and subordination for all their appeal to the ‘people’ and their common sense. Rather they aim to harness that common sense and win popular support for their particular political project. Sherman, for example, wants to single out those intellectuals who have ‘studied the pseudo-sciences of sociology and economics, mainly stemming from America’ rather than ‘classical and European history and languages’.116 This needs to be set next to Powell’s earlier prognostications. He was concerned more with the location of the ‘problem intellectuals, than with their intellectual origins. They were’, he said: a tiny minority, with almost a monopoly hold upon the channels of communication, who seem determined not to know the facts and not to face the realities and who will resort to any device or extremity to blind both themselves and others.117 The ground has shifted considerably since Powell’s remarks. It is now necessary to be a little
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less woolly about who this tiny minority are and why they appear to be so ‘wilfully blind’. Again it is Sherman who provides the crucial motivation behind the actions of the ‘immigrationists’ as he calls them. I can see no other answer than the self-destructive urge identified so scathingly by Orwell, three decades back, when he lumped together Russophilia, ‘transposed colour feeling’, inverted snobbery, a craving for the primitive, and anti-patriotism on the part of the intellectuals, as expression of disaffection, alienation and self-hate.118 (Our emphasis) The assertion that those whites who oppose racism have been unduly influenced by an alien system of ideas together with the extreme biologism of the new racism, prepares the ground for dealing with ‘this tiny minority’. They are going against the instincts of the ‘herd’. According to the racist ideologues, it is only ‘natural’ that the British should be racist; obviously those British people who are anti-racist (and it should be said those who support feminism) must ‘logically’ be unnatural. Something has gone wrong, they do not have the correct (natural) ‘national identity’; they are filled with ‘self-hate’. The ‘crime’ that this ‘tiny minority’ have committed is of course to allow blacks into the country. In this connection, it is worth noting once again the changes that have taken place between Powell’s earlier utterances and those of Sherman and others more recently. Powell argued that black immigration was a consequence of foolhardiness. The ‘visible menace’ which he sighted way back in 1966119 was due largely to ‘the legal fiction of commonwealth citizenship’ which allowed an ‘alien element’ to be introduced into Britain. By 1976, Sherman is talking of ‘Britain’s urge to self-destruction’,120 the implications of which are far more sinister. By 1979 he is talking of ‘jet-age migrants’ for whom Britain is ‘simply a haven of convenience where they acquire rights without national obligations’, and where they are ‘encouraged to see immigration restrictions as something to be circumvented’.121 In Sherman’s hands immigration becomes a deliberate invasion. The ‘barbarians’ are no longer ‘at the gates’, they are within the city itself ! The ‘tiny minority’ of pseudoscientists are to blame for this. It is no longer enough to blame a few ‘blind’ politicians. The ‘genuine fears’ of the people have been raised but the ‘tiny minority’ refuses to listen. Indeed they will not listen because they have an ‘evil intent’; they are subversive. Barker indicates the consequences of this line of argument. The logical outcome of this failure of the nation to protect itself is that the minority who press for these self-destructive actions must be purged. If they do not see the error of their ways, they put the pack at risk. How exactly they are to be dealt with is of course open to doubt. But the theory, with its semi-biological orientation, would make easy space for the idea that those who support immigration, those who attack the family, and so on, are biological failures.122 The common-sense racist ideologies and their theoretical counterparts which we have been examining are an important part of the context within which our discussion of ‘racerelations’ sociology takes place. We have emphasized the connections between common sense and the right-wing theories of ‘race’ with the purpose of demonstrating how it is that they are able to command popular support. We are not saying that common-sense racist ideologies are synonymous with the more theoretical racist ideology or that they necessarily
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lead to the same conclusions. It is clear that there are important disagreements even within the Tory party about ‘race’ and that what appear as logical solutions to the hard-nosed right wingers would seem to many ‘wets’ to be ‘rather extreme’. As one irritated right winger put it They (the wets) don’t seem to realise that the barbarians are at the gates . . . and that if the Tory party don’t do the job and legitimate the instincts of the people, within ten years it’ll be a choice between the National Front and the extreme Left.123 Nevertheless, the new racist ideology which has been forged in the white heat of the crisis can, because in its own terms it is coherent and puts forward a cogent strategy, be expected to dry out the liberalism of the ‘wets’. Furthermore the Labour Party, despite its wish for egalitarian solutions to the race-relations ‘problem’, also finds itself unable to counter the arguments of this racist ideology, partly at least because Labour politicians share many of its common-sense assumptions.124 Lastly, it is not difficult to see how this new racist ideology follows similar contours to the racist ideologies of the organized Fascist parties. The Tory ‘hards’ may not at the moment be prepared to openly share the same bed as the Fascists but they are not above stealing their sheets and indeed, ‘sewing, washing and ironing them’.
Acknowledgements Obviously the work presented here is the outcome of months of discussion with the Race & Politics Group as a whole, but Pratibha Parmar and Paul Gilroy have been particularly helpful. Also, the section on ‘youth’ owes a lot to the work that Paul had already done for an Open University course unit and the section on the end of Empire draws on some work that was done for the group by Robin Doughty. Outside of the group, Gilly Saxon helped me to think through some of the themes in this chapter and, along with Rajinder Bhagal, did a lot of the typing, particularly for the earlier drafts. I also had some useful discussions with Sue MacIntosh and Richard Johnson and benefited from a different kind of dialogue with the work of Martin Barker and Stuart Hall. If I’ve missed anyone else then I thank you as well.
Notes and references 1 See: S. Hall ‘Race and “moral panics” in post-war Britain’, BSA public lecture (2 May 1978), also reprinted as ‘Racism and reaction’, in Commission for Racial Equality, Five Views of Multi-Racial Britain (CRE 1978). 2 S. Hall, B. Lumley and G. McLennan, ‘Politics and ideology: Gramsci’, in CCCS, On Ideology (Hutchinson 1978), p. 49. 3 A. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (Lawrence and Wishart 1971), p. 324; quoted in Hall, Lumley and McLennan, p. 50. 4 M. Barker, ‘Racism – the new inheritors’ (an early draft for his book The New Racism), Radical Philosophy (Winter 1978). On p. 3 he argues that: If it were not for the presence of a theory behind the racist ‘common-sense’, the obvious lacunae and untested assumptions of its approach would not so easily escape scrutiny. We would argue that is is precisely because racist ideologies have been elaborated from ‘commonsense’ assumptions, which are already ‘taken for granted’, that they gain popular support and acceptance. 5 Hall, Lumley and McLennan, p. 49.
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6 S. Hall, C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (Macmillan 1978), p. 154. 7 See: Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, on ‘the war of manoeuvre and the war of position’. 8 Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts, p. 155. 9 ibid., p. 155. 10 In this connection it is worth remembering Marx’s remarks about the nature of bourgeois ideology: In this society of free competition the individual appears free from the bonds of nature, etc., which in former epochs of history made him [sic] part of a definite, limited human conglomeration. To the prophets of the eighteenth century . . . this . . . individual, constituting the joint product of the feudal form of society, of the new forces of production . . . appears as an ideal whose existence belongs to the past; not as a result of history, but as its starting point. Since that individual appeared to be in conformity with nature and correspond to their conception of human nature, he [sic] was regarded not as developing historically, but as posited by nature.
11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27
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General Introduction to the Grundrisse, in D. McLennan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press 1977), p. 346. Hall, Lumley, McLennan, p. 50. See, for example, Chapter 5 of Policing the Crisis, especially samples of the abusive letters sent to one of the mothers of the three youths given twenty-year jail sentences for ‘mugging’. M. Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: Some Problems in Marxist/Feminist Analysis (New Left Books 1980), p. 256. J. Weeks, ‘Capitalism and the organisation of sex’, in Gay Left Collective (ed.), Homosexuality – Power and Politics (1980). See also: Barrett, Chapter 6; and J. Donzelot, The Policing of Families (Hutchinson 1980), for a history of the changing nature of working-class households in France. For a useful critique of this aspect of the sociology of education, see: Education Group, CCCS, Unpopular Education: Schooling and Social Democracy in England since 1944 (Hutchinson 1981), Chapter 6. Guardian, 8 July 1981. Daily Telegraph, 8 July 1981. B. James, Daily Mail, 8 July 1981. Party Political Broadcast, 8 July 1981, reported in the Daily Express etc., 9 July 1981. This was in response to an ‘eleven day non-stop party’ which was alleged to have taken place in Birmingham between Christmas 1980 and the New Year 1981. See: Birmingham Evening Mail, 2 January 1981. Jill Knight, MP, Daily Mail, 9 July 1981. Guardian, ‘Making punishment fit the parent’, 21 June 1980. Hall, ‘Race and “moral panics” ’. See also The Times editorial, 5 September 1958. See our Chapter 4. Guardian, 8 July 1981. It is interesting to set our ‘enlightened’ picture of the ‘less developed’ countries alongside the more complex reality. The ILO, for example, estimated that in 1978 there were 327,000 child labourers in the USA. This number had fallen from 800,000 in 1971 when children comprised 25 per cent of the paid farm labour force. Such a comparison would not be purely arbitrary. It has proved relatively easy to demonstrate that the forms and styles of post-war white male working class youth subcultures relate directly to black cultural forms in a number of ways. See, for example: D. Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Methuen 1979). See also though: A. McRobbie and J. Garber, ‘Girls and subcultures; an exploration’, in S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds.), Resistance Through Rituals (Hutchinson 1976); and A. McRobbie, ‘Settling accounts with sub-cultures’, Screen Education (Spring 1980). Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, pp. 146–7. E. Long, Candid Reflections . . . (London 1772), pp. 46–9. Quoted in F. Shyllon, Black People in Britain 1555–1833 (Oxford University Press 1977), pp. 104–5. E. Long, History of Jamaica: or, General Survey of the Ancient and Modern State of that Island (London 1774). Quoted in S. Hall, ‘The whites of their eyes: racist ideologies and the media’, in C. Bridges and R. Brunt (eds.), Silver Linings: Some Strategies for the Eighties (Lawrence and Wishart 1981), p. 38.
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31 C. Robinson, ‘The emergence and limitations of European radicalism’, Race and Class, vol. XXI, no. 2 (Institute of Race Relations 1979). 32 ibid., pp. 155–7. 33 ibid., p. 158. 34 ibid., p. 160. 35 ibid., p. 162. 36 Slavery was also of course, a feature of some African and South East Asian states. See: J. Watson (ed.), Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Basil Blackwell 1980). 37 For a useful discussion of these points see: R. Brenner, ‘The origins of capitalist development: a critique of neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, no. 104 (July–August 1977). 38 W. D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550–1812 (Penguin 1969), p. 7. 39 Jordan refers to the fact that whiteness carried a special significance for Elizabethan Englishmen; it was particularly when complemented by red, the color of perfect human beauty, especially female beauty.
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49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65
and also remarks upon the practice of whitening the skin still further at the ‘cosmetic table’, p. 8. However, his examples are drawn from middle English and Elizabethan literature and since we know that the rate of illiteracy was high at that time, it makes it difficult to know how much these were merely the ideas of an educated elite and how much they were the ideas of the English people in general. Jordan. J. Walvin, The Black Presence: A Documentary History of the Negro in England 1555–1860 (Orbach and Chambers 1971). ibid. W. Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings (Chapel Hill 1942), p. 106. Quoted in F. Shyllon, p. 122. See W. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L’Ouverture 1972). Jordan. Sir Thomas Herbert. Essay reprinted in Walvin. Jordan, p. 43. R. May and R. Cohen, ‘The Liverpool race riots’, Race and Class, vol. XVI, no. 2 (IRR 1974). N. Evans, ‘The South Wales race riots of 1919’, The Journal of the Society for the Study of Welsh Labour History, 1980. J. Walvin, Black and White: a Study of the Negro in English Society 1555–1945 (Orbach and Chambers 1973). May and Cohen, p. 121. ibid., p. 119. Walvin, Black and White. ibid. A. X. Cambridge, ‘Marxism and black nationalism’, Black Liberator, vol. 2, no. 1 ( July–September 1973). F. Henriques, Children of Conflict: A Study of Interracial Sex and Marriage (E. P. Dutton 1975), p. 140. R. Blathwayt, Titbits, 21 July 1917. Quoted in Henriques, p. 141. As Walvin puts it, when The Times deplored ‘the familiar association between white women and negroes [sic] which is a provocative cause’ and argued that ‘his chief failing is his fondness for white women’, it came close to sharing the views of the rioters (Walvin, Black and White). Shyllon, p. 84. See: Education Group, CCCS, Chapter 2. Hall, ‘The whites of their eyes’, pp. 39–40. D. Horowitz, ‘Attitudes of British Conservatives towards decolonization in Africa’, African Affairs, vol. LXIX, no. 274 (January 1980). D. Goldsworthy, Colonial Issues in British Politics 1945–1961, From ‘Colonial Development’ to ‘Wind of Change’ (Clarendon Press 1971), p. 17. T. E. Utley, Enoch Powell (William Kimber 1968), p. 60. Quoted by Paul Foot, The Rise of Enoch Powell (Penguin 1969), p. 19. J. Strachey, The End of Empire (Victor Gollancz 1959), p. 132. F. Fanon, The Wretched on the Earth (MacGibbon and Kee 1965). R. Skidelsky, ‘Lessons of Suez’, in V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky (eds.), The Age of Affluence 1951–1964 (Macmillan 1970), p. 175.
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66 Hall, ‘The whites of their eyes’, p. 41. 67 G. Orwell, England Your England (Secker and Warburg 1953), p. 17. 68 Quoted in J. Higgins, ‘Partition of India’, in M. Sissons and P. French (eds.), Age of Austerity, 1945–51 (Hodder and Stoughton 1963). 69 Goldsworthy, p. 399. 70 The Picture Post, 16 July 1949, p. 9. 71 Hall, ‘Race and “Moral panics” ’, pp. 1–2. 72 The Picture Post. 73 J. H. Griffin, Black Like Me (Hamilton and Co. 1962), pp. 121–2. Quoted in Shyllon, p. 108. See also Henriques on this point. He cites a piece of legislation enacted in Virginia in 1662, which ‘laid down that if an Englishman indulged in fornication with a black woman any offspring inherited the status of the mother – that is, automatically became a slave’ (p. 59). 74 Shyllon, p. 106. 75 See Chapters 6 and 7. 76 Hall, ‘The whites of their eyes’, p. 43. 77 Daily Mirror, 14 September 1981. 78 Sun, 11 November 1980. 79 Brent Community Health Council, Black People and the Health Service (BCHC April 1981), for clear examples of how these common-sense racist images shape the ‘service’ provided to black women by the NHS. See particularly Section 4, ‘Towards new forms of control’, pp. 19–26. 80 Sun. 81 V. Amos and P. Parmar, ‘Resistances and responses: black girls in Britain’, in A. McRobbie and T. McCabe (eds.), An Adventure Story for Girls: Feminist Perspectives on Young Women (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1981). 82 P. Parmar, ‘Young Asian women: a critique of the pathological approach’, in Multiracial Education, vol. 9, no. 3 (NAME Summer 1981), p. 27. 83 Sun. 84 ibid. 85 Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts, pp. 139–50, contains a useful argument on how working-class understandings of ‘respectability’, ‘work’, ‘discipline’, etc. differ from yet can be articulated to the dominant ‘traditionalist’ consensus. 86 Telegraph and Argus, 15 July 1978. 87 D. Edgar, ‘Racism, Fascism and the politics of the National Front’, Race and Class, vol. XIX, no. 2 (IRR 1977). 88 Hall, ‘Race and “moral panics” ’, p. 2. 89 See: Barker, The New Racism, Chapter 4, for a good discussion of the ideology of ‘Butskellism’. 90 ibid. 91 A. Sherman, ‘Britain’s urge to self-destruction’, Daily Telegraph, 9 September 1976. 92 ibid. 93 E. Powell, Freedom and Reality (Paperfront 1969), p. 307. 94 G. Brook-Shepherd, ‘Where the blame for Brixton lies’, Sunday Telegraph, 19 April 1981. 95 I. Stanbrook, Hansard, p. 1409. Quoted in Barker. 96 Barker. 97 ibid. 98 ibid. 99 ibid. 100 R. Page, ‘To nature, race is not a dirty word’, Daily Telegraph, 3 February 1977. Quoted in Barker. 101 N. St John-Stevas, BBC 1, 2 March 1978 (Barker). As Barker observes: This idea of a 1,000-year continuous development is either sheer fiction, or it is so allembracing that there is no reason why it shouldn’t continue developing happily even if blacks became 75% of the population overnight. Of course Barker is right but its worth recalling here the work of Walvin and Jordan on the early presence of blacks in Britain. 102 Powell, p. 285. Powell is indeed ignorant of British history. He argues, for example, that Guyana was a ‘fragment of the large and miscellaneous spoils of the Napoleonic wars’ (p. 246), acquired
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Errol Lawrence almost by accident and nothing to do with Britain’s imperialist expansion. But see: Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (New Left Books 1977), on this point. A. Sherman, ‘Britain is not Asia’s fiancée’, Daily Telegraph, 9 November 1979. A. Sherman, ‘Why Britain can’t be washed away’, Daily Telegraph, 8 September 1976. Sherman, ‘Britain is not Asia’s fiancée’. ibid. ibid. Powell, p. 311. See: Barker. ibid. Barker argues that the evocation of ‘genuine fears’ is an important mechanism here. M. Thatcher, front page, Daily Mail, 31 January 1978. Quoted in Barker. Sherman, ‘Britain’s urge’. Sherman, ‘Britain is not Asia’s fiancée’. Sherman, ‘Why Britain can’t be washed away’. Sherman, ‘Britain is not Asia’s fiancée’. ibid. Obviously no-one has told him of the European origins of those ‘pseudo-sciences’! Powell, p. 300. Sherman, ‘Britain’s urge’. Powell, pp. 246–52. A reproduction of his speech at Camborne, 14 January 1966, on the ‘myth’ of the Commonwealth. Sherman, ‘Britain’s urge’. Sherman, ‘Britain is not Asia’s fiancée’. Barker. He argues that there is a ‘conceptual connection’ between the new racism, its ‘theory’ i.e. socio-biology) and the ‘idea of a strong state and a nation founded on organic blood-relationships’ (Fascism). His section on ‘The new philosophy of racism’ dealing with socio-biology, makes these connections more explicit. See also: Barbara Chasin, ‘Sociobiology: a sexist synthesis’ (May–June 1977); Freda Salzman, ‘Are sex roles biologically determined?’ (July–August 1977); and Richard Lewentin, ‘Biological determinism as an ideological weapon’ (November–December 1977). All in editions of Science for the People (Ann Arbor & Boston, USA), for how socio-biology has been taken up in USA. Quoted in: Barker. See, for example: R. Jenkins’ speech, Hansard, 5 July 1976, pp. 973–4; and R. Hattersley’s opinion quoted in: Deakin and Rose, Colour and Citizenship, that ‘without integration limitation is inexcusable: without limitation, integration is impossible’.
37 White woman listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood Hazel Carby
I’m leaving evidence. And you got to leave evidence too. And your children got to leave evidence. . . . They burned all the documents. . . . We got to burn out what they put in our minds, like you burn out a wound. Except we got to keep what we need to bear witness. That scar that’s left to bear witness. We got to keep it as visible as our blood.1
The black women’s critique of history has not only involved us in coming to terms with ‘absences’; we have also been outraged by the ways in which it has made us visible, when it has chosen to see us. History has constructed our sexuality and our femininity as deviating from those qualities with which white women, as the prize objects of the Western world, have been endowed. We have also been defined in less than human terms.2 Our continuing struggle with history began with its ‘discovery’ of us. However, this chapter will be concerned with herstory rather than history. We wish to address questions to the feminist theories which have been developed during the last decade; a decade in which black women have been fighting, in the streets, in the schools, through the courts, inside and outside the wage relation. The significance of these struggles ought to inform the writing of the herstory of women in Britain. It is fundamental to the development of a feminist theory and practice that is meaningful for black women. We cannot hope to reconstitute ourselves in all our absences, or to rectify the ill-conceived presences that invade herstory from history, but we do wish to bear witness to our own herstories. The connections between these and the herstories of white women will be made and remade in struggle. Black women have come from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean and we cannot do justice to all their herstories in a single chapter. Neither can we represent the voices of all black women in Britain, our herstories are too numerous and too varied. What we will do is to offer ways in which the ‘triple’ oppression of gender, race and class can be understood, in their specificity, and also as they determine the lives of black women. Much contemporary debate has posed the question of the relation between race and gender, in terms which attempt to parallel race and gender divisions. It can be argued that as processes, racism and sexism are similar. Ideologically for example, they both construct common sense through reference to ‘natural’ and ‘biological’ differences. It has also been argued that the categories of race and gender are both socially constructed and that, therefore, they have little internal coherence as concepts. Furthermore, it is possible to parallel racialized and gendered divisions in the sense that the possibilities of amelioration through legislation appear to be equally ineffectual in both cases. Michèle Barrett, however, has pointed out that it is not possible to argue for parallels because as soon as historical analysis is made, it becomes obvious that the institutions which have to be analysed are different,
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as are the forms of analysis needed.3 We would agree that the construction of such parallels is fruitless and often proves to be little more than a mere academic exercise; but there are other reasons for our dismissal of these kinds of debate. The experience of black women does not enter the parameters of parallelism. The fact that black women are subject to the simultaneous oppression of patriarchy, class and ‘race’ is the prime reason for not employing parallels that render their position and experience not only marginal but also invisible. In arguing that most contemporary feminist theory does not begin to adequately account for the experience of black women we also have to acknowledge that it is not a simple question of their absence, consequently the task is not one of rendering their visibility. On the contrary we will have to argue that the process of accounting for their historical and contemporary position does, in itself, challenge the use of some of the central categories and assumptions of recent mainstream feminist thought. We can point to no single source for our oppression. When white feminists emphasize patriarchy alone, we want to redefine the term and make it a more complex concept. Racism ensures that black men do not have the same relations to patriarchal/capitalist hierarchies as white men. In the words of the Combahee River Collective: We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual e.g. the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression. Although we are feminists and lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalisation that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.4 It is only in the writings by black feminists that we can find attempts to theorize the interconnection of class gender and race as it occurs in our lives and it has only been in the autonomous organizations of black women that we have been able to express and act upon the experiences consequent upon these determinants. Many black women had been alienated by the non-recognition of their lives, experiences and herstories in the WLM. Black feminists have been, and are still, demanding that the existence of racism must be acknowledged as a structuring feature of our relationships with white women. Both white feminist theory and practice have to recognize that white women stand in a power relation as oppressors of black women. This compromises any feminist theory and practice founded on the notion of simple equality. Three concepts which are central to feminist theory become problematic in their application to black women’s lives: ‘the family’, ‘patriarchy’ and ‘reproduction’. When used they are placed in a context of the herstory of white (frequently middle-class) women and become contradictory when applied to the lives and experiences of black women. In a recent comprehensive survey of contemporary feminist theory, Women’s Oppression Today, Michele Barrett sees the contemporary family (effectively the family under capitalism) as the source of oppression of women:
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It is difficult to argue that the present structure of the family-household is anything other than oppressive for women. Feminists have consistently, and rightly, seen the family as a central site of women’s oppression in contemporary society. The reasons for this lie both in the material structure of the household, by which women are by and large financially dependent on men, and in the ideology of the family, through which women are confined to a primary concern with domesticity and motherhood. This situation underwrites the disadvantages women experience at work, and lies at the root of the exploitation of female sexuality endemic in our society. The concept of ‘dependence’ is perhaps, the link between the material organisation of the household, and the ideology of femininity: an assumption of women’s dependence on men structures both of these areas.5 The immediate problem for black feminists is whether this framework can be applied at all to analyse our herstory of oppression and struggle. We would not wish to deny that the family can be a source of oppression for us but we also wish to examine how the black family has functioned as a prime source of resistance to oppression. We need to recognize that during slavery, periods of colonialism and under the present authoritarian state, the black family has been a site of political and cultural resistance to racism. Furthermore, we cannot easily separate the two forms of oppression because racist theory and practice is frequently genderspecific. Ideologies of black female sexuality do not stem primarily from the black family. The way the gender of black women is constructed differs from constructions of white femininity because it is also subject to racism. Black feminists have been explaining this since the last century when Sojourner Truth pointed to the ways in which ‘womanhood’ was denied the black woman. That man over there says women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, and lifted over ditches, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And aint I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And aint I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And aint I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And aint I a woman?6 In our earlier examination of common sense we indicated the racist nature of ideologies of black female sexuality. Black women are constantly challenging these ideologies in their day-to-day struggles. Asian girls in schools, for example, are fighting back to destroy the racist mythology of their femininity. As Pratibha Parmar has pointed out, careers officers do not offer them the same interviews and job opportunities as white girls. This is because they believe that Asian girls will be forced into marriage immediately after leaving school. The common-sense logic of this racism dictates that a career for Asian girls is thought to be a waste of time. But the struggle in schools is not just against the racism of the careers service: Yes, and then there are some racist students who are always picking on us. Recently, we had a fight in our school between us and some white girls. We really showed them we were not going to stand for their rubbish. Sangeeta and Wahida’s statements reflect a growing confidence and awareness amongst
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young Asian girls about themselves and their situations in a climate of increased racist attacks on black people generally. Many Asian girls strongly resent being stereotyped as weak, passive, quiet girls, who would not dare lift a finger in their own defence. They want to challenge the idea people have of them as girls ‘who do not want to stand out or cause trouble but to tip-toe about hoping nobody will notice them’.7 The use of the concept of ‘dependency’ is also a problem for black feminists. It has been argued that this concept provides the link between the ‘material organisation of the household, and the ideology of femininity’. How then can we account for situations in which black women maybe heads of households, or where, because of an economic system which structures high black male unemployment, they are not financially dependent upon a black man? This condition exists in both colonial and metropolitan situations. Ideologies of black female domesticity and motherhood have been constructed, through their employment (or chattel position) as domestics and surrogate mothers to white families rather than in relation to their own families. West Indian women still migrate to the United States and Canada as domestics and in Britain are seen to be suitable as office cleaners, National Health Service domestics, etc. In colonial situations Asian women have frequently been forced into prostitution to sexually service the white male invaders, whether in the form of armies of occupation or employees and guests of multinational corporations. How then, in view of all this, can it be argued that black male dominance exists in the same forms as white male dominance? Systems of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, have systematically denied positions in the white male hierarchy to black men and have used specific forms of terror to oppress them. Black family structures have been seen as pathological by the state and are in the process of being constructed as pathological within white feminist theory. Here, ironically, the Western nuclear family structure and related ideologies of ‘romantic love’ formed under capitalism, are seen as more ‘progressive’ than black family structures. An unquestioned common-sense racism constructs Asian girls and women as having absolutely no freedom, whereas English girls are thought to be in a more ‘liberated’ society and culture. However, one Asian schoolgirl points out: Where is the freedom in going to a disco, frightened in case no boy fancies you, or no one asks you to dance, or your friends are walked home with boys and you have to walk home in the dark alone?8 The media’s ‘horror stories’ about Asian girls and arranged marriages bear very little relation to their experience. The ‘feminist’ version of this ideology presents Asian women as being in need of liberation, not in terms of their own herstory and needs, but into the ‘progressive’ social mores and customs of the metropolitan West. The actual struggles that Asian women are involved in are ignored in favour of applying theories from the point of view of a more ‘advanced’, more ‘progressive’ outside observer. In fact, as has been seen in Chapter 2, it is very easy for this ideology to be taken up and used by the state in furtherance of their racist and sexist practices. The way in which the issue of arranged marriages has been used by the government to legitimate increased restrictions on immigration from the subcontinent is one example of this process. Too often concepts of historical progress are invoked by the left and feminists alike, to create a sliding scale of ‘civilized liberties’. When barbarous sexual practices are to be described the ‘Third World’ is placed on display and compared to the ‘First World’ which is
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seen as more ‘enlightened’ or ‘progressive’. The metropolitan centres of the West define the questions to be asked of other social systems and, at the same time, provide the measure against which all ‘foreign’ practices are gauged. In a peculiar combination of Marxism and feminism, capitalism becomes the vehicle for reforms which allow for progress towards the emancipation of women. The ‘Third World’, on the other hand, is viewed as retaining precapitalist forms expressed at the cultural level by traditions which are more oppressive to women. For example, in an article comparing socialist societies, Maxine Molyneux falls straight into this trap of ‘Third Worldism’ as ‘backwardness’. A second major problem facing Third World post-revolutionary states is the weight of conservative ideologies and practices; this is often subsumed in official literature under the categories of ‘traditionalism’ or ‘feudal residues’. The impact and nature of ‘traditionalism’ is subject to considerable variation between countries but where it retains any force it may constitute an obstacle to economic and social development which has to be overcome in the formation of a new society. In some societies customary practices tend to bear especially heavily on women. Institutions such as polygyny, the brideprice, child marriages, seclusion, and forms of mutilation such as footbinding or female ‘circumcision’ are woven into the very fabric of pre-capitalist societies. They often survive in Third World countries long after they have been made illegal and despite the overall changes that have occurred.9 Maxine Molyneux sees ‘systems of inheritance and arranged marriages’ as being one of the central ways ‘by which forms of pre-capitalist property and social relations are maintained’. One immediate problem with this approach is that it is extraordinarily general. The level of generality applied to the ‘Third World’ would be dismissed as too vague to be informative if applied to Western industrialized nations. However, Molyneux implies that since ‘Third World’ women are outside of capitalist relations of production, entering capitalist relations is, necessarily, an emancipating move. There can be little doubt that on balance the position of women within imperialist, i.e. advanced capitalist societies is, for all its limitations, more advanced than in the less developed capitalist and non-capitalist societies. In this sense the changes brought by imperialism to Third World societies may, in some circumstances, have been historically progressive.10 This view of imperialism will be addressed in more detail later in the chapter. At this point we wish to indicate that the use of such theories reinforces the view that when black women enter Britain they are moving into a more liberated or enlightened or emancipated society than the one from which they have come. Nancy Foner saw the embodiment of West Indian women’s increased freedom and liberation in Britain in the fact that they learned to drive cars!11 Different herstories, different struggles of black women against systems that oppress them are buried beneath Eurocentric conceptions of their position. Black family structures are seen as being produced by less advanced economic systems and their extended kinship networks are assumed to be more oppressive to women. The model of the white nuclear family, which rarely applies to black women’s situation, is the measure by which they are pathologized and stands as a more progressive structure to the one in which they live. It can be seen from this brief discussion of the use of the concept ‘the family’ that the terms ‘patriarchy’ and ‘reproduction’ also become more complex in their application. It
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bears repetition that black men have not held the same patriarchal positions of power that the white males have established. Michèle Barrett argues that the term patriarchy has lost all analytic or explanatory power and has been reduced to a synonym for male dominance. She tries therefore to limit its use to a specific type of male dominance that could be located historically. I would not . . . want to argue that the concept of patriarchy should be jettisoned. I would favour retaining it for use in contexts where male domination is expressed through the power of the father over women and over younger men. . . . Hence I would argue for a more precise and specific use of the concept of patriarchy, rather than one which expands it to cover all expressions of male domination and thereby attempts to construe a descriptive term as a systematic explanatory theory.12 Barrett is not thinking of capitalist social organization. But if we try to apply this more ‘classic’ and limited definition of patriarchy to the slave systems of the Americas and the Caribbean, we find that even this refined use of the concept cannot adequately account for the fact that both slaves and manumitted males did not have this type of patriarchal power. Alternatively, if we take patriarchy and apply it to various colonial situations it is equally unsatisfactory because it is unable to explain why black males have not enjoyed the benefits of white patriarchy. There are very obvious power structures in both colonial and slave social formations and they are predominantly patriarchal. However, the historically specific forms of racism force us to modify or alter the application of the term ‘patriarchy’ to black men. Black women have been dominated ‘patriarchally’ in different ways by men of different ‘colours’. In questioning the application of the concepts of ‘the family’ and ‘patriarchy’ we also need to problematize the use of the concept of ‘reproduction’. In using this concept in relation to the domestic labour of black women we find that in spite of its apparent simplicity it must be dismantled. What does the concept of reproduction mean in a situation where black women have done domestic labour outside of their own homes in the servicing of white families? In this example they lie outside of the industrial wage relation but in a situation where they are providing for the reproduction of black labour in their own domestic sphere, simultaneously ensuring the reproduction of white labour power in the ‘white’ household. The concept, in fact, is unable to explain exactly what the relations are that need to be revealed. What needs to be understood is, first, precisely how the black woman’s role in a rural, industrial or domestic labour force affects the construction of ideologies of black female sexuality which are different from, and often constructed in opposition to, white female sexuality; and second, how this role relates to the black woman’s struggle for control over her own sexuality.13 If we examine the recent herstory of women in post-war Britain we can see the ways in which the inclusion of black women creates problems for hasty generalization. In pointing to the contradiction between ‘home-making as a career’ and the campaign to recruit women into the labour force during post-war reconstruction, Elizabeth Wilson fails to perceive migration of black women to Britain as the solution to these contradictory needs. The Economic Survey for 1947 is cited as an example of the ways in which women were seen to form ‘the only large reserve of labour left’; yet, as we know, there was a rather large pool of labour in the colonies that had been mobilized previously to fight in World War II. The industries that the survey listed as in dire need of labour included those that were filled by both male and female black workers, though Elizabeth Wilson does not differentiate them.
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The survey gave a list of the industries and services where labour was most urgently required. The boot and shoe industry, clothing, textiles, iron and steel, all required female workers, as did hospitals, domestic service, transport, and the women’s land army. There was also a shortage of shorthand typists, and a dire shortage of nurses and midwives.14 This tells us nothing about why black women were recruited more heavily into some of these areas than others; perhaps we are given a clue when the author goes on to point out that women were welcomed into the labour force in a ‘circumscribed way’, as temporary workers at a period of crisis, as part-time workers, and as not disturbing the traditional division of labour in industry along sex lines – the Survey reflected the view which was still dominant, that married women would not naturally wish to work.15 Not all black women were subject to this process: Afro-Caribbean women, for example, were encouraged and chose to come to Britain precisely to work. Ideologically they were seen as ‘naturally’ suitable for the lowest paid, most menial jobs. Elizabeth Wilson goes on to explain that ‘work and marriage were still understood as alternatives . . . two kinds of women . . . a wife and a mother or a single career woman’. Yet black women bridged this division. They were viewed simultaneously as workers and as wives and mothers. Elizabeth Wilson stresses that the post-war debate over the entry of women into the labour force occurred within the parameters of the question of possible effects on family life. She argues that ‘wives and mothers were granted entry into paid work only so long as this did not harm the family’. Yet women from Britain’s reserve army of labour in the colonies were recruited into the labour force far beyond any such considerations. Rather than a concern to protect or preserve the black family in Britain, the state reproduced common-sense notions of its inherent pathology: black women were seen to fail as mothers precisely because of their position as workers. One important struggle, rooted in these different ideological mechanisms, which determine racially differentiated representations of gender, has been the black woman’s battle to gain control over her own sexuality in the face of racist experimentation with the contraceptive Depo-Provera and enforced sterilizations.16 It is not just our herstory before we came to Britain that has been ignored. These white feminists, our experiences and struggles here have also been ignored. These struggles and experiences, because they have been structured by racism, have been different to those of white women. Black feminists decry the non-recognition of the specificities of black women’s sexuality and femininity, both in the ways these are constructed and also as they are addressed through practices which oppress black women in a gender-specific but nonetheless racist way. This non-recognition is typified by a very interesting article on women in Third World manufacturing by Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson. In analysing the employment of Third World women in world market factories they quote from an investment brochure designed to attract foreign firms: The manual dexterity of the oriental female is famous the world over. Her hands are small and she works fast with extreme care. Who, therefore, could be better qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a bench-assembly production line than the oriental girl?17 (Original emphasis)
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The authors, however, analyse only the naturalization of gender and ignore the specificity signalled by the inclusion of the adjective ‘oriental’, as if it didn’t matter. The fact that the sexuality of the ‘oriental’ woman is being differentiated, is not commented upon and remains implicit rather than explicit as in the following remarks. It is in the context of the subordination of women as a gender that we must analyse the supposed docility, subservience and consequent suitability for tedious, monotonous work of young women in the Third World.18 In concentrating an analysis upon gender only, Elson and Pearson do not see the relation between the situation they are examining in the periphery and the women who have migrated to the metropole. This last description is part of the commonsense racism that we have described as being applied to Asian women in Britain to channel them into ‘tedious, monotonous work’. Elson and Pearson discuss this ascription of docility and passivity and compare it to Frantz Fanon’s analysis of colonized people, without putting together the ways in which the women who are their objects of study have been oppressed not by gender subordination alone but also by colonization. The ‘oriental’ sexuality referred to in the advertising brochure is one of many constructions of exotic sexual dexterity promised to Western male tourists to South East Asia. This ideology of ‘Eastern promise’ links the material practice of the move from the bench – making microchips – to the bed, in which multinational corporate executives are serviced by prostitutes. This transition is described by Elson and Pearson but not understood as a process which illustrates an example of racially demarcated patriarchal power. If a woman loses her job in a world market factory after she has re-shaped her life on the basis of a wage income, the only way she may have of surviving is by selling her body. There are reports from South Korea, for instance, that many former electronics workers have no alternative but to become prostitutes. . . . A growing market for such services is provided by the way in which the tourist industry has developed, especially in South East Asia.19 The photographs accompanying the article are of anonymous black women. This anonymity and the tendency to generalize into meaninglessness, the oppression of an amorphous category called ‘Third World women’, are symptomatic of the ways in which the specificity of our experiences and oppression are subsumed under inapplicable concepts and theories. Black feminists in the US have complained of the ignorance, in the white women’s movement, of black women’s lives. The force that allows white feminist authors to make no reference to racial identity in their books about ‘women’ that are in actuality about white women, is the same one that would compel any author writing exclusively on black women to refer explicitly to their racial identity. That force is racism. . . . It is the dominant race that can make it seem that their experience is representative.20 In Britain too it is as if we don’t exist. There is a growing body of black feminist criticism of white feminist theory and practice, for its incipient racism and lack of relevance to black women’s lives.21 The dialogues that have been attempted22 have concentrated more upon visible, empirical differences that affect
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black and white women’s lives than upon developing a feminist theoretical approach that would enable a feminist understanding of the basis of these differences. The accusation that racism in the women’s movement acted so as to exclude the participation of black women, has led to an explosion of debate in the USA. From a black female perspective, if white women are denying the existence of black women, writing ‘feminist’ scholarship as if black women are not a part of the collective group American women, or discriminating against black women, then it matters less that North America was colonised by white patriarchal men who institutionalised a racially imperialist social order, than that white women who purport to be feminists support and actively perpetuate anti-black racism.23 What little reaction there has been in Britain has been more akin to lighting a damp squib, than an explosion. US black feminist criticism has no more been listened to than indigenous black feminist criticism. Yet, bell hooks’s powerful critique has considerable relevance to British feminists. White women in the British WLM are extraordinarily reluctant to see themselves in the situations of being oppressors, as they feel that this will be at the expense of concentrating upon being oppressed. Consequently the involvement of British women in imperialism and colonialism is repressed and the benefits that they – as whites – gained from the oppression of black people ignored. Forms of imperialism are simply identified as aspects of an all embracing patriarchy rather than as sets of social relations in which white women hold positions of power by virtue of their ‘race’. Had feminists chosen to make explicit comparisons between . . . the status of black women and white women, it would have been more than obvious that the two groups do not share an identical oppression. It would have been obvious that similarities between the status of women under patriarchy and that of any slave or colonized person do not necessarily exist in a society that is both racially and sexually imperialistic. In such a society, the woman who is seen as inferior because of her sex can also be seen as superior because of her race, even in relationship to men of another race.24 The benefits of a white skin did not just apply to a handful of cotton, tea or sugar plantation mistresses; all women in Britain benefited – in varying degrees – from the economic exploitation of the colonies. The pro-imperialist attitudes of many nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century feminists and suffragists have yet to be acknowledged for their racist implications. However, apart from this herstorical work, the exploration of contemporary racism within the white feminist movement in Britain has yet to begin. Feminist theory in Britain is almost wholly Eurocentric and, when it is not ignoring the experience of black women ‘at home’, it is trundling ‘Third World women’ onto the stage only to perform as victims of ‘barbarous’, ‘primitive’ practices in ‘barbarous’, ‘primitive’ societies. It should be noted that much feminist work suffers from the assumption that it is only through the development of a Western-style industrial capitalism and the resultant entry of women into waged labour that the potential for the liberation of women can increase. For example, foot-binding, clitoridectomy, female ‘circumcision’ and other forms of mutilation of the female body have been described as ‘feudal residues’, existing in economically ‘backward’ or ‘underdeveloped’ nations (i.e. not the industrialized West). Arranged marriages, polygamy and these forms of mutilation are linked in reductionist ways to a lack of technological development.
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However, theories of ‘feudal residues’ or of ‘traditionalism’ cannot explain the appearance of female ‘circumcision’ and clitoridectomy in the United States at the same moment as the growth and expansion of industrial capital. Between the establishment of industrial capitalism and the transformation to monopoly capitalism, the United States, under the influence of English biological science, saw the control of medical practice shift from the hands of women into the hands of men. This is normally regarded as a ‘progressive’ technological advance, though this newly established medical science was founded on the control and manipulation of the female body. This was the period in which links were formed between hysteria and hysterectomy in the rationalization of the ‘psychology of the ovary’. In the second half of the [nineteenth] century . . . fumbling experiments with the female interior gave way to the more decisive technique of surgery – aimed increasingly at the control of female personality disorders. . . . The last clitoridectomy we know of in the United States was performed in 1948 on a child of five, as a cure for masturbation. The most common form of surgical intervention in the female personality was ovariotomy, removal of the ovaries – or ‘female castration’. In 1906 a leading gynecological surgeon estimated that there were 150,000 women in the United States who had lost their ovaries under the knife. Some doctors boasted that they had removed from fifteen hundred to two thousand ovaries apiece. . . . it should not be imagined that poor women were spared the gynecologist’s exotic catalog of tortures simply because they couldn’t pay. The pioneering work in gynecological surgery had been performed by Marion Sims on black female slaves he kept for the sole purpose of surgical experimentation. He operated on one of them thirty times in four years.25 These operations are hardly rituals left over from a pre-capitalist mode of production. On the contrary, they have to be seen as part of the ‘technological’ advance in what is now commonly regarded as the most ‘advanced’ capitalist economy in the world. Both in the USA and in Britain, black women still have a ‘role’ – as in the use of Depo-Provera on them – in medical experimentation. Outside of the metropoles, black women are at the mercy of the multinational drug companies, whose quest for profit is second only to the cause of ‘advancing’ Western science and medical knowledge. The herstory of black women is interwoven with that of white women but this does not mean that they are the same story. Nor do we need white feminists to write our herstory for us, we can and are doing that for ourselves. However, when they write their herstory and call it the story of women but ignore our lives and deny their relation to us, that is the moment in which they are acting within the relations of racism and writing history.
Constructing alternatives It should be an imperative for feminist herstory and theory to avoid reproducing the structural inequalities that exist between the ‘metropoles’ and the ‘peripheries’, and within the ‘metropoles’ between black and white women, in the form of inappropriate polarizations between the ‘First’ and ‘Third World’, developed/underdeveloped or advanced/backward. We have already argued that the generalizations made about women’s lives across societies in the African and Asian continents, would be thought intolerable if applied to the lives of white women in Europe or North America. These are some of the reasons why concepts which allow for specificity, whilst at the same time providing cross-cultural reference
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points – not based in assumptions of inferiority – are urgently needed in feminist work. The work of Gayle Rubin and her use of discrete ‘sex/gender systems’ appears to provide such a potential, particularly in the possibility of applying the concept within as well as between societies. With regard to the problems with the concept of patriarchy discussed above, she has made the following assessment: The term ‘patriarchy’ was introduced to distinguish the forces maintaining sexism from other social forces, such as capitalism. But the use of ‘patriarchy’ obscures other distinctions.26 In arguing for an alternative formulation Gayle Rubin stresses the importance of maintaining, a distinction between the human capacity and necessity to create a sexual world, and the empirically oppressive ways in which sexual worlds have been organized. Patriarchy subsumes both meanings into the same term. Sex/gender system, on the other hand, is a neutral term which refers to the domain and indicates that oppression is not inevitable in that domain, but is the product of the specific social relations which organize it.27 This concept of sex/gender systems offers the opportunity to be historically and culturally specific but also points to the position of relative autonomy of the sexual realm. It enables the subordination of women to be seen as a ‘product of the relationships by which sex and gender are organized and produced’.28 Thus, in order to account for the development of specific forms of sex/gender systems, reference must be made not only to the mode of production but also to the complex totality of specific social formations within which each system develops. Gayle Rubin argues that kinship relations are visible, empirical forms of sex/gender systems. Kinship relations here is not limited to biological relatives but is rather a ‘system of categories and statuses which often contradict actual genetic relationships’. What are commonly referred to as ‘arranged marriages’ can, then, be viewed as the way in which a particular sex/gender system organizes the ‘exchange of women’. Similarly, transformations of sex/gender systems brought about by colonial oppression, and the changes in kinship patterns which result from migration, must be assessed on their own terms, not just in comparative relation to other sex/gender systems. In this way patterns of subordination of women can be understood historically, rather than being dismissed as the inevitable product of pathological family structures. At this point we can begin to make concrete the black feminist plea to white feminists to begin with our different herstories. Contact with white societies has not generally led to a more ‘progressive’ change in African and Asian sex/gender systems. Colonialism attempted to destroy kinship patterns that were not modelled on nuclear family structures, disrupting, in the process, female organizations that were based upon kinship systems which allowed more power and autonomy to women than those of the colonizing nation. Events that occurred in the Calabar and Owerri provinces of Southern Nigeria in the winter months of 1929 bear witness to this disruption and to the consequent weakening of women’s position. As Judith Van Allen points out, these events are known in Western social science literature as the ‘Aba Riots’, a term which not only marginalizes the struggles themselves but which makes invisible the involvement of Igbo women. ‘Riots’ implies unsystematic and mindless violence and is a perfect example of the constructions of history. The Igbo people on the other hand remember this conflict as Ogu Umuniwanyi (the ‘Women’s War’).29
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Hazel Carby In November of 1929, thousands of Igbo women . . . converged on the Native Administration centers. . . . The women chanted, danced, sang songs of ridicule, and demanded the caps of office (the official insignia) of the Warrant Chiefs, the Igbo chosen from each village by the British to sit as members of the Native Court. At a few locations the women broke into prisons and released prisoners. Sixteen Native Courts were attacked, and most of these were broken up or burned. The ‘disturbed area’ covered about 6000 square miles and contained about two million people. It is not known how many women were involved, but the figure was in tens of thousands. On two occasions, British District Officers called in police and troops, who fired on the women and left a total of more than 50 dead and 50 wounded. No one on the other side was seriously injured.30
Judith Van Allen examines in detail the women’s organizations that ensured and regulated women’s political, economic and religious role in traditional Igbo society. Although their role was not equal to that of men they did have ‘a series of roles – despite the patrilineal organization of Igbo society’.31 Two of the associations that Judith Van Allen finds relevant were the inyemedi, or wives of a lineage, and the umuada – daughters of a lineage. Meetings of the umuada would ‘settle intralineage disputes among their ‘brothers’ as well as disputes between their natal and marital lineages’. Since these gatherings were held in rotation among the villages into which members had married, ‘they formed an important part of the communication network of Igbo women’. Inyemedi, on the other hand, came together in villagewide gatherings called mikri, gatherings of women who were in common residence rather than from a common place of birth (ogbo). The mikri appears to have performed the major role in the daily self-rule among women and to have articulated women’s interests as opposed to those of men. Mikri provided women with a forum in which to develop their political talents and with a means for protecting their interests as traders, farmers, wives and mothers.32 Men recognized the legitimacy of the decisions and rules of the mikri, which not only settled disputes among women but also imposed rules and sanctions which directly affected men’s behaviour. The mikri could impose fines for violations of their decisions, and if these were ignored, women would ‘sit on’ an offender or go on strike. To ‘sit on’ or ‘make war on’ a man involved gathering at his compound at a previously agreed upon time, dancing, singing scurrilous songs detailing the women’s grievances against him (and often insulting him along the way by calling his manhood into question), banging on his hut with pestles for pounding yams, and in extreme cases, tearing up his hut (which usually meant pulling the roof off ).33 A strike, on the other hand, ‘might involve refusing to cook, to take care of small children or to have sexual relations with their husbands’.34 British colonizers in Nigeria dismissed all traditional forms of social organization that they found as ‘organized anarchy’, and promptly imposed a system of administration that ignored female political structures and denied Igbo women any means of representation, leave alone any decision-making or rule instituting power. Coming from sex/gender systems of Britain in the 1920s these colonial males could not conceive of the type of autonomy that Igbo women claimed. When the women demanded that they should serve on the Native Courts, be appointed to positions as District Officers, and further that ‘all white men should
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go to their own country’, they were scoffed at by the British who thought they acted under the influence of ‘savage passions’. Their demands were viewed as totally irrational. The war waged by Igbo women against the British was a concerted organized mobilization of their political traditions. The fruits of colonialism were the imposition of class and gender relations which resulted in the concentration of national, economic and political power in the hands of a small, wealthy elite. We have quoted at length this example from the herstory of Igbo women, in order to illustrate the ways in which an unquestioning application of liberal doses of Eurocentricity can completely distort and transform herstory into history. Colonialism was not limited to the imposition of economic, political and religious systems. More subtly, though just as effectively, it sedimented racist and sexist norms into traditional sex/ gender systems. Far from introducing more ‘progressive’ or liberating sex/gender social relations, the colonizing powers as: class societies tend to socialize the work of men and domesticate that of women. This creates the material and organizational foundations for denying that women are adults and allows the ruling classes to define them as wards of men.35 Karen Sacks, in her essay ‘Engles revisited’, examines the ways in which these class societies have domesticated the field of activity for women to the extent that ‘through their labour men are social adults; women are domestic wards’.36 Although this work agrees with much white feminist theory, which has focused on the isolation of women within the nuclear family as a prime source of oppression in Western sex/gender systems, it does not necessarily follow that women living in kinship relations organized in different sex/gender systems are not oppressed. What it does mean is that analysis has to be specific and is not to be deduced from European systems. She goes on to explain that in India, in Untouchable tenant-farming and village-service castes or classes, where women work today for village communities . . . they ‘have greater sexual freedom, power of divorce, authority to speak and witness in caste assemblies, authority over children, ability to dispose of their own belongings, rights to indemnity for wrongs done to them, rights to have disputes settled outside the domestic sphere, and representation in public rituals’. In short, women who perform social labour have a higher status vis-à-vis men of their own class than do women who labor only in the domestic sphere or do no labor.37 Unfortunately feminist research has neglected to examine the basis of its Eurocentric (and often racist) framework. In the words of Achola O. Pala: Like the educational systems inherited from the colonial days, the research industry has continued to use the African environment as a testing ground for ideas and hypotheses the locus of which is to be found in Paris, London, New York or Amsterdam.38 Throughout much of this work, what is thought to be important is decided on the basis of what happens to be politically significant in the metropoles, not on what is important to the women who are under observation. Thus, from her own experience, Achola Pala relates how the major concerns of women are totally neglected by the researcher. I have visited villages where, at a time when the village women are asking for better
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Hazel Carby health facilities and lower infant mortality rates, they are presented with questionnaires on family planning. In some instances, when the women would like to have piped water in the village, they may be at the same time faced with a researcher interested in investigating power and powerlessness in the household. In yet another situation, when women are asking for access to agricultural credit, a researcher on the scene may be conducting a study on female circumcision.39
The non-comprehension of the struggles and concerns of the African women, which Pala talks about, is indicative of the ways in which much Euro-American feminism has approached the lives of black women. It has attempted to force them into patterns which do not apply and in the process has labelled many of them deviant. Another problem emerges from the frequently unqualified use of terms such as ‘precapitalist’ and ‘feudal’ to denote differences between the point of view of the researcher and her object of study. What is being indicated are differences in the modes of production. This distinction is subsequently used to explain observable differences in the position of women. However, the deployment of the concept sex/gender system interrupts this ‘logical progression’ and reveals that the articulation of relations of production to sex/gender systems is much more complex. ‘Pre-capitalist’ and ‘feudal’ are often redundant and non-explanatory categories which rest on underestimations of the scope and power of capitalist economic systems. Immanuel Wallerstein, for example, has argued that the sixteenth century saw the creation of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market . . . the emergence of capitalism as the dominant mode of social organisation of the economy . . . the only mode in the sense that, once established, other ‘modes of production’ survived in function of how they fitted into a politico-socio framework deriving from capitalism.40 Wallerstein continues to dismiss the idea that feudal and capitalist forms of social organization could coexist by stressing that: The world economy has one form or another. Once it is capitalist, relationships that bear certain formal relationships to feudal relationships are necessarily redefined in terms of the governing principals of a capitalist system.41 There are ways in which this economic penetration has transformed social organization to the detriment of women in particular. Work on sexual economics by Lisa Leghorn and Katherine Parker demonstrates that the monetary system and heavy taxation that European nations imposed on their colonies directly eroded the status of women. In many nations the impact of the sudden need for cash was more devastating than the steep taxes themselves. Only two mechanisms for acquiring cash existed – producing the new export crops and working for wages – both of which were made available only to men. Men were forced to leave their villages and farms to work in mines, plantations or factories, at extremely low wages. Women were often left doing their own as well as the men’s work, while most of the men’s wages went to taxes and to support themselves at the higher standard of living in urban areas. As men who remained on the farms were taught how to cash crop, most technological aid and education went only to them,
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and women were left maintaining the subsistence agricultural economy that sustained themselves and their children. In Africa women still do 70% of the agricultural work while almost all the agricultural aid has gone to men.42 We need to counteract the tendency to reduce sex oppression to a mere ‘reflex of economic forces’43 whilst at the same time recognizing that: sexual systems cannot, in the final analysis, be understood in complete isolation. A full-bodied analysis of women in a single society, or through out history, must take everything into account: the evolution of commodity forms in women, systems of land tenure, political arrangements, subsistence technology, etc.44 We can begin to see how these elements come together to affect the lives of black women under colonial oppression in ways that transform the sex/gender systems in which they live but that are also shaped by the sex/gender system of the colonizers. If we examine changes in land distribution we can see how capitalist notions of the private ownership of land (a primarily economic division) and ideas of male dominance (from the sex/gender system) work together against the colonized. Another problem affecting women’s agricultural work is that as land ownership shifts from the collective ‘land-use rights’ of traditional village life, in which women shared in the distribution of land, to the European concept of private ownership, it is usually only the men who have the necessary cash to pay for it (by virtue of their cash-cropping income). In addition, some men traditionally ‘owned’ the land, while women ‘owned’ the crops as in the Cameroons in West Africa. As land becomes increasingly scarce, men begin to rent and sell ‘their’ land, leaving women with no recourse but to pay for land or stop their agricultural work.45 It is impossible to argue that colonialism left pre-capitalist or feudal forms of organization untouched. If we look at the West Indies we can see that patterns of migration, for both men and women, have followed the dictates of capital. When men migrated from the islands for work in plantations or building the Panama canal, women migrated from rural to urban areas. Both have migrated to labour in the ‘core’ capitalist nations. Domestic, marginal or temporary service work has sometimes been viewed as a great ‘opportunity’ for West Indian women to transform their lives. But as Shirley-Ann Hussein has shown, Take the case of the domestic workers. A development institution should be involved in more than placing these women in domestic jobs as this makes no dent in the society. It merely rearranges the same order. Domestic labour will have to be done away with in any serious attempt at social and economic reorganisation.46 If, however, imperialism and colonialism have ensured the existence of a world market it still remains necessary to explain how it is in the interests of capitalism to maintain social relations of production that are non-capitalist – that is, forms that could not be described as feudal because that means pre-capitalist, but which are also not organized around the wage relation. If we return to the example of changes in ownership of land and in agricultural production, outlined above, it can be argued that:
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Hazel Carby the agricultural division of labor in the periphery – with male semi-proletarians and female agriculturalists – contributes to the maintenance of a low value of labor power for peripheral capital accumulation through the production of subsistence foodstuffs by the noncapitalist mode of production for the reproduction and maintenance of the labor force.47
In other words the work that the women do is a force which helps to keep wages low. To relegate ‘women of colour’ in the periphery to the position of being the victims of feudal relations is to aid in the masking of colonial relations of oppression. These relations of imperialism should not be denied. Truly feminist herstory should be able to acknowledge that: Women’s economic participation in the periphery of the world capitalist system, just as within center economies, has been conditioned by the requirements of capital accumulation . . . (but) the economic participation of women in the Third World differs significantly from women’s economic participation within the center of the world capitalist system.48 Black women have been at the forefront of rebellions against land seizures and struggle over the rights of access to land in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. Adequate herstories of their roles in many of these uprisings remain to be written. The role of West Indian women in the rebellions preceding and during the disturbances in Jamaica in 1938, for example, though known to be significant has still not been thoroughly described. White feminist herstorians are therefore mistaken when they portray black women as passive recipients of colonial oppression. As Gail Omvedt has shown in her book We Will Smash This Prison,49 women in India have a long and complex herstory of fighting oppression both in and out of the wage relation. It is clear that many women coming from India to Britain have a shared herstory of struggle, whether in rural areas as agricultural labourers or in urban districts as municipal employees. The organized struggles of Asian women in Britain need to be viewed in the light of this herstory. Their industrial battles, and struggles against immigration policy and practice, articulate the triple oppression of race, gender and class that have been present since the dawn of imperialist domination. In concentrating solely upon the isolated position of white women in the Western nuclear family structure, feminist theory has necessarily neglected the very strong female support networks that exist in many black sex/gender systems. These have often been transformed by the march of technological ‘progress’ intended to relieve black women from aspects of their labour. Throughout Africa, the digging of village wells has saved women enormous amounts of time which they formerly spent trekking long distances to obtain water. But it has often simultaneously destroyed their only chance to get together and share information and experiences. Technological advances such as household appliances do not free women from domestic drudgery in any society.50 Leghorn and Parker, in Women’s Worth, attempt to create new categories to describe, in general terms, the diversity of male power across societies. Whilst they warn against the rigid application of these categories – few countries fit exactly the category applied to them – the work does represent an attempt to move away from Euro-American racist assumptions of
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superiority whether political, cultural or economic. The three classifications that they introduce are ‘minimal’, ‘token’ and ‘negotiating power’ societies. Interestingly, from the black women’s point of view, the most salient factor in the categorization of a country has usually been that of women’s networks, because it is the existence, building or dissolution of these networks that determines women’s status and potential for change in all areas of their lives.51 These categories cut through the usual divisions of First/Third World, advanced/ dependent, industrial/non-industrial in an attempt to find a mechanism that would ‘free’ thinking from these definitions. Space will not allow for a critical assessment of all three categories but it can be said that their application of ‘negotiating power’ does recognize as important the ‘traditional’ women’s organizations to be found in West Africa, and described above in relation to the Igbo. Leghorn and Parker are careful to stress that ‘negotiating power’ is limited to the possibilities of negotiating, it is not an absolute category of power that is held over men by women. The two examples of societies given in their book, where women hold this negotiating position are the Ewe, in West Africa, and the Iroquois. Both of course, are also examples where contact with the whites has been for the worse. Many of the Ewe female institutions disintegrated under colonialism whilst the institutions that afforded Iroquois women power were destroyed by European intrusion. In contrast to feminist work that focuses upon the lack of technology and household mechanical aids in the lives of these women, Leghorn and Parker concentrate upon the aspects of labour that bring women together. Of the Ewe they note: Women often work together in their own fields, or as family members preparing meals together, village women meeting at the stream to do the wash, or family, friends and neighbours, walking five to fifteen miles a day to market together, sitting near each other in the market, and setting the day’s prices together. They share childcare, news, and looking after each other’s market stalls. In addition to making the time more pleasant, this shared work enables women to share information and in fact serves as an integral and vital part of the village communications system. Consequently, they have a tremendous sense of solidarity when it comes to working in their collective interest.52 It is important not to romanticize the existence of such female support networks but they do provide a startling contrast to the isolated position of women in the Euro-American nuclear family structure. In Britain, strong female support networks continue in both West Indian and Asian sex/ gender systems, though these are ignored by sociological studies of migrant black women. This is not to say that these systems remain unchanged with migration. New circumstances require adaptation and new survival strategies have to be found. Even childcare in a metropolitan area is a big problem. If you live in a village in an extended family, you know that if your child’s outside somewhere, someone will be looking out for her. If your child is out on the street and your neighbour down the road sees your child in some mess, that woman is going to take responsibility of dealing with that child. But in Brooklyn or in London, you’re stuck in that apartment. You’re there with that kid, you can’t expect that child to be out on the street and be taken care of. You
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Hazel Carby know the day care situation is lousy, you’re not in that extended family, so you have a big problem on your hands. So when they talk about the reduction of house-work, we know by now that that’s a lie.53
However, the transformations that occur are not merely adaptive, neither is the black family destroyed in the process of change. Female networks mean that black women are key figures in the development of survival strategies, both in the past, through periods of slavery and colonialism, and now, facing a racist and authoritarian state. There is considerable evidence that women – and families – do not . . . simply accept the isolation, loss of status, and cultural devaluation involved in the migration. Networks are re-formed, if need be with non-kin or on the basis of an extended definition of kinship, by strong, active, and resourceful women. . . . Cultures of resistance are not simple adaptive mechanisms; they embody important alternative ways of organizing production and reproduction and value systems critical of the oppressor. Recognition of the special position of families in these cultures and social structures can lead to new forms of struggle, new goals.54 In arguing that feminism must take account of the lives, herstories and experiences of black women we are not advocating that teams of white feminists should descend upon Brixton, Southall, Bristol or Liverpool to take black women as objects of study in modes of resistance. We don’t need that kind of intrusion on top of all the other informationgathering forces that the state has mobilized in the interest of ‘race relations’. White women have been used against black women in this way before and feminists must learn from history. After the Igbo riots described above, two women anthropologists were sent by the British to ‘study the causes of the riot and to uncover the organisational base that permitted such spontaneity and solidarity among the women’.55 The WLM, however, does need to listen to the work of black feminists and to take account of autonomous organizations like OWAAD (Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent) who are helping to articulate the ways in which we are oppressed as black women. In addition to this it is very important that white women in the women’s movement examine the ways in which racism excludes many black women and prevents them from unconditionally aligning themselves with white women. Instead of taking black women as the objects of their research, white feminist researchers should try to uncover the genderspecific mechanisms of racism amongst white women. This more than any other factor disrupts the recognition of common interests of sisterhood. In Finding a Voice, by Amrit Wilson, Asian women describe many instances of racial oppression at work from white women. Asian women are paid low salaries and everything is worse for them, they have to face the insults of supervisors. These supervisors are all English women. The trouble is that in Britain our women are expected to behave like servants and we are not used to behaving like servants and we can’t. But if we behave normally . . . the supervisors start shouting and harassing us. . . . They complain about us Indians to the manager.56 Black women do not want to be grafted onto ‘feminism’ in a tokenistic manner as colourful diversions to ‘real’ problems. Feminism has to be transformed if it is to address us. Neither do we wish our words to be misused in generalities as if what each one of us utters represents
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the total experience of all black women. Audre Lourde’s address to Mary Daly is perhaps the best conclusion. I ask that you be aware of how this serves the destructive forces of racism and separation between women – the assumption that the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and sole herstory and myth of all women to call for power and background, and that non-white women and our herstories are note-worthy only as decorations, or examples of female victimisation. I ask that you be aware of the effect that this dismissal has upon the community of black women, and how it devalues your own words. . . . When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murders. When radical lesbian feminist theory dismisses us, it encourages its own demise. This dismissal stands as a real block to communication between us. This block makes it far easier to turn away from you completely than attempt to understand the thinking behind your choices. Should the next step be war between us, or separation? Assimilation within a sole Western-European herstory is not acceptable.57 In other words, of white feminists we must ask, what exactly do you mean when you say ‘WE’??
Acknowledgements The debt I owe to my sisters, Valerie Amos and Pratihba Parmar, is enormous for the many hours we have spent discussing our experiences as black women and as feminists. Both contributed to the ideas in this chapter but any criticisms for inadequacies should be directed at me. To Paul, John and Errol, thank you for those transatlantic telephone calls – support and brotherly affection was regularly transmitted. To Susan Willis I owe especial thanks for her support and friendship in a new job and a new country. To faculty, staff and students at the Afro-American Studies Program at Yale and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, thank you for your encouragement and enthusiasm for my work.
Notes and references 1 Gayle Jones, Corregidora (Random House 1975), pp. 14, 72. 2 Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black (Penguin 1969), pp. 238, 495, 500. 3 My thanks to Michèle Barrett who, in a talk given at the Social Science Research Council’s Unit on Ethnic Relations, helped to clarify many of these attempted parallels. 4 Combahee River Collective, ‘A black feminist statement’, in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Persephone Press 1981), p. 213. 5 Michèle Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today (Verso 1980), p. 214. 6 J. Loewenberg and R. Bogin (eds.), Black Women in Nineteenth Century American Life (Pennsylvania State University Press 1978), p. 235. 7 Pratibha Parmar and Nadira Mirza, ‘Growing angry, growing strong’, Spare Rib, no. 111 (October 1981). 8 ibid. 9 Maxine Molyneux, ‘Socialist societies old and new: progress towards women’s emancipation?’, Feminist Review, no. 8 (Summer 1981), p. 3. 10 ibid., p. 4. 11 Nancy Foner, Jamaica Farewell (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1979). She also argues that: In rural Jamaica, most women do not smoke cigarettes; in London, many of the women I interviewed smoked, and when I commented on this they noted that such behaviour would
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Hazel Carby not have been approved in Jamaica. Thus in England there is an enlargement of the women’s world. (pp. 69–70)
12 Michèle Barrett. 13 See Chapter 7 for an elaboration of this point. 14 Elizabeth Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain 1945–1968 (Tavistock 1980), pp. 43–4. 15 ibid. 16 OWAAD, Fowaad, no. 2 (1979). 17 Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson, ‘Nimble fingers make cheap workers: an analysis of women’s employment in Third World export manufacturing’, Feminist Review, no. 7 (Spring 1981), p. 93. 18 ibid., p. 95. 19 ibid. 20 bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman (South End Press 1981), p. 138. 21 Much of this critical work has been written in America but is applicable to the WLM in Britain. Apart from the books cited in this chapter, interested readers should look out for essays and articles by Gloria Joseph, Audre Lourde, Barbara Smith and Gloria Watkins that represent a range of black feminist thought. In Britain, the very existence of the feminist Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) is a concrete expression of black feminists critical distance from ‘white’ feminism. See also: Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, ‘Resistances and responses: black girls in Britain’, in A. McRobbie and T. McCabe (eds.), Feminism For Girls: An Adventure Story (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1982), who criticize the WLM for its irrelevance to the lives of black girls in Britain. 22 See: Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives (Anchor 1981), for an attempt at a dialogue that shows just how difficult it is to maintain. 23 Bell Hooks, pp. 123–4. 24 ibid., p. 141. 25 Barbara Erenreich and Dierdre English, For Her Own Good (Doubleday Anchor 1979). 26 Gayle Rubin, p. 167. 27 ibid., p. 168. 28 ibid., p. 177. 29 Judith Van Allen, ‘ “Aba riots” or Igbo “women’s war”? Ideology, stratification and the invisibility of women’, in Nancy Hafkin and Edna Bay (eds.), Women in Africa Studies in Social and Economic Change (Stanford University Press 1976), p. 59. 30 ibid., p. 60. 31 ibid., p. 62. 32 ibid., p. 69. 33 ibid., p. 61. 34 ibid., p. 69. 35 Karen Sacks, ‘Engels revisited: women, the organization of production, and private property’, in Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (Monthly Review Press 1975). 36 ibid., p. 231. 37 ibid., p. 233. 38 Achola O. Pala, ‘Definitions of women and development: an African perspective’, Signs, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1977). 39 ibid., p. 10. 40 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System 1 (Academic Press 1974), p. 77. 41 ibid., p. 92. 42 Lisa Leghorn and Katherine Parker, Women’s Worth, Sexual Economics and the World of Women (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1981), p. 44. 43 Gayle Rubin, p. 203. 44 ibid., p. 209. 45 Leghorn and Parker, p. 45. 46 Shirley-Ann Hussein, ‘Four views on women in the struggle’, in Caribbean Women in the Struggle, p. 29; quoted in Leghorn and Parker, p. 52. 47 Carmen Diane Deere, ‘Rural women’s subsistence production’, in Robin Cohen et al. (eds.), Peasants and Proletarians: The Struggles of Third World Women Workers (Monthly Review 1979), p. 143. 48 ibid., p. 133.
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Gail Omvedt, We Will Smash this Prison (Zed Press 1980). Leghorn and Parker, p. 55. ibid., p. 60. ibid., p. 88. Margaret Prescod-Roberts and Norma Steele, Black Women: Bringing it all Back Home (Falling Wall Press 1980), p. 28. Mina Davis Caufield, ‘Cultures of resistance’, in Socialist Revolution, 20, vol. 4, no. 2, October 1974, pp. 81, 84. Leis, ‘Women in groups’, quoted in Mina Davis Caufield. Amrit Wilson, Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain (Virago 1978), p. 122. Audre Lourde, ‘An open letter of Mary Daly’, in Moraga and Anzaldúa, p. 96.
Section 6
History
Introduction Entangled histories Richard Johnson
Introduction Inevitably the collection presented here consists of fragments of larger projects but we can make sense of it through two intertwined histories. The first is the evolution of historical work at the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) from its beginnings (1964) until roughly 1985 when, for me at least, the specifically historical trail is lost, not abandoned, but dispersed into so many routes and individual careers it is hard to recover. The second history is that of the historical discipline itself, or those parts nearest to CCCS work in politics, intellectual approach or educational ethos, particularly the heyday of Marxist history in Britain and the diverse currents of labour, feminist, social and cultural history that flowed around the History Workshop Movement and its centre at Ruskin College, Oxford. We could examine these intellectual formations and interventions by comparing them. Marxist history in Britain derived initially from a political party, imbricated in the toils of international Communism. After the party split and the New Left was formed, the historians went their different ways, but remained in dialogue from different academic locations (and historical agenda). These ranged from Oxford (again) and Birmingham, to the (first?) ‘business university’ at Warwick and the Thompsons’ hospitable country house at Wick Episcopi near Worcester (Schwarz,1981; Kaye, 1984; Thompson, 1970). By comparison, though influenced by the New Left, History Workshop and CCCS began, each sometimes anomalously, in academic settings: at a college with an adult working-class education mission in the most privileged of English universities; and at a tiny informal postgraduate research ‘Centre’, insecurely based in a conservative discipline-based ‘Redbrick’ (big city) University (Birmingham again!). While CCCS had to establish its claims to ‘something new’ and link with other educational institutions (especially the polytechnics), Ruskin’s history project expanded on the borderlands between professional history, political commitments and popular enthusiasms. The Workshop and the Historians Group were strongly identified with history of course – only one thread of CCCS, as that important word ‘contemporary’ implied. A more vital story, however, can be told about relationships and dialogue, pre-structured in quasi-generational terms. CCCS and Ruskin were sister movements looking to the historians – and that more-than-historian Raymond Williams – as pioneers. For latecomers like myself and CCCS students, Stuart Hall at CCCS and Raphael Samuel, History Tutor at Ruskin, were the mediating figures, associated with the early New Left. Stuart undoubtedly taught me Cultural Studies, but this was on the basis of an education in Marxist social history from Edward Thompson and Dorothy Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class (Thompson, 1963) turned me into a social historian – and a ‘Marxist’. Teaching an MA
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course in Social History with Dorothy, as a young history lecturer, first turned my interests to the history and theory of history. These debts may help to make sense of my commentary and the documents themselves. Our intellectual development was quickened by the seriousness and dynamism of CCCS in the 1970s and early 1980s, but, in my case at least, development was charted through a changing relation to my earlier influences. If we ‘followed’ the Marxist historians, this meant studying, appreciating but also eventually criticising them. Ruskin’s inheritance from Marxist history was equally specific, so that the ‘sibling’ dialogues also were often very lively. I don’t want to imply, however, that the relation between history and cultural studies is exhausted by the relation with the discipline of history or its particular schools. The historical discipline cannot monopolise the dimension of time. Indeed, we were led to question the historical discipline as a cultural practice including its temporal schemes. Our differences often fed back into history-writing itself – as in the work by popular historians on memory (e.g. Samuel, 1994).
Social history, histories of hegemony and the history of history We can usefully itemise seven stages in these dialogues, each represented, more or less, in this collection. A version of social history, which was about the hidden experiences of subordinated groups and classes and was associated with the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, shaped our own approaches and our encounters with the historical. However, social history co-existed in the early years with a more literary-historical approach, which was typical of early cultural studies and which took authors and periods as its focus. A third type of historical work grew both from the theoretical readings introduced by Stuart Hall and from political agenda from 1968 to the early 1980s. The question of ‘authors and periods’ was re-posed under the pressure of the social transitions of the 1970s. Our reading of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (1971) was important here, our histories focussing on contemporary hegemonic formations, their dynamics and absences. This way of thinking about politics – as a work of cultural organisation or of the winning and losing of consent – was joined, qualified, and only rarely displaced, by others: feminist insights on gender and power and Foucauldian discourse theory in particular (e.g. Mort, 1987; Bland, 1995). The fourth engagement was with the ‘structural’ (including economic) aspect of historical transitions. Generally neglected by commentators on cultural studies, this work followed in part from the study of Marx’s method and concepts in the 1970s (see especially Hall, 1973). ‘Transitions’ was also a fresh point of junction with the Communist historians, less with Thompson’s social history now, more with ‘the transition debates’ inaugurated by the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb and a fundamental starting point for much Marxist history (Dobb, 1963). Studying Capital and Dobb on the transition from feudalism to capitalism stimulated a re-reading of The Prison Notebooks for Gramsci’s more ‘structural’ themes. So it was that we discovered Dobb’s ideas with some fascination. It was rather like discovering a grandparent, whom nobody talked about much, a process Bill Schwarz, in relation to his basic ideas, nicely summed up as ‘Dobb’s Bones’. By these different routes we were brought, fifthly, to studying history as a discipline with its own histories and political settings. The CCCS MA programme, begun in 1975, already had a strongly historiographical slant, but in a further (sixth) move we also took up more general
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issues about knowledge, theory and research. This theoretical or epistemological strand became particularly well known – perhaps infamous – outside the Centre, where it was sometimes viewed as a kind of anti-History. This kind of celebrity was particularly uncomfortable because our theoretical clarifications were not supposed to displace empirical studies, but to advance them. ‘Theory’, however, became the source of controversy with Marxist historians, especially with Edward Thompson, with activists and scholars around History Workshop, and also, briefly, with people pursuing other models of historical work – feminist, popular or Foucauldian for example – in CCCS itself. (e.g. Clarke, 1979; McClelland, 1979; Williams, 1979; Thompson, 1981). The final identifiable strand – before the diffusion so to speak – was the study of public representations of the past and of everyday popular memory. Our historiographical concerns were extended beyond professional history to a ‘historical apparatus’ composed of many different institutions and practices, and beyond this to the ‘memory work’ of individuals and social groups. This was in part a response to charges of elitist intellectualism – within as much as outside CCCS. But, defensive or not, the study of what Paul Ricoeur calls ‘the present of the past’ was a wholly appropriate historical task for students of contemporary culture (Ricoeur, 1984). In what follows I will fill this outline in a little, relating works collected here to the larger corpus surrounding them.
Servants and chapel goers: cultural studies and social histories The first two studies derive from the early to mid 1970s – Pam Taylor’s Women Domestic Servants 1919–1939 (SP No. 40 1975) and Trevor Blackwell’s The History of a Working-Class Methodist Chapel (WPCS No. 5 published in 1974 but based on an MA thesis of 1972). Both are histories of subordinated groups and of themes then neglected by historians. As Taylor argues, domestic servants were a ‘hidden army’: hidden in middle-class households and institutions, and assumed to be declining, though actually expanding, in the inter-war period. For Blackwell, studying Haslingden Methodist Chapel in Blackburn from its late nineteenth century foundation to its dwindling in the 1960s, was part of the larger project ‘which documents particular areas of working-class life and culture’, aspects of ‘a way of life which is oppressed and therefore oppressive, on many levels’. Both authors used oral testimony and upheld their subjects’ searches for pleasure, sociability, accommodation and resistance. Both histories are recognisably of a kind that emerged more powerfully elsewhere in the 1960s and early 1970s. They were part of a widespread interest in working-class life that marked the period 1957 to 1974 (Hoggart, 1956; Laing,1986, a study of this phenomenon also begun at Hoggart’s Centre). Blackwell explicitly explores the 1950s generation’s grief and mourning over older forms: their ‘sense of loss, [a] personal nostalgia for their own youth, and a more general sadness of the dislocation of a communal way of life’. An often noted paradox also applies here: that older (inter-war) working-class culture was ‘documented’ just as it was being transformed. As Taylor notes, her research coincided with the eruption of ‘service’ from ‘below stairs’ into contemporary fiction, autobiography, television and film (e.g. Powell,1968), later coinciding with feminist interest in women’s and domestic labour (see also Taylor, 1979). Both studies show early Birmingham influences. Taylor’s focus shifts from the neglected experiences of servants to a concern with the relations of power, compliance and opposition in which they were positioned. Blackwell engages with debates about accommodation and
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resistance, the working class as sources of hope or despair to theorists of the left. Questions about improvement or decline also figure: Taylor points to features of inter-war working class life gladly left behind perhaps, while Blackwell explores the double sense of loss and improvement. Both these studies are close to the kind of history that was being pursued at Ruskin and it is interesting to find that CCCS Annual Reports, in the early 1970s, record dialogues with Ruskin. In June 1971, for instance, there was a joint Ruskin/CCCS conference, held in Birmingham, with papers on popular culture, past and present, Ruskin’s travelling showmen, Guy Fawkes’ celebrations and one night stands in Darlington and South Shields are listed side by side with the Centre’s Wolverhampton’s Double Zero Club, Picture Post, rock and roll and the Western. Similarly Pam Taylor’s paper was written for the History Workshop of May 1975. My own research on popular politics and working-class education in early nineteenth-century England is also relevant. Under way before I joined CCCS in 1974, it found an audience at the Workshop in 1976. It was first published in an alternative teacher magazine – Radical Education – in 1976 and 1977, only appearing under CCCS auspices in the collection Working Class Culture (Clarke, Critcher and Johnson, 1979). This kind of social history, however, dominant at Ruskin, was not really typical of CCCS in any period. Both Pam and myself were recent migrants from Birmingham’s Department of Economic and Social History; Trevor Blackwell’s MA was researched before he came to Birmingham. His historical ‘documentation’ of working-class life had few successors, unless we include the rich, important but more strictly contemporary ethnographic studies.
From period pieces to histories of hegemony Richard Hoggart’s earliest Annual Reports record, however, an alternative way of doing ‘historical and philosophical studies’. This usually took the form of studying key texts in particular periods: ‘One of the first projects was to be a study in depth of the period of the ’Thirties, using Orwell’s work as a “key” ’ (CCCS, 1964, p. 5). These texts were often familiar from Culture and Society (Williams, 1958) with Matthew Arnold and George Orwell prominent. Authors and texts were ways into ‘climates of opinion’ or ‘the main movement of ideas’. The Rowntree study on The Daily Mirror and The Daily Express, the two main mass circulation wartime and post-war newspapers, published as Paper Voices, is a developed example (Smith, Blackwell and Immirzi, 1975; compare also Hall, 1968 and 1972 in this collection). Paper Voices predated the 1970s’ theoretical engagements and the hegemony studies; its Introduction, probably written before 1970, used a different language: Our starting point was the assumption that, at all times, but especially in periods of rapid social change, the press performs a significant role as a social educator. By its consistent reporting of, and comment about, people and events, the press reflects changing patterns of life in a society. More significantly, by its selectivity, emphasis, treatment and presentation, the press interprets that process of social change. What interested us most was this active process of interpretation. (Underlining supplied, Hall in Smith, Blackwell and Immirzi 1975:11; compare the mimeo-ed 1970 edn.) I re-read Paper Voices recently while teaching a Workers Education Association course on post-war politics and culture. It is still unusual (among histories) and especially valuable in its readings of press texts for changing flows of popular aspiration and desire.
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The third piece – the Cultural History Group’s ‘Out of the People: The Politics of Containment 1935–45’ (WPCS No. 9, 1976) – is interestingly transitional. It is a ‘period piece’, the period 1935–45 chosen in part because of previous work on the 1950s (‘The Period Group’ 1973–4) and MA work on the transitions of 1880–1926. ‘1945’, moreover, is a key moment of hegemony in twentieth-century British politics, and calls for a focus on larger political formations, especially on the pre-war middle-class reforming currents and on the ‘war radicalism’ of the early 1940s. By reading particular ‘educators’ (including Tom Wintringham of the Picture Post, Mass Observation, George Orwell, J.B. Priestley, and Cassanda of the Daily Mirror) we were able to show something of the popularity, but also the limits of the desire for postwar change. The creation of the welfare state is the product of a complex struggle, in which a widespread wish for a world better than inter-war injustices fuels major institutional change. There was also, however, a simultaneous process of containment in which radical commentators and political parties, of all shades, stopped short of further transformations. As the group put it: ‘It is clear that during the war an immense effort was made to “educate” the working class into a new role within the state, to redefine them as “the people” and the apparent arbiters of politics.’ This conclusion holds up well today. Later research has picked away at the arguments of Arthur Marwick and others that the war was a great accelerator of social change (Marwick, 1982 and compare Harold Smith, 1986). The post-war world was a contradictory mixture of traditionalism and modernity (Conekin, Mort and Waters, 1999). The 1950s saw a royalist revival and a positive celebration, albeit in increasingly contradictory terms, of separate social spheres for men and women. In its take-up within CCCS this account helped to establish, along with Stuart Hall’s work on Picture Post, the findings of Paper Voices and our reading of historians like Paul Addison (1975) and Angus Calder (1971), the idea of a ‘postwar’ or ‘social-democratic settlement’. This was not attached to a particular party, though Labour was its immediate beneficiary. Rather hegemony operated at a more ‘organic’ level in its connections with the post-war boom, household consumption and popular aspiration. It set the parameters of post-war solutions to which both major parties had to subscribe: welfarism, the extension of citizenship, and in social liberal terminology, the granting of ‘social rights’. Out of the People is also interesting as a text about CCCS history. The long preface announces an ambitious general aim: ‘an analysis of British capitalism since the nineteenth century’ no less! Something on these lines, with a stress on cultural formations, was an aim of historical work in CCCS, but the group also canvassed more particular possibilities: a study of changes in the state, class structure and class relations; a long-term analysis of a particular institution like education; an examination of a single ideological element like ‘service’; and the social history of ‘a specific social group [e.g. the lower middle class] and its way of living through social changes’. Behind this agenda lay many questions of approach. Should we take periods or ‘conjunctures’ or longer transitions? Could we study these ‘culturally’ without more work on Marxist theories of economy and state? Should we trace a thinner thread of change in a particular institution up to the present (or, later, follow Foucault’s more discontinuous style of ‘histories of the present’)? Should we, could we, undertake research of an archival or oral-historical kind? Could that be combined with the commitment to group work and discussion? Or should we mainly work from historians’ ‘secondary’ accounts? If so, how should we read them critically? And did any of this work resemble the kind of ‘history’ we needed anyway? Such questions were to trouble and stimulate historical work at CCCS for a decade but, as the preface suggests, the mid-1970s was a seedbed of historical projects, many taken up by
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other Centre groups – sometimes by the same people. The theme of economic transition was pursued by the History Group in the following year. In 1975 too an Education Group was formed; in 1976 a group on theories and histories of the state, feeding many individual projects and culminating in two collective volumes (Formations, 1984; Langan and Schwarz,1985). Historical work on authors and periods – especially on ‘middle-brow’ literature in the inter-war period – was pursued in new ways by successive English Studies Groups (e.g. Batsleer, Davies, O’Rourke and Weedon, 1985). Out of the People represents a type of conjunctural analysis common in the Centre’s work from the mid 1970s, in collective work and in individual theses. The opening essay of Resistance through Rituals (WPCS in 1975) presented working-class youth subcultures as forms of resistance within the larger post-war hegemony. Policing the Crisis (1978) and Stuart Hall’s later studies of Thatcherism (Hall, 1988) developed the method in relation to the racialisation of street crime and the emergence of a new right hegemony. A similar argument, about the crisis in education policy as a break-up of ‘the social-democratic settlement’, informed the 1976 Education Group paper (see this collection) and the book Unpopular Education (CCCS Education Group, 1981). The shift towards historical approaches also had implications for theory. As Stuart Hall put it Looking across the range of research areas, the most significant development appears to be the general strengthening of the historical approach. . . . A historical perspective lends a necessary specificity to the study of cultures, conceived as an aspect of the material and historical conditions of life of particular groups, classes or societies. It poses, in the centre of the field, questions of cultural power and hegemony; of domination and subordination through the exercise of cultural power . . . CCCS Annual Report 1975–6, pp. 5–6 This particular way of doing history differed significantly from the more politicised forms of social history. The focus was not on the history of a class or on other politically-emergent social identities, or, if so – as in the subcultures work – within a larger analysis of hegemony. Associated work on women’s history at this time took a similar form. The Birmingham Feminist History Group, for example, focussed on the contradictions and ‘cracks’ in the formations of femininity and gender relations in the 1950s, which presaged the shifts of the 1970s (1979). This gender perspective was noticeably absent from Out of the People and much of the early work on education. The shared features of approach, however, especially the focus on recent periods, often made CCCS-style historical work invisible to historians. The interest in crisis, transition and the recent past should not surprise. In the mid-1970s, the hegemony of welfarism and of relatively negotiative class and labour relations was breaking down. The old forms of consumerism that centred on the household, on the relative security in waged work of a male breadwinner and on patriarchal gender forms, were being replaced or supplemented by more individualised styles of consumption – and perhaps of identity – centred on youth and sexuality and inciting a certain ‘liberation’. The solvent of ‘autonomy’ and ‘self-expression’ was biting deeply into older hierarchies and solidarities. Deeply complicit silences around the end of empire, immigration and the normative whiteness of the nation were being broken by black political movements on one side and by Powellism on the other. Through the Heath and later Wilson years, it was not just Labour that ‘wasn’t working’, but the larger socio-economic solutions and ways of winning consent that had developed in the 1940s. 1975 was the year in which the Callaghan
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government experimented with monetarist solutions and with language borrowed from the New Right, while Margaret Thatcher, a convinced neo-liberal, became leader of the Conservative Party.
The question of transitions Both ‘Economy Culture and Concept: Three Approaches to Marxist History’ (SP No. 50, 1977) and Gregor McLennan’s, ‘Ideology and Consciousness: Some Problems in Marxist Historiography’ (SP No 45 Sept, 1976) belonged to a larger project which began around 1975. After three years study and writing, a proposal was submitted to the whole Centre for one of the Hutchinson book series. It was criticised and modified, and then supplemented with new themes and authors. By 1978 many groups within CCCS had an interest in history, so that when a proposal for ‘a book on history’ appeared, with a particular agenda, it seemed narrow and exclusive. The modified project was published as Making Histories: Studies in History Writing and Politics in January 1982. The project began as an attempt to think through the nature of long-term transitions. This is a key difficulty for historians of the contemporary: how can we distinguish the merely novel from the emergent, the phenomenal from the structural, or, in Gramsci’s terms, ‘the organic’ from ‘the conjunctural’? We were living, in the mid 1970s, at a time of evident transition, but how deep and far-reaching was it going to be? How far did the victories of Thatcherite Conservatism mark a fundamental change in hegemonic formations and or in capital’s movements? The coinage ‘Thatcherism’ seemed to give priority to politics and ideology, while implying more than a shift in party fortunes. Were there deeper changes in, for instance, the whole matrix of class/gender/ sexual relations, or in the ways in which the nation was composed, in ethnicised politics for instance? From the mid-1980s these larger changes were given names: neo-liberal capitalism, post-Fordism, globalisation, the network society, ‘New Times’, ‘ethnic absolutism’. But perhaps it was only after New Labour’s project took shape that the larger pattern could be discerned. Both neo-liberal variants or phases – Thatcherism and Blairism – corresponded in different ways to capital’s new solutions: its ‘flexibilisation’ of labour, its extending global reach and looser co-ordination, and its intensive commodification of everything including public services (Hall, 2003; Steinberg and Johnson, 2005). In 1975, without the benefits of hindsight, a feasible plan of inquiry was to go back in time to understand longer, older transitions: from competitive to monopoly capitalism and from the liberal to the modern interventionist state. We (History and State Groups) set out to trace the origins – in the period 1880–1945 – of the hegemonic forms that entered crisis in the 1970s. We also explored the larger problem of transition, traditionally posed within Marxism as transitions from one mode of production to another. These more abstract questions were central to the work of Louis Althusser and his associates (e.g. Althusser and Balibar, 1970) and the English post-Althusserians Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst (e.g.1975). A major issue for structuralist Marxism was how its theories could be made more dynamic, better able to explain contradiction and rupture. If you were seeking a more structural account of ideology and culture, in relation to other transitions, this project offered many resources that were produced by strenuous thinking! Structuralist Marxism was also of interest in 1970s CCCS, because of Althusser’s treatment of classic Marxist issues like determination, base and superstructure and the efficacy of ideology (Althusser, 1971). The rather abstract issue of base and superstructure in social theory had strong
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resonances for historical studies: what was the role of cultural formations in the dynamics of particular transitions?
From histories of history to history and theory The reflexive move – towards historiography and the history of history – again went back to the MA History course, whose members rebelled at the unselfconsciousness of historians, myself included. What was this practice called history writing? How and why do historians have different historical agenda, methods and intellectual self-justifications? Could history – including Marxist history – be regarded as a ‘science’ in any sense? Although the British Marxists were central, we also reviewed other historical schools including the historians of the French Revolution, the French Annales school, British socialists and radical liberals like Sidney and Beatrix Webb, R.H.Tawney and John and Barbara Hammond, feminist historians associated with the first and second wave of the women’s movement, and historians of the state, social policy and labour, not all of whom were Marxists (e.g. Johnson, 1979; Sutton, 1981). It was inevitable that Edward Thompson would receive particular attention. Through, especially, his 1961 critique of Williams’ The Long Revolution, he was a key influence on CCCS’s approach to culture (Thompson, 1961). According to CCCS Annual Reports, he visited to give seminars on eighteenth-century paternalism and on time and work discipline in 1964 and 1966, and a paper on ‘approaches from history’ at a CCCS Conference on The Expressive Arts and Society in 1968. He came twice to argue his position on Althusserian structuralism, both before (1974) and after (February 1979) the publication of The Poverty of Theory, his major polemic against Althusser (1978). This may explain his (at least) double appearance in these papers – his key notion of ‘experience’ explored by Gregor McLennan, his ‘socialist-humanism’ (in relation to structuralism’s anti-humanism) by myself. Our interest in history and theory was undoubtedly influenced by structuralist notions of ‘reading’. We learned how to read history texts not only for their findings, but for their theoretical ‘problematic’ or embedded presuppositions and what these often unacknowledged theories rendered unspeakable. ‘Symptomatic reading’ provided a way of linking history-writing, social theory and questions of epistemology and method. Other questions to the historians derived from the interest in transitions, some from pursuing a materialist but non-reductive account of the cultural. Generally, we were seeking guidelines for historical work, fit for a more self-consciously theoretical method, but still engaged with detailed histories and actual research. These four concerns – transitions, historiography, history and theory, and questions around culture/ideology – were closely intertwined. I have prised them apart a little for the sake of clarity. In the two papers – the collectively discussed but separately authored Economy, Culture and Concept and Gregor McLennan’s Ideology and Consciousness – they are combined.
Engaging Marxist history A main purpose of Bill Schwarz’s discussion of Maurice Dobb was to rehabilitate an explicitly theoretical project that formed the premise of later Marxist history. We were intrigued by the change of object – from mode of production to consciousness or culture – but also from the shift from open working with Marx’s own categories, to the later (it seemed to us) subordination of abstraction to detailed research. Bill’s study of Dobb was also part of his longer study of the Communist Party Historian’s Group, which was to appear in Making
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Histories (Schwarz, 1981). As Schwarz shows, Dobb critiqued the theoretical foundations of non-Marxist accounts of the transition, especially those of Max Weber and the pioneering medieval historian Henri Pirenne. He insisted on the complexity of any determining ‘base’ and was eager to ground Marxist theory in historical research. He argued for the priority of relations of production over technologies and saw the origins of capitalism not in the division between merchants and producers, but between small producers themselves. He made a sharp distinction between ‘logic’ and ‘research’. This, together his neglect of cultural and ideological aspects, troubled us, for surely the categories (however logical) were already informed by researching and vice versa. For Schwarz, Dobb is ‘the limit case of economism’; he also posed us with the puzzle of how to move from abstract categories to actual social formations, always the sum of many kinds of practices and relations. Though written earlier, Gregor McLennan’s single authored piece worries away at better ways in which we might formulate base/superstructure relations, with, as he says, more ‘conceptual clarity’. He distinguishes three approaches to the problem of ideology or culture: an economism in which ideology is reduced to ruling class ideas and/or a reflection of the economic base; ‘culturalism’ in which this reduction is refused, agency is stressed, but no clear distinction is allowed between economic and cultural powers or processes; and finally a ‘structural’ solution. This includes not only Althusser’s redrawing of base and superstructure to allow for the ‘specific effectivity’ of ideology, but also Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as the struggle to secure conformities between structure and superstructure. McLennan does not merely clarify or apply these distinctions however; he looks closely at five different histories and their ways of handling the issues in detail. In a strongly appreciative review he shows how close Thompson comes to the recognition of structure in his actual histories but how also, in his accounts of method, he has no coherent solution to the relation of theory and research. Unsurprisingly, of the other historians reviewed, it is Gareth Stedman Jones, who was heavily involved also in theoretical debates, who is found to get closest to a more adequate solution. Reading this rich and early piece today prompts two thoughts. The explorative and tentative nature of the writing reminds us how ‘we were all students then’, seriously struggling with intrinsically difficult issues. Solutions were not really proposed; our conclusions were often negative ones. In socio-cultural theory we were arguing against reductive solutions, against reducing social process either to ‘culture’ or to ‘the economic’. Methodologically, we are arguing against the empiricist sidelining of conceptualisation and also, on the other ‘rationalist’ side, against the identification of abstraction or theory with science per se. In an intellectual climate soon to be dominated by variants of constructivism, we also held a very bright candle for the possibility of ‘science’, in the sense, at least, of better or worse knowledges. My second reflection concerns the close parallel – which I did not altogether grasp at the time – between our quite developed socio-cultural theory and the problem of theory and ‘evidence’. Since knowledge – whatever else it is – is a cultural practice or product, issues of epistemology and of cultural theory have strong correspondences. At this time, CCCS as a whole had greater clarity – and perhaps agreement – about cultural theory, than we did about epistemology or method. Perhaps the work on history and theory was struggling towards aligning our views of culture and our views of knowledge. A main aim of my own piece on Thompson and Genovese was also limited and also (over-) ambitious. I wanted to persuade social historians – myself included – that there was much of interest in Althusserian theory and that a less polemical attention was worthwhile. This was quite an intimate dialogue. It was preceded by correspondence (with drafts
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attached) with Thompson himself and even a dinner party where I listened to him in conversation with Dorothy, and Eugene Genovese. I was attracted, however, by the clarity of Althusser’s insistence on the specific nature of ideological relations and yet his refusal to abandon a strong sense of determination. I was also entranced by the exaggerated – or daring? – belief in category building even though, for us, this was only ever an aspect of historical work. These aims were mixed up, moreover, with my excitement in reading both Marx and Dobb. So it is that in the writing, I seem sometimes to pass judgement on Thompson’s work according to some (unspecified) orthodoxies of my own. I am also involved in a kind of polemical inversion of Thompson’s own polemics against other positions and in defence of his ‘tradition’. It is now easy to see what an explosive admixture this was when it appeared, in abbreviated form in History Workshop Journal. I wince today at such fatal words as ‘correct’, or phrases like ‘echoes of a more authentic Marxism’ and I am not very happy nowadays with the term ‘culturalism’ itself, nor its widespread subsequent adoption to describe aspects of cultural studies. Such unease is undoubtedly mixed up with memories of the fierceness with which the argument was rebuked, first in the pages of the journal, and then by Thompson himself in conditions of maximum exposure, at the 1979 History Workshop (Johnson, 1978; and e.g. McClelland, 1979; Williams, 1979; Clarke, 1979; Thompson, 1981; but see also McLennan, 1979; Stedman Jones, 1979). The lack of positivity or ‘conclusions’ in these papers is not surprising: they represent a process of discovery. This left large spaces for critics to fill in our arguments, and they tended to do this as though our whole position was structuralist, or alternatively reductive in a Dobbian way. I think a careful reading of the texts, especially of Gregor McLennan’s nuanced piece on Hindess and Hirst, shows how far away we were from a rationalist epistemology of a structuralist kind. We argued against the empiricism of hypothesis and facts, but also against concept building without engagement in research and against hidden empirical reference in resolutely formalist accounts. Key parts of the arguments were developed later and published elsewhere: in the essays and applications in Making Histories, in my own work on theories of working class culture, in Gregor McLennan’s thesis and book on Marxism and the Methodologies of History (1981) and in Bill Schwarz’s own subsequent practice as a theoretically-inclined historian.
On popular memory: popular memory and historical representation The paper presented here as On Popular Memory was similarly part of a larger project,which became complex and many layered. Even the Stencilled Paper (included here) was part of a larger piece. The larger piece included examples of how one might analyse popular narratives in ways sensitive not only to questions of memory, but also to issues of subjectivity and self-production. Again there are significant contexts – local and historical – for this very collective piece. The extraordinary explosion of ‘heritage’ and popular historical practices in most countries of the developed world was a feature of the 1980s. It was often accompanied by nationalist revivals, most sharply seen in Britain at the time of the Falklands/Malvinas war. This in turn produced a plethora of constructivist analyses of nationalism as a political, and especially cultural phenomenon, extending to discourses of heritage (e.g. Anderson, 1983; Wright, 1985). In the West Midlands there were interesting – and very different – heritage projects available for study including the Ironbridge Museums, the Black Country Museum and Warwick Castle, the latter a well-preserved medieval castle lately sold to a large transnational
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corporation. Each of these were to be explored by members of successive popular memory groups, though only Bob West’s Ironbridge critique (West, n.d. – CCCS SP 83 not reproduced here) and the early work of Patrick Wright (Bommes and Wright, 1981) were published (see also West, n.d.-b CCCS SP No.86). We published the stencilled paper version as a kind of prospectus for a new way of engaging with the historical. Later CCCS groups developed this agenda in seemingly contradictory directions – on the one hand looking at daily life narratives as ways in which both individual and collective identities were produced (e.g. Clare and Johnson, 2000), on the other, looking critically at larger-scale historical representations, of the kind to be found in heritage sites, in political discourses, in film or other forms of public narrative (e.g. Dawson, 1994). Because of the difficulty of close analysis of others’ narratives, subsequent groups decided to analyse examples of ‘memory work’ produced by group members themselves, a method borrowed from a group of women from Berlin who visited CCCS at this time (see Haug, 1987). Despite the attempt to focus both projects around cultural nationalism – and its engagement of individual subjects – the project did not hold together and the group dispersed. (For a fuller, but necessarily reticent account, see Clare and Johnson, 2000.) Nonetheless these related projects were enormously productive, both academically and in terms of educational practice. Memory work – the writing and analysis of autobiographical fragments in a group work context – became one of my own standard ways of teaching for example, in many different educational contexts (for elaboration and relevance of the method, see Clare and Johnson, 2000; Johnson, Chambers, Raghuram and Tincknell, 2004). On Popular Memory, also published in a fuller version in Making Histories, acquired a wide circulation and influence. After early skirmishes, its ideas were also taken up by Ruskin’s popular historians, especially by Raphael Samuel himself, whose multi-volume tour de force on popular historical practices, not quite finished before he died, developed, in assiduous research and enthusiastic writing, one strand of the popular memory argument. (e.g. Samuel, 1994). It is a source of pleasure to me personally that this particular story can end by noting an area of strong rapprochement between historical cultural studies and popular history. Richard Johnson has taught cultural studies and contemporary history at Birmingham and Nottingham Trent Universities. His current interests include the politics of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, teaching culture, politics and social history within the Workers Education Association, working in CND and the Social Forum Movement and trying to compose a better future, with help from science fiction.
References Addison, Paul (1975) The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London: Jonathan Cape). Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso). Bland, Lucy (1995) Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality 1885–1914 (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Batsleer, Janet, Davies, Tony, O’Rourke, Rebecca and Weedon, Chris (1985) Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Class and Gender (London: Methuen). Birmingham Feminist History Group (1979) ‘Feminism as Femininity in the 1950s?’, Feminist Review, No. 3: 48–65. Bommes, Michael and Wright, Patrick (1981) ‘ “Charms of Residence”: The Public and the Past’ in
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Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1982) Making Histories: Studies in History Writing and Politics (London: Hutchinson). Calder, Angus (1971) The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945 (London: Jonathan Cape). Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1964) Annual Report (Birmingham, University of Birmingham). Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Education Group (1981) Unpopular Education: Schooling and Social Democracy in England since 1944 (London: Hutchinson). Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1982) Making Histories: Studies in History Writing and Politics (London: Hutchinson). Clare, Mariette and Johnson, Richard (2000) ‘ “Method in Our Madness”? Identity and Power in a Memory Work Method’ in Susannah Radstone (ed.) Memory and Methodology (Oxford: Berg). Clarke, John, Critcher, Chas and Johnson, Richard (eds) (1979) Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (London: Hutchinson). Clarke, Simon (1979) ‘Socialist Humanism and the Critique of Economism’, History Workshop Journal No. 8: 137–56. Conekin, Becky, Mort, Frank and Waters, Chris (eds) (1999) Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–64 (London: Oram Rivers). Dawson, Graham (1994) Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge). Dobb, Maurice (1963) Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Formations, (1984) Formations of Nation and People (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart). Hall, Stuart (1968) ‘The Hippies: An American Moment’, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Stencilled Paper, No. 16. Hall, Stuart (1970) ‘Chapter 1: General Introduction’ in Anthony Smith, Elizabeth Immirzi and Trevor Blackwell, The Popular Press and Social Change 1935–1965 (Mimeo; Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies). Hall, Stuart (1972) ‘The Social Eye of Picture Post’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, No. 2: 71–120. Hall, Stuart (1973) ‘A “Reading” of Marx’s 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse’, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Stencilled Papers, No. 1. Hall, Stuart (1988) The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso). Hall, Stuart (2003) ‘New Labour’s Double Shuffle’, Soundings, No. 14 (Autumn): 10–24. Hall, Stuart, Critcher, Chas, Jefferson, Tony, Clarke, John and Roberts, Brian (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, The State and Law and Order (London: Macmillan). Hoggart, Richard (1956) The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto and Windus). Johnson, Richard (1978) ‘Edward Thompson, Eugene Genovese and Socialist-Humanist History’, History Workshop Journal No. 6: 79–100. Johnson, Richard (1979) ‘Culture and the Historians’ in John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson (eds) Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (London: Hutchinson). Kaye, Harvey (1984) The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis (Cambridge: Polity). Laing, Stuart (1986) Representations of Working Class Life 1957–1964 (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Langan, Mary and Schwarz, Bill (eds) (1985) Crises of the British State 1890s–1920s (London: Hutchinson). Marwick, Arthur (1982) British Society Since 1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Mort, Frank (1987) Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). McClelland, Keith (1979) ‘Some Comments on Richard Johnson, “Edward Thompson, Eugene Genovese and Socialist-Humanist History” ’, History Workshop Journal, No. 7 (Spring): 101–115. McLennan, Gregor (1979) ‘Richard Johnson and his Critics’, History Workshop Journal No. 8 (Autumn): 157–166. McLennan, Gregor (1981) Marxism and the Methodologies of History (London: Verso). Powell, Margaret (1968) Below Stairs (London: Davies). Ricoeur, Paul (1984) Time and Narrative Vol. 1 (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press).
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Samuel, Raphael (1994) Theatres of Memory Vol. 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso). Schwarz, Bill (1982) ‘The People in History: The Communist Party Historians Group’ in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Making Histories: Studies in History Writing and Politics (London: Hutchinson). Smith, Anthony, Immirzi, Elizabeth and Blackwell, Trevor (1970) The Popular Press and Social Change 1935–1965 (Mimeo 2 Vols; Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies). Smith, Anthony, Immirzi, Elizabeth and Blackwell, Trevor (1975) Paper Voices: The Popular Press and Social Change 1935–1965 (London: Chatto and Windus). Smith, Harold (ed.) (1986) War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Stedman Jones, Gareth (1979) ‘History and Theory’, History Workshop Journal (Autumn): 198–202. Steinberg, Deborah and Johnson, Richard (2005) Blairism and the War of Persuasion: Labour’s Passive Revolution (London: Lawrence and Wishart). Sutton, David (1981) ‘Radical Liberalism, Fabianism and Social History’ in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1982) Making Histories: Studies in History Writing and Politics (London: Hutchinson). Taylor, Pam (1979) ‘Daughters and Mothers – Maids and Mistresses: domestic service between the wars’ in John Clarke, Chas Critcher and Richard Johnson (eds) (1979) Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (London: Hutchinson). Thompson, E.P. (1961) ‘Review of The Long Revolution’, New Left Review, Nos. 9–11. Thompson, E.P. (1963) The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollanz). Thompson, E.P. (1970) Warwick University Limited (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Thompson, E.P. (1981) ‘The Politics of Theory’ in Raphael Samuel (ed.) People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). West, Bob (n.d a). ‘ “Danger – History at Work”: A Critical Consumers’ Guide to the Ironbridge Museum’, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Stencilled Paper No. 83. West, Bob (n.d. b) ‘ “We Three Kings”: The Bradford Celebration of the 1937 Coronation’, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Stencilled Paper No. 86. Williams, Gavin (1979) ‘In Defence of History’, History Workshop Journal, No. 7 (Spring): 116–25. Williams, Raymond (1958) Culture and Society 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus). Wright, Patrick (1985) On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso).
38 Economy, culture and concept Three approaches to marxist history Richard Johnson, Gregor McLennan, Bill Schwarz*
Introduction In this paper we wish to raise in a limited way some problems involved in the relation between history and theory. We consider three marxist ‘tendencies’ principally because it is above all in the marxist tradition that such questions are raised, and because they are hotly contested within marxism itself. If our focus is relatively narrow, the repercussions of the discussion are, hopefully, of quite general significance. This is because issues, posed within marxism, confront historians and social theorists alike: for example, the question of a ‘science’ of history or of a ‘humanist’ alternative; the problem of the ‘subject’ or motor of history; the nature of historical causality; and the relation between ‘concreteness’ and abstraction. This is so even – perhaps especially – when historians or others choose to ignore or dispute the relevance of such issues. The refusal to see the problem of ‘theory’ and ‘research’ is itself one position with respect to the problem, but one whose strength lies only in its silence. It should be possible to substantiate the need for a theoretical history by taking examples across the whole range of historiography. But it is even more interesting to consider whether the internal claims of marxist historiographies and the consequent challenge of marxism to other problematics, could amount to the theory (or science) of history. Maurice Dobb, in many ways the father of British marxist theoretical history, begins each chapter of his seminal Studies in the Development of Capitalism with a discussion of alternative theoretical concepts and strategies. Engaging successfully with many rival ‘bourgeois’ definitions, it might nevertheless be asked in advance whether Dobb himself ultimately succeeds in demarcating his own perspective from a Weberian type of analysis (that of theoretical ‘models’). Dobb’s work has received many important extensions – especially on questions of class struggle and politics in feudalism – from Hill and Hilton, and aspects of the work of these writers are also briefly considered in Section One. Indirectly, Dobb and his ‘school’ raise some basic questions about the nature of marxist theory. Dobb himself can be seen as giving relatively little attention to politics and ideology or culture as aspects or levels of the social totality. Now, while this, in our view, is not necessarily a ‘fault’ in Dobb, and while Hilton and Hill undoubtedly provide a corrective, the question of an ‘economistically’ one-sided history (often misleadingly described as ‘economic determinism’) is a real one which marxists must face up to. One alternative is to assert a militantly humanist marxist perspective, where human agency and consciousness are shifted
*
Much of the discussion on which this paper was based occurred within the Centre’s Cultural History Group 1976–77, and we wish to acknowledge the help and stimulus provided by other members of the group.
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from the periphery to the centre of the historical stage. This tendency is considered here through an account of the work of the ‘theoretical twins’ Eugene Genovese and Edward Thompson. The metaphor of dramatic presentation is not wholly out of place: for both these writers are concerned more to let the people speak for themselves than to ‘impose’ a theoretical scheme which may scar the authenticity of their story. We will contend that the political merits of such a position do not outweigh some important theoretical lapses. The idea that theoretical coherence is indispensible to history has been raised sharply by a number of marxist theorists stemming from and including the work of Louis Althusser. The nature of the Althusserian intervention has been clarified and criticised by Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst in works – especially Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production – which have influenced some of our own views (if often only to clarify our critical perspective). However, if the epistemological ‘rationalism’ of the Althusserian positions (particularly with regard to the analysis of historical transitions) is fraught with problem, then difficulties of a similarly rationalist kind confront the neo-Althusserian views of these critics themselves. Principally this involves the status of ‘concrete historical reality’ when it is asserted that the object of historical theory is wholly constructed within discourse.
Part I: Maurice Dobb and marxist history Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) represents a decisive moment in the formation of British marxist historiography. One of the most distinctive features in this early formation, supported in the work of Hill and Hilton, was the reconceptualization of the problem of the transition from one mode of production to another – thought specifically in terms of the formation of capitalism – which is crucial, indeed central, to marxism. (This concern is closely paralleled in a contemporary and resonant theoretical project: Hindess and Hirst begin their book Pre Capitalist Modes of Production by stating: ‘Its object is to investigate the various pre-capitalist modes of production briefly indicated in the works of Marx and Engels and to examine the conditions of the transition from one mode of production to another’, 1975 p 1). If it is difficult to appreciate the originality of these historians today, it may only be due to the fact that the legacy of their work settled in the 1950s into something of a marxist orthodoxy. But nonetheless it is curious that this tradition, which was quite consciously premised on the elaboration of new theoretical positions, should today be criticized for its empiricism. Anderson, for example, claims that ‘It has been a general phenomenon of the last decades that marxist historians, the authors of a now impressive corpus of research, have not always been directly concerned with the theoretical implications of their work’ (1974b p 7). One of the aims of this section of the paper is to assess the accuracy of reducing this particular body of historical work to a notion of ‘research’ alone. An important precursor to Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism, and perhaps the earliest work in this tradition, was Hill’s The English Revolution 1640 (1940) which still claims a significant readership today as the most accessible introduction to the Puritan Revolution. It is largely the thesis itself – arguing that there had been a revolution in the C17 comparable to the French Revolution – that is notable, firmly opposing the naturalized evolutionism characteristic of the dominant Whig school of history, which was further challenged by Hill’s explicit taking of (political) sides, undercutting embedded beliefs in the objectivity and neutrality of scholarship. Yet at the same time it is perhaps a classic of economism and essentialism, in which history becomes the product of one single (economic) contradiction. As such the book has marked theoretical limitations today, although Hill’s premise at least was conceptual, in that he set out to investigate the historical
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specificity of a national bourgeois revolution, and this involved thinking a (simple) totality. The theoretical influence here seems quite clearly to be that of The Communist Manifesto. The problems of this approach, as well as its insights, defined much of Hill’s subsequent work, and in some respects, the same concerns were taken up by Dobb in Studies, although he had been working on the book for many years before its eventual publication in the 1940s. The starting point for Dobb is one which recently has once again received a great deal of attention: that is of Marx vs Weber, or more accurately, the problem of demarcating marxist from Weberian and sociological types of analysis. Thus the first chapter of Studies in the Development of Capitalism is constituted by the rejection of various concepts which were current in historical and sociological explanations of the formation and nature of capitalism. The process here is both a critique conducted at a high level of abstraction attempting to make explicit theoretical discrepancies, and one which precisely distinguishes Dobb’s conceptual framework from the dominant positions, structured by the assumption that the critique itself must lie in the explanations of the concrete, in the ‘Studies’ themselves. Nonetheless it is quite clear that the methodological structure of the book is one which proceeds from the abstract to the concrete, which from the outset dislodges the pertinence of any simple charge of empiricism. The first theoretical position which Dobb explicity rejects is the set of idealist tendencies represented in the work of Sombart and Weber which hold that the advent of capitalism can be understood primarily in terms of the realization of some embryonic spirit of capitalism. And secondly he rejects the reductionism of the position which equates capitalism with market or commodity relations alone, implying an unproblematic binary analysis composed of the twin concepts natural economy/market economy. Dobb correctly emphasizes the place and articulation of commodity relations (specifically, the role of labour power itself as a commodity) within the specificity of the new economic relations of capitalism. Complementing Hill’s work on the politics of the C17, he recognizes the historical break inaugurated by the dominance of capital as a relation of production, opposing at a fundamental theoretical level the evolutionist conclusions of the historians – Pirenne amongst them – who explain the formation of capitalism in terms of the ‘rise’ of the market, or commodity, relations. (Here Dobb’s argument duplicates Lenin’s criticisms of the Narodniks, whose analysis, thought in terms of natural peasant economy and ‘community’ or Gemeinschaft, is a theoretical variant of the money economy positions. See Lenin 1972.) Dobb argues that: The view that development is characterized by periodic revolutions stands therefore, in contrast to those views of economic development, moulded exclusively in terms of continuous quantitive variation, which see change as a simple function of some increasing factor, whether it be population or productivity or markets or division of labour or the stock of capital. A leading defect of the latter is their tendency to ignore, or at any rate belittle, those crucial new properties which at certain stages may emerge and radically transform the outcome . . . and the bias they are apt to give the mind towards interpreting new situations in categories of thought which were products of past situations and towards super-historical ‘universal’ truths, fashioned out of what are deemed to be immutable traits of human nature or certain invariable sorts of economic or social ‘necessity’. p 12 The direction of these preliminary propositions holds Dobb to a very precise trajectory: on the one hand, it is clearly at odds with any idealist notion of human intentionality or agency,
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encapsulated foremost in the theories of Sombart and Weber; and on the other hand, it is equally clear in rejecting its reverse position, that is, any variant of functionalism, such as a recourse to some metaphysical economic necessity. At this stage in his argument, it can be noted that his epistemological criteria for opposing the dominant theoretical positions are always constituted with reference to the concrete, to history as such. The basis for this is Dobb’s belief that the theoretical constructs of figures like Sombart or Pirenne can only result in the collapsing and blunting of historical specificity, thus concluding that his own way of proceding is more worthwhile in terms of the adequacy of the final explanation. Thus a theory of capitalism can tell us more about C19 England, for example, than the descriptive notions of market, or industrial, society. He builds into this a second strand of argument: The justification of any definition must ultimately rest on its successful employment in illuminating the actual process of historical development: on the extent to which it gives shape to our picture of the process corresponding to the contours which the historical landscape proves to have. p8 The looseness of the metaphor in this sentence points to a persistent ambiguity in the epistemological basis of his work: on the one hand the ‘definition’ (e.g. of capitalism) ‘illuminates’ a historical process, a process which appears to have a pre-conceptual existence, as an unproblematic and uncontentious entity which comes into being only through the diligence of historical research; and on the other hand, Dobb insists throughout the book that the concepts employed must ‘shape’ our understanding of this process, (thereby making a significant theoretical advance upon the earlier work of Hill). It is apparent that Dobb is attempting to hold together two moments in the practice of a historian: the moment of ‘logic’ (or abstraction) and the moment of ‘research’. But it is equally apparent that this unity remains one which is merely formal, one which in its effects has the tendency to dissever the process of historical knowledge into two quite distinct procedures. Nonetheless it is crucial to emphasize that Dobb’s sense of the determinacy of theory in forming historical explanation ensures that his critique of sociological concepts becomes a defining feature of his Studies. Dobb was one of the few marxists of the period to return to Capital with a specific theoretical purpose – to elaborate the concept of mode of production. This to a very large extent marked a break with the dominant readings of Capital as a paradigmatic economic history book, a reading determined by the influence of an eminent line of classical economic historians. Certainly there are a number of passages where Marx refers to specific historical conjunctures, passages which Dobb uses quite extensively. But at the same time Dobb draws the crucial distinction between logical operations, taking place wholly within knowledge, and the actual process of history itself: as for example in his distinction between thinking the abstract ‘definition’ of an economic system and the complex forms of any determinate social formation (p 11). Thus for Dobb a necessary level of abstraction – unlike those historians representing most sharply the culturalist positions, which are discussed in the next part of the paper – remains a fundamental step in his methodology; he explicitly claims that ‘the work of abstraction’ must be ‘competently handled’ (p 255), although for Dobb this can only remain a preliminary (and thus in itself incomplete) stage of theoretical work. As quite a direct result of his reading of Capital he attempted to do a number of things: to hold in mind and clarify the concept of the capitalist mode of production; to think through and elaborate from this paradigm the concept of the feudal mode of production; and most important of
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all, at a lower level of abstraction, to think the historical conditions for the transition from feudalism, ie. the formation and development of capitalism. This resembles quite closely a programmatic statement by Althusser that ‘the theory of the transition from one mode of production to another . . . is the same thing as the theory of the process of constitution of a determinate mode of production, since every mode of production is constituted solely out of the existing forms of an earlier mode of production’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970 p 197). In this particular respect, the readings of Marx by Dobb and Althusser – both formally constituted on the basis of their anti-empiricism – at the same time hold no warrant for the rejection of historical practice in the name of rationalism. Mode of production The key concept which structures Studies in the Development of Capitalism is the concept mode of production. Dobbs’ emphasis is always on the (economic) relations of production, on the various forms of appropriating surplus labour from the direct producers. He quotes (p 36) the important passage from Volume III of Capital: The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself, and, in turn reacts upon it as a determining element . . . Marx 1972 p 791 There are two important points in this re-statement of marxist ‘orthodoxy’. The first has reference to the positions which defined the terrain of historiography in the 1940s. To a very great extent it was the influence of Dobb himself which shifted this whole terrain from one which focused on the increasing role of trade, the widening influence of towns, the growth of market relations in general – analyses framed by the parameters of distribution and exchange – to one which was defined by an appreciation of the theoretical importance of the determinancy of production. This is not to suggest that Dobb discounted the contributions of the non-marxist historians, to which he returned again and again; rather he rethought and relocated these (conceptual) insights into a problematic which was radically distinct from the original. The second point refers to the culturalist positions which were formed partly as a result of the reception (and critique) of Dobb’s work. By following through the logic of this emphasis on the relations of production, Dobb refused to countenance any non-economic criteria for a theoretical definition of any determinate mode of production. Concerning the feudal mode of production he argues that: The emphasis of this definition will not lie in the juridical relation between vassal and sovereign, nor in the relation between production and the destination of the product, but in the relation between the direct producer (whether he be artisan in some workshop or peasant cultivator on the land) and his immediate superior or overlord and in the socio-economic content of the obligation which connects them. p 35 It is this premise – production as the determining social relation – which is the touchstone of Dobb’s marxism, sharply demarcating his historical practice from any which gives the dominant theoretical place to the juridical or superstructural, a characteristic, he writes elsewhere, of bourgeois historians.
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The centrality given to the concept of economic production had one crucial consequence for the development of British marxist historiography. Much of the work of the 1960s – the immense influence of culturalism – reacted against this early orthodoxy, against its emphasis on economics as well as its ‘economism’, and tried to outrun what was perceived as its residual positivism, and its tendency to abstraction. The theoretical nature of this response is discussed later – although note can be made here of Thompson’s characterization of the tradition he opposed, suggesting polemically that its thesis could be summarized as ‘Steam power + factories = working class’. But what is submerged in culturalist appraisals is that the ‘economis’ of Dobb at least was one formed explicitly in an engagement with the dominant idealist and Weberian theoretical positions, often themselves ‘culturalist’. It was precisely a re-assertion of marxism that drove Dobb not simply to economics or the ‘problem of production’, but to the marxist problematic of mode of production. The specific form or forms of the articulation of the relations and forces of production, which lies at the heart of theorizing concepts of modes of production, remains underargued in the Studies. But it is quite clear that Dobb considers any form of technicism – in which history is reduced to the outcome in changes of the instruments of labour alone, as in the formula ‘steam power + factories’ – to be foreign to marxism. By mode of production Marx did not refer merely to the state of technique – to what he termed the state of productive forces – but to the way in which the means of production were owned and to the social relations which resulted from their connections with the process of production. p7 It is strange perhaps how often this argument has had to be made from within and for marxism; but it is equally strange how Dobb’s work has sometimes been read as economistic because of his supposed theoretical adherence to a force of production or technicist problematic. He frequently argues against this, specifically proposing that the historically decisive moment in the formation of capitalism was the penetration and domination of the production relations by capital, and, closely following the Marx of Capital, claims that this transformation was not dependent on any substantial or qualitatitive change in the forces of production: The subordination of production to capital, and the appearance of this class relationship between capitalist and the producer is, therefore, to be regarded as the crucial watershed between the old mode of production and the new, even if the technical changes that we associate with the industrial revolution were needed both to complete the transition and to afford scope for the full maturing of the capitalist mode of production and of the great increase in the productive power of human labour associated with it. p 143 Moreover he emphasizes that this must necessarily be understood in terms of the articulation of the economic with the political ‘reaching its apex in the Cromwellian revolution’ ( pp 18–19). In fact Dobb’s thesis prefigures one of Anderson’s major arguments concerning the structure of the feudal crisis, from which Anderson concludes that ‘the relations of production generally change prior to the forces of production in an epoch of transition and not vice versa’ (Anderson 1974a p 204). Given the previous explanation by Dobb and Marx’s comments in Capital it is hard to understand why Hobsbawm (and Miliband
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elsewhere) should refer to this as one of Anderson’s ‘more brilliant observations’ (Hobsbawm 1976 p 8). This does not imply, however, that Dobb’s theoretical system denies an effectivity to the forces of production, an effectivity which may be decisive in theorizing certain determinate conjunctures, even in an epoch ‘of transition’. Thus for Dobb the priority of the relations or forces of production, in terms of explaining historical causation, is a matter of contingency, and not of any formal pre-given necessity. This is precisely what he intends to prove in his chapter on ‘The Industrial Revolution’. He begins by referring to Arnold Toynbee’s ‘four great inventions’ (p 261): but just as he takes the site of the problem of ‘the rise of market relations’ seriously, so too he appreciates the logic and limitations of the ‘four great inventions’ approach. In effect he rejects the essentialism common to both these positions, and rethinks the problems signalled by both by re-articulating and relocating them in a distinct conceptual structure. Further, by stressing that ‘industrial inventions are social products’ ( p 268) and that for the historian of capitalism the crucial factor is the moment when changes in the instruments of labour become socially significant (rather than when they make their first appearance), he implies that a simple technicism merely reverses the idealism of a position which attributes determinancy to the agency of the far-sighted industrial pioneer or inventor. But despite this, Dobb poses the problem no more precisely than in a notion of the generalized ‘reciprocity’ of the relations and forces (p 23): thus for the industrial revolution, he argues only for ‘the close connection between technical change and the structure of industry and of economic and social relations, and in the extent and significance of the effects of the new inventions upon the latter’ (pp 260–1); or again, in demarcating his own position from one in which the transition to machinofacture is reduced to ‘a purely technical revolution’ he mentions ‘the special significance of that transformation in the structure of industry and in the social relations of production which was the consequence of technical change at a certain crucial level’ (p 267). Any conclusions less ambiguous than these, for Dobb, would have to rest on more detailed historical research. Social formation There is a marked difference between the ways in which Dobb and Hill (in The English Revolution) conceptualize the social totality, although both are variants of the familiar base and superstructure formulation. The base, or the economic, in Dobb’s work is always constituted as a complex formation, which can never be reduced simply to any single and universal contradiction (e.g. between the relations and forces of production) except at a most general level of either hypothesis or conclusion. Note is taken of dominant and subordinate forms of production, necessary uneven development, the articulation of different modes of production in a social formation, the structured totality of production, exchange and distribution, and, most of all, tendencies and counter-acting tendencies of development. ‘An economic revolution’, he writes, ‘results from a whole set of historical forces in a certain combination: it is not a simple product of one of them alone’ (p 277). For Hill on the other hand, the monocausal economic contradiction is directly reflected in the superstructure, reducing complexly-articulated totalities to totalities expressive of their (economic) essence. Because of the complexity of the economic in the Studies, its determination can never be theorized in anything like such a direct way. But Dobb’s lack of attention to the political and particularly the ideological, structured in his methodological hierarchy economic-political-ideological, consistently undercuts many of his most important insights. And in passing, we should acknowledge that the reason this registers so deeply today must primarily be due to the
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legacy of culturalism. Inattention to the superstructural in itself need not be the result of a theoretical economism, although the assumptions of many of the culturalist positions might imply this. But it is the case with Dobb that, despite formal recognition of the non-economic, the superstructural is nowhere adequately theorized in his work. For example, he claims that one of the most decisive conditions for the formation of capitalism in England was the political revolution of the C17: but how this was so, and why it took the historically specific form it did – in other words an explanation of determinacy – is ignored. Thus even by employing his own criterion of the adequacy of the explanation of the concrete, Dobb ultimately produces ‘Studies’ which are quite severely reduced in their scope. And this is a form of economism against which later culturalist tendencies were correct to engaged and to oppose: as this reaction crystallized, however, many of Dobb’s positive theoretical contributions were ditched in the process. But any serious criticism which consigns Dobb to a position within economism has immediately to be qualified: there is no warrant for accepting the rationalist corollary that the only answer can be the quick and painless liquidation of his entire problematic. There is of course much to be valued in his marxism. As we have suggested, it was a marxism formed in critical engagement with other positions; and as we shall see the process of the production of his marxism was at the same time the process of the reproduction of certain Weberian tendencies – it is the double nature of this process which marks the crucial epistomological ambiguity in his work – but nonetheless, these were reproduced within an original and distinctive problematic. There is perhaps here an analogy with the argument which claims that Gramsci’s marxism defines the ‘limit case’ of historicism, for the ‘structuralism’ of Althusser and Poulantzas, a historicism with which they have to come to terms in constituting their own anti-historicist marxism; similarly it could be argued that Dobb’s particular position is one which provides a limit case of economism. For a start, his marxism is structured on the concept of the relations of production, which at once distinguishes Dobb from any technicist variant of economism. We have noted also the necessary complexity of the base which is the site of a series of articulated contradictions, which in their combination are determinant. Further Dobb also uses the descriptive (and ambiguous) notion of ‘the social’, which he often places in the context of ‘the political and the social’, pointing towards a largely unmapped location; however it does suggest, in context, not only the effectivity of the superstructural, but also implies a sense of culture and ideology as something more than mental reflections of the economic base. That this is ultimately class reductionist is uncontentious; that it is economistic in the sense of reducing the political and ideological to simple products of economic class ‘interests’ is much less clear. (For an explicit rejection of economic determinism, in general, see his essay ‘Historical Materialism and the Role of the Economic Factor’ 1951). One element which supports this argument is that Dobb himself – as we have repeated throughout this part of the paper – was acutely aware of the problem of essentialism: at every stage of his argument, he is careful to demarcate his own analysis from those which rely on an understanding of ‘the motor of history’ as some central and unproblematic essence, be it the market (Pirenne), or the spirit of capitalism (Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), or the forces of production (Toynbee). It is these ‘discrepancies’ in Dobb’s peculiarly complex economism which are as serious for marxism today as the neglect of the superstructural was for the culturalists who followed him.
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Transition The nature of Dobb’s contribution to marxist historiography can only be adequately assessed by examining quite closely the ‘Studies’ themselves: the critical edge of his marxism was explicitly constituted as much in the explanations of the concrete, as in the preliminary process of demarcating his particular conceptual field. This is not to imply that his aim was to write a narrative of the development of capitalism – predicated on some given and unproblematic chronology – thought within the terms of a simple empiricism. The book itself is formally structured so that the major levels of abstraction are held together in tension. Thus, as we have noted, the first chapter is wholly analytical, taken up with the rejection of various concepts of capitalism, and this is the closest Dobb comes to discussing the capitalist mode of production ‘in general’. But it is also the case that the beginning of each chapter focuses on more specific abstract problems, and these sections correspond to a second level of abstraction, formed primarily by the elaboration of sets of subordinate concepts. One very clear example of this is Dobb’s re-working of the thesis on ‘the two ways’ in which capital came historically to penetrate production, which for Marx (1972 p 334) had a function which was quite marginal. Certainly Marx carefully explained the analytical conditions for thinking the abstract process of the transformation of money into productive capital (Capital Volume I, Part II); but this procedure is distinct from the one which produces the analytical conditions for thinking the historical process as it occurred in determinate social formations. It is at this lower level of abstraction – concerned in this case precisely with the problem of transition – that Dobb formulates the theoretical focus of each of his ‘Studies’. Thus in his chapter on industrial capital, he begins by examining the theoretical problem of the nature of merchant capital, its relation to the feudal mode of production, and the possible routes and obstacles which allow its transformation into productive capital (pp 120–9). Having set up this theoretical framework, he then shifts to a lower level of abstraction again, to explain the historical transition itself; he writes: ‘The first stage of this transition – the turning of sections of merchant capital towards an increasingly intimate control over production – seems to have been occurring on an extensive scale in the textile, leather and smaller metal trades in the sixteenth century . . .’ (p 129). Moving through various stages of abstraction, in a way typical of Marx himself, Dobb finally comes to explain historical change itself. His account of the formation of capitalism is one particular study which clearly broke with the dominant readings, and it was precisely in the nature of their dominance that their theoretical basis had been largely unquestioned. The classic interpretations were defined by the assumptions of the money economy theorists: feudalism (often conceptualized as a political system crystallized around serfdom) is dissolved directly by the assault of an incipient and ‘vigorous’ capitalism (in the guise of trade, understood as the great agent of dissolution), a framework which can only place the vanguard social grouping as urban money capitalists. This reading is posited on a pure evolutionism by which history is reduced to a simple unilinear development, determined by human intentionality, the ‘needs’ of the economy, or whatever. And if this is a caricature it can be recalled that even the marxism of Hill in The English Revolution (consciously constructed by its opposition to political evolutionisn) provided an explanation which was quite apparently the consequence of this theoretical evolutionism. Dobb’s account is quite different. Here the feudal crisis of the C14 and C15 is understood as the direct result of an intensification of class struggle between the direct producers and the feudal lords, which, constituted by the dominant relation of production, overdetermines secondary struggles. But the routes out of this ‘transitional conjuncture’ were shaped by the
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variant forms of class struggle, including non-economic struggle: he draws the distinction between the different ‘political and social’ factors ‘which played a large part here in determining the course of events’, especially in determining the restabilization of feudal relations of production in Eastern Europe and their destruction in parts of Western Europe (p 51). The result in England at least was the partial breaking of feudal relations, and the formation of pockets of petty commodity production in town and country. This was a form of production which was necessarily subordinate, existing in the feudal model, but at the same time disintegrating it (p 121). Thus the argument illustrates that the dissolution of the feudal mode of production was well advanced before the formation of the capitalist mode of production; and also, in a further rejection of the evolutionist position, Dobb explains how the capitalist mode of production was formed not out of the feudal mode of production, but from petty commodity production. (Marx refers to ‘The original historic forms in which capital appears at first sporadically or locally, alongside the old modes of production, while exploding them little by little everywhere . . .’ 1973 p 510.) Dobb has then to prove how it was that capital as a relation of production was formed within petty commodity production. This he does by means of a double analytical process. The first side of this conceptualizes the forms of stock-piling or accumulating money capital, which takes place either in the form of trade ‘external’ to a particular social formation (historically, for example, the income from Mediterranean trade for London merchants), or more crucially, the appearance of domestic merchant capital itself, arising from the systematic practice of buying cheap and selling dear through control of the market, a practice instituted and protected by the political power blocs of the monopolies. The second side of this process refers to the growing internal differentiation of the small commodity producers, which both depended on the effects of accumulated money wealth, and was also the precondition for the dispossession of the direct producers from their means of production. In this stage of his argument, Dobb introduces the ‘two ways’ thesis: this proposes that Way I, ‘the really revolutionary’ path to the formation of capitalism, occurred when sections of the direct producers themselves, already undergoing the process of social differentiation, began to employ other workers and to organize their own control of the means of production. As against the control of the market by merchant capital, this involved a direct control of both the means of production and labour, as commodities, by capital. The second route, according to Dobb, was the more gradual encroachment of control by some merchant capitalists (sometimes through various ways of organizing the putting out system) which in the long term came to transform some subordinate fractions of merchant capital into productive capital. The conclusion of this analysis, however, is that merchant capital was structured by its place in the economic totality in such a way that it tended to be a reactionary force, its monopoly position threatened by the new sections of productive capital which had emerged, through struggle, from small commodity production; and that it was merchant capital which effectively fettered the emergent productive capital from an autonomous role in the economy. Thus the central feature of the C17 Revolution was the political struggle between these two sections of capital, and not the antagonism between ‘the wealthy’ and the dispossessed. The decisive political condition for the victory of productive capital, from the very start of the C17, was the destruction of the monopolies, interlocked with and dependent on the absolutist state. Thus the analysis based on the evolution of a money economy, by the very nature of its theoretical standpoint unable to distinguish capital as money and capital as a relation of production, is forced to teleologically read back a progressive role to urban merchant capital, to the ‘monied’ classes. (See Marx 1976: ‘The economists have made the blunder of confusing these elementary forms of capital – money and commodities – with
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capital as such’ p 975.) This was precisely one of the conclusions to Hill’s The English Revolution, which he himself criticized in a later Preface (1955), referring specifically to the non-evolutionist restructuring of the whole problem by Dobb. The passing criticisms of this reconceptualization of the formation of capitalism by Hindess and Hirst are perplexingly imprecise. By consigning Dobb’s work to an unproblematic economism and empiricism, it is of no surprise that they should regard it as being outside of a strictly marxist terrain. But it is within their protocol to appropriate and re-theorize specific insights of non-marxist theorists, most notably in their treatment of the slave mode of production. Thus the lack of attention they give to Dobb is also curious, especially given the common concern with the problem of transition. Indeed, there are a number of conclusions which overlap quite closely, for example: the similar approach to thinking the analytical conditions of the feudal mode of production, without politicizing the productive relation, or relying on a theoretical humanism which constitutes these conditions in terms of personal inter-subjectivity (Dobb pp 33–7; Hindess and Hirst, 1975 Ch. 5); the key place Dobb gives to the forms of class struggle in determining the outcome of the feudal crisis (Dobb above; Hindess and Hirst: ‘The object of the theory of transition is the transitional conjuncture and its transformation’ p 288); or the common emphasis they give to the necessary displacement and extension of commodity production in the formation of capitalism (Dobb above; Hindess and Hirst p 298). These examples could be multiplied, but don’t touch the heart of the issue, as Hindess and Hirst would claim that their own conclusions have a different status to Dobb’s, due to their different theoretical objects. Alternatively they might argue that these apparent agreements are actually based on ambiguities in their own position which they would now reject (Hindess and Hirst, 1977). What then are the disagreements? There are a couple of minor criticisms they make: that Dobb regards trade as being ‘in some sense’ external to feudalism (p 263). Here they misread the historical point that some wealth was appropriated (through trade, plunder, etc) from outside the parameters of the feudal production of the English social formation. (See Marx, 1976 p 918). It would make nonsense of Dobb’s opposition to the money economy theorists to suppose that he regarded trade as a feature ‘external’ to the feudal mode of production. Nor is it the case that he relies on defining the capitalist mode of production at the level of the individual unit of production (Hindess and Hirst, 1975 p 270). As we argued earlier Dobb appreciates the theoretical importance of understanding determinate modes of production as dominant and subordinate formations, unevenly articulated, and this is exactly the way that he conceptualizes the development of capitalism: at a different level of abstraction, he used the instances of individual units as illustrations, which are not explanatory in themselves. The major criticism of Dobb however appears in their critique of Balibar, and it is this rather oblique approach which to some extent dislocates their treatment of him. Briefly, the Hindess and Hirst argument against Balibar is based on the rejection of the concept of a transitional mode of production, because i) the concept mode of production – specifying the reproduction of the relations of that mode – necessarily precludes the notion of a mode of production which reproduces the relations of a different mode of production; and ii) Balibar’s dichotomy, founded on the correspondence and noncorrespondence of the relations and forces of production (where non-correspondence marks a transitional mode of production) is formalist and idealist. They do not suggest that Dobb formally proposes any adherence to the notion of a transitional mode of production (note his rejection of this analytical strategem, pp 19–21); But Hindess and Hirst do claim that the characteristics that Balibar assigns to a transitional mode of production, Dobb assigns to all modes of production, so that any mode of production ‘is time-bound in its
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very concept’ (p 266). Thus, they continue, Dobb’s historicism (in the company not only of Balibar, but also of Hegel) leads him to the conclusion that the supersession of all modes of production is specified by their concepts, the ‘necessary’ decline of ‘all’ modes of production (p 265, our emphasis). The evidence which Hindess and Hirst cite for this is the passage in which Dobb writes: It was the inefficiency of feudalism as a system of production coupled with the growing needs of the ruling class for revenue, that was primarily responsible for its declines; since this need for additional revenue promoted an increase in the pressure on the producer to a point where this pressure became literally unendurable. Dobb p 42 They comment on this: ‘Here the very development of feudalism and the consequent intensification of its basic contradiction is thought to be responsible for its supersession’ (p 265). This is correct; (although note the difference between Dobb’s ‘primarily responsible’ and Hindess and Hirst’s lack of qualification). But this is not the same thing as stating that the decline of feudalism is given in its concept; Dobb’s statement is a generalised historical conclusion, thought from within the theoretical terrain given by the concept of the feudal mode of production, referring to the dislocation of feudal social formations, and is constructed theoretically from concepts of historical tendencies, which are given by the concept of mode of production. (See for example Marx’s argument for the ‘historical tendency’ of capitalist accumulation, thought within terms of contradiction, class struggle, and counteracting tendencies, Marx, 1976 p 929.) ‘Necessity’ is nowhere specified in Dobb’s theory; nor is there any indication why we should accept the shift which Hindess and Hirst make in extending Dobb’s conclusion on the feudal mode of production to ‘all’ modes of production. (Is it conceivable that Dobb would have included the advanced communist mode of production as one which must necessarily come to its end?). The structural analogy between Dobb’s problematic (one of the laws of motion of a mode of production) and Balibar’s (transitional mode of production) cannot hold; in their determination to be done with both at one blow, they fail to do justice to Dobb. Epistemology We have shown how Dobb works at a number of different levels of abstraction, that he believed both in the necessity of quite a complex abstract procedure, and that even the most abstract moment should be thought with reference to the concrete. In this respect alone, his contribution to British historiography is significant. But formulated in this very general way, as many problems as answers are encountered. What, for example, is the nature of this ‘logical’ stage in the practice of the historian? How can it be itself theorized, how can its internal adequacy be assessed, and why should one position be superior to another? What relation does this have to the ‘research’ of the historian? How is it possible for this level of conceptual abstraction to be ‘tested’ by the concrete? Dobb, by thinking the ‘facts’ of history as already constituted, is forced into an empiricist position, even though he may never quite comfortably inhabit it. He often implies that it is possible to ‘describe’ the historical process, which the theorist can then re-work according to the varying protocols prescribed by the different theoretical positions: Since classification must necessarily precede and form the groundwork for analysis, it
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But despite his adherence to thinking the importance of abstraction, it is an adherence already thought from within an empiricist standpoint. The consequence of this, as we suggested earlier, is the disseverance of the ‘logical’ and the ‘historical’, or abstraction and research. Thus for Dobb, the ‘economist’ (or theorist) . . . is in the dark partly, no doubt, because the questions that he needs to ask have too seldom been formulated sufficiently fully or correctly for the economic historian to have sorted the material that is relevant to their answer, p 256 which institutionalizes the split, in much the same way as the debates which were common some years back, confining historians to the ‘facts’ and sociologists to the ‘models’. This theorization of the relation between the theoretical and the concrete, despite the insistence on the importance of this for marxism, can only reach an impasse, descriptively focused on the necessary ‘inter-relation’ between the two. The argument can be taken a step further. Dobb formally recognized the need to be able to understand the nature of abstraction itself, and (again descriptively) he points towards the direction of locating one particular concept in a whole conceptual field defined in terms of other concepts: ‘. . . it is not simply a matter of veryifing particular assumptions, but of examining the relationships with a complex set of assumptions’, and then continues by adding the further point which we might expect, ‘and between this set as a whole and changing actuality’ (pp vii–viii). But it is precisely in his attempt to think these two moments together, that Dobb gives only a provisional status to theory, provisional in the sense of being tested (and ‘completed’) by the ‘facts’. This position depends on an understanding of the concrete as an unproblematic entity, appropriated in knowledge empirically, independent from any conceptual conditions. The effect of this is that the nature of abstraction itself ultimately cannot be thought other than in terms of the concrete-as-facts. Hayek’s proposition, that theory ‘can never be verified or falsified by reference to facts’, Dobb thinks is a ‘rather startling claim’ (p 27). (And thirty years later, it seems as if he was equally taken by ‘surprise’ encountering the similar claim by Hindess and Hirst that ‘facts are never given; they are always produced’ (Dobb 1976).) The paradox is that Dobb’s epistemological position is very close to Weber’s, despite the force of Dobb’s critique in many other respects. Hirst argues that ‘there are no criteria of proof, conceptual, empirical or otherwise for general concepts in Weber’s epistemology. Concepts and categories are selected and rejected by the ambiguous test of their ‘usefulness’ for reaching and illuminating the significance of the concrete’ (Hirst 1975a pp 56–7). Recall the passage by Dobb quoted at the beginning of this section of the paper: ‘The justification of any definition must ultimately rest on its successful employment in illuminating the actual process of historical development . . .’. It is the limitations of this approach which determine some of the underargued passages in his ‘Studies’: just as this position reaches an impasse in thinking the relation between the conceptual and the concrete, so too the same tendency occurs in elaborating the conceptual field itself. The tension produced in Dobb’s attempt to think the theoretical and empirical moments as structurally related – which is the one side of his argument – is not always expressed
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consistently throughout the book. The chapter on the formation of productive capital, for example, where he relies quite directly on the prior theorization by Marx, is one of the most complex. But at its weakest, this tension collapses into what is perhaps the logical consequence of the ambiguity of his epistemology: the methodology in which all abstraction is reduced to a ‘model’, which approximates as best as possible to the complexity of the concrete. This is true both of particular studies (see the chapter on monopoly capitalism, where Dobb outlines a model, and then claims that there are a number of features ‘which do not fit this simplified model’ p 334) or of his general methodology, where the criterion of internal theoretical adequacy rests on whether ‘a given structure of assumptions and definitions affords an abstract model which is sufficiently representative of actuality to be serviceable’ (p vii). And again it is possible to note the appearance of this position throughout his work: in a very interesting essay he wrote late in life he argues: As is well known, the shape assumed by atheoretical model is itself a selection of the facts and the events to be studied; hence however impeccable or elegant its logic, it can represent a biased selection which may distort our vision of the real world, instead of illuminating it. 1967 p 132 But whatever the consistency in Dobb’s theoretical position, the position as a whole is ultimately framed first by the identification of the two separate procedures, the logical and the historical, and secondly by the attempts to retheorize the integration of these moments, which, we have argued, – once the prior assumption has been made – can only produce a solution with a reduced theoretical potential. There are indications that he was never completely satisfied with this logical/historical approach, not least in the ambiguity of the various formulations by which he tries to re-think the structured relation of the two. Whatever the limitations, it is, however, this consistent adherence, almost alone in the historiography of the time, to the elaborating and rethinking of the conceptual terrain which is most striking today. But his legacy is ultimately contradictory: his re-assertion of the theoretical centrality of the concept mode of production, in itself almost a re-statement of marxism, slides into economism; and his belief that ‘the work of abstraction must competently be handled’ was framed from the outset by empiricist presuppositions. To focus on these tendencies is important precisely because of the value of Dobb’s marxism for contemporary historiography, which lies primarily in his defining most sharply the site of the problem of the logical and historical categories. The transition debates The response to Dobb’s Studies from the academic history establishment was minimal, but its impact on marxists was formidable. Isolated at home – Thompson has recently emphasized that ‘intellectual McCarthyism was not confined to the United States’ – the major appreciations and challenges to Dobb came from American, European and Japanese marxists, notably in the pages of ‘Science and Society’ in the early 1950s (collected and reprinted as The Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism, edited by Hilton 1976). These lengthy debates focused on the transition itself, taking up most frequently that part of Dobb’s work which aimed to elaborate the sets of subordinate concepts which referred specifically to the transition, those which we suggested functioned as an intermediate level of abstraction. Very little attention appears to have been given to Dobb’s project as a whole, or to its theoretical and
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epistemological assumptions: indeed one of the points which emerges quite clearly from the debates is that Dobb’s tendency to separate out the two moments in the practice of the historian forms an unquestioned assumption for both his critics and his admirers. Further, while Dobb struggled against the effects of this position, the participants in the debates seem to have accepted from the start the ‘logic and research’ approach as a formal solution to the problems of historiography. Indeed it even came to define and frame the theoretical issues of subsequent historiography, which is expressed sharply by the conceptual form of Anderson’s appraisal which was quoted at the start of this section. Possibly the one exception to this is the contribution from the Japanese historian, Takahashi, who was acutely sensitive to the general theoretical project on which Dobb had embarked. He begins his article by outlining the value of this project: Maurice Dobb’s Studies . . . raises many important problems of method. It presents a concrete case of a problem in which we cannot but be deeply interested – the problem of how a new and higher stage of the science of economic history can take up into its own system and make use of the positive results of preceding economic and social historians, and, he continued, ‘to establish more accurate historical laws’ (Transition p 69). The place he gives to a relatively high level of abstraction – he explicitly emphasized ‘the logical content of “the passage from feudalism to capitalism” ’ (p 87) and the preconditions for this knowledge (p 72) – are reminiscent of Dobb at his most complex. The protagonist who came to define the concerns of the debates was Paul Sweezy: he marshalls the most developed non-marxist accounts of the transition (based most of all on Pirenne) to challenge Dobb’s account. But the weakness of his procedure – which can be crudely characterized as appropriating the insights of the non-marxist historians without adequately re-theorizing them from within a distinct problematic – primarily serves to illuminate the undoubted strengths of Dobb’s methodology by comparison. For what Sweezy in effect does is to shift the whole discussion back onto the ‘Weberian’ terrain, which Dobb had originally set out to demolish. In the course of Sweezy’s argument a number of familiar themes re-appear. He proposes the adoption of the term ‘system of production’ alongside the concept mode of production, but gives it no analytic coherence, nor explains its relation to the latter concept. He re-asserts the importance of the ‘destination’ of the product (for use or for exchange) as the key criterion for defining a mode or system of production, rather than the relations in which production takes place. This forces Sweezy into pursuing a variant of the money economy theories: It seems to me that the important conflict in this connection is not between ‘money economy’ and ‘natural economy’ but between production for the market or production for use. We ought to try to uncover the process by which trade engendered a system of production for the market, and then to trace the impact of this system on the pre-existent feudal system of production for use. Transition p 41 This, despite the formal denial, is merely another way of stating the same problematic. By eclectically pulling together part of Dobb’s thesis (the place of petty commodity production as a subordinate form alongside the feudal mode of production) and part of Pirenne’s (the
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rice of urban trade sectors) his problem becomes one which is peculiarly his own: to examine ‘some of the currents of influence running from the exchange economy to the use economy’ (p 42). The four determinants of this influence which Sweezy proposes illustrate how close he comes to the money economy standpoint; he notes i) the role of the inefficiency of production on the manorial estate ii) ‘the very existence of exchange value as a massive economic fact tends to transform the attitude of the producers’ iii) the development of the ‘tastes’ of the feudal ruling class iv) the rise of towns (pp 42–3). In re-stating this basic Pirenne analysis, Sweezy has to explain the nature of the historical formations from the C14 (when these features first appear) to the C15, without resorting to the strict natural economy/market economy formula. In his failure to locate the market and commodity relations within the structure of the economy as a whole, he concludes that these formations were neither feudal nor capitalist, but teleologically designates them as forms of ‘precapitalist commodity production’ (p 49), which theoretically parallels Balibar’s attempts to think a transitional mode of production. In a second contribution Sweezy saw little need to correct any aspect of his argument, although he added two minor points which are of some significance for his argument as a whole. The first was his insistence (against Dobb) on discussing only the feudalism of Western Europe ‘because what ultimately happened in Western Europe was manifestly very different from what happened in other parts of the world where the feudal mode of production has prevailed’ (p 103) strengthening his earlier teleological tendency. Secondly he concludes that theoretically ‘no internal prime mover’ is contained within the feudal system, and thus ‘the driving force is to be sought outside the system’ (p 106), that is, from the accumulation of merchant capital from the Mediterranean, and the effects of this on the feudal mode of production. Dobb’s contributions to the debates (including one as late as 1962) do little more than refine aspects of his original thesis, which he seems to propose each time with growing confidence. He again argues the decisive theoretical point about the determinacy of the relations of production (in the 1950 and 1962 articles,) quoting that same key passage from Capital III which structured the first chapter of the Studies), rejecting especially the tendency to give analytical priority to exchange relations; he gives further and more nuanced emphasis to the variants of the extraction of the surplus product within feudalism (p 166); he restates the primacy of the struggle between the direct producers and the feudal lords, in relation to which other struggles are secondary (p 59 and p 166); he is much less inclined to understand the inefficiency of the feudal mode of production (p 59); and he regards as ‘an impossible procedure’ the notion of a transitional mode of production, which in this case leaves ‘two centuries suspended uncomfortably in the firmament between heaven and earth’ (p 62). This is only a skeletal summary of the main points which Dobb re-argues. What is of importance is that at least until 1962, he did not believe any major re-working of his original positions was necessary, that there had been no counterpropositions which he believed had damaged the argument of his Studies. So how do we assess the nature of Sweezy’s challenge? Nowhere did Sweezy engage critically with the conceptual structure of Dobb’s work. What he did do was to propose the elements of an alternative theory of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. These elements were produced from within a perspective which was more or less coherent, i.e. there is a certain coherence in the ‘trade and towns’ thesis within a money economy problematic, and a certain internal incoherence in the notion of a transitional mode of production, where the arguments of Dobb and Hindess and Hirst seem to be correct. On the other hand Dobb’s account was composed theoretically around the concepts of the determinacy of the
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relations of production, class struggle and contradiction. That the one position may be closer to marxism doesn’t necessarily make it better than the other. But the point is that, at a number of levels of abstraction, Dobb in the Studies had rigorously challenged the assumptions of the theories and explanations to which Sweezy and Pirenne adhered, and had produced a conceptual alternative that was critical of those theories, which itself was internally coherent. And it is the case that neither Sweezy nor anyone else in the debates either defended the Pirenne position or elaborated an alternative account which took note of Dobb’s reformulations. One of the persistent themes of the debate is expressed by the claim that Dobb had produced an imaginative hypothesis, but that it was now necessary for the historians to confirm this hypothesis by unearthing the relevant empirical material. Of course there is some substance to this: Dobb’s Studies were in no sense definitive, and could further be extended in scope and elaborated as a result of further historical work. But the assumption behind many of these assertions is one which almost classically expresses the ‘logic and research’ approach: that Dobb’s hypothesis will fall if the empirical material is found not to ‘fit’. Lefebvre writes: ‘Dobb and Sweezy have performed the service of formulating the problems. Now it is up to the historians to answer them!’ (Transition p 127). Sweezy himself calls for more ‘factual research’ (p 107); and Procacci suggests that ‘The only way of emerging from this impasse is to give the contenders equal weapons, that is, to encourage research in keeping with this plausible explanatory hypothesis’ (p 133). Hilton, in his 1976 Introduction, fully endorses this suggestion of Procacci (p 11); indeed it is from him that we take one of the terms which describes this tendency, when he writes that historical work is ‘an effort of research and not only of logic’ (p 12) As a crystallization of Dobb’s legacy, this is correct in so far as it goes, marking out the site of the whole problem of the place and levels of abstraction in historical work. It is interesting that at the same time, but from a different context, a rather different assessment is made on the historiography of the formation of capitalism: ‘ . . . the time is now ripe for erecting some sort of building from the enormous mass of facts accumulated by the German historical school . . .’ (Vilar 1956 p 34). But both these claims appear to construct the relation between the ‘concepts’ and the ‘concrete’ as an unspecified reflexive unity, which offers very little guidance precisely how the elaboration of concepts structures the practice of writing history. So far as we are concerned here, there is one final point to be made. The way that this paper has been composed may seem to suggest that we believe there to be a rigid division between the problematics of ‘economism’ (Dobb) and of ‘culturalism’ (Thompson and Genovese). This is not the case. Apart from a certain common theoretical basis, it can also be noted that some of the most interesting developments in recent historiography have been the products of the overlap of these tendencies. Hill, clearly, is one example. Or the case of Hilton is also important: starting from the conceptual framework produced by Dobb, his later work (1969, 1973) has not only refined our theoretical understanding of the determination of the central forms of class struggle by the feudal relations of production, but has illustrated how the precise mechanisms which precipitated particular struggles were overdetermined by the determinate cultural and ideological formations, adding a crucial dimension to the Studies. And in a very early essay, conceived as a contribution to Dobb’s project, he emphasizes the necessity of grasping the whole social totality, the non-correspondences between the economic, and the political and the ideological, and the effectivity of the superstructural (Transition pp 153–7). Or Takahashi, the contributor most intransigently committed to conducting the complex work of abstraction in elaborating the concepts of determinate modes of production, criticized Dobb for ignoring Weber’s insights into the
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cultural and ideological conditions for the transition (Transition p 89). But there is one footnote to these debates with which we can conclude: one of the important issues of the debates was how the bourgeois revolutions can be conceptually located in the general theoretical conditions for thinking the formation of capitalism, which was the object of Hill’s original study in 1940. In the mid 1960s there occurred the well known debate between Thompson and Anderson, which largely revolved around the contentious issue of the nature of the English bourgeois revolution and the subsequent development of capitalism. The contribution of Dobbs’ work to this later discussion was, potentially, immense but it had already been swept into oblivion by the whole culturalist tide. That, however, tells us more about ‘culturalism’ than about Dobb’s achievements.
Part II: Edward Thompson, Eugene Genovese and socialist-humanist history From Maurice Dobb and those influenced by him we turn to Edward Thompson and to Eugene Genovese, marxist historian of the slave South. This succession – from Dobb to Thompson – is both an ‘historical’ and a ‘logical’ one. A history of marxist historiography might well be written around the movement that is composed in the shift from Studies in the Development of Capitalism to The Making of the English Working Class (though it might also be composed, still more strikingly, around the earliest and the latest work of one historian – Christopher Hill). We may regard the period from the early 1960s as, indeed, a second stage in the development of this tradition, breaking sharply from some earlier Dobbian emphases. Logically, or in terms of theoretical position, the break is from Dobb’s theoretically-aware and complex economism to Thompson’s militant a-theoreticism and ‘culturalism’. This shift was also registered in a different appropriation of Marx himself in which class (understood in a particular way) became the master category, displacing almost completely the previous concern with modes of production (feudalism, capitalism and various ways of producing within them) and with economic transitions. Politically the move was understood as part of a battle against a Stalinist politics and the moral insensitivity of orthodox communism. Stalinist practices of control and coercion were juxtaposed against the ideal of a humanist socialism. These associated changes are evident in much of the history written in early 1960s and later. But they were, of course, part of a more general set of shifts within European and American marxism (‘Western Marxism’ in Perry Anderson’s phrase) whose history is only just beginning to be written (Anderson, 1976). So ‘culturalism’ was not limited to history. In the re-discovery of ‘class’ within English empirical sociology from the later 1950s’ class relations took characteristically qualitative and ‘cultural’ forms. The uncompleted history of Raymond Williams’ literary criticism is part of the same movement and so, for that matter, was both Sartre’s fusion of existentialism and marxism and the answer of ‘scientific’ marxism to both this and economism in the work of Louis Althusser. Nor was this movement – the general concern with the cultural – or experiental – or ideological – by any means limited to marxism or to sociologies employing the category of class. The American reaction against the classic sociologies – the forming of what has been called ‘the two sociologies’ is a parallel case of the rejection of ‘structures’ in favour of ‘experience’ (Dawe, 1970). Culturalist historiography is by no means as thorough-going a rejection of ‘structure’ as say, radical ethnomethodology, but there are clearly some broad similarities. Many of the tendencies which we later specify and describe as ‘culturalist’ are present (often with others) in the later work of Christopher Hill (e.g. Hill, 1975), in Perry Anderson’s
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attempts at a theoretical and politically useful history (Anderson, 1965 and 1974) and in the work of very many younger historians who have been influenced by culturalist classics. There is, then, a certain arbitariness in the choice of Thompson and Genovese, to stand in, as it were, for a much more internally various movement. Yet their work constitutes, together or apart, a peculiarly tough-minded and consistent project, hugely influential on both sides of the Atlantic and in parts of Europe and fully ‘culturalist’ in its pre-suppositions. They may be taken together because of the parallels in their major works and, perhaps, at certain particular points, what seems to be a real mutual influence. Thus, Roll Jordan Roll (surely to date Genovese’s masterpiece, 1974) is a kind of Making of the black nation, very clearly influenced by Thompson’s early work, with the same epic scope, the same emotional commitment to its main object – the culture of the slaves, and as we shall see, the same theoretical and epistemological position. On the other hand, Edward Thompson’s later work – his sustained critique of received notions of eighteenth-century society and politics and his exploration of the relations of ‘symbolic violence’ – seems to owe something to Genovese’s early discovery and use of Gramscian concepts in understanding the relations of masters to slaves. ‘Hegemony’, in the shape of the slave-holder’s ‘paternalism’, is the main organising idea of Roll Jordan Roll, but is important in Genovese’s history as early as The Political Economy of Slavery (1961). The same conception, also in the form of a (gentry) paternalism is present in Thompson’s work from ‘The Moral Economy of the Eighteenth-Century Crowd’ (1971) onwards. Clinching such influences, however, is not an important part of our argument; we suggest them merely to re-inforce our conviction of the real affinities between these two major historians – who also, undoubtedly disagree on many things. It seems legitimate both to treat their work as symptomatic of a distinctive solution to ‘logic and history’, and to deal with them, only half in jest, as ‘theoretical twins’. Socialist-humanism and the rationalist critique The most powerful criticisms of the Thompson-Genovese positions derive from a structuralist marxism. It is through the theoretical categories of Louis Althusser (and their extension by neo- and post-Althusserians) that we are best able to place these histories within the range of contemporary marxisms and to assess them critically. To put it in another way, Althusser’s work provides a privileged vantage-point from which to survey our object. This opposition, though not the force of the critique that follows, is undoubtedly recognised by Edward Thompson himself. His published rebukes of Althusser and Althusserianism have, so far, fallen short of a real engagement, yet hardly a piece passes without a pot shot or two at the target of ‘some structuralist philosophers’ (e.g. Thompson, 1975, pp 258–269). This circumstance – the power of the Althusserian critique of ‘culturalism’ – has particular historical causes to do, in fact with the initial formation of these two tendencies on either side of the English Channel: the fact that ‘culturalism’ derives from a single opposition – culturalism versus various kinds of economism; while ‘structuralism’ derives in a double movement, hostile to both economism and ‘humanism’. It is important to insist that this circumstance does not carry with it, as a matter of ‘logic’, a consequence that might seem to follow: that structuralist marxism is in every way superior as a marxist practice to culturalist historiography. These two related points cannot be developed in this paper – though they are of prime significance for another associated project, the development of an adequate marxist account of culture and ideology. At this point we can only note that the relation between ‘culturalism’ and ‘structuralism’ is altogether more complicated than one in which culturalism is simply superseded, or ‘culture’ succumbs to ‘ideology’.
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At first sight the two tendencies seem so dissimilar as to be simply not comparable. On the one side we have histories of particular social and cultural formations or movements; on the other works of ‘philosophy’ and ‘critique’ working at an altogether higher level of abstraction. Evidently Reading Capital and The Making of the English Working Class are very different kinds of books. If, however, culturalist practice is raised to a more abstract level, if what is mainly implicit is made explicit, it is clear that the histories are organised around quite definite theoretical and epistemological pre-suppositions. They have, in Althusser’s term, their own ‘problematic’. And, as we shall argue this problematic is very much in opposition to the structuralist protocols, so that on some essential matters, it is indeed necessary to argue through the oppositions or to decide in favour of one or the other. This, however, is not the end of the story, for it is also possible to argue that the two positions share some very specific deficiencies, notably a reduced view of economic relations – a consequence of some common elements of origin in opposition to economism. Moreover, though, as we shall see, the Althusserian critique of the tendencies represented by culturalism is very powerful, this critical power is not always matched by equivalent success in supplying adequate theoretical and especially epistemological alternatives. This is especially the case if we judge ‘adequacy’ both as consistency and rigour and as explanatory power in the analysis of particular situations. It is part of the argument of the third part of this paper that there are some ultimate incompatibilities to a fully ration list epistemology and the development of a properly conceptual history. In this sense Thompson’s scattered criticisms of the Althusserian demon are not, despite all the misrecognitions, so wide of the mark. They mistake structuralism for the old (mutual) enemy of economism; they simplify the very contradictory epistemology in order to damn it; they fail to recognise the point of the basic criticisms of empiricist ‘proofs’. Yet Thompson is absolutely right to point to the epistemological questions – the distancing of ‘theory’ from the analysis of particular situations – as the major difficulty of the Althusserians (Thompson, 1976, esp. pp. 18–20). Despite the mutual relevance and the creative potential of these tensions, there has been no really sustained two-sided encounter between the British marxist historians and marxist-structuralist philosophy. This circumstance is itself testimony to the gulf that has opened, subsequently to the transition debates, between ‘theory’ and ‘history’. Some British marxists, Gareth Stedman Jones, Perry Anderson and, more fleetingly, Eric Hobsbawm, have espoused Althusserian notions or, at least reviewed them favourably (Hobsbawm, 1973, pp 142–52; Stedman Jones, 1971, p 16; Anderson, 1974), but neither Hobsbawm nor the two editors of the New Left Review are at all typical of the historical tradition, or even of the dominant marxist tendencies within it. The nearest thing to a direct encounter, Thompson versus Althusser apart, has been the critique of Genovese in the work of the English post-Althusserians Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst (1975, esp. pp 148). Unfortunately, to our knowledge, Genovese has not replied, so that the encounter remains somewhat one-sided. He has, however, polemicised against American critics who have made somewhat similar points (Genovese, 1977). Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production itself will be discussed in its own right in part III of this paper. But one of its themes is a sustained attack on History as a marxist intellectual practice and on the accounts offered by historians of particular modes of production and particular transitions. The critical designations are drawn from Althusser’s original armoury – especially the trio: ‘humanism’, ‘historicism’ and ‘empiricism’. They are applied with great ‘rigour’. The implicit assumption (different from that which informs our critique) is that once a work is shown to be organised through a problematic which is humanist, historicist etc, the whole edifice falls. Among the historians discussed, Genovese figures prominently as a worthy
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antagonist. His early work – The Political Economy of Slavery – is the main target of the chapter on the slave mode of production. It is twice referred to as ‘a serious attempt’, a positive accolade, in this book, for an historian. In what follows we summarise the critique with necessary brevity, then assess its force for culturalism as a whole. The main target of the chapter on slavery is ‘humanist assumptions’; no subject is more prone to ‘humanist mythologising’ than slavery itself. Typically humanism argues that slavery is characterised by the denial to the slave of his human essence. He is treated instead as a species of property. The slave’s forms of protest or culture on the other hand can be understood as an assertion of humanity. Genovese work is shown to be organised around such humanist presuppositions. In general his portrayal of the Old South conforms to ‘an idealist-historicist variant of marxism strongly influenced by Gramsci’ (p 148). The nub of the demonstration is to show that Genovese understands southern slavery as simply a relation between two classes – slaves and slave-owner – a relation between groups of persons, of a primarily political-cultural kind, a relation of domination and subordination. This portrayal is ‘historicist’ because it collapses what in Althusserian protocols are held to be separate ‘instances’ of a social formation – the instances or ‘levels’ or relatively autonomous practices of the economic, the ideological and the political. Qualitatively different processes with their own specificity are simplified down to an ‘essential’ (or unitary) relationship between groups of people. The account is ‘humanist’ both because of this stress on the pre-constituted and unproblematic human being and because of the centrality of the notion of human essence which slavery is held to deny. The account also lacks a concept of a mode of production in the sense employed by Althusser (and by Marx). Hegel’s master/slave relationship, much cited by Genovese, stands in for a properly worked up concept of slavery as a mode of production involving relations between people and things, not merely between people. Genovese is also, according to the neo-Althusserian diagnosis, guilty of a more Weberian failing – a speculative empiricism. He builds his conception of capitalism, for instance, by generalisations based on observation – societies that are held to be capitalist look like this, have this or that feature. The final proof of all this is Genovese’s portrayal of the American Civil War as ‘a conflict between social systems mediated and realised in the mind of a class subject’ – the slave-owning ‘aristocracy’ in the South (p 172). In both its mode of argument and its conclusions this critique is highly contentious. The whole manner and substance of the book make it peculiarly indigestible to historical appetites and historians have very generally sidled round it or consumed it in most unproductive ways. Thus the force of the critique (which ought at least to be considered by any open and undogmatic historical practice) has been ignored. In what follows we want to suggest that ‘philosophical’ criticisms of culturalist historiography, not dissimilar to those marshalled by Hindess and Hirst and with a common origin in the work of Althusser, do indeed go to the heart of the culturalist position and have to be properly considered. In making this case, however, it is important first to present the culturalist problematic as clearly and as strongly as possible. Re-presenting culturalism We may start with a quotation from the opening pages of Roll Jordan Roll: But, knowing that the ambiguity of the Black experience as a national question lends the evidence to different readings, I have chosen to stay close to my primary responsibil-
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ity: to tell the story of slave life as carefully and accurately as possible. Many years of studying the astonishing effort of black people to live decently as human beings even in slavery has convinced me that no theoretical advance suggested in their experience could ever deserve as much attention as that demanded by their demonstration of the beauty and power of the human spirit under conditions of extreme oppression. p xvi And pair it with a very similar and very well-known one from the preface of the Making: I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obselete’ handloom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we do not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience . . . 1963 edn, pp 12–13 Such statements in prefaces are something read as mere gestures on the way to the real business of history. These two historians, certainly, as part of their continuing practice, hold out fraternal hands to the oppressed people of the past. Yet this runs much deeper than a mobilising political stance; it is indicative of a whole theoretical, epistemological and political position which deeply influences the whole style of history and which is indeed actively advocated. The first imperative is to comprehend and respect the authenticity or ‘validity ’ or ‘rationality’ of the experiences and cultures that are addressed. Alongside Genovese’s (rather artless) ‘tell the story of slave life’ we might set Thompson’s stress on ‘listening’ (and compare it with the audacious interventionism of the Althusserian ‘reading’): But the fact is, again, the material took command of me, far more than I ever expected. If you want a generalization I would have to say that the historian has got to be listening all the time. He should not set up a book or a research project with a totally clear sense of exactly what he is going to be able to do. The material itself had got to speak through him. And I think this happens. 1975, p 15 This fundamental attitude has a number of consequences of a theoretical and epistemological kind. It leads, in the first place, to a principled distrust of theory and of the more abstract modes of discourse. Greg McLennan has caught the inter-relation of this with the stress on ‘experience’ excellently: Thompson’s humility with respect to the human agency he observes in the history of ‘subordinate’ classes is counterbalanced by the moral outrage directed against those (especially marxists) who ‘seek’ to replace individuality and agency by the reification of concepts: a reductionist scholasticism which cannot but lead to political sectarianism. For Thompson, history requires the closest attention to the feelings and motives of those who, due to bias or philistinism, have been lost to our own modern experience. Historical study therefore necessitates a certain suspension of presuppositions, an empathetic ability to ‘listen’ to people whose essential rationality in terms of their
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So there is a preference, in practice, for examining an object ‘in its own terms, and within its own set of relations’, hence a preference (common to historians in general) for the close study of specific cases. Not that analysis stops here; in Thompson’s work cases are used as crystallised forms of more general features of a social formation. His work is full of the identification and examination of such symbolic moments – Whigs and Hunters being the best example of this method. But the use of externally-derived concepts, of generalisations based on other instances, let alone deductive systems derived from other theoretical propositions may, and perhaps must, lead to the forcing of real historical materials into some distorting mould of the theorist’s own pre-occupations. This procedure is ‘irrational’ because it imposes no check on speculation (Thompson 1965; Thompson, 1976). It is doubtful whether within this conception, ‘theory’ or ‘abstraction’ can have any place at all. True, both historians write, on occasion, of ‘theory’, as a legitimate pursuit. This occurs, especially in Thompson’s case, much more often in the course of general or political writing than in the histories. Thompson’s history in particular is much less scrupulous in the acknowledgement of theoretical debts than in the range, and explicitness of the citation of ‘sources’ in the more usual historians sense. This ‘theoretical’ discussion is, however, of a particular kind. To simplify a complex argument, ‘theory’ is understood either as a kind of critical long-duration history (as in Edward Thompson’s criticisms of Perry Anderson’s provocations), or as a kind of political prognostication and diagnosis, or as the critique (including expirical criticism) of other historians, economists or sociologists. As Thompson himself puts it, citing Feuerbach, Anti-Duhring and the Marx–Engels correspondence, ‘I think of theory as critique, theory as polemic’ (1976, p 21). There is one more sense, however, in which theory is understood: as something very similar to Weber’s ‘ideal-type’, or the social-scientist’s ‘hypothesis’ or, more common-sensically, as a kind of informed guess. Thompson’s word is ‘model’, (1965, pp 349–50). As such, theory is a moment in the historian’s method – the moment of forming questions rather than testing them, a moment always provisional in status, always subject to the ultimate control of ‘grand facts’. We shall return later to these conceptions, but one has only to note the distance between the level of abstraction in most (but not all) of the three volumes of Capital and the specificity of most ‘history’ to want to question the hostility to abstraction as such. We may say, then, that there is a necessarily anti-theoretical tendency in culturalism, a tendency to prefer ‘experience’ to ‘theory’. A further symptom of this preference is a sometimes quite astonishing supression of borrowings of a theoretical kind even where it is clear, from the whole cast of the work, that they exist. Thus Genovese’s debt to Freud, somewhat less evident, it must be said, than his longstanding and admirably explicit use of Gramsci, is quite casually divulged in a recent casual piece (1977, p 108 and footnote 9). Thompson’s debt to Gramsci, a striking feature of much of his recent work, has never, outside a mention in ‘the Peculiarities of the English’ been properly acknowledged at all. Its importance for the formation of Thompson’s own work can be gauged, however, by comparing the emphasis of the Making or of other early work like ‘Homage to Tom MacGuire’ (1960) with the later work on the eighteenth century. Despite the epic sweep of the Making it remains the history of a single class, both breaking from and staying within a tradition of labour or working-class history. Thompson’s later work involves a much more sophisticated
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attempt to grasp social-cultural totalities and deals, more centrally than before, with relations between classes. The main concept employed to think these relations is a particular appropriation of Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’. This debt is clearest in the shorter essays on the eighteenth century, especially the important but enormously compressed essay ‘Patrician Society; Plebian Culture’ (1974). But in the curiously half-conscious nature of these borrowings (which the avowed method actually forbids) culturalism has much in common with those kinds of history which are attacked as empiricist, with the apparently pre-suppositionless (but actually ideological) economic history, for instance, which is a principle target of the Making. There is one further corollary to judging historical objects in their own terms according to the centrality of what Thompson calls ‘the inwardness of experience’. The Making is overwhelmingly a book about how people see and understand their social world and how, in their consciousness, they respond. This emphasis was inscribed in culturalism from the beginning, in the initial reaction to a Stalinist politics and a theoretical economism. All of Thompson’s work, indeed, has, he stresses, been informed by the pre-occupation with ‘values’, with supplying what is seen as this absence in Marx and as a peculiarly deforming aspect of orthodox communism. This over-riding pre-occupation has necessary consequences for how other aspects of the social formation are viewed. This is all the more the case since culturalist histories (the Making or Roll Jordan Roll ) are not what we might call ‘regional’ histories; they do not present themselves as ‘cultural histories’ or histories of the culture of particular classes. Though they cannot be histories of everything that occurred within a particular society (and are, in that sense ‘abstractions’, willy-nilly), they are informed by a sense of the totality, do have the ambition of grasping it, and are critical of the kinds of history that ‘fragment’. Such histories necessarily involve some conception, explicit or implied, of what a social formation is, how it may be thought. The commonest general formulations are, as might be expected, in the form of critiques, rather than the general specifications of the Althusserian type. Thus Thompson rejects altogether the base-superstructure metaphor and prefers to speak of ‘economics’ and ‘values’ as ‘two sides of a coin’, or in ‘a dialectic of interaction’. Culture may be understood as ‘the ways in which the human being is imbricated in particular, determined productive relations’ (1976 p 23). Certain value systems are ‘consonant with certain modes of production and certain modes of production and productive relations . . . are inconceivable without consonant value-systems’. We shall return to these formulations later, but it is important to stress that, on the whole, it is not the relation mode of production to culture which concerns culturalist historiography, but the relation culture to class. It is indeed the culturalist stress on class that constitutes its claim to be a marxism. It is this above all that Thompson and Genovese take from Marx – the emphasis on class, class-as-relation and classes in struggle. As we shall see, however, class is given a very particular ‘culturalist’ inflection, reduced in some important ways, from the full richness of Marx’s categories. We might end this section, then by summarising the main features of what have been calling ‘culturalism’. Again McLennan’s description of a ‘cultural’ marxism sums up the matter very appositely: The reaction against this kind of determinist or ‘vulgar’ marxism often takes the form of an assertion of the equality of social conditions and ideas. Each is ‘as real’ as the other. Human agency (dependent upon ideas) is a precondition of revolutionary change, not its mechanical result. Societies are dialectical totalities in which there is not a pre-given dominance of economy over ideas and agency, but, rather, an essential
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But what are the main problems of this view of the historian’s object and practice? It is important to say, at the outset, that none of the problems which culturalism poses and fails to solve are easy to resolve. In some cases it is possible to suggest better solutions, but this is by no means true in every case, especially on the very vexed epistemological questions. The ‘critique’ that follows is, despite occasional appearances to the contrary, written in the knowledge that it is easier to object than to propose, and still more difficult to construct histories that are adequate in every sense. Abstraction Let us start with epistemological questions. As we have seen culturalism robs itself of ‘theory’ in the interests of authenticity. This is because theory is identified as a priori mental schematism and ‘history’ as a quite direct (if only we listen) mediation of the real. There are two sets of problems with this. First, it is by no means clear that relatively abstract statements about, shall we say, modes of production in general, are of a wholly different status (in relation to ‘the real’) than, shall we say, an account of the Peterloo massacre. Both are statements (thoughts) about the real world. It is possible that they ought to be understood as mutually necessary and complimentary kinds of statements or thoughts, distinguished mainly by their relative degrees of abstraction. Both are representations of the real; in the one case relatively simple, formal and general, in the other extremely complex, concrete, dense and specific. The second set of problems concerns Thompson’s own epistemology – the epistemology of ‘models’ and ‘grand facts’. While this certainly describes the sense of the relative subjectivity of the question and the very real (material) existence of the ‘source’ of ‘text’ which every historian experiences in research, the operation it describes – the friction of theory on fact – is not a coherent or possible relation. The best way to develop the first of these points is to recall some of the key features of Marx’s method in Capital. These hinge around the notion of abstraction which, it will be recalled, Marx himself describes as a hall-mark of what is scientific in his method in the preface to vol 1 (Capital I, 1976, p 90). Now, according to the Althusserian reading of Capital, it is a work of theory. It is not the history of a particular social formation, nor even, despite its reliance on English illustrations, a history of English capital. It is concerned rather to develop the categories that may be used in such a concrete analysis. This is true as far as it goes. It is true that Capital is not a history book. But it would be still more accurate to say that there are different discourses present in Capital, distinguished mainly by their degrees of abstractness. It is best to take an example. One aspect of Capital that has recently received much attention from marxist feminists and others interested in education, the family and their articulation through the state, is the theory of ‘reproduction’. Reproduction might be described as the process by which, mostly in production itself, the conditions of further production (of a capitalist kind) are secured. Now there are several different kinds of discussion of this theme in Capital. In one kind of discussion (e.g. the chapter on ‘Simple Reproduction’ in vol I), Marx’s strips the process down to some bare essentials; he presents a very formal, simplified, abstract version. He does this by pre-supposing a range of conditions. With which,
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at least for the moment, he is not prepared to deal. Sometimes such conditions are merely omitted, though we know that Marx is aware of them from later and more complex treatments of the same theme. Sometimes such conditions are mentioned, but are presupposed in the sense that their precise state is fixed – assumed to be ‘constant’ in the language of social science. Thus, in the chapter on Simple Reproduction, Marx assumes a certain level of skill in the work force (very low) and nil accumulation. It is also assumed that reproduction occurs fairly unproblematically, through production and circulation itself and ‘the worker’s drives for self-preservation and propagation’. Throughout Capital, however, this very abstract version is progressively rendered more concrete through the specification of more and more sets of relevant relations. Accumulation and its reproductive mechanisms are supplied; the inherent contradictions of the process are elaborated; the necessity, in general, of conscious political intervention through the State becomes apparent. Yet even here, Capital remains a work of theory, some way from the specific complexities of ‘reproduction’ in nineteenth-century Britain. Yet this too is implicitly recognised in Marx’s procedures. For Capital (especially vol I) does contain what Marx calls on occasion his ‘historical sketches’ and these are more recognisable as ‘history’. For here Marx puts his own tools to work usually on the materials supplied by contemporary economic analysis and observation – typically the Blue Books – in order to conduct a critique of contemporary bourgeois analyses. He is attempting to demonstrate the power of his own conceptions, their critical edge, their adequacy to the objects described within a different frame of reference. But there is something else going on in these sections. Often Marx transgressed the self-imposed limits of Capital itself, the most important abstraction of that work – the abstraction of economic social relations from the total matrix of relations. In his historical sketches (as also in earlier works like the Eighteenth Brumaire) Marx supplies something of other instances. In the case of reproduction, for example, he shows, especially in the analysis of the Factory Acts and their effects, how ideological and political relation are necessarily involved – and in what precise forms – in a particular history of reproduction. (See Capital I chapters 10 and 15.) All this means that if we are, for example, concerned to understand ‘Marx on reproduction’ we must attend quite as much to these sketches as to the simplest schemes. It is often necessary to draw out from Marx’s discussions of the particular some more general considerations for our understanding of the process: i.e. to abstract out further relations which are only dealt with in Capital in a ‘practical state’. The main conclusion from this theoretical work on Capital so far as reproduction is concerned is that it must never be seen as an automatic process, but is constantly contradictory or problematic, requiring continuous, external management. This very cursory ‘reading’ requires much elaboration and development. But if it is anything like accurate, it may suggest a range of ways in which Marx’s legacy can be (and has been) mis-appropriated. The fundamental mechanism here, is the failure to recognise the range and levels of discourse in Capital and, often, to mistake the properties and pertinances of one level for those of another. The actual structure of the text aids selective appropriations. Thus ‘philosophers’ appropriate the grander concepts – mode of production, relations and forces of production especially – and ignore the specific tendencies, laws and forms that constitute the capitalist mode of production as a process. Historians relate to the ‘histories’ (e.g. the chapters on ‘the so-called primitive accumulation’), but may overlook the fact that these are constructed with a prior series of abstractions on which the coherence of the account depends. In the same way, a pathological divorce develops between those who analyse particular situations (historians, journalists or politicians) and those concerned to develop ‘theory’. ‘Culturalism’ as an epistemological position represents one side of this particular divorce in a particularly extreme manner. Despite the emphasis on critique, it
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represents a form of intellectual work that, rather systematically, distances itself from what is most distinctive in the method of the mature Marx. What, then, of the friction of ‘models’ on ‘facts’? This has been dealt with more elegantly than is possible here in Greg McLennan’s paper and the problem will be specified here very briefly. Like all ‘empiricist’ formulations, this conception assumes that somehow thought (a hypothesis or some provisional conception of the real) can be brought into a direct relationship with the real in the form of ‘facts’ about the past. The problem is that this operation is simply not possible. In order for such a comparison to take place, these objects must be of like kind. But in order for this to be the case, ‘facts’ must already have been transformed into ‘categories’, into the same medium, as it were, as the ‘theory’. (These are in fact, typically categories at a lower level of generality than those that compose the theory.) Some process of representation of the real is, therefore, necessarily involved as part of the process of testing. But this is the problem with which we started. How do we grasp the historically concrete? The empiricist solution, then, while it certainly indicates a process with a definite knowledge effect, constitutes a circular or tautologous argument or ‘proof ’. In the case of a culturalist historical practice, the ‘facts’ are commonly those about conceptions of the world; what are in fact interrogated here are people’s conceptions of their lives. But since culturalism makes ‘subjective experience’ the final court of appeal in matters of human science – it is against this that theories must be tested – yet supplies us with no protocols of what we do when faced with radically different experiences or meanings, it dooms us, if consistently followed, to a relativism. If not consistently followed, we may suspect hidden and therefore arbitary sets of criteria are in play, typically linked to an ascription of moral or cognitive superiority to the culture of populace or working class over that of the bourgeoisie. Reductions Let us now turn to the question of reductions. This involves a critique of the conception of the social totality which informs culturalist practice. There are in fact two associated reductions. The first of these is a reduction of class and of social formations to relations between groups of people (the characteristic termed by Althusserians ‘theoretical humanism’); the second is the characteristic reduction of ‘culturalism’ – a reduced conception of the economic. In both Edward Thompson and in Genovese, the very proper moral and political commitment to a ‘truly human society’ (a necessary constituent of communist morality and purposes) becomes transformed into a theory of how things actually are or were. What is properly an objective is made into a tool of analysis. Thus from sympathising with the oppressed peoples of the past, both historians slip into understanding the past (or whole social formations) in terms of relations of a more or less exploitative kind, between groups of people. Classes are constituted as such groups of people in a relation with each other and with people of another class. Both historians have a superb sense of the relational character of class which already raises the analysis beyond the level of social-democratic conceptions (as static structure or ‘stratification’); but they have no conception at all that these relations are over or in some thing. Here, for instance, is Genovese on slaves and slave-holders: As in a lasting though not necessarily happy marriage, two discrete individuals shared, for better or worse, one life . . . masters and slaves shaped each other and cannot be described or analysed in isolation. xvii
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Or Slavery bound two peoples together in bitter antagonism while creating an organic relationship so complex and ambivalent that neither could express the simplest human feeling without reference to the other . . . and compare the following passage from the Making: More than this the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead . . . The finest meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context . . . We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference without squires and labourers. And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared) feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. p9 Phrases like ‘slavery bound’ promise to explore the nature of the tie. Thompson’s later reference, in the same preface, to ‘the productive relations into which men are born’ similarly heralds a rather different mode of analysis. In both historians there are echoes of a more authentic marxism. But in practice such ties and necessities are not elaborated in these histories. In Roll Jordan Roll we return no further back than ‘slavery as a system of class rule’, ‘class power in a racial form’, or ‘the master–slave relationship’. In a symposium in Radical History Review on Genovese’s history Eric Perkins made the following point about Genovese’s work: ‘He fails to utilise the familiar, though misunderstood marxist conception of ‘ “social relations of production” ’ (RHR, 1976, p 42). Despite Genovese’s pungent reply, this criticism is substantially correct. As we shall see in more detail in a moment, these conceptions are also absent, in any elaborated way, from the Making too. As both the earlier quotations suggest, then, class is seen very much as a collective inter-subjective relationship; metaphors of ‘personal relations’ are those most often used to encapsulate it. In such a conception what is specific to class relations in Marx – their rootedness in economic relations – is not grasped; in this respect the Hindess and Hirst criticisms of The Political Economy of Slavery are deadly accurate. What applies to slaves and slave-holders applies also to patricians and plebians. The privileged status of Althusser’s analysis in relation to the conceptions informing these histories can be seen on the following quotation from Essays in Self-Criticism: Marx shows that what in the last instance determines a social formation and allows us to grasp it, is not any chimerical human essence or human nature, nor man, nor even ‘men’, but a relation, the production relation . . . And, in opposition to all humanist idealism, Marx shows that this relation is not a relation between men, a relation between persons, nor an inter-subjective or psychological or anthropological relation, but a double relation between these groups of men and things, the means of production . . . pp 201–22
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This takes us to the characteristically ‘culturalist’ reduction. This might also be described as a reduction ‘upwards’, a reduction to the political and the cultural. While in theory, culturalism attempts to establish ‘economics’ and ‘values’ on an equal footing and in a dialectical relationship, the histories that are written are firmly ‘super-structural’. Their characteristic objects are culture and politics. They focus on what we might term ‘relations of authority’. It is relations of authority indeed, or what Bourdieu terms ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu, 1976) that forms the very nature of relations of class in both Thompson’s portrayal of the eighteenth-century system and Genovese’s of the slave South. It is not, precisely, that the ‘economic’ does not appear in their work. Genovese has a ‘political economy’, but the object of this study – a kind of polemical economic history – is mainly the nature of the economic crisis of slavery or of its origins and limits. In the Making, and in Thompson’s later work (see especially, Thompson, 1967) the economic is also, in a sense, present. But it is present all the time mainly through the category of ‘experience’; economic relations exist in the feelings and imputed meanings of members of the class. The economic as a set of objectively present relations – only appears in an attenuated form, through the cultural, through the ‘inwardness of experience’. We shall see in a moment how this works in a particular chapter of the Making. One last index of ‘culturalism’ is the reception of Gramsci and especially of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony by these English and American historians who have been attracted to his formulations. (This criticism applies to Anderson, 1964, to Gray, 1976 and to Tholfsen, 1976 as well as to Thompson and Genovese). Very briefly, we may say that whereas Gramsci’s conception concerns the relation of base to superstructure (or in Gramsci’s terminology, of structure to superstructure), it is appropriated by Genovese and by Thompson as a concept to do with culture and politics alone. It is easy to see how this occurs. Gramsci’s conception of the social formation, despite the historicism of his conception of philosophy, is a uniquely structuralist one. He had a very strong sense both of the significance of the distinction between economic and other relations, and of the ‘normality’ of enormous disjunctions – non-correspondencies between them. This unevenness between levels, which ought nonetheless to be distinguished, was matched by a very ‘hard’ way of using the term ‘super-structure’. Superstructures were not merely composed of ideas or relations between people with certain conceptions in their minds. They were subject to political and institutional organisation. In both these ways, then, his conception of a social formation was an attempt to comprehend complexity. Such a conception cannot be described as ‘historicist’. But Thompson and Genovese do collapse structure and superstructure. In theory they refuse the distinction; in practice structure virtually disappears. It follows that they are bound also to reduce the full complexity of Gramsci’s conception. If Gramsci is not a historicist; Thompson and Genovese are. Determination All this has important implications for the problem of determination. Some notion of determination (which is not the same as determinism) seems essential to any explanatory account of the social world whatever, certainly for an adequate history. There are limits to how far determinations can be discussed at a relatively high level of abstraction. Yet some general formulations are more coherent than others and give more exact or comprehensible protocols for work of a more specific kind. All the general formulations of a recognisably culturalist kind – ‘dialectical interaction’, ‘consonance’, ‘two sides of the same coin’ seems to produce irresolvable dilemmas. If one wants to retain some notion of determination, and
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some sense of the specific effect of cultural and political processes, notions like ‘consonance’ are not very helpful. They permit indeed very little ‘play’ between ‘social being’ and ‘consciousness’ in the typical culturalist formulation. ‘Dialectical interactions’ is an attempt to avoid this dilemma, but carries no coherent or usable conception of determination. Nor is there any point where it is really shown to be operative in culturalist histories where the actual explanatory dynamic is the (undifferentiated) relation of men-in-class and in struggle. But there is here a very similar problem. Culturalist explanations are a kind of amalgam of two of Marx’s dicta in truncated form – ‘Men make history’ and ‘All history is the history of class struggle’. But which classes make history? Which groups of men and when and how? Slaves? or slave-holders? Plebians or patricians? Workers or capitalists? It is symptomatic of the problem that whereas one of Genovese’s books is titled The World the Slave-Holders Made, another, Roll Jordan Roll, is sub-titled ‘the World the Slaves made’. What is missing of course are the determinant conditions on which Marx was equally emphatic and which set limits to what it is possible for any group of men or women to do, which constitute them indeed as social beings. Bearing in mind the subtlety and coherence of Althusser’s general protocols on determination, one is tempted to suggest that Thompson and Genovese declare themselves Althusserians forthwith! ‘Exploitation’ We may sum up much that has been said so far, by seeing how the general features of ‘culturalism’ are worked through in a particular, classic location of the paradigm. Chapter 6 of The Making of the English Working Class is an appropriate choice since it is here, according to its author, that the more ‘structural’ arguments of the book are to be found (Thompson, 1976, p 22). It is also the chapter that comes nearest to using Marx’s own categories of economic analysis. The chapter certainly contains most of the characteristic features of Thompson’s theory and method. It is a ‘theoretical’ chapter in the rather idiosyncratic sense of the word discussed above. It is ‘theory’ as polemic. In particular it conducts an argument against the two characteristic targets of the Making: a crude economism (‘steam power plus the cotton mill equals the new working class’) which is in fact a vulgar marxism; and an ‘empiricist’ economic history which at best radically de-contextualised the questions of ‘standards of living’ and, at worst, confuses history with Cold War ideology. A principled theoretical position is argued against both these positions. Political and cultural traditions and events have their own effectivity in the creation of classes. Industrial revolution, on its own, is no adequate explanation of class formation. There was no spontaneous generation of a proletariat; rather the class made itself from the pre-existing cultural materials and under the force of both economic revolution and political counter-revolution. Against the economic historians a not dissimilar case is argued. Whatever the movements of the economic series, subjectively, ‘exploitation’ intensified and suffering increased. To argue thus is no imposition on ‘the facts’. The sources show how people felt – a journeyman cotton spinner, indeed, testifies to how he feels for three and a half pages. Similarly, though the empiricists might argue, along with Francis Place, that conditions of existence were too varied to warrant the ascription of a single class-ness, cultural and experiental materials show a clear sense of shared interests, grievances and antagonisms. Nevertheless, when every caution has been made, the outstanding fact of the period between 1790 and 1830 is the formation of ‘the working class’. This is revealed, first,
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Richard Johnson, et al. in the growth of class-consciousness: the consciousness of an identity of interests as between all these diverse groups of working people and as against the interests of other classes. And, second, in the growth of corresponding forms of political and industrial organisation. By 1832 there were strongly based and self-conscious working-class institutions – trade unions, friendly societies, educational and religious movements, political organisations, periodicals – working-class intellectual traditions, working-class community patterns, and a working class structure of feeling. p 194
On both its fronts of engagement the chapter remains an extremely effective critique. It marshalls, in the kind of summary paragraph quoted above, a dense knowledge of popular movements and a fully ‘cultural’ reading of contemporary sources. These are compressed into lightning histories – ‘grand facts’ – and sent off to refute economistic and other theses. Those (un-named) who argue that the factory created the working class are shown the anticipatory work – in culture and organisation – of domestic workers, artisans and weavers, and are reminded of the importance of the mutations of earlier popular notions like ‘the free-born English-man’. The ‘new orthodoxy’ (Sir John Clapham and some less respected economic historians) are faced with a quick sketch map of ‘the political context’ and the evidence of felt grievances. By this complicated mixture of critique and compressed empirical reference, a whole historiographical re-evaluation is suggested. The ideologues of Capitalism and the Historians are extremely clearly identified, growth and ‘modernisation’ theories are given their first hard pull through the hedge, ‘the Hammonds’, pioneering social historians, are very properly seen as precursors of many more modern emphasis, and are rehabilitated. The mixture is a powerful one and one remembers, once again, the impact of this work on a whole generation of young historians and less specialised readers. Yet, in retrospect, it is easier to see that these victories were bought at a price. In the most ‘economic’ or, if one will, most ‘structural’ chapter in the Making, the attack on various species of economism seems to involve vacating the ground of the analysis of economic relations altogether. Economic processes are mainly represented in the chapter symbolically. It begins with perceptions of the factory – with ‘observers’ – and ends on the following well-known note: By 1840 most people were ‘better off ’ than their forerunners had been fifty years before, but they had suffered and continued to suffer this slight improvement as a catastrophic experience. p 212 There is a tendency to identify the industrial revolution Tout court with the factory and, in the absence of any serious reading of Marx on precisely this transition, to fall back on the categories of a non-Marxist economics: ‘process of industrialisation’; ‘problems of economic growth’. Time and again, on the verge of structural moment, the argument returns to a cultural mode. There are, however, several passages in the chapter where the fundamental theoretical limitation of ‘culturalism’ is almost broken through. In some of Thompson’s other work, there are similar moments though we would argue that the break-through to the analysis of economic social relations – in their particular historical forms – must be a peculiarly difficult one for this historian to make without some major and conscious shift in his basic problematic. The context is the discussion of ‘exploitation’ (see mainly pp 194–99 and 203–6) and it
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is these passages, perhaps, that warrant the term structural. On a closer look, however, it is clear that although the ‘culturalist’ reduction is partially broached here, the tendency to a theoretical humanism makes it extremely difficult to employ economic categories in any very exact way. They acquire instead an almost metaphorical character. This is especially the case with ‘exploitation’. Consider closely the shifts that occur in the following paragraph which is, perhaps, the most explicitly ‘theoretical’ section in the chapter, and the nearest approach in the whole of this work to exploitation conceived as an economic relation of production: The exploitative relationship is more than the sum of grievances and mutual antagonisms. It is a relationship which can be seen to take distinct forms in different historical contexts, forms which are related to corresponding forms of ownership and State power. The classic exploitive relationship of the Industrial Revolution is depersonalised, in the sense that no lingering obligations of mutuality – of paternalism or deference or of the interests of ‘the Trade’ – are admitted. There is no whisper of the ‘just’ price, or of a wage justified in relation to social or moral sanctions, as opposed to the operation of free market forces. Antagonism is accepted as intrinsic to the relations of production. Managerial or supervisory functions demand the repression of all attributes except those which further the expropriation of the maximum surplus value from labour. This is the political economy which Marx anatomised in Das Kapital. The worker has become an ‘instrument’, or an entry among other items of cost. In fact, no complex industrial enterprise could be conducted according to such a philosophy . . . pp 203–4 This is a puzzling paragraph. What is being addressed here? Relations of production in something like the ‘classic’ Dobbian or marxian sense? The references here and elsewhere to Marx and the (fleeting) use of concepts like surplus value suggest this is the case. But if we read the passage carefully it is clear that it slips in and out (and mostly out) of some structural conception of relations of production and in and out (and mostly in) of some cultural or idealist notion of capitalist ‘philosophy’ or ‘spirit’. In terms of Dobb’s critical categories, it hovers between a proper mode-of-production analysis in which relations of production (which objectively exist independent of perceptions) constitute the relations of classes at an economic level and a more Sombartian or Weberian account (Dobb, 1945 pp 4–5). The paragraph begins with the (un-culturalist) insight that exploitation is more than felt grievances. It is a historical form of (economic?) relations. These relation(ships) of production are related to juridical and political forms. So far we might regard the analysis as ‘structural’: it shapes up as an analysis of a mode of production. But then it breaks back into culturalist definitions. It is the subjective, felt features of the relationship that are really important – its cultural-psychological aspects: depersonalisation, the decline of mutuality, the destruction of custom, the forms of legitimation. Thompson is back – too soon – to his famous ‘absence’, ‘values, culture, law, and that area where what is normally called moral choice evinces itself ’ (1976, p 23). There is then, apparently, a brief return to the structural level: ‘functions demand the repression’ etc, but we soon discover that what is being discussed here are not the structures of capitalist economic relations as such, but ‘political economy’ (i.e. representations of these relations) and a ‘philosophy’ which cannot, in practice, be altogether enforced. One more example must suffice. Earlier in the same chapter, it is argued that exploitation
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became both more ‘intensive’ and more ‘transparent’ (p. 198). The term ‘economic exploitation’ is used, promising precision. There follows a typical compressed account of agrarian and industrial change: enclosure, the loss of common rights, the replacement of the small master or small producer by the large employer, the employment of women and children, the introduction of factory organisation and the new labour disciplines ‘all contributed to the transparency of the process of exploitation’ (p. 198). Of course each of these points is elaborated in detail in the chapters that follow on field labourers, artisans and weavers. What is never elaborated, however, is the notion of exploitation and its ‘intensification’. One way in which the changes described might have been thought, for instance, is in terms of the rising rate of exploitation, but this economic and partly quantitative ground is largely left to the economic historians, and, towards the end of the chapter, Thompson appears to accept their findings based largely on wages and consumption (p 212). It is precisely at this point of his critique, however, that he really needs to employ Marx’s economic categories to identify changes at the level of productive relations, and to question, more radically, a view of economic amelioration based on wages, prices and the sphere of exchange. Of course there is nothing unproblematic about an analysis on these lines, though Marx himself supplied us with many of the materials and a whole set of further concepts – absolute and relative surplus value and the transition from manufacture to machinofacture for instance – that help to make sense of this period. But this is alien to the whole direction of Thompson’s analysis; instead we return, post haste, to the cultural level. ‘Exploitation’ is reduced, in the end, to a simple ‘humanist’ conception: We can now see something of the truly catastrophic nature of the Industrial Revolution; as well as some of the reasons why the English working class took form in these years. The people were subjected simultaneously to an intensification of two intolerable forms of relationships: those of economic exploitation and of political oppression. Relations between employer and labourer were becoming both harsher and less personal; and while it is true that this increased the potential freedom of the worker . . . this ‘freedom’ meant that he felt his unfreedom more . . . pp 198–99 ‘Intolerable’, ‘harsher’, ‘less personal’, ‘felt’ all signal the re-entry into the world of cultural evaluations, the inability, indeed, to escape it. These examples do seem to show some of the ultimate limitations of the culturalist paradigm and of socialist-humanist history as a historiographical form. Definite and precise categories, necessary for a really systematic analysis, acquire a literary or metaphorical character – they become, as it were, experiential categories themselves. In this way histories like the Making are very far removed from Marx’s own conception of historical materialism as ‘science’. Conclusions We might end by stating what we have and have not set out to do in this part of the paper. We have not been concerned to review the whole oeuvre of two major historians – both of whom are productive to a quite intimidating degree. We have been concerned, instead, to take some of their work as examples of a particular approach to history and to theory. We are not concerned to write critical reviews but to examine, critically, a particular position. Our criticisms of ‘culturalism’ may not apply equally to every text. We have not, for example, discussed any of Genovese’s work apart from Roll Jordan Roll and The Political
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Economy of Slavery; we have not discussed Thompson’s most recent major text, Whigs and Hunters which seems in some ways to break from his earlier paradigm (though it is more about modes of predation than of production). We have drawn heavily on critical categories developed by Louis Althusser, but our own position is not that of a generalised assault on culturalist practices from ‘structuralist’ perspectives. We distance ourselves from this position in two ways. First, as we show in the third part of this paper, there are definite problems with tendencies derivable from Reading Capital and with attempts to extend a part of the logic of that work. Secondly, we would insist that there are elements within culturalism that ought to be preserved. As a moment in the development of Marxism, socialist-humanist history has an important place. Works like the Making stand as a permanent remainder that any account of the world that does not come to terms with intentionality, ‘subjective experience’ or ‘the inwardness’ of culture risks reversion to mechanical notions of society or to fundamentally conspiratorial ideas of ‘control’. Neglect of the content of conceptions and ‘values’ and of the nature of their ‘hold’ or ‘appeal’ in particular moments for particular classes and groups similarly returns us to the crudest models of ideological processes – models which fall back on unilateral manipulations or transmissions and which are astonishingly persistent, not least within Marxism. In this sense Thompson’s ‘experience’, or concepts that indicate, less ambiguously, a similar space, are absolutely indispensable. If ‘culturalist’ history is inadequate, without a history of intentionality we can have no adequate explanatory history at all. If this is ‘humanism’, it is humanism in a quite specific sense. An insistence on the importance of what Marx called, generally, ‘consciousness’ (and regarded as an attribute of men through all history) cannot be dismissed as a mere romanticism, or as the intrusion of ‘moral’ considerations into theoretical and scientific matters. Rather it is a kind of provisional description of an object which science itself must grasp. Yet we hope to have shown that the costs of an overbearing stress on ‘experience’ are too high. We are robbed, in the first place, of a powerful tool of analysis. Culturalism, preferring ‘authenticity’ to ‘theory’, renders its own theoretical project guilty, surreptitious and only partly explicit. It places a kind of embargo on abstraction, though a certain amount of smuggling of the most refined of goods must still go on. By ‘abstraction’ here is meant something different from ‘theory’ in orthodox sociology, or the ‘hypothesis’ or testable propositions of the Popperians, or the ‘models’ or ‘ideal types’ of a Weberian methodology. Genuine abstractions are simplified formal representations of really-existing relations, as true as far as they go, true at that level of abstraction. Now, to reject the moment of abstraction, even as part of a method, is a hopelessly contradictory procedure if conducted from within the Marxist tradition. Abstraction is central to the method of Capital and is also much referred to in the Marx-Engels correspondence (e.g. Marx and Engels 1975 pp 29–39, and 98–99). It is the inclusion of the higher levels of abstraction in Capital (that which refers to the capitalist mode of production as such) that makes it more than a history book. We would argue that all works of history are going to have to look more like that, moving systematically through different levels of abstraction describing and examining particular histories and situations but ‘doing theory’ all the time. It is not only in its method that culturalism departs from marxism. It also suppresses Marx’s major substantive achievements – the analysis of the forms, tendencies and laws of the capitalist mode of production. Since Marx’s anatomy of economic social relations is based on the English case, the neglect in The Making of the English Working Class is all the more astonishing Culturalist pre-suppositions, so we have argued, make this inevitable. The consequences are very serious. It is not enough to say that culturalism supplies an absence in
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marxism or, reversing the relation, that we must add to insights about culture, Marx’s insights about ‘economics’. Nor is it adequate to defend neglect of economic relations by reference to the work of other sympathetic historians (c.f. Thompson, 1976, p 25). Absences of this kind must actually lead to re-definitions – the whole field of concepts is effected. So, for example, the reduction of ‘class’ to ‘class consciousness’ or to how men and women feel about social relationships is a serious empoverishment of marxist categories and, must have definite theoretical and practical effects. It produces serious difficulties, for instance, when it is necessary to analyse moments in the history of classes when cultural and political fragmentations do actually prove, in political outcomes, to be more powerful than any sense of class unity. Do classes then not exist? One might consider the question for the 1850s and 1860s in Britain and for the period of the ‘disappearance’ of class in the post-World War II period, especially the 1950s. Faced with periods like these (much of the eighteenth is indeed another), the characteristic culturalist move is to show that real cultural differences persist – there is no actual ‘embourgioisement’. This strategem may often suffice but has its own dangers and limitations – the danger for instance of searching the record for only the most dramatic or conflictual of class relations; the limitation of having to hang class designations (patricians? plebians?) on some pretty imprecise and idiosyncratic criteria of attitude or collective organisation. A much more powerful strategem is to show how, even in moments of consensual hegemony, or the political defeat or prostration of subordinate classes, class remains integral to the very organisation, reproduction and movement of the social formation in question. This requires not only a great deal of careful research but also some conception of class or classes which does not rest on cultural or experiental criteria alone and retains a quite ‘orthodox’ stress on economic positions and relations. With such a conception it is possible to ‘think’ the disjunctions and autonomies of economic and ideological relations. It is possible, theoretically, to show how men and women may be constituted as class subjects within economic relations and yet be moved by forms of ideology and politics which address them in other terms – as ‘citizens’ or as ‘the people’ or as members of the imperial race, or as ‘the respectable’ as against the rest. (These formulations owe much to Laclau, 1977.) In both these respects, then, in terms of theory and epistemology, we hope to have shown that culturalism is inadequate. In its over-reaction to economistic and mechanical marxisms, it actually suppresses some earlier strengths of the tradition, strengths best seen in Dobbs, Studies and in the transition debates. It is all the more important, standing as it were in a third phase of the development of a marxist historiography, that we take stock and recover some of the elements of the older Dobbian practice. The problem is a much broader one than faithfulness to Marx’s original insights. As we have seen, culturalism belongs to that range of ‘sociologies’ – using the term in its widest sense – that seek to grasp phenomena in their own terms, in their forms of appearance in the world. Culturalism does not altogether refuse questions of ‘structure’ or ‘process’ – it is significant that Thompson wishes to appropriate the word to his own usages (e.g. 1976, p 18). Class, however experientially rendered, supplies a kind of structure, yet it is a structure that sits on the surface of things, is there to be seen by anyone who looks (or listens). The problem, in general, with such sociologies, is that they abandon the ground of ‘determinations’ or of explanations of why things (or relations) appear as they do. So it is, when we finish reading The Making of the English Working Class. We can picture all this movement and strife and human energy. We identify, are moved and comprehend it all imaginatively. We
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may (through some 1960s resonances) be politically excited and animated. Yet we still want (and need) to know how these things came to be.
Part III. Rationalism: Hindess and Hirst Foundations We have been trying to suggest that a nuanced employment of the categories ‘economism’ and ‘culturalism’ is of considerable critical value in the assessment of marxist historiographies. The responsibility for the uses and abuses of theoretical ‘pairs’ like economism/humanism (culturalism) must lie in the wide impact which the work of Louis Althusser has had on marxism in general, and in the renewed attention to the ‘science of history’ in particular. It would be beyond the scope of this short paper to give an adequate assessment of Althusser’s contribution to historical materialism: this would involve a great deal of general argument and close textual detail with regard to the relation between history and philosophy, marxism and science, and so forth. It is also a particularly difficult task in view of the fact that Althusser’s alleged ‘theoreticism’ reveals surprisingly nuanced and ambiguous attitudes towards the ‘concrete’, towards ‘history’. Surprising, this, because it is a widely held and not wholly justified position that Althusserian approaches necessarily rule out due respect for the primacy of reality over thought. However, if Althusser himself is not fully open to such charges, the work of Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst (especially Pre-capitalist Modes of Production) might be seen as a critique of Althusser’s limitations and ambiguities having the crucial consequences, for the purposes of this paper, of problematising the notion of the concrete, and of rejecting the very possibility of a (marxist) science of history. We therefore discuss it as an example of a ‘rationalist’ position which attempts to surmount difficulties common to the previous perspectives we have indicated. Some characterisation of the project of Althusser and Balibar’s Reading Capital is necessary in order to place Hindess and Hirst’s denial of history as a legitimate object of marxism. In Reading Capital, Althusser argued that the character of Marx’s epistemology definitively separated marxism as a scientific enterprise from all forms of empiricism, economism, and humanism. These doctrines represent a range of positions from the absolute primacy of the technical productive forces to the replacement of economic classes at the heart of marxism’s conception of history by the concept of ‘Man’. Althusser tried to show that although superficially contradictory to one another, the positions within this range shared ‘essentialist’ notions of a self-moving ‘subject’ of history, having privileged casual status with respect to its forms of appearance in society and history. In short, economism and humanism were shown to be more or less sophisticated philosophies of history which can only hinder marxism’s scientific project. However, the notion of historical science, for Althusser, is not one which emphasises, for example, verification procedures – an alternative widely adopted by historians and rationalised by academic empiricist philosophy in opposition to ‘speculative history’. On the contrary; the empiricist idea of the primacy of the perceptual ‘given’ is as philosophical and speculative as those philosophical dogmas it aspires to contradict. Althusser thus plausibly asserts that empiricism as well as idealist essentialism shares a common epistemology such that the relation between thought and reality, or concepts and the concrete is i) treated as a philosophical ‘problem’, and ii) is resolved by a short-cut reduction of one term of the couplet to its essence as represented by the other term. From even this abstract summary, it should be clear that Althusser’s notion of a ‘science of history’ is, in intention at least, thoroughly theoretical: it must be produced by the
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systematic correlation of marxist concepts in a way which transcends the reductionisms of the observational given and of speculative philosophies of history, be the latter dependent on economism or cultural humanism. Althusser’s alternative, schematically, is a conception of the social formation governed by a complex or structural causality. He insists that structural and interdependent social relations and levels could be exhaustively analysed in a marxist fashion without recourse to a monocausal reductionism or to a philosophical subject, pattern, or goal of ‘History’. At the same time, Althusser stressed the ‘openess’ of the scientific procedure which establishes and deploys these categories, as against the artificial and ideological closures to what are in any case ‘false’ problems erected by typically philosophical conceptions of causality, social formations, and history. This concern to emphasise ideologyfree marxist science and its thoroughly theoretical character we may, for convenience, term marxist rationalism, and it is rationalism which makes possible the view that economism and culturalism as histories are no more than equally limited and internally related projects which must be subjected to a radical critique. While having noted our view that Althusser’s own arguments are not wholly susceptible of a simple and schematic summary, Balibar’s contribution to Reading Capital was in general terms an application of Althusser’s protocols in a reconstruction of the ‘basic concepts’ of historical materialism. And Balibar’s theory can be seen to fit the rationalist schema in such a way as to give rise to intractable problems for Althusserianism. On the basis that ‘history must constitute its object before it can receive it’, Balibar argued that ‘mode of production’ was the central concept of marxist analysis, and the crux of Marx’s latent theory of historical periodisation. As we have seen, such a notion is by no means original: it was, for example, constitutive of Dobb’s work. However, two further features mark off the Balibarian conception from other interpretations of Marx. First, following (and perhaps overextending) Althusser, mode of production is conceived as a structured whole comprising economic, ideological, and (in class societies) political ‘levels’. Now while the economy is determinant in the last instance, the mode of casuality involved is neither mechanical nor expressive, but structural. The determinant economic structure is said to be present only in and as its effects – that is, the other levels. Second, the basic elements of the economic level are invariant (the labourer, the means of production, and the non-labourer, linked by variant relations of property ownership and a connection of ‘real appropriation’). It would be superfluous to go further into details here. What is important is that while Balibar is aware that there can be no theory of possible modes a priori, there are nevertheless certain invariant features of all modes of production which Balibar considers to be of importance. The theoretical status of these invariant elements, it would seem, can in no sense be reduced to the ‘obvious’ fact (indeed, tautology), that human agents must produce in any labour process. The effect of Balibar’s analysis is that history must be conceived as a series of discontinuous modes of production, each structured around a determinant instance which has a formally unchanging basis. Precapitalist modes of production Let us now turn to Hindess and Hirst. These authors accept Althusser’s rejection of economism and humanism, but detect contradictions in his project which show that the Althusserian critique is actually not radical enough. They themselves propose to show the impossibility of Balibar’s position by combining an even greater drive to theoretical purity (which involves the rejection of all history), with the claim to reinstate the ‘material causality’ of the class struggle as a central category. Hindess and Hirst criticise Althusser and Balibar
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as follows. a) The notion of structural causality, they argue, while formulated against essentialism, is itself essentialist. This is because, by definition, a structure which is nothing outside its effects implies a self-sustaining or ‘eternal’ social totality. History thus becomes a succession of ‘eternities’ – a notion which escapes self-contradiction only at the cost of regarding each mode as a variant of a trans-historical combination of ‘basic’ elements. b) The theory cannot, therefore, account for historical change or class struggle. Balibar, it should be said, is aware of this problem, and attempts to overcome it by theory of social reproduction which would involve the possibility of a transformation of the structure themselves. However, such an attempt must fail, since he initially defines the problem of reproduction in terms of structural causality. Hindess and Hirst thus point to the fact that Balibar has to conceive transition between modes of production as itself a mode, or else introduce factors (such as the forces of production) which teleologically detach themselves from the structural mesh to produce a new mode. The ploy thus both muffles the ‘basic’ concept and undermines the general validity of structural causality – a supposed validity upon which the entire theory was predicated. c) Hindess and Hirst argue that such confusions have their roots, ironically, in the fact that Althusser and Balibar themselves retain the empiricist ‘problem of knowledge’. This is because they continue to recognise the philosophical primacy of an object outside theory which the thought-object somehow appropriates in the ‘knowledgemechanism’. The critics term this epistemology a rationalist one. In this more specific sense, rationalism means that the order and causality of concepts are taken to be the order and causality of the material world. In short, Hindess and Hirst accuse Althusser and Balibar of producing yet another philosophy of history, however sophisticated and however marxist. Hindess and Hirst reject the idea of a general theory of modes of production. They propose to clarify the object of marxist theory, by doing away altogether with the pre-critical concept of history, which they see as inevitably tied to bogus philosophical difficulties. Clearly, they would respect no distinction between ‘history’ and ‘logic’ or theory. Marxist theory, for Hindess and Hirst, serves to formulate general concepts of modes of production, which specify the conditions which must be fulfilled by specific concepts of modes of production (feudal, ancient, slave, etc.) This theoretical task contributes to the elaboration of what they see as the primary object of marxist theory – the ‘current situation’. The current situation itself is the product of theoretical and political practice. They argue that their position will clarify errors and ambiguities in marxist theory by denying the dualism upon which philosophy of history is based. In so doing, the temptation to introduce philosophical substantialism – that is, the substitution of the development of concepts for the real historical process – can be avoided. Hindess and Hirst assert that, by definition, history is all that is past. Now, all that is past exists only through its representations. The claim for a ‘marxist history’ would necessarily involve regarding marxism as merely another set of ideological representation of a reference external to, but commonly designated by, different theories, namely the mythical object, ‘the past’. Marxism cannot therefore have the past as its object, and cannot be a science of history, for no such thing is possible. The legitimate scope of the concepts of modes of production is, they contend, central to the real object of marxist theory, the current situation – not least due to the theoretical and political tangles left to marxism by Althusser. The architecture of their proposal can be summarised as follows. A mode of production is an articulated combination of a set of productive forces and definite relations of production, with priority given to the latter. Against technicising, it is argued that nothing in the concept of improved technique, for example, can specify definite forms of social relations. Concepts of particular modes of production, in turn, specify ‘variants’ and ‘elements’ of themselves. These concepts together
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indicate concrete social formations when an economic mode of production (in a variant form) exists together with its ideological and political conditions of existence, or in the case of communist modes, with only ideological conditions. A mode thus requires such conditions, and is in that sense dependent upon them, but the forms they take, and whether or not they can ensure the continuance of the mode, are things which cannot be known in theory or in advance. Such a degree of conceptual specification would involve the kind of rationalism of which Balibar is guilty. The state of conditions of existence is determined by the material causality of the class struggle, and this is the only form of causality which Hindess and Hirst endorse. The class struggle can also therefore create the conditions under which transition from one mode to another is made possible, but it is quite impossible to establish any necessary succession from one mode of production to another: marxism is not a teleological theory, not an evolutionism. The bulk of Pre-capitalist Modes of Production is devoted to an extensive application of these theoretical propositions: in turn, the primitive communist, the ancient, the slave, and the feudal modes are interrogated, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism is problematised. Assessment and critique In sum, we can say that Pre-capitalist Modes of Production attempts three things: i ii iii
To return to their proper levels of specificity both conceptual necessity (the logical relations between theoretical propositions) and the ‘materiality’ of the class struggle. To avoid both rationalism and all forms of teleology. To produce a ‘concrete’ object while escaping the allegedly false concreteness of the empiricist object ‘history’.
Before taking up critical assessment, it should be said that the proposal is an exciting and novel one. There can be no doubt that the rationalism of Reading Capital, and especially Balibar, is open to such criticism. The impressive negative-critical manner of Hindess and Hirst should not be undervalued in that respect. Whatever the consequences, at least the intention to rid marxism of a substantialist philosophy from those areas in which it does not belong is an important aspect of critique. The emphasis on conceptual clarity is a refreshing presence: too often the theoretical ideas crucial to marxism stagnate into dogma. No good history can be produced unless the organising conceptual framework aspires to selfconsciousness and rigour. Hindess and Hirst ambitiously but rightly point out the need to sharpen up such basic concepts which are, frankly, weaker than they should be: mode of production, social formation, class structure, superstructures. Further, the proposition that ‘mode of production’ necessarily has an economic definition is a useful counter to the difficulties engendered by Balibar and Poulantzas and others, that is, that it should be seen as a multi-levelled structure. That kind of position, one which effectively conflates mode of production and social formation, can only breed confusion, as can be seen in Poulantzas’ later work on the identification of classes. However, the important concept of conditions of existence in Hindess and Hirst, in conjunction with ‘material causality’ (both actually adapted from Althusser), ensures that the schema is anything but economistic: on the contrary, it militates against a general determinism, but without necessarily ditching a principle of determinacy. These positions produce useful theoretical clarifications of specific modes of production (as Dobb himself pointed out in a review). The Asiatic mode, for example, is shown to be
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extremely dubious theoretical proposition, and certain elements of and problems with the feudal mode are given important treatment. Generally, Hindess and Hirst are quick to take up their positions at the slightest sign of either economism or the illegitimate extension of superstructural factors (especially legal relations) into the economic definitions itself. In view of these positive, and undoubtedly challenging features, it is unfortunate – and disappointing – that the book has been largely ignored by historians. However, it is a frequent feature of attempts to replace philosophical encroachments into ‘science’ by yet another philosophical variant. If such a case can be made against Althusser, then it also reveals the contradictions which render Pre-capitalist Modes of Production an unacceptable position. Whatever critical value the operation has had, it is incapable of providing a body of knowledge; a theoretical shell has been constructed which can have no substantive centre. Asad and Wolpe (1976) have convincingly argued that the general definition of a mode of production given in the introduction shifts in different chapters to accommodate what can only be thought of as the historical realities of societies which produce under the mode concerned. Clearly, if this is the case then the central and first proposition – that the concept of ‘mode of production’ lays down the necessary conditions for specific modes – is fundamentally undermined. For example, the general concept states that modes are defined by the form of the appropriation of surplus product, yet the chapter on the slave mode of production defines that mode by the fact that it is the entire product of labour which is appropriated. Asad and Wolpe thoroughly trace these discrepancies through several definitions, and leave little room for confidence in the verbal formulations, though it could be said that on some other important counts (such as the claim that not only do Hindess and Hirst overwork the term ‘empiricism’, they don’t actually understand it precisely) the case against is overpitched. There are other sets of discrepancies: for example, the absurd inclusion of a chapter on the ancient mode. By defining the mode as ‘appropriation by right of citizenship’, the authors break their own strictures against superstructural definitions of the economy (elsewhere ably used by Hirst in a review of Perry Anderson’s culturalism). Similarly, there are a number of crucial ambiguities on the nature of kinship as ideology in the discussion of the primitive communist mode. The fact that, at least in the case of the ancient mode, Hindess and Hirst admit their transgression yet allow it to remain, is astonishing. Such discrepancies and counter-example weigh against the idea that a purely conceptual procedure can deliver the promised goods of specific analysis. Take, for instance, the notion of conditions of existence. While, it seems, variants of a mode of production are specified by the concept of the mode, conditions of existence cannot be. It follows that conditions are a consequence of class struggle but variants are not. This gives rise to large problems; for how do we explain the effects of class struggle on, say, the changes from one kind of rent to another in the feudal mode? If we were to believe the historians (according to one caricature), it would seem that the very conditions and variants – and indeed modes themselves – are the effects of particularised historical events, initiatives, and struggles. And Marx himself, in the chapter of Capital on the genesis of ground rent, carefully – and somewhat inconclusively – considered the problem of ‘elements’ and ‘conditions’ in his discussion of the changes from one form of feudal rent to others (including transitional forms). This raises difficulties for Hindess and Hirst. What exactly are elements, variants, and conditions that they should be of such different species? Can there be a conceptual limit to the scope of class struggle? What is the nature of the ‘materiality’ of class struggle? In fact, these questions, and many like them, cannot be satisfactorily answered by the
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authors. This is due to a persistent rationalism of a Balibarian kind. A social formation is conceived as a mode of production together with its conditions of existence, and a conjuncture is a specific state of those conditions. That is to say, the existence of a concept has pertinent effects on what exists and in what relations of determination. Such rationalism – as in Balibar’s case – is a product of both the drive to conceptual self-sufficiency and the recognition of the material reality of struggle. But it is therefore also a contradictory product. Despite the anti-history, Hindess and Hirst engage in debates about real historical questions (with Genovese on the American Civil War, and with Balibar on the reality of transitions). The recognition of reality is expressed in the ‘materialist’ terminology – material causality, class struggle – while its suppression is guaranteed by either the lack of a content for these concepts (material causality), or the transposition of content from the status of contingency to that of strained conceptual necessity (for example, conditions of existence and variants). There is, consequently, a failure to engage squarely with important questions, such as that concerning ‘history’. This is a poor argument. The authors characterise history as whatever is past, thus reducing what Marx would surely have seen as only the point of departure for a multi-determined analysis to a ‘forced abstraction’ (see 1857 Introduction). This condemns together, and in advance, theories which might be in all other respects incommensurable. It presupposes that all other questions of theoretical history (periodisation, theoretical scope and coherence) are automatically subordinate to that simple bi-polar distinction. It is a purely verbal manoevre which thus relies on an imprecise level of generality, and on the theoretical value of a couplet (past/present) which will not bear elaboration and which assumes, paradoxically, empiricist means of identifying cases. The further claim that marxist history, being just another set of representations, is ideological, is equally banal. For, providing the simplest empiricism is avoided, it is clear that not only history appears through its representations (eyes, documents, theory??), but so does political practice, current situations, and theories of modes production. Holding an anti-empiricist position in Pre-capitalist Modes of Production, but, unlike their later work, retaining a science/ideology distinction, the notion of representation is arbitrary and unclear. For Hindess and Hirst the object of marxist theory is the current situation, yet they have (as Asad and Wolpe suggest) made the concrete elaboration of such a situation by the theoretical concepts impossible. The supremacy of the concepts ultimately rests on their withdrawal from the terms of possible explanatory power. Pre-capitalist Modes of Production is a text ridden with uneveness in quality and rigour, and is structured by contradictions. The contradictions of Balibarian rationalism are reproduced and formalised. The argument against rationalism in the text takes the form of a denial of the epistemological dualism which tempts the transposition of the conceptual order on to the world of material causality. Yet the very denial reveals a belief in the non-reducibility of the concrete to concepts. Seeking to avoid both empiricism and rationalism, Hindess and Hirst reproduce the logical form of knowledge as appropriation, but can say nothing about it. This fact should not however, at least in this text, imply an agnosticism or neutrality, for the contradictions of the position stem from the attempt to push rationalism as a theoretical tendency within marxism to higher levels of conceptual self-sufficiency. In conclusion, we should note that some of these critical points have been acknowledged in subsequent books and papers by Hindess and Hirst – in particular the ‘auto-critique’, Mode of Production and Social Formation. They now see the fault of such texts as Reading Capital and Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production as the pernicious effects of any epistemology in the social sciences, and they offer a critique of epistemology as such. The latter is, they argue, a dogmatic form of thought which must always uncritically presuppose its own validity.
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Rival theories are condemned simply in view of their form, and wherever they doubt the ‘privileged’ concepts and objects of the epistemology in question. Kantianism, empiricism, Althusserian rationalism, and any epistemology at all share this structure, Hindess and Hirst thus advocate a ‘bracketing out’ of all such philosophical questions, especially that of ‘scientificity’. We also find, as a consequence of the excision, a replacement of the primacy of the abstract ‘mode of production’ by the more flexible and concrete ‘social formation’. However, the authors insist on the concepts lack of a ‘real’ reference outside the field of ‘discursive practice’. The only criteria by which to judge the usefulness of a theory or concept is in terms of politico-theoretical ‘problematisation’ or in those of internal coherence. Briefly, it may be said that ‘knowledge’ as something implying a non-conceptual reference and a degree of ‘objective’ validity is now a quite unacceptable notion for Hindess and Hirst. Whatever the merits of the new position, it seems to leave the ‘rationalist’ alternative to economism and culturalism as represented by Pre-capitalist Modes of Production with no defenders. It has been part of the purposes of this paper to argue that none of the three positions discussed actually do exist as coherent wholes in their pure form. Beyond that, much theoretical work has to be done in order that positions having coherence but which are also useful for concrete research can be developed. To be adequate, such theories will have to acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of the three perspectives we have outlined, yet must avoid both eclecticism and the claim to eternal validity. This will involve theoretical choice and argument. We would assert – it cannot be substantiated here – that the marxist theory of history can be developed in such a way as to produce a body of theoretical propositions and a means of informed concrete research and analysis without having to resort to justification of a purely epistemological kind. The poles of empiricist myopia and (to use Hindess and Hirst’s terms) the rationalist ‘quagmire’ do not preempt and dictate to the whole field of theoretical argument. Insofar as this is a tenet of the latest stance of Hindess and Hirst, there is something to be said for it. However, this should not be taken as a denial of the epistemological consequences of supporting one set of basic concepts and arguments as against others. It is Hindess and Hirst’s mistake to think that to deny the primacy of epistemological questions in historical theory implies their necessary and radical elimination, but a stance of total anti-epistemology can be no less dogmatic and arbitrary than full-blown rationalism or empiricism. Their latest texts, it seems to us, deny epistemology as a form of argumentation in precisely the way in which epistemology is said to operate. For all the sophisticated self-criticism, Hindess and Hirst remain unaware of – or simply repress – the philosophical nature of their rejection of philosophy, the essentialist manner in which they condemn all essentialisms. With due recognition of philosophy’s necessarily limited role, the inescapable epistemological consequences of theoretical debate can sometimes be put to some use in the reformulation and extension of the concepts of historical materialism.
Bibliography Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. Reading Capital (1970) Althusser, L. Essays in Self-Criticism (1976) Anderson, P. ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’ New Left Review 23 (1965) Anderson, P. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974a) Anderson, P. Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974b) Anderson, P. Considerations on Western Marxism (1976)
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Asad, T. and Wolpe, H. ‘Modes of Production’ Economy and Society Vol 5 No 6 (Nov 1976) Bourdieu, P. Reproduction (1976) Dawe, A. ‘The Two Sociologies’ British Journal of Sociology Vol 21 No 2 ( June 1970) Dobb, M. Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946, reissued 1963) Dobb, M. ‘Historical Materialism and the Role of the Economic Factor’ History (February 1951); reprinted in M. Dobb On Economic Theory and Socialism (1955) Dobb, M. ‘Marx’s Capital and its Place in Economic Thought’ Science and Society Vol 31 (1967); reprinted and quoted from The Economics of Marx edited by M.C. Howard and J.E. King (1976) Dobb, M. Review of ‘Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production’ History Vol 61 (1976) Genovese, E. The Political Economy of Slavery (1961) Genovese, E. Roll Jordan Roll (1974) Genovese, E. ‘A Reply to Criticism’ Radical History Review Vol 4 No 1 (Winter 1977) Gramsci, A. Prison Notebooks (1971) Gray, R. Q. The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh (1976) Hill, C. The English Revolution 1640 (1940) Hill, C. The World Turned Upside Down (1975) Hilton, R. The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England (1969) Hilton, R. Bond Men Made Free (1973) Hilton, R. (ed) The Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism (reissued 1976) Hindess, B. Philosophy and Methodology in the Social Sciences (1977) Hindess, B. and Hirst, P.Q. Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (1975) Hindess, B. and Hirst, P.Q. Mode of Production and Social Formation (1977) Hirst, P. Social Evolution and Sociological Categories (1975) Hirst, P. ‘The Uniqueness of the West’ Economy and Society Vol 4 No4 (1975) Hobsbawm, E. J. Revolutionaries (1973) Hobsbawm, E. J. ‘Feudalism, Capitalism and the Absolutist State’ Our History No 66 (1976) Laclau, E. Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977) Lenin, V. The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1972) Marx, K. Grundrisse (1973) Marx, K. Capital I (1976) Marx, K. Capital III (1972) Marx, K. and Engels, F. Selected Correspondence (1975) McLennan, G. ‘Ideology and Consciousness: Some Problems in Marxist Historiography’ CCCS Occasional Stencilled Paper No 45 (1976) Perkins, E. ‘Roll Jordan Roll: A ‘Marx’ for the Master Class’ Radical History Journal Vol 3 No 4 (Fall 1976) Stedman Jones, G. Outcast London (1971) Tholfsen, T. Working Class Radicalism in Mid Victorian England (1976) Thompson, E. P. ‘Homage to Tom Maguire’ in Briggs and Saville (eds) Essays in Labour History Vol I (1960) Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class Thompson, E. P. ‘Peculiarities of the English’ Socialist Register (1965) Thompson, E. P. ‘Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’ Past and Present No 38 (1967) Thompson, E. P. ‘The Moral Economy of the Eighteenth Century Crowd’ Past and Present No 50 (1971) Thompson, E. P. ‘Patrician Society; Plebian Culture’ Journal of Social History Vol. 7 No 4 (Summer 1974) Thompson, E. P. Whigs and Hunters (1975) Thompson, E. P. ‘Interview with Edward Thompson’ Radical History Review Vol 3 No 4 (Fall 1976) Vilar, P. ‘Problems in the Formation of Capitalism’ Past and Present No 10 (1956) This paper was completed before the simultaneous appearance of a number of significant contributions to the debates on the formation of capitalism. See especially Jairus Banaji ‘Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History’ Capital and Class No 3 (Autumn 1977); Robert DuPlessis ‘From
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Demesne to World System’: A Critical Review of the Literature on the Transition from Feudalism to ‘Capitalism’ Radical History Review Vol 4 No I (Winter 1977); Robert Brenner ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism New Left Review No 104 (July–August 1977); Scott Cook ‘Beyond the ‘Formen’: Towards a Revised Marxist Theory of Precapitalist Formations and the Transitions to Capitalism’ Journal of Peasant Studies Vol 4 No 4 (July 1977). It is not the case however that these arguments provide any major re-evaluation of our particular concern in the first part of this paper: Dobb’s contributions to marxist historiography.
39 Out of the people The politics of containment 1935–45 Cultural History Group
Prefatory note: history and contemporary cultural studies The existence and importance of historical work in this Centre was acknowledged in 1973–74, with the formation of a ‘period’ sub-group for two main reasons. First, work on problems in contemporary culture was increasingly being grounded in an analysis of British capitalism since the nineteenth century; second, and more urgently, we lacked an adequate working account, for reference and revision, of basic themes in that development – though Hobsbawm’s Industry and Empire1 went some way towards fulfilling the need. The work of that group soon confronted distinctive challenges: 1
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A need was felt for theoretically informed models and analyses of shifts and developments in British society and culture, against the dominant received tradition of empiricist narratives, many concerned with narrowly political themes. We wanted to try, as suggested in Richard Johnson’s preceding paper, to specify the dimensions of a ‘cultural history’ which, in itself, remained only one way of understanding a social formation. The work had a ‘meta-function’ within the Centre as a whole: that of offering an overview of British history in various respects, yet able to develop only through specific new work in particular areas. Such ambitions were tempered by the difficulties of interpreting materials in contemporary history, owing to their abundance and variety as well as to their absence in important areas. When work began on a period, the 1950s, it found itself in infinite regress since the 1950s had emerged from and often been lived in contrast with the 1930s, and so on. Moreover, a ‘period’ in one domain of social life might not ‘fit’ with developments in another domain, as the debate on ‘social’ and ‘historical’ times between Althusser, Braudel and Vilar suggested.2
So when work began in a re-named ‘cultural history’ group in 1974–75 it sought first a broader sweep of English history, concentrating on two topics: changes in the role of the State (on which there is now a group working specifically) and shifts in class structure and relations. In the attempt to define more closely a particular topic and problem, we thought of perhaps analysing a specific institution, such as education, as a way of opening up larger changes. Another possibility canvassed was to look at a specific ideology, such as the idea of ‘service’ which runs through a society with a significant proportion of domestic servants, is crucial to the formation of imperialism, and lingers in the founding and institutions of the
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welfare state. Or again we thought of analysing a specific social group and its way of living through social changes – for example we considered concentrating on the lower middle class. In the event we chose the period from the 1929–31 depression to the end of World War II. This choice was informed by our appreciation of gaps in the Centre’s historical work, notably between our knowledge of the nineteenth century (and a growing research interest in the period 1880 to 1926) and all our work on the post-war world, the main focus of historical attention so far. We were especially concerned with the need, if only at the level of survey, to extend backwards some of the emphases of the Sub-Cultures Group and the Mugging study3 around the recent history of hegemony. It should be stressed that what follows is only a short exploratory sketch, largely reliant on secondary historical materials – a beginning in building a bridge between the ‘historical’ and ‘contemporary’ ends of the Centre’s work.
Starting points We had three main starting points. The first of these was an initial reading of some important texts including Stuart Hall’s essay on Picture Post, Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism, Calder’s The People’s War and Orwell’s essays.4 The second point of departure was Richard Johnson’s model of challenges to hegemony and the repertoire of containing responses sketched for the nineteenth century in the preceding article. Finally work on the post-war period led us to ask questions about the origins of the political ‘consensus’ of the 1950s and the construction of a genuinely hegemonic order on the basis of ‘affluence’. How far was it possible to trace elements in this order to the period of the war and, indeed, to see the war as the main generator? And could these changes be accurately formulated as a ruling class response to popular challenges – a forced or anticipatory shift in the mode of domination? Did the war win a fuller citizenship, this passage out of a social and cultural apartheid into bourgeois society, at the same time the means of political control? Pursuing this line of reasoning we attempted (we now think rather mechanically) to identify both ‘challenge’ and ‘response’, or at least their most empirically obvious symptoms. It seemed to us that challenge might be identified in the shape of a ‘war radicalism’, a deeprooted but inchoate popular opposition to the dominant class-fractions of the inter-war period and to their characteristic (Tory) policies. Miliband has described this social mood or movement thus: All this is not to suggest that the popular radicalism of war-time Britain was, for the most part, a formed socialist ideology, let alone a revolutionary one. But, in its mixture of bitter memories and positive hopes, in its antagonism to a mean past, in its recoil from Conservative rule, in its impatience of a traditional class structure, in its hostility to the claims of property and privilege, in its determination not to be robbed again of the fruits of victory, in its expectations of social justice, it was a radicalism eager for major even fundamental, changes in British society after the war.5 What, then, was the nature of this challenge? What was new, radical, or for that matter working-class about it? What were its roots in inter-war experiences and the economicmilitary mobilisation of a ‘total war’? We assumed, at the beginning, that war radicalism acquired an unstoppable force or at least represented a popular presence which it proved politically impossible to ignore. How, then, was it checked, diverted or contained or held at the level of the corporate?
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The most obvious result of mobilisation was the Labour victory of 1945 and the repudiation of Churchill and the natural party of rule. The Labour Party became the main, perhaps the only vehicle of war-time expectations. What, then, was its role? Was it Labour’s inherited and structural Labourism, formed in an earlier history, that was the means of containment? What other elements prevented a really qualitative social change? These notions suggested a programme of work around a number of related topics. 1
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the origins and class character of ‘war radicalism’ – its programmatic expressions – its relations with more identifiably left groupings of the time (especially the Communist Party). the programmes, performance and political rhetoric of the Labour Party especially during and after the war. the concurrent changes in the class character and ideology of the Conservative Party. the patterns of middle-class reaction to Labour’s ‘socialism’.
Finally we wished to stand back and assess the significance of these years,6 matching the wartime challenge with Labour’s somewhat muted achievements and comparing the modes of political domination of the inter-war period with those of the 1950s. We record these tentative formulations to suggest the nature of group work at an early stage, and some of the issues which were never reached. For in practice we found there has no one entity called ‘war radicalism’, no united, specific oppositional challenge. Rather, the war displayed the development and shifts in an uneven configuration of essentially separate pressures for change, some whose origins lay in the crisis of the 1930s, some which can be traced farther back in the traditions of British radical thought (especially to both ‘radical’ and ‘imperial’ liberalism), and some springing specifically from the wartime situation. For example, there was already a determination in the 1930s within some members of ruling parties and among some industrialists to promote changes in industrial and economic planning, in the role of the state, and in the provisions of some elements of social welfare. There was then a much more articulate and visible refusal of the capitalist order, and a more tenacious registration of its effects on working-class life, in the writing and journalism of the period; and there were scattered and very unequal pressures ranging from mild hopes for reform to an often abstract ‘communism’ in political groups and organisations of the labour movement. This is to speak only of the public and visible statements of social crisis in the decade, to which needs to be added detailed work on the range and nature of disaffection in all social groups in the period. With the war new elements appeared, industrial militancy, political discussion among the troops, the effects of ‘total war’ on strained civilian morale, pressures for a revolutionary peace or for a radical pacifism. In the first section of the work, then, we tried to establish the strength of alternative or oppositional ideas in the 1930s. However, for a movement of such varied discontents to assume any effective political force a special conjuncture of crisis was to prove necessary. We go on to suggest that such a ‘moment’ occurred in the first six months of 1940 and that while the temporary solution adopted was that of unity behind a single leader, the long-term ‘solution’ was also ushered in at this moment, the renegotiation of ruling class hegemony through changes in its personnel and through a marked re-orientation in economic and social policy. That this renegotiation achieved only partial success in the early years of the war is shown in further critical episodes in both 1942 and 1943/4. To some extent we can show three crises; but they were of steadily diminishing impact, and by the time of the third, Common Wealth challenge in 1943/4, the solution of the ‘centre alliance’ was already accepted. Throughout, it is clear
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that many of the various critics in the war lacked any effective political base. Throughout, the protests had a force diminished by the absence of any clear proposals. And throughout (though we have as yet no work on this) the attitude of Orwell’s ‘multitudes of unlabelled people’, Mass Observation’s many who . . . consciously regard this war as in some way revolutionary or radical7 found no place in public debate, remained unheard. Each of the three moments was characterised by a particular form of radical criticism: the first, in 1940, by the populist protest of those we call the war commentators against those in charge of the war and against the limitation of its stated aims, the second, in 1942, by a movement of recoil from Churchill and from political parties when defeats were accumulating and when issues of economic and social organisation seemed to be being neglected; the third, by the late attempt by Common Wealth in 1943/4 to present an alliance of the non-aligned. Triggered by different elements – a long dormant but still crucial crisis of capitalism, military defeat abroad and stagnation at home, popular cynicism as a result of government prevarication over post-war reconstruction – all these forces eventually gave ground before the centre alliance. Within this process lay a paradox: a steady broadening of the political centre ground, but a narrowing of the area and terms of debate. Certainly the deepest continuity from the 1930s through the war years, despite recurrent crises, was found in the determination to construct a more liberal corporate capitalism. The disparate elements of the various challenges, and indeed the inertias of the older order, were all contained, deflected and successfully re-orchestrated by 1945, to be presented against the threat of Cold War as a post-war ideology of social democracy, indeed as ‘common sense’.
In the 1930s The deep crisis of capitalism in the early 1930s posed questions about the viability of the capitalist order itself; about the need either for its reconstruction, or alternatively for its transformation and replacement, which were to remain contested through the decade and well into the war itself. The disaffections of various groups and classes, the sense of a system in decay, centred especially around the new kinds of industrial structure emerging in Britain (unevenly, belatedly in international terms, and often against reluctance and ignorance in government) and around the misery and protest of sections of a working class now refusing their abandonment to market forces. The weight, and the inter-relationship, of the articulated responses to the crisis were only to be resolved through the course of the war: it was to be there that a more planned capitalism emerged through uneven and often contradictory resistances, taking up and adapting elements of radical protest in the 1930s and in the war, and translating such elements at each stage into the terms of a broadening consensus. Almost all the relevant research into the critical place of the working class in British society between the wars has yet to be started especially for the 1930s.8 But it seems that structural changes were bringing sections of the working class ‘into society’ in new ways during the period. The rapid development of large firms involved also the potential for a more collective awarness and strategy in the labour force; just as the slow, tentative development of the domestic consumer market in the later 1930s involved an acknowledgement of working-class interests. These factors crudely described and needing much theoretical and empirical development, went along with a broadening of horizons, however restrained and restricted, through education and the media. Particularly, these accompanied an unwillingness since the first war, but especially in the slump itself, to take wretched conditions ‘for
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granted’. The great symbolic marches of the 1930s were in this respect enormously important. They helped register the restless, almost sullen presence of a working class whose consent to a changing industrial and social order would need actively to be won. Ironically, the organisations and parties of the working class entered the depression weakened by their earlier formation, particularly in the struggles after the first war. This of course in no way alleviated problems recognised over a much longer term. Balfour had said before the first war that ‘Social legislation . . . is not merely to be distinguished from Socialist legislation but it is its most direct opposite and its most effective antidote’9 and, as we shall see, Beveridge in the late 1920s was already anxious to abate the effects of an unmodified laissezfaire capitalism. But in the 1930s, for various reasons, left wing groupings were unable to deliver, only very partially to attempt, a challenge to the capitalist order. The Labour Party showed its continuing willingness to work within existing political structures by choosing Henderson as its leader after the departure of MacDonald, Snowden and Thomas. Its programmes in 1931, 1934 and 1935 promised to bring some basic industries into public ownership, but emphasised for the reassurance of orthodox liberals the empirical, practical and ‘undogmatic’ aspects of such changes. The Party was inimical to mass extraparliamentary agitation either over foreign policy or unemployment. Its young intellectuals such as Gaitskell and Jay were planning reform led by government, the establishment of a corporate state upon scientific lines; and in so doing they followed the traditional interest shown by the Webbs and other Fabians in a Benthamite confidence in rational planning from above. Leadership was emphasised rather than any pressure for working-class control in industry or government. And the Labour Party, working with the unions, drew a large section of the working class into a centrist alliance. The unions had been severely affected, especially in morale, by the defeat of 1926 and by the Trades Disputes Act of the following year. The invitation to collaborate with employers in industrial reorganisation (Mondism, practised in the late 1920s at a time of further splits on the left) was often accepted; just as Bevin and Keynes were to work together on the MacMillan committee on finance policy (1931). By the mid-decade, the general unions had come to dominate in the struggle with the industrial unions, and Bevin and Citrine pursued an accommodatory policy in which the unions in effect became the ‘labour side of management’. The containment of labour in the unions may be seen in the neglect of the unemployed and in the claim that the maintenance of real wage rates owed more to employers’ caution than to the efforts of union leaders; and some elements of containment were to remain through Bevin’s period at the Ministry of Labour (and into conditions of full employment after 1945). Meanwhile the Communist Party remained subordinate to the national concerns of Stalinism in the USSR, after the isolation imposed by the international counter-revolutionary offensive. During the ‘third period’ of the Communist International (1928–32) the policy of ‘class against class’, which in Germany led to attacks upon social democrats as social fascists, involved the British Party in, for instance, attempting to build new and alternative trade unions. With the Nazi rise to power and destruction of the KPD there followed an abrupt change of line, a policy of United and Popular Fronts, involving work with organisations of the Second International. Both the Labour Party and the unions refused affiliation to Party members, however, and only the ILP and Socialist League joined in Popular Front campaigns culminating with the Unity Manifesto of 1937. The Party hardly broadened its working-class base; instead its rise in membership from 5,600 in 1932 to 17,750 in 1939 was largely made up of lower middle and middle-class scientists, technical workers and intellectuals.10 These members were drawn in around divergent emphases: a faith in the planning, direction and corporatist policies of the USSR; in another direction the Party’s militant anti-fascism. But
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the Party’s Marxism remained confidently rigid; so that lacking a working-class base, cut off from the party and institutions of labour, and attracting intellectuals for very diverse reasons, the CPGB was weak and ineffective in its theory and strategy in 1939. Partly for this reason, something of a division between Marxists and others was important in the more outspoken, continuous and fundamental protests of intellectuals throughout the decade. Marxism was essential to the formation of many writers in the period, but was often, and was seen to be, extremely schematic, as in Day Lewis’s anthology Mind in Chains.11 Even those committed to the Communist Party felt keenly their distance from working-class people as many writers, perhaps best of all Upward in his later fiction, showed.12 By comparison, non-aligned writers recorded more vividly working-class life and consciousness in the period. Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole made the slump’s effects unforgettable even to those not experiencing them directly. Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier and Priestley’s English Journey in different ways tried to go behind the remoteness of governments, industrialists, and as they saw it, Marxist intellectuals alike to register working-class experience and responses. Of the many moods in the writing of the 1930s, too quickly collapsed in retrospect, the most tenacious, carried through the mass media in the early years of the war, was the detailed evocation of a determined resilience against official contempt and neglect. By 1940 there could be a widespread and simultaneous attack on behalf of the suffering people against an incompetent and narrow ruling class. This incompetence was as keenly felt in a different way by those within the Liberal and Tory parties appearing as radicals, arguing against and ahead of their own parties for a developed corporate capitalism. The Liberal Yellow Book of 1928 advocated State intervention to deal with unemployment: new credit policies; industrial co-partnership; an increasing public sector; and better, co-ordinated economic planning. The dominant influence on liberal thinking was the work of Keynes. His General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) was a boldly unorthodox solution for stabilising the system; through his work the liberals merged with younger Tories to form a new movement of ‘middle way’ reformist writing. The ideas of Boothby, Stanley and especially of Macmillan were to gain ground against the disatrous developments in Europe, in emulation of Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ and with Keynes’s theoretical underpinning to consolidate an already powerful argument. From many standpoints, then, much more was at stake in 1939 than the defeat of Hitler. The era of monopoly capitalism, and state intervention, and the demands of the working class within it, had produced a serious crisis in the depression. The war intensified the crisis and furthered some processes already at work by the very nature of warfare in this century: to the unequal and various attempts to remake Britain after the slump were added the further pressures unleashed by the war’s own effects on society.
War and crisis For the Second World War, more than any other that preceded it, was a ‘total war’ involving challenge socially, economically, technologically and politically to the efficient organisation of Britain.13 One important result was the greatly increased role of the State in economy and society. This, in itself, was not new; the State had been driven to intervene during the First War on an unprecedented scale. But now, coming after changes in industrial structure between the wars, the State’s intervention was of a new order. Moreover the State had to organise both the economy and the mobilisation of the population as a whole; the first task required the direct involvement of the unions in meeting production targets, the second
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necessitated education of troops and civilians alike into ‘citizenship’, one of the key words of wartime propaganda. Yet while the situation’s logic demanded such developments, they could not be introduced without difficulty; their implementation had to be negotiated. As a first concession, it proved necessary to abandon the ‘old gang’ who had presided over the dismal and ruthless anarchy of inter-war capitalism, and, if the war was to be seen as a struggle for democracy against fascism, to replace them by men who had refused to appease the dictators. This early moment, delivered by the situation of ‘total war’, must be seen as crucial to the generation of radical feeling; the immediate concomitant of a degree of State involvement which appeared necessarily to challenge the pre-given structures of capitalism was that radicals could take this involvement as a starting-point for demands concerning the running of the country and in what ways and for what ends the war should be fought. In 1940, as the war got under way, complex discontents acquired a vivid focus – ‘in the last few months it has been hard to find many who do not consciously regard this war as in some way revolutionary or radical’14 and found sharp expression in a mode of writing which now found its opportunity, as in Tom Wintringham, with his Picture Post experience: ‘obviously the first thing to do is to get rid of the men at the top’, and ‘restatement of our aims and policy should be accompanied by a restatement of home policy, including full acceptance of the idea of a People’s war’.15 Dunkirk stands as an impressive symbol of those times: the failure of ‘the old gang’ both military and political, and the people in their flotillas of small boats coming to the rescue of surviving remnants of the anti-Fascist cause, and of England itself. Certainly ‘the old gang’ were now thrown out of office; but such protests, then and later, were an expression of criticisms, not an organised attempt to found a new political order. Some observers thought national unity could both bring the country together and drive it leftwards in pursuing a better post-war world. In retrospect there were as many conservative opportunities in the situation which Churchill was to take up on gaining power after the 1940 crisis. A crisis may arise, says Gramsci, when ‘the ruling class has failed in some big political undertaking for which it has asked, or imposed by force, the consent of the broad masses’.16 In such a situation the ruling class may either change its men and programmes to re-establish control, ‘with greater speed than can occur in subordinate classes’; or it may unite, and seek unity behind, a single leader. When the crisis finds this second solution there exists an ‘equilibrium whose factors may be unequal’ but ‘in which the immaturity of the opposing forces is decisive’. In this first stage of the war the response was the single leader. Later, while the totemic figure of Churchill was retained, sometimes with a certain embarrassment, new policies were introduced as a way of shaping and controlling change. At all stages, oppositional fractions were unable to pose adequate alternatives to dominant definitions of the nature of the problem.
England, whose England? The war commentators The English revolution started several years ago, and it began to gather momentum when the troops came back from Dunkirk. Like all else in England, it happens in a sleepy, unwilling way, but it is happening. The war has speeded it up, but it has also increased, and desperately, the necessity for speed. Progress and reaction are ceasing to have anything to do with party labels. If one wishes to name a particular moment, one can say that the old distinction between Right and Left broke down when Picture Post was published. What are the politics of Picture Post? Or of Cavalcade, or Priestley’s broadcasts,
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or the leading article in the Evening Standard? None of the old classifications will fit them. They merely point to the existence of multitudes of unlabelled people who have grasped within the last year or two that something is wrong. But since a ceaseless, ownerless society is generally spoken of as ‘Socialism’, we can give that name to the society towards which we are now moving. The war and the revolution are inseparable. Orwell, 194117 The eve of war, and its early stages, were accompanied by a range of writing powerfully eloquent of a discontent with the rigidity and incompetence of English society. Articulate and prolific, the war commentators made up a group popular, and feared, because of their deep engagement with the mood and attitudes of a very wide audience. To Orwell’s list of Picture Post, Cavalcade, the Evening Standard and Priestley’s Sunday evening broadcasts we may add the Daily Mirror, Tom Wintringham’s articles and book (New Ways of War), the Searchlight series edited by Orwell and T.R. Fyvel including ‘Cassandra’s’ The English at War (1941) and for a distinctly intellectual audience, Orwell’s own essays. More could be cited; and though this work was most visible between 1938 and 1941, other work shared its rhetoric both during the war (the war documentaries of Jennings and Grierson, Olivier’s Henry V) and afterwards – when the Ealing comedies worked more fully through a major strand in the arguments. Though this writing varied with the specific modes of discourse in which it engaged (Picture Post and the ‘documentary’ style in cinema,18 the Mirror’s evolved style of journalism, Priestley’s conscious adoption of a tradition stretching back to Cobbett and Defoe) there were common themes and images, evoking values and concerns which official war propaganda had failed to reach – startlingly failed by comparison with the almost universally shared blend of patriotism and imperial feeling in the First World War. Hence Priestley’s rapid popularity (credited by the BBC with ‘the biggest regular listening audience in the world’19), hence also, as many writers became more critical of the war’s conduct and its confinement purely to an external enemy, official resistance. Churchill, aware of the contrast between his own Augustan rhetoric and the bluffness of Priestley or the Mirror, disliked Priestley’s insistent discussion of domestic war aims. The broadcasts were challenged in parliament, Priestley for a while withdrawing voluntarily: This is my last Sunday postscript for some time . . . The decision was mine . . . the high generous mood . . . is vanishing with the leaves. It is as if the poets had gone and the politicians were coming back. Stupid persons have frequently accused me in public of . . . taking advantage of my position to bring party politics into my talks . . . the most I’ve asked for in these talks is that we should mean what we say; be really democratic, for example, while fighting for democracy; and that we should make some attempt to discover the deeper causes of this war and to try and find a remedy for them, thus making this a colossal battle, not only against something, but also for something positive and good. If all this, together with certain obvious elements of social justice and decency seems to you Socialism, Communism or Anarchy, then you are at liberty to call me a Socialist, a Communist or an Anarchist . . .20 ‘Cassandra’ was famously posted, Picture Post in various ways censored. Yet the war commentators were to prove less powerful than these reactions suggest. In their initial appeal, the force of the commentators lay in a refusal of a simple unifying national patriotism. The attacks on the Chamberlain circle, the ‘old gang’, the men ‘at the top’, were unabating and high-spirited:
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Cultural History Group The Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service under the command of Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan didn’t exactly inspire the ordinary woman to enthusiasm for the cause . . .21
A ‘war to win the war’ was to be conducted against a parasitic, amateur and incompetent establishment (still derisively summoned by Harold Wilson in the 1964 election). Refusal to forget the experience of Jarrow went with a determination to work realistically for the society which had not appeared after the first war: These were the years of the false peace . . . There was plenty of good will about in those nineteen-twenties – it’s a sad mistake to think there wasn’t – but somehow it couldn’t secure adequate representation. It let the old hands, the experts, the smooth gentry who assure you that your inexperience tends to make you gravely underestimate the difficulties of the situation, speak for it, and they sold it out. Then came the ’Thirties, and that road descended into a stony wilderness of world depression and despair . . . said Priestley in his broadcast of 4 August, 1940,22 beginning his campaign, resented by Churchill as undesirable and unrealistic, for an account of domestic war aims. In the same way, ‘Cassandra’ sought a better post-war Britain: there is no excuse for not producing a blueprint for the social reconstruction of the country . . . After the fall of France, the inclusion of Bevin, Morrison, Attlee and Greenwood in the Cabinet suggested that the post-war reconstruction might include something else besides the elements of paradise as seen by nut and bolt manufacturers. But these leaders have not said so . . . The English desire peace – but not on the terms of The Times . . . They want a parliament representative of the people and not a legislature devoted to the interests of property.23 In written and broadcast journalism alike, there was an appeal to the national conscience over divisions within England. Priestley in his English Journey (1934) had described three Englands touching but hardly meeting each other: an old feudal/agrarian England, the now desolate landscapes of northern cities built around the basic industries of the first stage industrial revolution, and the brighter, prosperous though also slightly empty worlds of towns recovering around newer industries – Southampton, Birmingham. Picture Post’s reporting of poverty had appealed on behalf of the neglected, as in its more complex way had Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Moral appeal was now made, under war pressures, to shared values which could be commonly fought for – above all, ‘justice and common decency’. ‘Decency’, with its suggestion of a nonconformist northern integrity, was everywhere in the writing; in, for instance, Orwell’s version of Dickens in 1940: ‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.24 This decency could only be achieved, in the idea underlying all the work of the commentators, by the common efforts of ‘the people’. The ‘people’ were seen as being forged by the war, entering society as a force to be reckoned with through mass mobilisation, experience in air raids and the breaking-down of working-class ghettoes. They would survive the war only by working together, united, decent, fighting against Fascism abroad and an establishment at home. So, in a spirit of cheerful resilience grounded in everyday life, there developed an image of the enduring people: ‘Only the Common People remain. In defeat the ordinary people pay the price. They foot the blood-soaked bill.’25
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This was ‘Cassandra’s’ image, yet it had connections with a more Churchillian ‘we happy few’, united under a leader, in Olivier’s Henry V. The rhetoric, popular and populist, had an early antagonistic, protesting force soon to be contained after ‘the old gang’ had disappeared. For in English Journey, Priestley had already cultivated an affection for individuality which should be cherished against the planners. Confronting a squire in the Cotswolds he had remarked: We need a rational economic system, not altogether removed from austerity. Without such a system, we shall soon perish . . . It would be very easy to denounce and dismiss this leisured gentleman . . . but . . . I am glad he is at play under those crazy roofs, in that green cup among the hills, and would not have him sent to clerk in the gasworks or draw plans for communal garages . . .26 In Out of the People (1941) he was to oppose the concepts of ‘the people’ and ‘the masses’. Masses he linked with Fascist demagoguery, people with humanity and affection. But as he described them people became quirky, slightly anachronistic individuals with foibles; we are on the way to the nostalgia of the post-war Ealing film cycle.27 This was combined in Priestley with a pride in mess and confusion. Dunkirk, the idea of ‘the eleventh hour’ belonged to a people who were muddling and irresponsible yet also ‘free and generous’,28 at Dunkirk, ‘the little holiday steamers went to hell – and came back glorious’.29 A warm, muddling humanity might after all be superior to ‘plans’ and ‘blueprints’. Orwell was to argue the same case about Dickens. On top of this, talk of ‘class’ was seen as an obstruction. In English Journey it had been described as divisive, based on envy; a theoretical abstraction, betraying individuality. In Out of the People a belief in classes was derided as a harmful anachronism, overlooking the real movement . . . towards a structure of masters and masses.30 Orwell remarked: ‘the differences in outlook and habits between class and class are rapidly diminishing’.31 It followed that England must be seen as a family, in Orwell’s famous remark32 or in Priestley’s ‘it was you who gave me courage and hope, the truth being, I suppose, that we all gave each other courage and hope, like members of a sensible affectionate family’.33 By this stage, the crusading effort of the commentators had become a harmless tautology. There has an appeal for change but no structural analysis (which might be theoretical, bureaucratic or divisive) of what is needed to be done. Much was held wrong, but there were no notions of class, or of power, only a rhetoric of ‘working together’. A desire for a better post-war world had found no concrete bearings, indeed ‘planning’ sounded grey and ‘impersonal’. Above all, the new world was in effect to come about through a change in attitudes, only – Orwell’s debated ‘change of heart’,34 Priestley’s ‘We are all the people so long as we are willing to consider ourselves the people’.35 It followed that the precision of the Beveridge plan could not be opposed by any alternative sketch of a more ‘decent’ (but also more equal) society. Instead, the scale of the plan, and the bureaucracy it required, combined with Cold War views of the Russian machine, and an ambivalence about the rise of the United States, to produce from these writers a haunted vision of a soulless dystopia. With ‘big brother’ and the kind of state control symbolised by the ration-book, the free, generous England seemed further away. Orwell’s responses are well-known. Priestley was to write novels and essays about a rich, human world that seemed ever more anachronistic, until able in the mid-1950s to share in the founding of the CND
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campaign and to lead again a populist protest based on moral appeals. Lines of continuity appear with a non-aligned, distinctively literary left, whose moral force was regularly weakened by a vagueness about the structure of society and about the goals and agencies of change. This is not to endorse completely Perry Anderson’s later essay on the New Left36 but to recognise much earlier elements of the picture he describes. So it was mainly in 1940 that the commentators could distinctively articulate a challenge from ‘the people’ against the men of the 1930s, and against the attempted suppression of debate about domestic aims in fighting the war. With these aims fulfilled, the vagueness of an unprogrammatic populist mood, and (with the brief exception of Priestley’s chairing of the non-aligned ‘1941 committee’) its lack of any organisational base, were revealed. In the two years between the crises of 1940 and 1942 oppositional political activity continued, if in a rather haphazard manner, and with only tangential reference to the real base of power. We have singled out two elements, firstly the People’s Convention of January 1941 and the agitations of the CP and its acolytes before the invasion of Russia in June 1941 and, secondly, the movement away from party. This latter, a manifestation of popular censure particularly noted by Calder, had some influence in promoting the crisis of the summer of 1942,37 although a series of disastrous military episodes may well have been of greater importance. While focussing on these two elements we remain aware of our ignorance of developing dissatisfaction among the troops and of our inability to adequately summarise oppositional industrial activity on the home front. The Russian-German non-aggression treaty of August 1939 had dismayed and baffled many of the left, including some in the Communist Party: many members resigned and fellow travellers deserted in droves. Yet the immediate reaction of the CPGB was one remarkable for its independence. On the 14th of September 1939 Harry Pollitt issued a pamphlet entitled ‘How to Win the War’, in which, in language reminiscent of the popular front campaign of the preceding years and prophetic of the anti-government campaign of the coming months, he called for: a just war which should be supported by the whole working class and all friends of democracy in Britain . . . The country needs a government where all key positions . . . are in the hands of real representatives of the people. These men are there. Maybe they are not all of them in parliament. What of that? We know they can be found in the ranks of the Labour and democratic movement. The men are there. Let’s have them.38 A month later discipline reasserted itself and the line had changed. Back within the Comintern fold R. Palme Dutt wrote on November 1st: ‘We call for a united movement of the people to compel the immediate ending of the war.’39 The populist rhetoric remained but subservience to Moscow had been reestablished. The CP’s criticism of this ‘unjust’ and ‘imperialist’ war stood outside the acceptable limits of debate, even as this debate widened in the crisis of 1940. From a membership of 17,750 in June 1939 membership fell to 12,000 in June 1941.40 The major event in the CP campaign of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ in this period was the People’s Convention of January 1941, attended by 2,000 delegates, many of them young people, and which produced a six point programme, calling for: 1 2
Defence of the people’s living standards. Defence of the people’s democratic and trade union rights.
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Adequate air raid precautions, deep bomb-proof shelters, rehousing and relief of victims. Friendship with the Soviet Union. A people’s government truly representative of the whole people and able to inspire the confidence of the working people of the world. A people’s peace that gets rid of the causes of war.41
The immediate outcome of the Convention was that Morrison, acting under Defence Regulations, banned the Daily Worker, but it remains clear that the CP mistook a general dissatisfaction with the way the war was being run for hostility to the war itself. It was probably a relief for many members when their self-imposed isolation was ended by the entry of Russia into the war. Thereafter the CP, while discouraging strikes and attempting to boost production, rapidly developed a complete support for Churchill. The Party’s policy demands, at first ambitious, yielded ground to a patriotic emphasis and a desire for political respectability, and became compatible with advanced thinking within the centre alliance. Reconciliation with the existing order was further advanced in 1943 with the TUC withdrawing the Black Circular and the dissolution of the Comintern, and by 1945, partly, no doubt due to popular enthusiasm for Soviet Russia, Party membership had climbed to 45,000. By this time its policies were hard to distinguish amid a wide spectrum of opinion favouring tighter post-war state controls and an extension of social services along lines proposed by Beveridge, and on the stony parliamentary road to socialism, the Labour Party seemed the better vehicle for the aspirations of the people. It is clear, therefore, that the CP remained on the periphery of war-time discontent, and, with the possible exception of the People’s Convention, did not constitute a major component of radical discontent. The major crisis of the summer of 1942, again characterised by Orwell as a potentially revolutionary crisis,42 had, as its focus, the House of Commons, but was due to far wider causes than factional manoeuverings within the legislature. Two major factors precipitated what was in fact a personal crisis for Churchill: firstly ‘the movement away from the party’ and secondly, the course of the war itself. Churchill remembered the summer of 1942 as his ‘most anxious moments of the war’.43
The movement away from party and the crisis of 1942 By the summer months of 1942 it was becoming obvious that Westminster party factions were running behind shifts of political attitude in the country, and this was reflected in the movement away from party. It must, however, be remembered that while it was a movement away from conventional party politics, it was not, at this time, a movement to any articulated, programmatic challenge. In 1941/2 the Labour Party realised the country was moving leftward but could not cash in on this shift in popular opinion without splitting the coalition and violating the electoral truce. At first the swing was mainly against Conservative candidates but, by 1942 Labour, too, was losing seats. There were other signs of this movement away from party. Acland and Priestley, both fairly radical but unaligned ethical socialists, joined forces and issued a nine point manifesto. The ageing House of Commons was discredited. Apart from the leading members of a Government which remained unpopular, the best known MPs were the rebels, who came from all parties and none.44 Mass Observation found that the war had changed the political views of one-sixth of the nation in December 1941; by August 1942 one-third of the population had changed their views. Furthermore, in
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August 1942 only one-third of the voters expected any of the existing parties to get things done as they personally wanted after the war. The minority was mostly Labour or Communist; the entire Conservative front had caved in. In March and April 1942 three independent candidates were elected to seats which one of the two major parties should have won. In the same year, Tom Driberg, a socialist but also chief correspondent of the William Hickey column in the Daily Express, was elected as an independent for Maldon, Essex, turning an 8,000 Conservative majority into a 6,000 independent majority. It was in this crisis of 1942 that popular radicalism came nearest to seizing Parliamentary power. For a short while, the people found themselves a potential leader in the person of Sir Stafford Cripps, who had returned from his post as Ambassador to Moscow early in 1942. Still officially excommunicated from the Labour Party, he had, in fact, moved a good way to the right following his ardently left wing period in the late 1930s. To the people, however, this was immaterial; it seemed that Cripps might draw together their many criticisms in a concerted attack on the military incompetence and the political prevarication of the Churchill Government. Cripps, as Calder put it, ‘glittered as a major political figure, the only one who was not tainted with the hardships and mistakes of the last two years’. His commitment to a strict Christian Socialism and his teetotal, vegetarian, austere manner appealed to the public mood as one grim piece of news followed another in the early months of 1942. The German battle-cruisers, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, had slipped away from their guard to add to the strength of the German Navy which was already, through its U-boats, terrorising merchant shipping in the Atlantic; the Japanese had swept through the Far East and had taken Singapore without a single major battle being fought; in the Middle East, after months of resistance under seige, Tobruk had fallen with the loss of 30,000 men; Rommel had advanced 400 miles in a matter of weeks and was threatening Cairo. At home there was mounting criticism both of the composition of the Cabinet and of the conduct of the war generally. The press moved leftward and not a single newspaper could be relied upon to advocate reactionary or even conservative policies. Barrington Ward replaced Dawson as Editor of The Times and the historian, E.H. Carr, became chief leader writer; even The Times began to advocate state intervention and to criticise the conduct of the war. Eventually the pressure reached such a pitch that the overtly hostile Daily Mirror was threatened with closure. After the American entry into the war the military outcome was not in doubt but Churchill’s future most certainly was; with Stalin and Roosevelt, both with seemingly stronger qualifications, now joining forces with Churchill as the leaders of opposition to Fascism, Churchill no longer seemed indispensable. Under popular pressure Churchill rearranged his cabinet early in 1942, and in a widely popular move, brought in Cripps as Leader of the House and Lord Privy Seal. Yet Churchill played the situation with great skill. As if to answer calls for a second front to take the burden of the fighting of the Red Army, Churchill went to Washington to consult with Roosevelt; it turned out that there would indeed be a second front, but not, as most people had wished, in Europe but in French North Africa. Cripps, as a member of the War Cabinet and as Leader of the House, had to defend British defeats. His light had already begun to fade when Churchill sent him on a special mission to India to discuss the independence of the sub-continent. He was seen presenting insulting terms and was seen to have failed in his mission. In the summer Churchill turned a vote of no-confidence against him in the House into a farce, only 25 votes were cast against him. Lastly Churchill gambled everything on victory in the desert. As his friend Brendan Bracken wrote at the time: ‘The Prime Minister must win his battle in the desert or get out . . . I’m afraid of that fellow Cripps, I think he means business.’ Auchinleck was
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sacked and replaced by Alexander. Montgomery was appointed Commander of the Eighth Army. With huge losses of men and equipment Montgomery broke Rommel at El Alamein on November 2, 1942. George Orwell wrote two war-time diaries, corresponding with the moments of greatest crisis, 1940 and 1942. He concluded the second on November 15, 1942 thus: ‘Church bells rung this morning – in celebration of the victory in Egypt. The first time that I have heard them in over two years’.45 The challenge had been contained. By January 1943 Orwell could write: . . . the forces of reaction have won hands down. Churchill is in the saddle again, Cripps has flung away his chances, no other left wing movement or leader has appeared, and what is more important, it is hard to see how any revolutionary situation can recur till the western end of the war is finished. We have had two opportunities, Dunkirk and Singapore, and we took neither . . . the growing suspicion that we may have all underrated the strength of capitalism and that the Right may after all, be able to win the war off its own bat is very depressing . . . Cynicism about ‘after the war’ is widespread and the ‘we’re all in it together’ feeling of 1940 has faded away.46 Exactly one month after Alamein the Beveridge Report was published. Orwell disconsolately remarked: People seem to feel that this very moderate measure of reform is almost too good to be true. Except for the tiny interested minority, everyone is pro-Beveridge – including leftwing newspapers which a few years ago would have denounced such a scheme as semifascist – and at the same time no-one believes that Beveridge’s plan will actually be adopted.47
The centre and the failure of Common Wealth As victory neared, the possibility of such a potentially threatening crisis recurring receded and policies of moderate change could be introduced in an atmosphere of relative stability and confidence. Capitalism could be rationalised and made more efficient under a veneer of socialist legislation, which would only go some of the way towards answering the demands of radical discontent; it would remain to be seen whether a Labour Government, elected with a clear majority, would take up and develop in the post-war era the changes so cautiously introduced in the last years of the war by the reluctant centre alliance. Perhaps the most important element of those changes was the Beveridge Report. To a considerable extent the Report was formed by the inter-war experience; by the manifest irrationality of capitalist economies in the period, by the bitterness generated by unemployment, by the confident belief in planning common to many kinds of Fabian and Liberal intellectuals and by the conversion of such Tories as Macmillan to the need for judicious reforms. Other pressures stem from the direct needs of wartime: for a military population in good condition, for a post-war work-force which would be healthy, for a unifying of services and conditions for soldiers and civilians in a situation of ‘total war’. Beyond that were a whole range of demands on the state for better provision, whose relative strength is now hard to gauge. The radical campaigning of the journalists and commentators, finding fertile responses among troops and civilians, powerfully challenged Churchill’s restriction of war aims to the defeat of Germany. The TUC formally requested a committee to enquire into full employment, education, health and social services. ‘Progressive’ employers and younger
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Tories continued to envisage a greater role for the state in the economy and in welfare. Internationally the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, the January 1942 joint declaration of the United Nations, and American intervention in the war signalled a post-war world in which American approval for a Keynesian approach to planning would be needed. These conditions, together with changes in capital structure, furthered by the needs of the war economy, and the knowledge of a widespread discontent, combined in the absence of any effective left wing pressure to allow Beveridge’s reforms. The Beveridge Report itself stated that ‘Want is only one of the five giants on the road to reconstruction and in some ways the easiest to attack. The others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.’48 It thus assumed the concurrent establishment of a National Health Service, radical improvements in housing and education, and a pledge to maintain full employment. In itself the Report rationalised all previous efforts at relief, unifying benefits, contributions and administration: the Report’s innovation was its universality by which all would pay and all benefit as of right. Determined to abolish the hated Means Test, Beveridge saw universality as the way forward although it now seems that progressive contributions would have achieved another of the Report’s aims, the redistribution of wealth more effectively. (Elizabeth Wilson has written forcefully on the Report’s attitudes to women and the limiting nature of its implications.)49 Treated warily by the Cabinet, who seem to have wanted the minimum possible implementation of its recommendations, the Report inaugurated a series of reports and measures. The 1944 White Paper on Employment Policy, appearing in the same year as Beveridge’s own Full Employment in a Free Society (called by The Economist the war’s most revolutionary document), committed all three coalition parties to high post-war employment. The Butler Education Act of 1944 enforced the adoption of the 1926 Hadow Report’s suggestions, establishing a uniform system of primary, secondary modern and grammar schools. This was a Conservative act, Labour’s National Health White Paper took up the proposals for a general medical service made by the BMA in 1930 and by the Cathcart Commission on Scottish Health in 1936. Industrial changes, involving state intervention, followed along lines suggested in the mid-1930s. Across the range, then, measures were introduced which, although to some extent springing from the pressures of the war years, more importantly rationalised tendencies and suggestions from the pre-war period. Thus in the closing years of the war a powerful centre alliance was able to bring together in a tight ideological fit both the changes necessary to transform an ailing capitalist system and the necessary public consent to that system. As Calder writes: From the Consensus which was now emerging sprang the ideology which was to govern the practice of both parties in office after the war. Capitalism, with its system of powerful private interests must be preserved; but the State would take a positive role in promoting its efficiency, which would include measures of nationalisation. In effect the Consensus included the whole centre of British political life: Cripps and Eden, Herbert Morrison and R.A. Butler, the Liberal Action Group and the Tory Reformers, William Beveridge and William Temple and many influential members of the Fabian Society.50 On the right, only the vested interests stood out, in splendid and somewhat embarrassing isolation, in opposition to the reforming measures of this centre alliance, the Roman Catholic Church condemning the Education Act, the insurance companies and some senior doctors the National Health White Paper. On the left, however, war radicalism had one last
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throw. Indeed, there is some irony in the fact that the most programmatic expression of war radicalism, the nearest it ever came to achieving an alliance of the non-aligned, should have occurred after the forces of the centre alliance had grouped themselves and were, in effect, sufficiently powerful to brush the challenge aside. This last surge of oppositional activity took the form of the sporadic successes of the Common Wealth Party in 1943 and 1944. The Party, according to Calder, ‘represented the refined essence of Beveridgism – the revolutionary zeal, the millenarian dream, the unselfishness’.51 Formed in 1942 when Sir Richard Acland’s Forward March Movement merged with Priestley’s 1941 Committe, Common Wealth had reflected the widespread dismay following the defeats of that year. With the military situation improving it found a new role as the guardian of Beveridge. The three main principles of the party were Common Ownership, Vital Democracy and Morality in Politics, but although it specifically rejected the politics of consensus, many of its policies and attitudes show clearly the links between radical discontent during the war and the post-war ideology of social democracy. Common Wealth dropped the whole idea of the class war and much of the party’s literature was aimed at winning over the technicians and the ‘little men’ of the lower middle class, with some success.52 The economics of its programme emphasised increased production rather than the equalisation of consumption while it carefully avoided describing itself as socialist, rather adopting in its propaganda a strongly ethical tone. Vitiated as it was by the lack of a strongly based critique of capitalist society, and by its lack of a solid organisational base, the party was used for different ends by individual members and supporters. Tom Wintringham, an ever present war radical, stood as a Common Wealth candidate and hoped that the party would take its place beside the trade unions, the Communist Party and even radical elements of the Liberal Party, in a popular front. Others saw Common Wealth either as a stand-in for Labour, fighting for them until Labour withdrew from the Coalition, or as a conscience for Labour in case it accepted Churchill’s offer to continue in a post-war coalition. The party won some by-election victories in 1943 and 1944, but when both the Labour and Liberal Parties announced that they would fight the forthcoming election independently, Common Wealth lost its role. It won only one seat in the 1945 General Election, and that in a constituency where the Labour candidate had stood down.
The 1945 election In the 1945 election it was not, therefore, Common Wealth, essentially an alliance of the non-aligned, that was able to establish itself as a major radical Parliamentary force. Nor was the Communist Party, rapidly attempting to achieve respectability within Parliamentary democracy, able to make any significant gains in its representation at Westminster. Rather it was the Labour Party, no longer constrained by the formal Coalition, that presented itself as the radical, even socialist vehicle, and which became the ‘electoral beneficiary’, to use Miliband’s phrase,53 of war-time popular radicalism. Any satisfactory explanation of this victory would require an analysis both of that radicalism as it appeared among the troops and in the factories and also an analysis of the tenacity and mode of reproduction of ‘labourism’, as ideology and as political practice within the British Labour movement.54 In attempting to situate the significance of the 1945 Labour victory certain features do stand out clearly. This victory, the first unambiguous endorsement of Labour in its history, was, in large measure, a result of the war-time discontent which, in some of its more public manifestations, we have examined above. The generation of radical ideas in a situation in which, at some moments, the handling of the war could be severely criticised, in which the
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State was demanding that the people be educated into ‘citizenship’ and was involved on an unprecedented scale in economic and social planning, and in which there was a continuing rhetoric that the war was being fought for democracy and against fascism, had a natural concomitant: that in the making of the post-war world there should be a government both willing and apparently committed to the maintenance and extension of the advances which had been negotiated during the war. Importantly, the election of a Labour Government did seem to guarantee that there would be no return to the dominance of British politics by that ‘old gang’ which had been thrown out in the early stages of the war. If, however, the Labour victory can be seen in part as a result of those aspirations, it needs also to be related to wider changes. In the first instance, much of the Party’s programme could build on what had been made necessary by the demands of total war. As we have already noted, the implementation of substantial measures of planning and the acceptance of important policies in social provision, notably Beveridge and the 1944 Education Act, indicated key shifts in the nature of ruling class thinking about society and the economy. And if radicals could draw lessons from such measures and use them as a basis for arguing for a new type of society, so too could consent be constructed on the basis of the meeting point of that ruling class shift and the radical ideology. That meeting point was almost precisely what the Labour Party offered as its definition of socialism: some measures of nationalisation, greater welfare measures and a rhetoric which centred upon the notion that the British people were essentially practically minded and against dogmatism and yet demanded a greater share in the running of the country. This is not to argue either that the Labour Party had a single unified vision of what should be done or that it could carry through all that it desired without difficulty. On the first point it is clear that, as before the war and since, the Party had a vocal and influential left-wing whose chief figure was Nye Bevan and which had been demanding a more consistent and coherent strategy for the Parliamentary road to socialism than the leadership was able to offer. However, in its continuing attempts to steer a course between the demands of being ‘responsible’ in government and in placating that Parliamentary left wing with its strong roots in the mass base of the Party’s membership, the leadership had to give support to some radical measures. This links to the second point; it is clear that the case of the implementation of the National Health Service was a major achievement for the left of the Party, an achievement that perhaps only the left and Bevan in particular could have carried through against the opposition of the senior doctors and an undefined but strong current of middle class opinion. This is not the place, however, to attempt a full analysis of the Labour Governments of 1945–51 nor of the Labour Party in general. It is only necessary to reiterate that the significance of the Labour victory of 1945 lay in the fact that the Labour Party was able both to maintain the gains that had been made during the war and at the same time to facilitate a passage to the reconstruction of consent within capitalism. Given the limitations of the radicalism that developed during the war and given the nature of the Labour Party it is unlikely that anything of an essentially different nature could have happened. But that it happened in this particular way is of continuing importance, both for the history and for the future.
Retrospect It seemed to us useful to end with some self-criticisms as part of the continuing attempt to close the distance between the kind of history we need and want and the history we actually produce. We are aware of five main weaknesses in this essay.
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We think we were right to define ‘war radicalism’ more tightly, in terms not of some general popular upsurge but of particular moments and spokesmen. In this narrower sense ‘war radicalism’ (commentators, Common Wealth etc.) undoubtedly had its effects: it gave voice to ‘popular discontent’ but in a way that eased the job of containment. Its role was much more ambiguous than our original hypothesis assumed. In particular the substitution of ‘the people’ for ‘the class’ is one more illustration of the power of English radical liberalism and its penetration of ‘the left’. By defining, however, we also narrowed the scope of the term. Originally it could be held to include the experience and mood of the working class. War radicalism as we define it bears a quite indeterminate relation to the central wartime experiences of working-people. The logic of the distinction war radicalism/working class was to go on to examine working-class experience and forms of activism outside the confines of the organised left or the war-radical fractions. As every social historian knows, this is an enormously difficult task and would have certainly required us to break into collective research. But the self-criticism certainly points to the need for a socio-economic history of the war with a particular emphasis on the internal re-structuring of the working class, the development of unionism and shop stewards’ action in key industries and the experiences of women at work at home and of men in the army.55 For example, the most important structural mechanism was the immediate necessity for full employment which registers the change from the 1930s, effects the balance of class economic power and becomes a condition for post-war consensus politics. In this way we might have been able to gauge more fully the socialist potential of the war and therefore specify more precisely (out of a sense of alternatives) the roles of ‘war radicals’, centre alliance and Labour Party. Second, we are aware of ending up with a history more like ‘the dominant received tradition of empiricist narratives, many concerned with narrowly political themes’ than we would have wished. ‘Political History’ actually fits our account quite well, though it is a history of policies and strategies rather than a narrative of political intrigue. Although we would insist that the level of ‘political society’ is the key domain for the construction of hegemony, we must acknowledege large gaps in our conception of the ‘political’. The war experience raises, for instance, absolutely crucial questions about the State in capitalism, particularly in its ideological functions. The key to our original problematic lies in the ability of the ruling bloc (itself changing and to be specified historically) to use a state apparatus flexibly, granting, when it becomes necessary, limited but real concessions. Similarly our account is weak in terms of the institutions of civil society and the part they played in incorporation under the organising power of the State. Official trade unionism is the obvious example. Third, we paid too little attention to the ideology and language of war-time politics, excepting only our work on the commentators. We make it appear that the concessions ‘spoke for themselves’ whereas they were always presented, of course, by media, ‘experts’ and politicians. It is clear that during the war an immense effort was made to ‘educate’ the working class into a new role within the state, to re-define them as ‘the people’ and the apparent arbiters of politics. Fourth, we are conscious of a tendency to seek in the pre-war and war configurations the origin of the hegemonic system of the 1950s. We may have suggested too easy, too unproblematic a passage from the 1930s to the 1950s even allowing for our recognition that the labour movement of the 1930s was the product of recent defeats. The necessary corrective to this would have been a really adequate history of the working class during the war, and perhaps a more intimate account of struggles between ‘progressives’ and conservatives within the ruling parties and the bourgeoisie as a whole.
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Finally, by emphasising policies, by neglecting the working class and by knowing too little about the whole British shift into monopoly capitalism we ended up with a rather idealist history. We learnt just how difficult it is to escape this trap and something of the logic of conventional histories. The experience suggests two conclusions: the need to return to theory (especially to Marx, Gramsci and recent developments in political economy) and the need to take a long view, trying to define the British conditions of the shift from laissez-faire to monopoly capitalism. When we have some understanding of this, we shall need to return to those complex notions of ‘citizenship’ and ‘containment’ in their relations to the forces that drive the whole social formation.
Notes 1 E.J. Hobsbawn, Industry and Empire (1968). 2 L. Althusser, ‘The Errors of Classical Economics: An Outline for a Concept of Historical Time’ in Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital (1975); F. Braudel, ‘History and the Social Sciences’ in P. Burke, Ed., Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe (1972); P. Vilar, ‘Marxist History: A History in the Making’, New Left Review 90. 3 For the work of the subcultures group see Working Papers in Cultural Studies 7/8, especially ‘Subcultures, Cultures and Class’. The findings in the Mugging study on the history of hegemony in post-war Britain are summarised in Jefferson et.al., ‘Mugging and Law n’Order’ (CCCS Stencilled Paper 35). A book is in course of preparation for publication. 4 S. Hall, ‘The Social Eye of Picture Post in Working Papers in Cultural Studies 2; R. Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism (2nd ed., 1964); G. Orwell, Collected Essays etc. (4 vols. 1970). 5 R. Miliband (1964), p. 274. 6 P. Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (1975) is a a thorough and useful book which appeared as this essay was being prepared for printing. 7 A. Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945 (1969, quotations from paper edition 1971), p. 160. The book is an extremely solid and constantly suggestive piece of work, on which we have continuously relied for particular reference and for an understanding of the war’s overall shape, and to which we are substantially indebted. 8 N. Branson and M. Heinemann, Britain in the Nineteen Thirties (1971) is useful. 9 Quoted in D. Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State (1973) p. 129. 10 These figures and others cited from H. Pelling, The British Communist Party: A Historical Profile (1958), p. 192; K. Newton, The Sociology of British Communism (1969), Appendix IA (Newton’s work is useful for the social composition of the Party, although his discussion of its sociology and history is poor). 11 C. Day Lewis, ed., The Mind in Chains (1937). 12 E. Upward, The Rotten Elements and Other Stories (1969); In the Thirties (1969). 13 S. Andreski, Military Organization and Society (2nd edition 1968) for a theorization of ‘total war’, and see also A. Marwick, Britain in a Century of Total War. For comparisons with the experience of the First World War see Philip Abrams, ‘The Failure of Social Reform 1918–1920’ in Past and Present 24 and the debate with Andreski in Past and Present 26. 14 See n.7. 15 T. Wintringham, New Ways of War (1940) p. 122. 16 A. Gramsci, The Modern Prince (trans. L. Marks 1957) p. 175. 17 G. Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), printed in Collective Essays etc. Vol.2 (paper 1970) pp. 112–113. 18 See S. Hall, cited in n.4. 19 A. Calder (1971) p. 160. 20 20th October 1940 broadcast, in J.B. Priestley, Postscripts (1940) pp. 96–98. 21 ‘Cassandra’, The English at War (1941) p. 19. 22 J.B. Priestley (1940) p. 45. 23 ‘Cassandra’ (1941) pp. 122, 126. 24 G. Orwell (Paper 1970), Vol. 1, p. 469. 25 ‘Cassandra’ (1941) p. 5. 26 J.B. Priestley, English Journey (1934) p. 62.
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27 See J. Ellis, The Ealing Comedies 1947–1957: Their Production and Use (Birmingham University M.A. thesis 1974) and ‘Made in Ealing’ Screen Spring 1975. 28 J.B. Priestley (1934) p. 412. 29 J.B. Priestley (1940) p. 4. 30 J.B. Priestley, Out of the People (1941) p. 26. 31 G. Orwell (1941) in (1970) Vol. 2, p. 116. 32 ‘A family with the wrong members in control’ (1941) in (1970) Vol. 2, p. 105. 33 J.B. Priestley (1940) p. 7. 34 G. Orwell (1940) in (1970) Vol. 2, p. 468. 35 J.B. Priestley (1941) p. 33. 36 P. Anderson, ‘The Left in the Fifties’ New Left Review 29. 37 A. Calder (1971) pp. 270 ff. 38 H. Pollitt, ‘How to Win the War’ (CPGB, 4 September 1939) pp. 3, 7. 39 R. Palme Dutt, ‘Why This War?’ (CPGB, 1 November 1939) p. 31. 40 H. Pelling, The British Communist Party (1958) – the only available full, but sketchy history. 41 H. Pelling (1958) p. 117; for the campaign leading up to the convention see also ‘Political Letter to the Communist Party Membership: The Campaign for a People’s Government and a People’s Peace’ (CPGB, 5 July 1940). 42 G. Orwell (1970) Vol. 2, p. 317. 43 A. Calder (1971) p. 349. 44 A. Calder (1971) ch.5, for this and following information on 1942. 45 G. Orwell (1970) Vol. 2, p. 508. 46 G. Orwell (1970) Vol. 2, p. 317–318. 47 As 46. 48 W. Beveridge, Report, Social Insurance and Allied Services (1942) p. 6. 49 E. Wilson, ‘Women and the Welfare State’, Red Rag pamphlet (1974). 50 A. Calder (1971) p. 532. 51 A. Calder (1971) ch.9 discusses the Party. 52 G. Orwell (1970) Vol. 2, p. 330. 53 R. Miliband (1964) p. 272. 54 Useful for the analysis of Labourism are R. Miliband (1964), D. Coates The Labour Party and the Struggle for Socialism (1975) and J. Saville in R. Benewick and others, eds., Knowledge and Belief in Politics (1973). 55 Some of this work is now being done for the First World War. James Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (1973) is fine example of work of a kind that needs doing for the later period.
40 The history of a working-class Methodist Chapel Trevor Blackwell
Introduction This paper is an attempt to examine the social history of a Methodist Chapel in a workingclass area of a northern industrial town over the period 1885–1970.1 It is presented as a contribution to the collection of material which documents particular areas of working-class life and culture. Since working-class life and culture have existed in oppressed and oppositional modes in British society, we must look to understand them outside of the privileged cultural forms which have been part of the dominant culture. In analysing institutions which have been created by the working class, or significantly modified by them we move in an area of considerable historical and political complexity. For example, what does it mean to describe an institution as ‘working class’? Such a description necessarily raises the question of how direct, and of what nature, are the connections between a person’s position in the process of production, and his ideological position in a society which alienates his whole life. In analysing any aspect of working-class culture we must constantly remember that we are dealing with a way of life which is oppressed, and therefore oppressive, on many levels. And one which, nevertheless, compels our admiration and moves our hope. Nowhere is this more true than in the study of working-class religious institutions. Historically Methodism has played an ambiguous role for its working-class converts. On the one hand it has given practical training in ‘lay-leadership’, which has been carried over into working-class politics and, for some it has provided an (unintentional) stepping-stone on the way to free-thinking radicalism. On the other hand it has actively deflected working-class energies from political action to change this world, by concentrating them on the achievement of individual piety and spiritual self-regeneration, and whilst simultaneously offering sobriety and virtue their more immediate rewards in upward social mobility.2 As the chapel studied here was a Wesleyan (the most conservative and ‘Anglican’ of the Methodist groupings) Chapel in a traditional working-class area, it is of some particular interest to see how these ambiguities have been resolved. This paper uses three main sources of material: records kept by officials of the chapel (e.g. Trustees’ Minute Books, Sunday School Attendance Registers); question sheets filled in by older members of the chapel; and tape-recorded interviews. An attempt is made to match these sources in the following account, which is divided into four main sections. The first section briefly describes the town and the area, the setting of the Chapel. The second section attempts a description of the Chapel from the inside, a grouping of cameos and snapshots. The third section traces the development of the Chapel in more general terms. The fourth section examines possible factors accounting for the Chapel’s development, and
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attempts to place these in the context of some wider trends in British working-class history and culture.
Haslingden Road chapel: the setting Blackburn is an industrial town in East Lancashire, situated twenty-four miles to the north of Manchester, with a population of 100,000. From the early nineteenth century up to the 1950s. Blackburn was one of the most important of the Lancashire cotton towns, with some 90 per cent of its adult population working in the cotton and allied trades at the turn of the century. Factory chimneys still dominate a hard, hilly, windy town, with rows of terraced houses, interspersed with Thwaites’ pubs, fish and chip shops, small corner-shops, and more occasional chapels. Since the 1950s a newer Blackburn has emerged, with white-tiled shopping precinct, a new technical college, an enlarged cathedral and high-rise flats. But the cotton-town of factories regulated by the ‘one o’clock gun’, the sound of the knocker-up, clogs on cobbled streets, Blackburn Holidays, short-time, and managers who were ‘tartars’, is still present in a thousand gestures, jokes and tensions.3 Haslingden Road is the main road leading from Blackburn over the moors to Haslingden. Half-way up the section of the road that climbs steeply from Grimshaw Park to what used to be the workhouse, is Haslingden Road Chapel. Set back a little from the road, and protected by railings, it is a rectangular, weathered, red-brick building. On either side of it, stone terraced houses stretch down to town. The Chapel developed as part of Grimshaw Park, an urban colony which grew up on the south side of Blackburn in the middle third of the nineteenth century. The houses that were built around the Park Place Mills and then climbed the hill beyond the canal belonged to weavers whose industry gradually began to make what had previously been known as a ‘rough area’ rather more respectable. The fact that in the troubled 1840s the local Wesleyan preaching services had to be discontinued suggests, however, that Grimshaw Park had some periods which were rougher than others.4 Although there had been regular Methodist society classes in Grimshaw Park in the 1790s, and various attempts throughout the middle years of the nineteenth century to establish the ‘cause’ in this area, it was the re-establishment of regular services in 1879 that really marked the beginning of Grimshaw Park Methodism associated with Haslingden Road. After having converted a house in Kemp Street into a Mission Room, the Wesleyans pressed on to secure their own building, and in 1880 they bought a piece of land on the south side of the ‘Turnpike Road leading from Blackburn to Haslingden’ from the lord of the manor. By 1885 the building, ‘a plain, substantial edifice on the Gothic lines of architecture’, was complete. This building, enlarged by the addition of extra vestries onto the back of the chapel in 1892, is the present Haslingden Road Methodist Chapel. The Chapel in 1970 is still a plain, substantial edifice, but there are signs of change and decay surrounding it. The redbrick at the front of the chapel, above the door-stone announcing ‘Wesleyan School Chapel 1885’, is marked by lines of bird droppings. To the left of the Chapel the red-dirt tennis court, once echoing to excited voices on long summer evenings, is overgrown with grass and foxgloves. The lines of stone terraces still sweep down the hill, but one or two of the houses are boarded up, and the corner shops are gradually becoming empty, or being converted back to private houses. There is talk that the whole area may have to come down in a road-widening programme. Going into the town, much of Grimshaw Park has been pulled down. Some of it has been grassed over, some left as rubble, awaiting future development. A nearby area has already ‘gone down’, filled up with Pakistanis. Just
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over the road, in Brandy House Brow, Bethany Mission Hall has had to close down. It’s true that some new houses are being built on what used to be the allotments on the other side of Haslingden Road, but they’re being built too quickly to last very long. Still, it might bring some new life into the area. Meanwhile the congregation at the Chapel is dwindling, and there is a sense of loss, of slow inexorable decline.
The social life of the Chapel But it has not always been like this. The members of the Chapel remember a warm and varied social life, on Sundays and throughout the week. For those faithful to the Chapel, Sunday was always a busy day, with Sunday dinner and tea wedged in between services and Sunday School. The Sunday School was always important and well attended. Indeed, many of the congregation still refer to the Chapel in conversation as the ‘School’. Well into the 1960s the largest class in the Sunday School was the ‘Adult Class’, where many of the parents of the children being taught in the Sunday School would have their own lesson, commencing with each of them reading, in turn, a verse from the Bible. It was not uncommon for three generations of the same family to be Sunday School scholars together. Spiritually and financially, it was the ‘School’ that kept the Chapel going. The morning and evening services were plain, straightforward worship, with enthusiastic hymn singing, extempore prayer, and long sermons. The congregation sat on wooden forms, facing a central pulpit, with choir stall and a small organ to the right, and the piano to the left. The services were usually conducted by visiting ‘Local Preachers’, unordained men and women from various backgrounds who had received a ‘call’ to preach, and who, after some preliminary training by a more experienced local preacher, were put on ‘the plan’. Thus the conduct of the services was very much dependent on the character and beliefs of the visiting preacher, and the congregation soon learned what to expect when any particular name appeared on the plan. Some were feared as ‘longwinded’, some gently mocked as ‘a bit oldfashioned’, but all were generally respected as ‘doing their best’. All of them at least, it was felt, were in contact with ‘real life’. Their lives were not sheltered as a minister’s life might be. And some of them in drawing on their own experiences, opened new horizons for their listeners. Once or twice a month, the minister, who might have three or four chapels under his care, came to conduct the service, and administer the sacraments, the Lord’s Supper and, occasionally, Baptism. For some this was a service which they would make a special effort to attend. For those who grew up at the Chapel, Sunday meant Chapel and Sunday School, big meals, best clothes, meeting friends, afternoon walks in the park or through the fields, star cards, collecting missionary money, sandwiches and hymn singing in someone’s home at the end of the day. It was a very special day of the week. But besides the Sunday activities, the Chapel also functioned as a centre for the social life of its members, and, to a lesser extent, for the social life of the district, during the week. It is this crowded social life, and its annual high-points, that the congregation now remember most vividly. In listening to them remembering we gain some kind of access into their world and our past. The high-point of the year was, as for so many Nonconformist chapels, the Sunday School Anniversary and Field Day. Here is a description of the Anniversary in the 1920s: Mr. Gelder started the morning with an eloquent sermon. In the afternoon it was a great pleasure to see the old faces of scholars who attended in days when Mr. Gelder
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was superintendant. The rendering of the cantata ‘The Golden City’, by our friends from Derby Street, under the leadership of Mr. Starr, was greatly appreciated. At the morning and evening services the children sang their part splendidly, giving one encouragement to fight on the good fight for the Master, and train them in His great love . . . The collections amounted to over £85, of which £70.0.7d. was collected in the school. The excitement of the day, here somewhat muted in a contemporary written account, is seen more vividly in remembered descriptions: Anniversary Day was the big day for us when former members returned and renewed old acquaintances and the collecting boxes were given to such returned male members who would probably give the collection a handsome start . . . My happiest memories of the Chapel were just as a child on the steps at Anniversary day . . . in later years we had to bring in more chairs to seat everyone. These ‘steps’ were the levels of a tiered platform placed at the front of the Chapel on the day itself. They sometimes led to trouble: . . . I can remember being in tears because I did not get on the top steps. It was usual to put the small ones at the bottom and the tall ones at the top. Of course some of the small children were older than the tall ones and the trouble started then. Right at the front of the chapel was the Sunday School banner. In memory the Chapel is always crowded, so much so that Sometimes you couldn’t get in. They used to put chairs . . . down the centre, there down the aisle part . . . We had some good preachers. They used to come out of town, more or less . . . An’t’ children always sings . . . all day, but more or less at night little children didn’t come . . . All their parents used to come. If they didn’t come to school themselves, they used to come at Anniversary to see their children . . . There were a good turnout, there were. The money-raising aspect of the Anniversary, as has been noted above, was very important, and each Sunday School class was encouraged to compete with the others in trying to raise more money than the previous year: You used to go into t’vestries for th’Anniversaries. You used to put your shillings, your ten shillings, your whatever. Instead of putting it all in together (they’d say) ‘Now, we’ve got two pound fifteen. Are we going to make it up to t’pound?’ Then they’d go round again. Then they’d be a bit more short again. ‘C’mon, make it up in another pound’. Well, that’s the way they kept going. The amount raised by each class depended partly on the collections taken weekly in the Sunday School, and partly on special fund-raising activities organised by the class during the course of the year. This need to raise money gave a public purpose to many of the social activities of the congregation. Closely associated with the Sunday School Anniversary was the Field Day. This was the
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occasion when the members of the Sunday School paraded round the streets of Grimshaw Park with a banner and, sometimes, a band, finishing up in a nearby field for games and refreshments. This is how one woman, a weaver, remembers the event: Like, when you were small, you used to walk under the banner. We thought we were everybody then. We used to have a band, that was at front, then there were t’banner, then there were t’children, in sizes you knows. Grown-ups -fellows- were last . . . Superintendant used to lead the procession . . . Then we used to march round Mosley Street, and round them little back streets, and then come back. And we used to have a field at top of Haslingden Road somewhere, big field, and we used to go back there after we’d marched round. And we’d have coffee and cakes, then band used to sit down, and they used to play. You could have games. They used to have games for t’children, running, and them as won used to get a prize . . . Oh I used to enjoy them, we used to run wild in t’fields . . . and if you wanted to do a bit of dancing you could just dance round and that. Another woman remembers details which echo village custom: Small children carried baskets of flowers, bigger children had crooks decorated with flowers. And finally ambition was fulfilled when the young women ‘steered’ i.e. held the ribbons of the Chapel banner as it flapped in the wind. The Sunday School Anniversary and Field Day were high points, then, but the social life fo the Chapel went on throughout the year. Christmas was also a time for special occasions and for many years a Christmas Treat was held on Christmas Day, with a concert. In 1917 . . . over one hundred children attended. Coffee and buns and oranges were given during the interval and several items were rendered, which were greatly appreciated by the children. An annual pantomime, which often replaced the concert at Christmas, was also very popular. For these performances the stage would be taken out from under the floorboards and erected at the front of the Chapel. The pantomime involved much coaching of children by the teachers, and making of costumes by mothers before the great night came. Money had to be raised for these costumes by various means. One woman remembers how: To buy our dresses and that we used to sell bars of chocolate. You could get whipped cream walnuts for tuppence then. We used to have a boxful, and there would be . . . five shillings worth we made, and we used to go round selling these. I used to take ’em to work to sell ’em. There are fond memories of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pearl the Fisher Maid and The King of Kandy. People still remember the girl who took a leading part in the pantomime, but who ‘always used to faint or something like that’ on the night. And the boy, who: when he were a little lad, you know, weren’t it orange and blue, Tory colours? We once had a thing, and he were t’prince in it, a pantomime at Christmas I think it were, and
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the day when election were on – now I can always remember that – he were dressed up in orange and blue, Tory colours. Then after the performance there would be a visit, in costume, to the photographers. Concert and social evenings continued throughout the year. Sometimes there would be entertainments by visiting parties from other chapels, groups like the Jovial Pierrots. Often they would make their own entertainment. People remember how: Socials on Saturday nights were joyfully anticipated. Picnics with the Sunday School teacher were delights. We would have gone in the rain. New Year’s Day tea parties, concerts were lots of fun practising. Selling chocolate bars to raise money for dresses for the concert. House parties where people made their own fun. House parties were very popular: Eeh, them house parties. We used to have some fun. (You) used to pay a shilling, then you got refreshments, and a lot of fun. Because they’d sing or do owt. They’d act gormless. (Laughs) They used to make a lot of money with them In summer there were rambles and picnics in the countryside around Blackburn. And times when Ed, who was leading the ramble, used to say, ‘It’s not so far’. We used to say, ‘This is one of Ed’s miles.’ You know, they kept walking and walking. ‘How far yet?’ Summer also brought a new season at the Chapel’s tennis court. A woman, who was also a weaver, remembers how: I used to go home from work in the summertime, and have a meal and a wash, and change, and off up to the Chapel to play tennis. We weren’t posh. The men played in the overalls they had been to work in . . . Besides tennis in the summer there was football in the winter, and billiards in the Sunday School billiard room all the year round. Special sporting successes were often celebrated by potato-pie suppers and a social evening. Alongside this host of social activities there were the more formal mid-week meetings, a women’s class on Tuesday, ‘the Bright Hour’, a class or service, often held on Wednesday night, and a choir practice. It becomes clear how: That was really our life when we were younger . . . We found all our pleasure in our church. Sometimes I would get in trouble at home. ‘You’re never in’. But I was only up at the Chapel all the time . . . You see, it was nearly every night we were booked up for something. It was a full life, an absorbing life, though one that was sometimes overshadowed by events in the larger world outside. For many of the young people who met at the Chapel, making friends, and courting future husbands and wives, there was a sense of down-to-earth companionship somehow altered by the religious context in which it took place. They used to
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have, as one woman puts it, ‘good fellowship with one another’. Or, putting the same point in a slightly different way, ‘we used to be just one big happy family’. It is difficult to know exactly what, within this round of social activities, religious beliefs actually meant. Talking to members now one is reminded of Richard Hoggart’s description of ‘Primary Religion’, that whole complex of beliefs about ‘doing as you would be done by’.5 There is always at least this. Here a woman is talking about rationing during the Second World War: I’ll say one thing like this, we never wanted for anything. We didn’t. We’d always something. Well, I mean to say, if we got some butter, well, we’d exchange it for some tea. That’s way we did, didn’t we . . .? We helped one another, and we seemed to get through . . . I think, well, I think if you help somebody like that, Trevor, you get paid in another . . . I think so, I don’t know. We always try to help anybody we can don’t we . . .? This seems to have been a general experience. But there was also something more. Something pointed to by words like ‘fellowship’, some sense of being caught up in a more-thanhuman endeavour which relegated politics for example to a very secondary status, which placed a ‘change of heart’ at the centre of it’s programme. There was a misgiving that ‘politics and religion don’t go’, a sense that religion should enable you to rise above politics. Though you might still vote Liberal. For some, perhaps a majority, religion seems to have been a somewhat alienated experience. They felt at home in the familiar, busy round of socials and events. They sang the hymns, listened to the sermons, made sure their children behaved in Sunday School. But about anything beyond the moral certainties of ‘primary religion’ they remain silent. Religion may have offered consolation in the tribulations of this world. They certainly sang: We love to sing below Of mercies freely given; But O we long to know The triumph song of heaven. It may have functioned as the expression of dissatisfaction, of a deep desire to radically change the world that hemmed them in, as the expression of a struggle to transform the kingdoms of this world into the ‘kingdoms of our God’. The religious activities of the Chapel members are so interwoven with their social activities, however, that it is difficult to be more certain about the meaning of the religious activities at an individual level, beyond the moralities of a good life and support at times of crisis. This is not to say that the religious beliefs and practices of the Chapel members were necessarily in any way less real than their social activities. Although such religious beliefs are seldom articulated, they clearly form a firm sub-stratum on which their ‘primary religion’ rests.
The social history of the Chapel These descriptions, then, give us some idea of what the social life of the Chapel meant to its members. The social life of the Chapel did not, however, remain static. It changed as the Chapel changed through the different phases of its development. It is the aim of this section
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to outline the major phases of the Chapel’s life from the closing decades of the nineteenth century up to the present day. The founding of the Chapel took place as part of a determined expansion of Wesleyan Methodism in Blackburn during the period 1875–1896. After some years of struggle in a not altogether friendly area, a Mission Room was established in 1879 and Haslingden Road Chapel opened in 1885. The early years were successful. Outstanding debts were soon cleared off, and within the first decade the Chapel was enlarged and beautified. A large Sunday School, with morning and afternoon sessions, was established, and the influence of the Chapel came to be increasingly felt in the area. The social life of the Chapel seems to have been richest, however, in the 1920s and 1930s, the years when Blackburn was hard hit by the Depression. Most of the congregation, who worked in the mills or allied trades, were out of work. Here one weaver remembers: I think I were nineteen when t’Depression came proper, ‘cause I know where we worked closed down . . . Well, we were on t’dole for a bit. Of course Means Test come. ’cause mi mother had saved a little bit of money she were knocked off right aways (laughs) we got a little bit, but it were just like begging for money. Oh it were shocking. They used to ask you all sorts of questions, them in t’Labour Exchange. Every Wednesday and Friday you had to go. Oh it were shocking, that bit. The enforced leisure was made less oppressive by the extension of the Chapel’s social life. It was at this time that the ‘Bright Hour’, an informal afternoon meeting, was introduced to cater for the needs of the women who were out of work. The Chapel’s billiard room, reading room and tennis court were used extensively, and the younger members of the congregation organised swimming parties to the Ribble and rambles in the country. Problems were caused, though, by this opening up of the Chapel’s facilities to a wider range of the people of Grimshaw Park than had previously attended the Chapel. There were complaints of ‘horseplay’ by the young men and, even more scandalous, reports of gambling being carried on during the day-time. In spite of protests that ‘the young men would be better in the school, than on the streets’, the opening hours of the Young Men’s Institute were curtailed. It was in the hard years of the 1920s and 1930s, then, that many of the men and women of the area increasingly turned to the Chapel as the centre of their social life, and that the members of the Chapel learned to ‘kindly help each other on’ in difficult times. The years of the Second World War marked a time of similar, perhaps even increased, stress, and there are still poignant memories of services where the congregation sang hymns chosen by ‘the lads’ serving in the forces, and of swapping rationed butter for sugar. The immediate post-war years seem to mark a quickening in the life of the Chapel, and a greater pastoral interest in the receiving of new people into official membership of the Chapel. The 1950s were a period of growth and expansion. During the first half of the 1950s vestries were enlarged and the Chapel was redecorated. The number of official members continued to rise slowly, and perhaps most significantly, the number of scholars attending Sunday School began to increase after a long period of sustained, slow decline. All these trends were continued in the second half of the 1950s, and there was a marked expansion in the range of activities catering for the needs of the young people of the Chapel, which included ‘Crusaders’ for the children, and a weekly Youth Club for the teenagers. The social life of the Chapel was now increasingly centred on the young peoples’ activities, with a resurgence of socials, dances, pantomimes and Gang Shows. These were very active years.
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These activities had slackened by the mid-1960s, although the impetus already generated had resulted in a thorough redecoration of the Chapel. This redecoration, which had included the replacement of the pulpit by a central Communion Table, and the wooden forms by pews, gave the Chapel a much more ‘church-like’ appearance, in contrast to its earlier, preaching-house format. Sunday School attendance was now declining sharply, and in 1966 it was decided, after much heart-searching, to bring to an end the traditional afternoon Sunday School, with its large adult class, and replace it by Family Worship, that is, by a normal Sunday service, during part of which the children and young people leave for their own lessons whilst the adults stay to hear the sermon. This experiment does not seem to have been successful, however. Sunday School attendance figures have continued to fall, and have now stabilised at a low level. There is a shortage of Sunday School teachers, and the Chapel officials are finding it hard to get younger people to take on official posts. The social activities have shrunk to a much diminished level. Many life-long members of the congregation feel a sense of loss, of failure. Many identify this decline with the ending of the traditional Sunday School. One couple put it like this: Since they did away wi’ t’Sunday School we don’t seem to have made any headway. We were dead against it from the beginning. We said, ‘When they close the Sunday School the Church’ll go down’. And it has gone down since. I don’t care what anybody says, it’s gone down since then . . . Another woman says: We’ve missed Sunday School, us. That’s one o’things as we’ve missed more than anything is Sunday School. Now the members are considering closing the Chapel down, and taking part, with two other congregations, in the building of a new church in a more central location. For those who have spent their lives at Haslingden Road Chapel this is a sad prospect. They feel worries, at a loss: I don’t know what to think about it all. I should be sorry to see it go, but if they was making a good new church, and they’d workers, well, it might be a good thing. There is a strong sense that what has held a central position in their own lives is coming to an end, will not survive them: It’s not like it used to be, no . . . Can’t think there is much future for the Chapel with not many young people to follow on . . . But now everything is dying out and there are no younger ones to follow. One woman, who had talked about the Depression earlier, offered an explanation: You see, there’s too much going on outside. There’s television and all that. And these young ones don’t seem to want to come . . . Well, they’ve more money for one thing . . . Since this Second World War folk’s earned good money, more or less, and they’ve bought houses on the outskirts . . . there used to be more or less a little community lived round Haslingden Road and Bennington Street, and those little places . . .
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This is a provocative explanation, and one which raises some of the themes to be explored in the next section. This sadness and sense of an ending is very much present in all that the members of the Chapel say about its recent development. For them it is a personal loss and deprivation. This is the time in their lives when they should be able to sit back, the older and most respected members of the Chapel, those who have borne the burden and the heat of the day, watching the younger members taking over the posts they have relinquished, carrying on the work they have begun. Instead they are faced with struggling to maintain the Chapel in an area which shows early signs of stagnation and decay. For some there is the faith that ‘the Lord has brought us this far and He will see us through’. For others there are more questions than answers.
Factors in the development of the Chapel Some of the factors in the development of Haslingden Road Chapel have been indicated already in the preceding account of the Chapel’s response to the social needs of the Grimshaw Park area. Before looking at this response in the wider context of general social developments and trends, it is important to look at some aspects of the inner dynamic of the Chapel’s development. Although the Chapel is situated in a traditional working-class area, the leaders of the Chapel were predominantly middle class right up to the 1950s.6 Taking the Trustees as a central example (between fifteen and twenty members of the Chapel with responsibility for the upkeep of the fabric of the Chapel), the following pattern emerges. In 1880 14 out of 18 had middle-class occupations; in 1901 there was no change; in 1925 17 out of 18 had middle-class occupations. This pattern breaks in 1950 when 9 Trustees had middle-class, and 9 had working-class, occupations. The 1950 Trust has almost as many women as men, in sharp contrast to earlier Trusts. This break is confirmed in 1967, which also has a balanced class make-up. Whilst the Trust is only one of the leading committees, there is good reason to believe that it is representative of the general formal leadership structure of the Chapel. The Leaders’ Meeting, for example, is dominated by a group of five people from 1917 (when records are first available) up to 1951. Four of these five people are also members of the Trust. Thus it would seem that this closely-knit leadership structure, reinforced by close friendship and family ties, is an important feature of the life of the Chapel up to the beginning of the 1950s. Whether this predominantly middle-class leadership structure represents the ‘Wesleyan element’ superimposed upon a working-class chapel, or whether the members of the Chapel chose those with higher social status to fill leadership positions, or whether it was the case that the middle-class members ‘emerged’ as ‘natural’ leaders, is more difficult to say and there remains the further question as to why this pattern was so decisively broken in the 1950s. This break at the beginning of the 1950s coincides with the post-war resurgence of the Chapel, as described above. Without underestimating the importance of other factors (such as the appointment of a new minister, or evangelistic missions visiting the town) it seems reasonable to assume a strongly significant causal relationship between these two developments. What one gets is a sense of the emergence of a middle generation in the Chapel (aged 30–40 in the 1950s) which, having been held down by the older, more middle-class leadership elite, suddenly comes into its own in the 1950s, calling into being, and finding confirmation in, the increased activities of its children, the next Chapel generation. This impetus
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begins to ebb out by the mid-1960s, when it becomes clear that the members of the next generation (largely their own children) have disappeared. It is this ‘missing generation’ that now calls for an explanation. As outlined above, the Chapel had functioned as a centre for the social life of its members, and of the Grimshaw Park area generally, throughout the period, and especially in response to the increased demands of the Depression years. A significant number of the new members, especially men, were attracted and held through these activities. Gradually during the 1950s, these entertainments and amusements have been overshadowed and deglamorised by the growing availability of more professional mass-media entertainment. The mass media have provided images which working-class people, with increased relative prosperity, have felt able to reach out for. Although this may have affected the younger members of the Chapel most, the older members have also experienced a widening of their horizons and a sophisticating of their tastes. Their nostalgia for the old house-parties where you made your own fun is genuine enough, but during Blackburn Holidays they are more likely to be living it up in Italy than in Blackpool. The movement away from the architecture of the preachinghouse to that of a church is evidence of the same trend.7 The reduction in the Chapel’s social life is not, however, merely the result of the provision of more sophisticated alternatives. It also points to the fact that the Chapel can no longer draw on a firm group of members and supporters in Grimshaw Park. In fact during the past decade there has been a marked tendency for members of the Chapel to move out of this area. This is strikingly revealed by an examination of the subsequent ‘careers’ of a group of young people admitted into full membership (confirmed) at Haslingden Road Chapel in 1959. Only one out of the eight now lives in the area; two live on the rural outskirts of Blackburn; five live in other towns. None of them currently attend the Chapel. The list of new members in 1962 shows a similar pattern. Out of nine new members two live in the area, the rest live out of the area and in other towns. None of them currently attend the Chapel. Naturally in every generation there will be some geographical mobility, but this is a wholesale movement of the young people who have been most involved in the life of the Chapel, precisely those who might be expected to become its future leaders and officials. It is the geographical mobility of these people and their peer groups which has marooned the middle generation of the active 1950s. These ‘internal’ factors in the Chapel’s development are simultaneously an expression of changes in the wider society of which the Chapel is a part. These include changes in the general salience of religious belief, and changes in working-class life and culture in post-war Britain. These are examined separately, although they relate dialectically. Wesleyan Methodism, which became part of a unified Methodist Chuch in 1932, has experienced the decline in membership common to most religious groups in the increasingly secularised urban society of the twentieth century, and for some years there has been an absolute fall in membership figures. There is, in fact, strong evidence to suggest that the real upsurge of Wesleyan Methodism had been halted half-way through the nineteenth century, though this development was masked by the growth in actual membership figures.8 Thus the decline of the Chapel takes place within the context of a general shrinkage in the Methodist world. It should also be noted that the population of Blackburn has been gradually declining throughout this present century (from 133,000 in 1911 to 101,000 in 1971), and would have declined further but for the arrival of Asian immigrants. A second factor is the changes in working-class life and culture which have emerged since 1945. These changes, which have been discussed on many levels in relationship to the ‘affluence and embourgeoisment’ thesis, are both complex and controversial.9 If we reject
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the wider theories of the disappearance of the working class into some kind of ‘endless middle’, we can see some limited support for the thesis in the development of the Chapel, in so far as the increase in relative prosperity10 experienced by the working class has operated as one crucial factor in the erosion of traditional working-class community. To the extent that ‘neighbourliness’ was merely a way of reducing the effects of poverty a lessening of that poverty will tend to reduce the felt need for neighbourliness. To the extent that working-class life and culture are more than ‘neighbourliness’, and to the extent that ‘neighbourliness’ is more than a mere response to shared poverty, the effects of relative prosperity on that life and culture are more debateable. This study of the members of Haslingden Road Chapel suggests that the changes have been complex. The members of the Chapel have no doubt at all that life is materially better than ever for people like them. Sometimes, when they hear that the local corporation has made bus travel free for old-age pensioners, or that the son of someone they know has been given a scholarship to study in America, they say, ‘Eeh, there never were such times’. They are aware of, and pleased by, the relatively increased geographical and social mobility available to working-class people. Sometimes they ruefully feel that ‘we were born too soon’. But to all this their feelings about the Chapel and its present decline add a further complexity. Certainly a sense of loss. A personal nostalgia for their own youth, and a more general sadness of the dislocation of a communal way of life. They still meet socially, still go to each others houses, still go on holiday together. But the ‘fellowship’ has dwindled down to friendship. Many of their children have ‘got on’. But they have also gone away. The Chapel is more beautiful than ever. But it is dying. It seems the end of a line. For the opening of the Chapel to its working-class membership came at a moment when the working-class life and culture which the Chapel partly expressed were entering a period of dislocation and apparent decline. The Chapel was particularly sensitive to this decline because it drew its support from the ‘respectable’ working class (chapel as opposed to pub), precisely that section whose children, in the post-war years, would tend to move most frequently from the working-class neighbourhood and Chapel. As the Chapel’s social life diminished it would be able to draw even less on the support of friends in the area, those who were not members of the Chapel themselves, but whose children might become so. Thus the decline has been accelerated during the last decade.
Conclusion Although this account of Methodism in a working-class area is based on an examination of one particular chapel, there is strong evidence that the experiences described here could be easily duplicated. Indeed, some of the accounts in Kenneth Young’s Chapel echo the descriptions of Haslingden Road Chapel life almost word-for-word.11 There is the same sense of a communal memory that Jeremy Seabrook found generally in Blackburn: As the old recount the past, identical memories occur, word-for-word accounts of a way of living which was shared in every detail by those who depended on the mills and weaving-sheds for their existence. Sometimes they speak shyly, confidentially, of some feature of their life, which they imagine to be a personal and unique experience, but which was the public property of almost every other family in the town. The sub-culture was a closed and impermeable system, which penetrated every area of their life, dictated patterns of behaviour, belief and thought.12
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Though to the extent that the Nonconformist subculture was chosen by its adherents it was that much less oppressive than the one described above. The members of the Chapel have been drawn from the lower middle class (shopkeepers, clerks, insurance agents) and the ‘respectable’ working class, (mainly weavers). The middleclass provided the formal leadership up to the beginning of the 1950s. It must be remembered, though, that they were a Lancashire middle class, that their accents were not that far removed from those of the rest of the Chapel members. The working-class members entered into a rather different relationship with the Chapel. They created a neighbourly and sharing world within the structure provided by the Chapel, enthusiastic at the points where the Methodist and working-class elements could be matched, silent at the points where they did not connect, usually wavering between embarassment and conviction. For the ‘brighter’ working-class children, the Chapel provided access to the middle-class information and styles which they needed to negotiate the education system, and a ready platform for their newly-acquired educated skills. But since education usually meant a movement out of their own class, the Chapel lost them to other towns and to other institutions. The history we have traced is centrally the history of that generation of working-class people who took over the Chapel at the historical moment when their own life style was undergoing an important dislocation. It is important to take a measure of this Chapel’s achievement. It provided a focal, nomic centre for the creative activities of a working-class neighbourhood, offering scope and encouragement for the development of skills denied in mills and factories. It was a means of expressing the aspirations and ideals of oppressed people, and it offered some ways of ameliorating that oppression. For many it was indeed ‘the heart of a heartless world’. But it became this heart only at the cost of excluding from its life any consideration of the forces and pressures of working-class life which went beyond neighbourliness and personal selfimprovement. The energies it drew on were not returned directly to the people of Grimshaw Park in their endeavour to alter the world they lived in, but were restored only in an alienated form which, at best, gave them little purchase on the changing world of post-war Britain, and, at worst, deflected energies which might have been more usefully employed elsewhere. The energies that filled the Chapel do need to be recovered. But first, to use one of the Chapel’s own expressions, they need to be redeemed.
References 1 This paper is based on research carried out at Lancaster University. For more detailed references and bibliography see ‘Haslingden Road: The Social History of a Lancashire Methodist Chapel 1885–1970’, M.A. dissertation, University of Lancaster, 1972. 2 For detailed accounts see E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1963, and R.F. Wearmouth, Methodism and the Working-class Movements in England 1800–1850, 1937. 3 For a recent description of Blackburn see Jeremy Seabrook, City Close-Up, 1971. 4 A brief account of the history of Grimshaw Park is given in George C. Miller, Bygone Blackburn, 1950, pp. 111–115. 5 See chapter four of Richard Hoggart, Uses of Literacy, 1957. 6 It proved impossible to locate early membership lists which might have made it possible to establish conclusively the extent of working-class membership. Interviews and question-sheet material confirmed majority working-class membership, but gave no indication of its possible fluctuation. 7 Some of the implications of this kind of development in twentieth-century Methodism are traced out to Robert Currie, Methodism Divided, 1968. 8 See the discussion of Methodist Population Ratios in Robert Currie, op. cit.
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9 For the scope of this debate see the introduction to John H. Goldthorpe, et. al., The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure, 1969. 10 Relative, that is, to their own previous experience of deprivation and prosperity, not relative to the experience of other social groups. 11 See, for example, the chapter ‘At Sunday School’, in Kenneth Young, Chapel, 1972. 12 Jeremy Seabrook, op. cit., pp. 3–4.
Comment Roger Grimshaw The importance of examining concrete practices in the study of culture is borne out by the fruitful work of Trevor Blackwell, set out in his article. Instead of reconstructing an ideology through direct interrogation, he describes the practices connected with the institution dealt with and discusses beliefs in the light of these. The former richness of the ‘social life’ of the Chapel emerges naturally and consequentially by virtue of this approach; by contrast, the concrete content of religious belief appears reluctant to reveal itself, despite the ongoing practice of worship etc. This remains an important fact, whatever conclusions one may draw from it. The decline in the Chapel’s fortune in recent times took place against a background of cultural change which affected the current and potential membership in a number of ways. The function of mutual aid and leisure provision, revealed as important in the previous description, were now performed by other institutions, on an enlarged social basis, or superseded altogether. The localised and intimate nature of the Chapel’s activities gave way to the large-scale impersonality of mass society. In this respect, the course followed by the Chapel seems symptomatic of developments affecting a large sector of society. In tracing the changes that influence this institution, we might add that the notion of ‘respectability’, if we use it as a focus for a certain set of attitudes and activities, has lost some of its force. In the context of chapel life, this tendency might operate so as to weaken the force of values nurtured by their utility, yet now less demanded. It is perhaps possible to speak at the present time of a critical phase in the history of the cultural form, whose facets can be summed up in the concept of respectability. In measuring the importance of that apparent critical phase. we have to discover what the decline of such an institution as a Methodist chapel may mean in the context of the societal culture. For this reason, the full implications of the events described in this essay remain ambiguous.
41 ‘Ideology’ and ‘consciousness’ Some problems in Marxist historiography Gregor McLennan
Section one: Introduction The aim of this essay is to outline some recent developments in Marxist historiography, and to situate these in the context of general theoretical discussions current within Marxism, in particular over the question of the analysis of ‘ideology’ and ‘class-consciousness’. The importance of this question is intimately connected with larger political and theoretical events of recent times; especially the re-assertion of Marxism as a humanism, and subsequent attempts (expressed above all in the work of Louis Althusser and in the rediscovery of that of Antonio Gramsci) to provide a more scientific analysis of social formations than allowed for by the (related) extremes of ‘economism’ and ‘humanism’. Unfortunately, these developments and other significant debates – the related problems of ‘empiricism’ and ‘historicism’, for example – can only be acknowledged and, to some extent, assumed in what follows. A longer philosophical discussion would probably overburden the paper, and since adequate analyses of many of the concepts exist elsewhere, it seems rational to refer the reader to them.1 Another major reason for an omission of this kind concerns the background to the analytical perspective adopted here. It was formed in part by a critical reading of one central proposition emerging from Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst’s important text ‘Pre-capitalist Modes of Production’: that Marxism cannot be a science of history. Now, that proposition rests on a closely argued position which depends not only on an interpretation and critique of empiricism and essentialism, but also on an analysis of those concepts in relation to Althusser’s work. The present paper is not conceived as an explicit contribution to that debate. Rather, it attempts to engage with the issues raised in that debate at an ‘intermediate’ level – not so much to rescue or reject Althusser’s ‘science of history’ as to show that the general problems are implicit in current British Marxist historiography. Accordingly, the informing question is, ‘What are some of the key issues confronting a theoretical Marxist history?’, rather than the more specific ‘Is not the very idea of a Marxist history a misconception?’ Two further levels of incompleteness arise from this absence. First, the essay is structured in a somewhat descriptive fashion. In a later section the inadequacies of such an approach – something more than a matter of procedural convenience, especially with regard to history texts – will be indicated. On the other hand, such a procedure can be utilised providing its limitations are recognised. As a ‘moment’ (but only one moment) in the search for conceptual clarity, it is not altogether valueless. Second, as suggested, current theoretical debates make ever clearer the difficulty of entering a discussion over a specific question without making explicit one’s own particular interpretation of the ‘basic’ concepts of historical materialism: mode of production, social formation, class, transition, and so on. The problem
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of ideology, perhaps more than most, is bound up with such interpretations. Yet the assessment of the character of Marxism as a theoretical enterprise is something too vast to be in any sense adequately summarised or appended in a paper of this kind. I choose, therefore to raise, rather than offer a definitive solution to, such issues. The somewhat negative stance adopted here is, it follows, a necessary one: a ‘positive’ account of Marxist theory and the problems of historiography logically awaits a deeper clarification of those more ‘fundamental’ concepts. My own competence to produce such an account, rather than to signal some possibilities, is a question conveniently forestalled by the restrictions of space. We hope, however, to return to these problems, and, in particular to the nature of Hindess and Hirst’s intervention, in a future paper. It is, nevertheless, an important strand of this essay to insist that the problem of theoretical presuppositions is quite central to the practice of Marxist historians. It has been too often assumed that their ‘closeness’ to the ‘real’ historical process is privilege enough to exempt them from explicit recognition of theoretical ‘relevance’. I have included a short study of E.P. Thompson because in his work this very proximity is openly given theoretical status. The other, younger, writers to which I refer are chosen because – in rather different ways – ‘abstract’ questions have a direct and conscious bearing on their ‘historical’ products. The dialogue between these two approaches seems to me extremely useful, and its resolution in favour of the latter inevitable. Marxist history will develop, is developing, only in the light of enquiry into conceptual issues not directly related – it would seem – to one’s ‘research’. Justification by reference to ‘the facts’ or ‘reality’ or History or ‘working class experience’ begs rather than (as it once did) answers all the questions. Despite its temporary negative phases, a conceptual enquiry of this kind is not a retrogressive enterprise: on the contrary, its exciting dependence on critical rigour and coherence can only be to the long-term benefit of historiography. There are, broadly speaking, it seems to me, three ways in which ‘ideology’ can be conceived in a ‘Marxist’ account. A) Economistically. This conception would be that ideas are more or less direct (superstructural) emanations from the economically-defined ‘base’ or reality of a given society. Ideology thus reflects the dominance of a ‘ruling’ class: in capitalism, for example, the bourgeoisie. If, however, it is also held that such independent movement of the economy necessitates in the long run, say, a transition from capitalism to socialism, then it will be maintained that the class responsible for such a transition is but temporarily bound by bourgeois ideas. These ideas, therefore, because they are i) temporary, and ii) do not reflect the long term ‘interests’ of the proletariat, are false ideas, ‘ideological’ (in the pejorative sense) since they are the imposition of apparently-eternal truths by a historically limited minority class on the majority class, whose real interests lie elsewhere. The realisation that this is so, and that socialism is the true embodiment of working class ‘aspirations’, is often termed ‘revolutionary class consciousness’. It is the logical opposite of false (ideological) consciousness. B) Culturally. The reaction against this kind of determinist or ‘vulgar’ Marxism often takes the form of an assertion of the equality of social conditions and ideas. Each is ‘as real’ as the other. Human agency (dependent upon ideas) is a precondition of revolutionary change, not its mechanical result. Societies are dialectical totalities in which there is not a pre-given dominance of economy over ideas and agency, but, rather, an essential complementarity. The sense which people make of their ‘objective’ situation is part of, and not reducible to, that situation. There is no abstract ‘imposition’ or ‘distortion’ of ideas. To reject such a schematism is to acknowledge the real constitutents of socio-cultural formations. It is the task of historians to reveal and investigate such processes.
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C) Structually. Both Gramsci and Althusser have in different ways gone beyond the reductionism of the first account and the lack of theoretical differentiation in the essentialist or culturalist approach. Gramsci has argued that ideology springs from everyday life as much as from class design. ‘Consciousness’ is situated in practices defined and dominated by capitalist social relations. Nevertheless, the process by which that dominance is established (‘Hegemony’) is something to be continually secured: it is a negotiated process involving a changing relation between coercive and consensual practices, and taking place throughout ‘civil society’, often through alliances, from the level of everyday practical consciousness to that of political parties. This conception is clearly an advance on the mechanical notion, which remains ever-open to the (justifiable) criticisms of both non-Marxist and Marxist writers on the question of exceptions ‘lags’, a priorism, and so on. It also goes beyond the ‘culturalist position’, which comes too close to relativism and empiricism to be a recognisably Marxist account. Althusser’s theory is similar, but tries to avoid both the ‘cultural’ and catch-all characteristics of some Gramscian interpretations. The social formation, for Althusser, is a determinate structure of relatively autonomous ‘levels’, the articulation of effective hierarchy within which is specified, ultimately, by the economic level, or, more strictly, the mode of production. As one such level, the ‘ideological’ ‘region’ is necessarily (structurally) incomplete, incapable itself of grasping the totality of which it is a determinate part. Now, while there can be various degrees of recognition or ‘misrecognition’ at the level of consciousness (ideology is relatively autonomous; it is not wholly determined by the economy, or anything else), ideology is by definition a partial, or, better, imaginary relation by which individuals relate themselves to their real conditions of existence. It ‘alludes’ to reality without being inferior or reducible to that larger reality: their respective ‘objects’, Althusser would say, are logically incomparable. Despite charges of dogmatism and obscurity, this Althusserian conception is at once more flexible and coherent than any variety of the first two explanations. Indeed, such an openness, he has argued, is characteristic of a non-ideological conception. Whether assertions of ‘common sense’ or more sophisticated ‘bourgeois’ rationalisations, ideological notions constantly seek to account for the totality, strive to identify its ‘object’, in terms inevitably reducible to their limited position. As such, ideologies are equally inevitably prone to a theoretical ‘closure’ which is, for Althusser, in contradiction to the canons of genuinely scientific practice. I cannot go into these questions any further here, though the differences between Gramsci and Althusser are significant and interesting, as is Althusser’s view of science.2 I hope, however, to have indicated that the theoretical scope of the ‘third’ interpretation of ideology, despite such differences, is far greater than that of the other two. The nature of the practical problems in Marxist history should provide some backing for that claim. Of course, it would be strange if the work of any one Marxist historian corresponded exactly to any one of the abstract positions outlined. Texts or arguments quite often combine analyses and methods of substantiation which may have different conceptual bases. I have tried to schematically trace these differences. My argument will be that John Foster’s work is, by and large, dependent on the first series of positions, and that E.P. Thompson provides a good example of the second approach. In that sense, the first two sections of the paper can be seen as the most important ones. Yet Hinton and Stedman Jones represent a complex combination of viewpoints perhaps more typical of Marxist – historians. The difficulty in ‘placing’ the former pair is, certainly, to do with the restricted scope of their respective objects of analysis. Yet the work of Hobsbawm, Hill, Dobb, or Hilton might just as well have
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been examined to show a similar combination of perspectives, were it not for the convenience offered by the smaller volume and more recent theoretical formation of Stedman Jones’ and Hinton’s books. Within and between texts, a greater or lesser, explicit or implicit, degree of conceptual ‘impurity’ can often be detected. Dobb, for example, was by no means the straightforwardly ‘economistic’ Marxist which he is sometimes said to be.3 Hilton has even less been so, and both Hobsbawm and (particularly) Hill have produced important ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ texts.4 Having said that, the abstract of concepts which I have offered is no less an objective theoretical criterion. Authorial complexity, or juxtaposition within and between texts, for example, are no guarantees that the theoretical positions offered are coherent examples of the ‘third’ problematic – the latter being something more than a combination of the first and second ‘tendencies’. One last prefatory comment. The inability of ‘sectional’ viewpoints to adequately account for the structure of social formations, and thus the historical conjunctures which might be said to ‘fall under’ them, raises serious doubts concerning the methodology of ‘labour history’ or ‘history from below’. Such practices depend on the idea that one has only to fill in the large blanks left by ‘bourgeois’ historiography in order to reach a more balanced view of the ‘actual’ historical process. The untheorised pluralism of this position (its reliance on a ‘given’ distribution of social places) is obvious, and it is empirically clear that the existence of a substantial body of trade union or working class history by no means produces a systematic Marxist history. If it is indeed the case that this is due to the inherent limitations of any sectional viewpoint, then whatever the moral justification for such research, its political aim, if it has one, is theoretically misguided. To adequately establish this last assertion would require the kind of long and difficult discussion into the nature of historicist, empiricist and teleological explanation to which I have already referred, and which can therefore only be hinted at here. Such justification as my account has, however, is, in part, dependent on these broader arguments.
Section two: The centrality of experience The writings of E.P. Thompson, stretching over twenty years, form a massive and consistent body of militant socialist-humanist work. From his principled opposition to stalinism, through the break-up of right and left Cold War ideologies, to the resurgence of what he regards as the new dogmatism of Marxist theory, his purpose has remained the same: Always life is more unexpected, arbitrary, contradictory than the thoughts of the philosophers who abstract and make conceptual patterns . . . Imaginative and intellectual faculties are not confined to a ‘superstructure’ and erected upon a ‘base’ of things (including men-things); they are implicit in the creative act of labour which makes man man’. ‘A Letter to the Philistines’, 1957 p. 129, 131 To reduce class to an identity is to forget where agency lies, not in class, but in men. ‘Peculiarities of the English’, 1965, p. 358 People are not so stupid as some structuralist philosophers suppose them to be’. Whigs and Hunters, 1975, p. 262 Thompson’s humility with respect to the human agency he observes in the history of
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‘subordinate’ classes is counterbalanced by the moral outrage directed against those (especially Marxists) who ‘seek’ to replace individuality and agency by the reification of concepts: a reductionist scholasticism which cannot but lead to political sectarianism. For Thompson, history requires the closest attention to the feelings and motives of those who, due to bias or philistinism, have been lost to our own modern experience. Historical study therefore necessitates a certain suspension of presuppositions, an empathetic ability to ‘listen’ to people whose essential rationality in terms of their everyday experience relative to the conditions of their own society is often cynically dubbed by the right as the spontaneity of the mob, or by the left as ‘ideology’, something pre-given by a social structure. In the light of this stress on the validity of experience, it is no accident that Thompson, wherever possible, uses literary rather than statistical sources, descriptive rather than analytical argument. It must be admitted at once that Thompson’s command of such sources, and the line of argumentation deriving from it, have resulted in formidable achievements of humanist history. The Making of the English Working Class is a classic of imaginative historical reconstruction. By skilfully combining ‘literary’ radical documents with the premiss that class is agency as much as conditioning,5 he traces the politically articulate process by which the labouring poor, under conditions of increasing industrialisation, became, in their growing experience of solidarity as an interest group, and through varying degrees of self-recognition (machine breaking, radical societies and press, reform movements, etc.), a distinct class. In his studies of the eighteenth-century crowd,6 of the anonymous threatening letter, or of the identity of plebian culture, Thompson’s project remains the same: to establish by sympathetic documentation the essential rationality and cultural autonomy of the ‘lower classes’, with the intent and effect of massively redressing the imbalance in our total view of social relations and their historical development. It is important to see, I think, that such a project is of a general nature: one not simply about ‘periods’ but about (any) class society. The clear political directives about the recruiting ground for socialist ideas which derives from such a view indicate that Thompson is a political and socialist historian, and not merely one keen to see a more fully-balanced literary picture. And politics, he argues in his essay on the origins of the I.L.P.,7 is no efflux of a system. Rather, it is the product of the energy and intellect of men such as Tom Macguire, something absolutely basic to the creative organisation of ordinary working people. It is Thompson’s task as a socialist historian to rescue such people from oblivion. The political thrust of his work, however, leads one to question his implicit methodological assumption that experience is to be seen in its own terms. I noted earlier that this position is linked to a variety of relativism. It has the implication that all experiences are equal in the face of the researcher. I have tried to show too that Thompson’s political concerns are linked to his practice as a historian. Yet it seems that any political significance which the experiences he illuminates allow i) is part of the substance of their historically relative social totality, but ii) that such significance can only be the expression of some, amongst very many, ‘interests’, because all experiences, be they patrician or plebian, are equally valid. One way out of this difficulty – one which would seem to reduce the importance of political-historical generalisations which are based on external moral, and therefore contingent, judgements – would be to deny that experiences are the basic social data, that in themselves experiences are incapable of achieving a ‘total’ perspective, delimited as they are by their ‘objective’ social-structural positions. This is a solution, however, which Thompson has fiercely resisted. The difficulty here is that Thompson himself would certainly not argue that class power, economic production, or any other concept is necessarily inapplicable, or that they can only
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be derived from experience. Rather, they must be validated in terms of peoples’ experience, not seen as external forces moulding them. The term ‘empiricist’, therefore, would be (and with some justification) objected to, probably in terms of a necessarily dialectical materialism. The further argument as to whether such a concept of materialism shares large premisses with empiricism is something which I pointed to earlier, but which is, in the Marxist tradition, hotly contested. Merely to deduce, from that argument, that someone such as Thompson is wholly concept-less or anti-theoretical, would be a travesty, whatever intractible problems remain. In his paper, ‘Peculiarities of the English’ and in his review of John Foster’s book Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, Thompson takes up arms against modern Marxist ‘platonism’ and ‘idealism’. His adverse view of Foster’s (as with K. Thomas8) use of computerised statistics, is, not surprisingly, accompanied by a defence of literary sources and sympathetic understanding. Against Perry Anderson9 he – in a different way – urges a return to concrete research into the uniqueness of historical phenomena (in this case, the English ‘route’) at the expense of distorting theoretical models (especially that of ‘other countries’). But, as before, not simply in order to argue for concreteness as such. This is clear in his criticism of Anderson’s use of the concept ‘hegemony’. Briefly, this is that hegemony, as Anderson uses the term, becomes a fact or property of the existence of a dominant class, such that – almost by definition – a class society entails effective hegemonic functions. Such an a priori position, Thompson righly argues, commits us to the idea that the working class, for as long as it is the working class, is necessarily subordinate to bourgeois hegemony, inevitably ‘corporatist’ in ideology and practice. For Gramsci, of course, hegemony was a process of domination, achieved on a number of levels. It is never ‘given’, but something to be continually consolidated, and therefore open to the influences of the class struggle. Difficult though the attainment of working class hegemony might be, it is, for Gramsci, the precondition and site of fundamental social change, and not its unproblematic result. If Thompson’s defence of Gramsci slides over some extremely difficult problems of analysis (corporatism, reformism) raised by the Anderson-Nairn theses on labourism,10 he is nevertheless correct to reassert a Gramscian position. Indeed, in some ways, his own practice is a Gramscian one: essentially historicist in outlook, it seeks to reassess the real balance of forces in particular societies, the degree and mechanisms of hegemony exercised by the dominant class. His descriptions of forms of resistance on the part of the labouring poor in the eighteenth century not only aims to show the rationality of, say, food riots as collective bargaining, or the criminal letter, or the attempts to disrupt governmental control over forestry. He is also at pains to point out that in certain crucial respects these practices were allowed for in the outward ‘theatre’ of patronage and deference, ultimately limited by the equally ritual violence of the gallows. If the subtle reciprocity of ideas11 which was the primary cultural hegemony of deference was at times stretched, it was nevertheless firmly enough based, itself specified the regions of opposition, such that it was never, before 1800, stretched to breaking point. Thompson’s conception of the social totality, then, is primarily historical, and only secondarily general or theoretical; or, more strictly, that the separation of the two (allegedly different) modes of analysis is untenable for a serious Marxist historian. However, Thompson’s historicism, despite its stress on the interrelationship of basic experiences, is not of the openly ‘expressive’ type, exemplified, for, example, in some of Raymond Williams’ work.12 The latter’s insistence on the necessary complementarity and unity of different social practices is entailed by their harmony at a methodological level. That is, that since any level of social intercourse is in principle inseparable from the totality, any concrete instance is an
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expression of an essential unity. His concept of ‘structure of feeling’, for example as something wider and deeper in application than ‘ideology’, depends on this methodological conception. It is not dissimilar to a notion of a different tradition: that of the ‘spirit of an age’. Thompson has rightly taken Williams to task over such a conflict-free formalism, when applied to a concrete historical formation, namely the 1840s. On the contrary, Thompson argues, conflict – and in particular, class conflict – was the motor of social relationships. His expertise in nineteenth-century history is used to adequately substantiate the claim. I have been attempting to show that Thompson’s practice as a historian is far from presuppositionless or concept-free. One further example should suffice. In his essay ‘Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, while still insisting on subjective experience as the validation of concepts about social relationships, this study of the inward apprehension of time under changing conditions of wage labour as a commodity nevertheless raises questions not dissimilar to those posed by Althusser in his discussion of the concept of historical time. In a sentence such as ‘Time becomes currency: it is not passed but spent’,13 Thompson implicitly acknowledges the necessity of an objective account of modes of production and the relationships which they define as the precondition, and not the result, of subjective or collective experience. In addition, that proposition poses the problem of how to conceptualise time ‘itself ’, or, strictly speaking, different temporal structures.14 This, in turn, undermines the conception of the historians ‘object’ as given ‘periods’, or areas of analysis delineated by temporal boundaries, such as ‘the social history of the nineteenth-century’. To extend a phrase of Hobsbawm’s15 we have to move from social history to the history of society to the theory of social formations. In the course of his latest work – a project intended to reconstruct a view of eighteenthcentury social relations as a whole from the scattered documentary sources of a supposedly ‘criminal’ fringe – Thompson again mounts an attack on current formalism within Marxism. The onslaught is not so out of the blue as seems at first sight. He has been attempting to suggest that the Waltham Black Acts represented a last resort (though not entirely successful) on the part of an apparently secure class society, to counter the growing militancy of hunters and poachers of peasant or yeoman background, which threatened to undermine the property relations upon which that class society rested. In their defence of certain agrarian practices and livelihood, these hunters consciously challenged the arbitrary extension of property by taking extreme action. They nevertheless retained a belief in the appeal to justice and ‘legal’ protection. Thompson theorises his defence of the hunters by opposing it to two apparently antagonistic theories which, for him, share the same assumptions. These are a ‘law and order’ historiography, and structuralist Marxism. The former rationalises the actions of the ruling class in terms of the necessity for the stability of the legal status of property relations. The latter, he claims, shares this view by its insistence that we should never be surprised to find out that laws are always class laws. Against both positions, and in favour of the hunters’ indignation at blatant miscarriages of justice, Thompson argues, rightly in my view, that were laws as obviously partial as is made out, there would be no way in which they could contribute to the often subtle mechanisms by which cultural hegemony is exercised. In some sense, laws must actually be fair and just for much of the time. In that sense, he concludes, legal protection against arbitrary power is an unquestionable human good. In this series of arguments, it seems to me, virtually all the characteristics of Thompson’s work are present. The methodological belief that cultural experience is the only starting point. The idea that by the imaginative reconstruction of the rationality of the lower classes, as expressed in their own beliefs and agency, one can ‘get at’ the real history. The insistence
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that this real history can defy overbrief abstractions. The ethical impulse to defend the subjects of his text because they are the basis of both history-making and politics. The assertion that such positions are related to, but not reducible to, concepts such as class or hegemony. Just to list these elements, however, reveals the inherent ambiguity of some of his theoretical arguments. Is the transformative labour of the historian ever simply a more or less transparent view on to the real historical past? Are past systems of social relations in any sense chiefly explicable in terms of (a minority) literary experience gleaned from selectively created and selectively preserved sources? How can there be a subjectively defined concept of class? On these questions Thompson’s position can only be described as naively empiricist. On the other hand. I have indicated that certain features of his work are inconceivable without a familiarity with Marxist concepts which, whatever his claim to the contrary, necessarily have criteria of application quite removed from the moral priority of subjective experience. This very term is dubious: he often means by it cultural formations or traditions, but these yet more depend on a series of general concepts. In arguing against the idea that law is invariably a reflection of class interests, Thompson misguidedly attempts to foist upon ‘structuralist’ Marxists a vulgar conception of ideology and politics which it has been one of their primary achievements to refute. In the concept of ‘relative autonomy’, it has been the position of Althusser, and (for the political ‘level’) Poulantzas,16 to insist that there is a genuine effectivity of each of these levels: not the appearance of, but a real dislocation between social practices. And this is, if less rigorously, what Thompson himself argues. However, in the myopic misrecognition of which he is often guilty, he does not carry the argument further to include the realisation that the very scope and limits of autonomy are in turn set by its compatibility with the reproduction of the relations of production. These relations are class relations. There are, then, some similarities between Thompson and those Marxists against whom he takes a stand. In his analysis of methodism, to take a final example,17 Thompson comes close to a ‘structural’ account of ideology. By this I mean that in his refusal to write off ideology as simply ‘false consciousness’, a discussion of the mechanisms in which it operates as a necessarily imaginary relation seems to be on the agenda. However, in his determination i) to avoid abstraction, and ii) to repeatedly conflate vulgar with what he equally indiscriminately calls ‘structuralist’ Marxism, he is subjectively bound to close the discussion. This personalist ascription has methodological roots: in maintaining that experience and agency are the irreducible stuff or historical reality, Thompson is epistemologically prevented from theorising the object of Marxism and therefore of Marxist history. His rejoinder to such a charge would no doubt be similar to that directed against Anderson: (to paraphrase) history remains irreducible, but also does not become history until there is a model. Yet the moment the model becomes explicit, it begins to petrify into axioms. We cannot, however, do without models; there must be a quarrel between model and reality, ‘the creative quarrel which is at the heart of cognition’. Now E.P. Thompson is not a naive realist: he is aware that conceptual categories are indispensible for making sense of ‘the facts’. The above definition of knowledge, consequently, displays an anti-empiricist intention. In conclusion, I want to briefly argue that in spite of that intention, the argument embodies the confusion which lies at the heart of Thompson’s work. The main point here is to insist that theoretical history – or indeed any other kind of scientific theory – to be coherently anti-empiricist, cannot rely on the notion of a model. For the conception of a model already admits of the separation between fact and theory with priority given to the former. A theoretical ‘hypothesis’ can, therefore, only be a
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more or less plausible construction to be judged by its ‘correspondence’ or similarity to the ‘real’ facts. Yet this picture (itself a model) presupposes a means of identifying how closely the model approximates to reality. That is, an independent, a-theoretical means of identification: a projected neutrality which empiricism quickly reduces to the ‘common sense’, or experiences, or perceptions of the empirical individual. There cannot be a theory of models of approximation which is not intrinsically open to the empiricist position. A consistent anti-empiricist theory of models is, therefore, and untenable theoretical stance, as is the concomitant notion of a dialectical provocation of theory by fact. ‘Facts’ and theory are not equivalent and comparable categories: facts can neither stand on their own, nor ‘speak’ for themselves. Any role which supposedly non-theoretical referents play in the construction of knowledge is itself, and cannot be other than, theoretically produced. Thus it is important to see that Thompson’s thesis that models are the precondition of knowledge, yet necessarily distort it, is not a dialectical thesis, but a contradictory one. There is no logical sense in which knowledge can be defined as having a contradictory essence. To offer a somewhat psychologistic explanation: that move represents the wishful thinking of someone who cannot resolve the antithetical pull of his theoretical tendencies. I have argued that in spite of a strong Marxist and political thrust, a substantial presupposition of Thompson’s work in general is that the object of history is real and unproblematic, and that the task of the historian is to reveal its authenticity. The result of this reversion to the irreducibility of certain realities is to theoretically close discussion under the shelter of a metaphysical belief. Such a closure, whatever the important source work and humanist insight of Thompson’s project, is ideological.
Section three: Class consciousness and social control Thompson’s review of John Foster’s book is appropriately entitled ‘Measuring Class Consciousness’. This is a useful starting point from which to grasp the apparent similarities and profound divergencies of the two historians. The convergence is at the level of ‘subjectmatter’: part of Foster’s account is the growing class consciousness of the proletariat in a period which partly includes, but goes beyond, the limits of Thompson’s The Making. On the other hand, it will be clear from my outline of the latter’s interests that the notion that such a phenomenon can be ‘objectively’ assessed, especially by the partial use of statistical methods of measurement, is fundamentally in opposition to Thompson’s phenomenological approach. Characteristically, the review is intended to establish the ‘platonism’, typical of all ‘pre-selective’ modes of historical analysis, in Foster’s work. This polemic once again allows Thompson to undermine an argument by reference to the actual facts (misconceptions about handloom weavers, chartism, etc.). In the review, however, Thompson refers to a method of analysis wider in scope than the perhaps too-easy critique of pre-conceived models. This is that, for all Foster has done to reassert ‘social being’ as the basis of Marxist history, his thesis – and in particular its pre-conceived nature – paradoxically remains at the level of a supposed progression of working-class consciousness. Now, although we do an injustice to Foster to miss the fact that he is concerned to overcome the rigid conception that ideas are without material effects, be they in the economy or in political practice, nevertheless Thompson’s point signals discrepancies in Foster’s project. In this section I will attempt to identify these by arguing that they are primarily to be located not in the epistemological space between concept and fact, but at the level of the concepts themselves. Foster’s claim, to simplify, is this: the limited class identity of the early (c. 1830) working class gave way to a revolutionary consciousness in a period of crisis for the bourgeoisie
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(1830–47), that was followed in turn by a phase of ‘liberalisation’, which, though corresponding to a new stage of capitalist expansion, was the product of a necessary and conscious response on the part of the bourgeois class to the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. I have put this argument in a general form because Foster himself regards it as a contribution to our knowledge of the overall development of capitalism.18 It is, however, important to remember that his claim and its substantiation refer primarily to Oldham. This imposes necessary limitations on his mode of analysis. The identification of the nature and extent of class membership, cultural formations, political alliances, and, above all, the mechanisms of liberalisation, are specific to Oldham. Yet the method of enquiry is general and comparative: this is why Foster insists that his inclusion of material from Northampton and South Shields is crucial. In this sense the study is ‘objective’ and anti-historicist. The reasons for the existence of class consciousness here, or the lack of it there, are assessed by general criteria. And, as a Marxist, it is not surprising to find that these are a combination of economic, political and ideological factors. The means of assessment, however, as Thompson points out, are in no way the prerogative of Marxists: census data, housing, intermarriage, poverty, and occupational statistics familiar to social scientists of many persuasions. It is in his marshalling of the extensive research in the light of a thesis about the development of the social totality which distinguishes Foster’s project as Marxist, and from modern social scientific empiricism.19 What are the more specific arguments? The early formation of capitalist social relations – quite distinct from the later ‘industrial’ revolution – removed the conditions necessary for social revolution in the eighteenth century. Despite influential and literate radical groups around the turn of the century, state intimidation on a massive scale prevented the fruition of Jacobin ideas. The new development of the productive forces, however, entailed different and characteristically industrial methods of guaranteeing profit levels. There was, consequently, a change in the control of working-class living standards from prices to wages. It was in the face of wage cutting as a systematic mechanism of class exploitation that a parallel economic class consciousness amongst the working class was formed. This having been established, Foster traces the development of trade union consciousness from the ‘guerilla campaign’20 of 1811–12, though its legalisation in 1825, to the upsurge and failure of general unionism. In Oldham, this massive new presence of the working class had political dimensions, which, by the late 1820s, had qualitatively altered the political balance of forces. With its unique ‘unity from below’, the alliance in Oldham between petty-bourgeois radicals and the working class had established its control over police force and vestry, had MPs committed to radical policies decisively formed by the masses, themselves unable to vote. This local political eminence resulted in popular control over the Poor Law, which remained unenforced for 12 years. Such popular gains, Foster argues, achieved through mass mobilisation, required a high degree of unity between vanguard and rank-and-file which was absent in previous struggles, and suggests that we are dealing with a new phase of class consciousness. What other factors would clarify such a development? In a painstaking comparison of his ‘three towns’, Foster concludes that there is not enough to establish that unemployment, poverty, or unionisation have significant political consequences. Again, the existence of a tradition of radicalism does not help to distinguish Oldham’s class consciousness from Northampton or Shields, where it was conspicuously absent. Tradition and conditions of life, then, do not, of themselves, imply revolutionary class consciousness. Neither do patterns of housing conditions, intermarriage, or occupational and neighbourhood interrelations. (It should be noted that some of Foster’s figures are not
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actually for the period under analysis). We can, in fact, observe, as would be reasonable if political factors overshadowed sectional, a higher degree of occupational integration in Oldham, but it is probably too small to substantiate Foster’s case. In one respect, however Oldham is clearly differentiated: the ‘logic’ of the structure of its main industries, especially cotton. Shipping in Shields was a (basically) stable trade, where unemployment was a recurrent problem for employers and men alike. Northampton’s shoe industry remained domestic and sweated. The scale and technology of Oldham’s cotton industry alone of the three created work conditions which hinged around wage struggles. Here the connection could no longer be hidden: the arbitrariness and severity of cuts in living standards were directly produced by the capitalist mode of appropriation itself. Here were the ‘economics of class consciousness’ which provided the conditions for the crucial level of ‘intellectual commitment’ which, according to Foster, differentiated the first stage of consciousness from the second, and revolutionary, stage. This revolutionary consciousness, however, was defeated by a conscious and consistent ruling class offensive. The reason, we are told, is not to be seen in terms of either economic recovery or the reassertion of law and order. The facts might suggest this: loss of popular control over police, poor relief, and parliamentary representation, and the disaffection from the alliance of tradesmen and small masters at a time of the switch to foreign investment and increased differentials. But these are results, Foster insists, and not causes of the loss of initiative in mass political action, which allowed the re-isolation of the town’s vanguard. This is in turn partially explained by the bourgeoisie’s change of strategy: accepting the popular demand for ‘10 hours’ legislation, household suffrage, and a Health of Towns Act. These political concessions accompanied measures in industry aimed to cut out the initial source of the problem. The creation of a ‘labour aristocracy’ by means of increased differentials reintroduced sectional authority and consciousness. Pacers in cotton, pieceworkers in metal, and (to some extent) pithead observers in coal, became the new vehicles of class discipline. ‘Liberalisation’ succeeded at an ideological level through the return of religious influences, Sunday schools, and reformist institutions such as mechanics institutes. The completion of the process of capitalist counter-offensive is indicated by the deep-seated anti-Irish and anti-foreign chauvinism shown in the 1850s and 1860s. One way to begin assessing Foster’s challenging account is to start, following a ‘review’ procedure, by noting its omissions, and thus making, in a fairly ad hoc fashion, some countersuggestions. It could be pointed out, for example,21 that there can be no simple bipartite division between boom and slump, or that Sunday schools, institutes, and popular demands for reform occur throughout the century. Or that there is no account of either national context or the role of Chartism,22 and that to apply the tag ‘guerilla campaign’ to a series of complex, but to some extent backward struggles (‘Luddism’), under the general heading of ‘early trade union consciousness’, is simply inadequate. At a more general level, Saville23 has criticised the unmarxist anachronisms of Foster’s conception of initial industrialisation, and his categorisation of the early movements’ ‘lack of Leninist rigour about state power’.24 Further, his case – indeed his research – is undermined by his own admission that the statistical evidence is no more than a ‘rough backing for more impressionistic findings’,25 yet it is maintained that the factor of ‘intellectual commitment’ (the findings) constituted the ‘decisive factor’.26 Whatever the grounds for such a variety of criticisms – and many of them are, in my view, correct – they are only the index of Foster’s real difficulty: the incoherence of his theoretical framework. If the overall importance of his work is as a rare attempt to systematically apply Marxist concepts to historical sources, the most impressive features are those least amenable
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to Foster’s Leninist rigour. What is lacking, however, is not the empiricist proposition that abstraction will necessarily distort the raw material, but a curious lack of systematisation and rigour, not in their application, but in the concepts themselves. In a review I have found very useful in this account, Gareth Stedman Jones27 argues that the problem lies in the combination of two sets of concepts which are in certain respects fundamentally opposed. In characterising capitalist relations as ‘alienation’, expressed above all in terms of ideas as ‘false’ consciousness, Foster employs a concept of the early Marx which is inherently unhistorical. It is a thesis which, because of its philosophical dependence on an abstract and unverifiable ‘human nature’ (or identity, or creativity), in positing a lost essence, entails the possibility of its recovery. Foster, following other Marxists who have used this humanist schema, sees such a recovery in the victory of true consciousness over false. The content of such a process is filled out not by philosophical explanation but in the Leninist thesis that trade union consciousness can give way to revolutionary consciousness by the politicisation of the former stage through the intervention of a politically literate organisation. In modern times, this has been seen to be the task of a Communist Party. Foster’s necessary historical modification of that role emphasises instead the remarkable degree of unity between the masses and the leaders of the radical tradition. And, following Lenin, Foster attempts to show that the conditions for such political mobilisation are themselves produced by capitalist growth. Stedman Jones, with these kinds of premisses in mind, increases the catalogue of criticisms of Foster, though more theoretically based. The simplicity of the False/True consciousness schema leads to the over-simplification of the move from trade union consciousness to revolutionary. For example, even if it can be shown that something more than trade union consciousness was at work, it is not necessarily an instance of revolutionary will. This, argues Stedman Jones, has to be determined by the content of the demands in question. And the demand for the Ten Hours Bill can hardly pose as revolutionary. Moreover, in principle, the idea of the Marxist party is so central to Lenin’s concept and so clearly anachronistic to Foster’s object that radical leaders unjustifiably become ‘vanguard’, and too much is made to hang on the rather intangible factor of intellectual conviction as the decisive, new political element after 1830. Factors such as conviction, or even absence of sectionalism, do not themselves indicate a revolutionary will. Without wishing to disagree with many of Stedman Jones’ points, it is important, I think, to examine why the Leninist problematic and that of alienation might be seen to be compatible. Both share a formal schema of ‘stages’ in a progression to an ideologically free consciousness which serves as a teleological end from which to categorise previous stages. Such a schema will inevitably tend, therefore, to reduce ideology to just false or distorted consciousness, and thus be unable to recognise, especially for this historical period, that 1) there can be different forms of ideology having their own specific conditions of existence. 2) That there is no simple qualitative progression from ideology to non-ideology, even under the ‘external’ pressure of politics. And 3) that there therefore can be different degrees of ‘falsity’, or, better, that since ideology is a relation of people to their real conditions, it is as true as it is false. Political ideas are capable of having effect at all levels of the structure of a social formation and so cannot be reduced to the internal development of one of those levels: consciousness or ideology. There is, however, a good reason why such a conception persists: both ideology and politics are often implicitly defined as the effects of the progression of the economy. From my account of Foster’s argument, it is clear that he sees the economic level as determining both politics and ideology: the existence of class consciousness in Oldham alone of the three
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towns is the result of the development of the contradictions of capitalist relations as expressed in the internal problems of the cotton industry. This seems to be inconsistent. Is the existence of class consciousness determined by the ‘decisive factor’ of intellectual conviction, or by the stage of the mode of production? Although Foster hangs a lot on the former notion, we have seen that it is untenable in any ‘hard’ sense. However, it seems in the end that it is this latter factor, operating independently of the progression of consciousness, which posits the need for an equivalence to its own combustible state at other levels of society. As yet, though, the ambiguity is only sufficient to change some of the emphases. It is in his explanation of liberalisation that the methodological ambiguity becomes a contradiction. Liberalisation, for Foster, is the conscious response by the bourgeoisie to defuse insurgent class consciousness. On the one hand, this personalist argument is seen in terms of the political appropriation of working-class demands and the consequent absence of an independent socialist programme. (It does not seem to occur to Foster that the ease with which such demands were appropriated calls into question their revolutionary content and the class consciousness of those who held them. Surely, here, an analysis of Chartism would have clarified the issue?) Above all, such an approach is taken further when he argues that the success of the bourgeoisie was fundamentally secured by the deliberate creation of a labour aristocracy. I have discussed the basis of this notion: a tiny minority of the labour movement are ‘bought off ’, ‘through the market’, and entrusted with positions of privileged authority in the structure of Oldham’s industry. Stedman Jones asserts that this conception is a structural rather than a ‘betrayal’ theory of incorporation. And the grounds for this claim subsist in the Leninist theory of a necessary staged development into monopoly and imperialism: a process supposedly inherent in the mechanisms of capitalist growth. Foster accepts this position. One needn’t accept this theory in its entirety to say, with Stedman Jones, that the solution to the ‘crisis’ was only the re-stabilisation of the labour process on the basis of modern industry. Such an economistic position is open to Foster: some of his other claims are similar in outlook. Nevertheless, and paradoxically, the fact of restabilisation through the creation of a labour aristocracy and liberal ideology, is primarily, for Foster, the product of a conscious counter-offensive by the bourgeoisie, necessary primarily to offset an impending revolutionary situation. This is further implied by his assertion about the existence of revolutionary consciousness. Foster’s analysis of the two ‘moments’, then, has, at the least, paradoxical results. The moment of class consciousness, apparently explained by ‘intellectual conviction’, is at a deeper level given by the critical contradiction between the forces and relations of production. The moment of liberalisation, however, is not the further development of capitalist structures of industry, but rather is the product of a direct political response on the part of individuals of the bourgeois class. But for the obstinate persistence of the whole problematic of false consciousness/ revolutionary consciousness, such ambiguities need not arise. It would be more plausible to ascribe the contradictory content and movement of early working-class politics to the very fact that it was ‘early’, operating under the general instability of the formation of industrial capitalism. It would be further possible to attribute liberalisation in a non-voluntaristic manner to the growing stabilisation of the social formation without resort to the dubious category of labour aristocracy. Dubious, that is, in so far as it is used in a functionalist way. (See Note at end of Section.) That problematic is, however, central to his case: without the claim that revolutionary
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consciousness existed, there would be no need to revert to a ‘conspiracy’ theory of ruling class manoevre as an explanation of its defeat. It seems that a false problem has been set up, and one depending on the correspondence of a progressive dialectic of consciousness with the underlying movement of the social totality, in particular, the economic structure. It is the assumption that, whatever the phenomenal prominence of politics or the economy, the two form an essential and unproblematic unity, that is responsible for the arbitrary resort to now the one explanation, then to the other. This conception, despite other differences, is shared by the ‘alienation’ and the Leninist frameworks. Frameworks which use this assumption tend to structure their arguments towards a ‘necessary’ or teleological end (revolutionary consciousness, for example, or the supersession of alienation, or the idea that capitalism is inherently incapable of survival). Such teleology is common to historicist explanation, but in this variant we also seem to have an example of what Poulantzas has termed the ‘invariable duo’ of historicism,28 the combination of the seemingly opposed terms of the couplet: economism/voluntarism. This dualism is not only in the alternations between economic necessity and political freedom of response, it enters into the very concepts employed. The labour aristocracy, for instance, is both the product of political design and the expression of a certain stage in capitalist development. Ideology is the necessary result of a capitalist system (false consciousness), yet is prevented from becoming ‘true’ under requisite maturity of the economic contradiction by the imposition of bourgeois class values. Such definitions are possible only if one conceives of a social formation as an expressive unity. The difficulty is, however, that being dependent on that conception, these definitions cannot then be used as the ‘concrete’ justifications of such a conception. Therein lies the theoretical obstacle of projects such as that of ‘Class Struggle’. From liberalisation to general strike Foster’s latest articles29 on the general strike of 1926 compare interestingly with his book. Once again the concept of a labour aristocracy as a means of social control is the organising thread. The nineteenth-century labour aristocracy, according to Foster, explains the combination of political backwardness and organisational advance in the working class. Under conditions of crisis for British capitalism in the international market, and in the unique circumstances of the First World War, there occurred, however, a massive increase in union membership, accompanied by widespread industrial militancy. Coupled with this was a marked politicisation of sections of the working class, as instanced in the shop stewards movement, and the later organisation around the defence of the young Soviet Union, embodied in the Councils of Action, 1920. Foster charts the development of this conflict situation from ‘above’ as well as below: the stability of the British economy, above all of finance (i.e. Banking) capital, absolutely required an ideological counter-offensive in order to prepare for an attack on wage levels (this, in turn, necessitated by the Gold Standard policy and the chronic state of Britain’s basic industry, especially coal). To create such conditions, the ruling class could no longer employ the classical labour aristocracy manoevre: splitting the working class by buying off its leaders through the market. Rather, the policy appropriate to conditions of mass unionisation was a process of incorporation of union leaders, and thus those class organisations. Parallel to this was the attempt to de-politicise the newly-successful political wing of the movement by ‘educating Labour’ to be a constitutional, non-militant, parliamentary organisation. As in the last century, the initial moves in this process were directed at the
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accommodation of certain political demands: Lloyd George’s ‘social imperialist’30 welfare policies. Such a two-pronged attack – the de-politicisation of union activity and the incorporation of labour’s political party – became the main (and successful) ruling class strategy. The ‘Baldwinian’ policy did not, however, have an easy passage. Apart from the relative divergence within the ruling class and government (notably Churchill’s position), over the question of a ‘soft’ line, it was above all the massive resistance of the working class which led to the eventual adoption of ‘hard’ tactics during the general strike itself. If the leaders capitulated to the temptations of ‘education’, the rank-and-file of the class showed, once again, their fierce class resilience, something which, Foster remarks in Class Struggle, although often existing as false consciousness, nevertheless contains the ‘trigger’ which could set off fundamental opposition to the capitalist system.31 I have presented this thesis schematically because, at root, it is a fairly simple one. And one that is clearly operative in Class Struggle. Given certain critical economic factors and a resurgence of political class consciousness, the ruling class deliberately de-fuse the situation by the adoption of a (different but recognisably) labour aristocracy strategy. The result, although by no means guaranteed (Foster’s stress),32 is nevertheless the maintenance of bourgeois class domination. One factor clearly more important in the 1920s than in the 1850s, is the role – and for Foster, the directly class-functional role – of the State. This element, he argues, was recognised by the men of the Councils of Action, but forgotten by labour leaders in the six years of growing collaborationist ideology up to 1926. The reason for the intensity of the struggle of that year, it is implied, was that many ordinary workers had remembered. In his shorter article in Marxism Today, it is principally this theme of the class nature of the state and the resilience of rank-and-file consciousness which is put forward as the ‘lesson’ to be learnt from those years. These arguments help to clarify the presuppositions of John Foster’s work in general. Ideology and politics (the state), operating through mechanisms of economic control (labour aristocracy phases 1 & 2), are the means by which the bourgeoisie maintains class power in crisis situations which are, to a large extent, ‘given’ by the economic contradiction, and which depresses the tendency of the working class to aspire to revolutionary consciousness. It is the task of Marxists, it would seem to follow, to lay bare these mechanisms. Such a political orientation depends on certain theoretical premisses, some of which I have outlined. In the later articles, it is even more clear than in the book that, for Foster, there can be no conception of ideology or politics which is not functionalist. Moreover the functions which they perform are the expressions of the very logic of capitalist development. It would seem important, therefore, to try to relate any criticisms of this analysis of a particular conjuncture, to some theoretical alternatives. The ascription of revolutionary consciousness to the working class seems exaggerated. That there was a militant economism, and among certain sections, a socialist outlook (say, the shop stewards’ leaders), is undeniable. But, as Hinton,33 for example, makes clear, this was far from a general movement of the class: sectionalism and patriotism even in militant cities such as Glasgow, remained predominant. By the time of the Councils of Action, such militancy had been broken (by the disappearance of the conditions upon which craft militancy rested – dilution, for example – or by the large-scale post-war unemployment), or had of itself died out. It seems unlikely that, whatever the importance of the Councils for consciously political militants, it cannot be easily merged with wartime economism, just as the latter was not quite the ‘same’ phenomenon as the syndicalist-inspired unrest of 1910–14. Nor is there any
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evidence to suggest that the participants in such struggles went over in large numbers to the cause of the Soviets. Greater numbers opposed British intervention, but that was a different demand: Ramsay MacDonald supported it. The extremely close connection of state and ruling class during the First World War was, by definition, a unique circumstance. The state in capitalist formations does indeed work in the interests of capitalism, but in general there is no simple correlation between class and state, either in terms of personnel or in those of legislation. By Foster’s own admission, the ‘ruling’ class was itself fragmented, and those in the Tory party who could roughly be said to be its ‘representatives’, if anything, more so. Foster’s theoretical collapse of the political and economic levels of a social formation oversimplifies (in the clarity of conception of the ‘Baldwinian’ strategy, for instance, and its extension in time through very different politicians) the nature of the specificity of politics. To reject his a priori ruling class teleology while maintaining the determinateness of ideology and the state, especially in conjunctures of crisis such as the general strike, is quite compatible with the correct, but in itself misleading, slogan that the state is a class state. Whatever its own difficulties, Poulantzas’ account of the political ‘region’34 is one attempt to theorise that compatibility. A final point concerns the idea of a split between leaders and led of a class. This is entailed by Foster’s second labour aristocracy thesis. It assumes a purity of consciousness in the ‘rank-and-file’ which is almost assumed to be natural – quite unjustifiably – to the future bearers of socialism. With such a conception there can be no room for the idea that ideology is an organic or structural part of the social formation, having a real basis35 and a theoretical explanation. Instead, it is presupposed in Foster’s general ‘social control’ approach, that reformism, economism, and sectionalism are artificially imposed from above by the buying off of labour leaders. On the contrary, and despite the greater militancy of the rank-andfile, labourist and syndicalist36 ideologies were a constant feature of working-class consciousness throughout the period, and none the less ideological for being militant. The gullibility of labour leaders (indeed the fact that they are leaders) is more likely to signify the general absence rather than the presence of a coherent counter-ideology or political practice. A note on the ‘labour aristocracy’ It will be clear from my general argument that I leave open the possibility of there being a non-functionalist use of the term ‘labour aristocracy’. Whatever else may be said of it, it cannot be a general category of analysis. Foster’s writing, I have argued, hankers after such applicability. But, as Stedman Jones points out, the internal differentiation of the working class has been a regular feature of capitalism taking many specific forms. It seems evident, moreover, that no simple correspondence can be established between political practice or function and the degree of economic privilege (or, as Foster himself shows, emiseration). The case for the ‘labour aristocracy’ as a historically specific cultural and economic formation has been argued by R.Q. Gray in an important recent book.37 Consciously adopting a Gramscian approach, to question of ideology and class position, Gray’s account is an attempt to offer a Marxist account of the phenomenon without the ambiguities of previous Marxist writers, deriving from a mechanical theoretical perspective. In spite of parenthetical qualifications, Gray does not include Foster in such a category, which does include, in part, Lenin and Hobsbawm. While recognising Foster’s contribution towards the acceptance of ideology’s ‘cultural’ conditions of existence, my own view would not, ultimately, permit such an exception. Gray’s account relies heavily on Foster’s methodology (a statistically informed
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thesis about the political nature and ‘place’ of an economic phenomenon), while correctly avoiding the tendency towards a ‘conspiracy’ theory, and the consequent lack of an organic (structural) conception of hegemony which Foster’s account often implies. The result is a well-argued theory of the quite specific cultural and political characteristics of a highly placed stratum of skilled manual workers in Victorian Edinburgh. The thesis is a familiar one (respectability, aspiration to better housing, education, selfdifferentiation) which need not be repeated here. Gray’s important qualification, however, should be noted. Just as the process of hegemony, despite being (to use an Althusserian phrase) structured in dominance, yet must be constantly re-negotiated, so a conception of the labour aristocracy and the ‘corporate’ consciousness of the mid-Victorian working class has to include the fact of class struggle, which was, at times, intense. This kind of stress runs against the theoretical grain of some of Foster’s formulations, for example: ‘For a whole half-century labour’s class organisations remained virtually under enemy control’ (Skelly, ed. p. 24). Explicitly Gramscian, Gray’s contribution to Marxist historiography is significant. Yet some doubts about the practice of Marxist history remain. Gray insists on the need for further comparative material, because no general conclusions can be drawn from his study. When such material exists in bulk We can begin to write working class history as the history of any class must be written – by beginning from the life situation, the hopes and fears of members of the class. Gray p. 190 This Thompson-like formulation involves a concession to the methods and outlook of a separatist labour history which is curiously at odds with the presuppositions of Gray’s own analysis. One thing a Gramscian view is committed to is the abandonment of piecemeal ‘histories’ in favour of a general, integrated and theoretical analysis of historical conjunctures. Whatever the difficulties – and none more so than assessing Gramsci’s own philosophical pronouncements – of ‘epistemologising’ history, this retention of the rather naive idea that the validation of Marxist concepts (or those of any other systematic body of ideas) awaits the unproblematic ‘collection’ of localised data is yet more difficult to establish theoretically. Perhaps it is time that the concept of an aristocracy of labour, something which has its origins in middle class Victorian parlance, and which, as subsequently theorised in ‘social’ history is open to a number of arbitrary or ‘sociological’ interpretations, should be dropped by Marxists in favour of more general, comprehensive categories. The term could only unambiguously refer to an objective phenomenon (say, a historically specific category of the social division of labour) if the metaphorical and emotive character of the description (‘aristocracy’) were to be omitted. The latter element is, in effect, an ideological description taken from near-contemporary commentators, and derived from the attitudes of some of the agents at the time. While it is doubtful if such a restriction would satisfy those who employ the term, the confusing connotations of both economism (‘conspiracy’ theses), and subjectivism (definition by moral attitudes) might be avoided.
Section four: Sectionalism and politics Some of the weaknesses of both the ‘economic’ and ‘labour’ approaches to history have been pointed out. Neither the procedure which consists in ‘reading off ’ social phenomena in terms of the motor of the economic structure and its changes, nor that which gives priority
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to the history of one class (here, the working class) in terms of the growth of its institutions and influences seems to me to be wholly adequate or specifically Marxist. On the other hand it would seem to be obvious that the struggles of the working class, and therefore history from the point of view of that class, has a special place for Marxists. If ‘from the point of view of ’ is a formulation which is, theoretically speaking, misleading, if nevertheless poses the question of the political ‘relevance’ of Marxist history in a way that cannot be simply dismissed with the brief rejection of ‘labour’ history. Even if such relevance is conceived to be the clear-sighted strategies gained from a scientific knowledge in which the notion of a ‘special region’ cannot be morally imported from outside the articulated structure undergoing analysis, then that claim itself still has a necessary political dimension. One way or another, we ‘learn’ from history, or at least from historical analysis. This phrase has, however, been in different ways the justification for a number of extremely mechanistic political outlooks, some of which are, paradoxically, quite unhistorical. The erection of, for example, the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 as the unquestioned model of transition to socialism, has led to a dogmatic conception of the ‘correct’ strategy for a Marxist party. The notion that the immanent revolutionary consciousness of the working class is repeatedly ‘betrayed’ by labour or socialist leaders is another instance. Whatever the form of the argument, these notions assume an essential similarity of historical conjunctures grounded in a teleological conception of the revolutionary situation (including revolutionary consciousness). This (perhaps natural) inclination is current at present in the interest shown by left-wing students and militants in the early years of British communism, where comparison of that period is often offered with both the contemporary situation in Russia, and the crisis of capitalism in Britain today. In this context, James Hinton has made a significant contribution to our historical understanding. What is interesting in his work is the insistence that any political lessons which are to be learnt from that conjuncture can only be obtained by the assertion of the historical specificity. On the other hand, such a ‘concrete analysis of a concrete situation’ is still guided by the idea that we must known our minds a conception of the appropriate conditions under which a successful Leninist politics is possible. This clearly holds directives for a historical study of such a conjuncture. It implies, for example, that any chronological account of ‘the events’, however rooted in the ‘point of view’ of the working class, is at best inadequate, at worst radically misguided. At the same time, it directs criticism towards those who wilfully abstract ‘conclusions’ which have no basis in a thoroughly historical appreciation of the situation. The first distortion, he suggests in his short book on the formation and tactics of the CPGB (written with Richard Hyman),38 can be found in Klugmann’s official party history:39 the second in the extreme ‘Trotskyist’ thesis that the CP betrays the revolutionary upsurge of the masses.40 In a review of an otherwise useful book on the origins of the British revolutionary movement.41 Hinton makes clear that Walter Kendall’s arbitrary ‘rightist’ view that the CPGB was from the first a diversionary creation of Moscow, nevertheless hangs on the same absence of a historical explanation. Both these shorter pieces, however, rest on conclusions about war-time militancy, which is the subject of Hinton’s major book, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement. His thesis is, briefly speaking, that the war-time economy created industrial conditions (particularly the ‘dilution’ of skilled labour) under which the previously conservative craft traditions of engineers could become the vehicle of a new class militancy. Moreover, since the war-time struggle for economic demands across in the rare situation in which the class function of a state machine ‘servile’ to capitalist interests could be transparently perceived, there existed the possibility of an advance from labourist or syndicalist to socialist politics
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within the working class. It was, above all, the assertion of genuinely rank-and-file activity (as opposed to bargaining by union executives) which made such a move possible. There is no unwarranted moral optimism in Hinton’s position, however. The tension between craft and class only allowed definite possibilities, not certainties. The movement remained within sectional necessities of an economic nature (dilution), which, without the unlikely event of a dislocation between shop floor economism and socialist consciousness, greatly hindered the attempt to reach out beyond sectionalism to the (majority) unskilled workers. The revolutionary leaders of the shop stewards’ movement undoubtedly considered their politics an adequate means of facilitating such a step, but, objectively, whether BSP or SLP,42 such politics remained syndicalist, and thus, however militant, economistic in orientation. Unlikely too was the possibility of a ‘revolutionary’ conjuncture based on a handful of strategic but localised centres. In ostensibly the most inflammable of these, ‘red’ Clydeside, (though Hinton plausibly argues43 that Sheffield, if less visibly so, was in fact the most successful for the shop stewards movement), the revolutionary leaders, helped by political divisions within Glasgow’s socialist groupings, were fairly easily contained and outwitted by the state44 in its attempt to facilitate a rapid and constant supply of war materials. The struggle over dilution was, after all, a defensive operation. With dilution clearly irresistible, the stewards main policy was to have a say in how the process was to be conducted: to enforce such a policy,45 however, required a mobilisation of the whole class which was from the outset close to moonshine. Further, as long as people such as Maclean remained propagandists, by choice having nothing to do with what they saw as the Clyde Workers Committee’s collaboration in imperialist war policies, there was little likelihood of a mass political response to force the issue. This separation of struggles assured that the very issue of the war remained secondary, and when occasionally it was in principle opposed, it was usually over the question of conscription: and conscription of skilled workers at that. Having countered any romanticised pictures of these class struggles it is, however, important to see that, for Hinton, they were neither inevitably limited, nor without great significance. On a number of occasions (to continue to exemplify Glasgow), an extension of struggles, based on but going beyond dilution, was feasible. If the general rent strike of 1915 has been falsely set up as such an occasion, the imprisonment and deportation of the CWC leaders in 1916 clearly became an issue of political consequence in itself, around which general working class protest could have been marshalled. In the event, not craft sectionalism as such, but lingering political and inter-plant rivalry was, sadly, the predominant reason for the delay of a co-ordinated response. The opportunity of providing the kind of link-up of a wider political nature was lost, and potential of such overwhelming shows of deep-rooted if untheorised dissatisfaction with capitalism as the 40 hours strike of 1919, correspondingly less explosive. Glasgow, then, led the movement in the early years of the war. The CWC, however, was not reconstituted until September 1917, and so the initiative for national momentum passed to other centres. The national strikes of May 1917 had little effect on the temporarily quiescent Glaswegian working class. There was nothing in essence, however, which distinguished the demands at issue in May from previous concerns on the Clyde. The proposed abolition of the Trade Card scheme which exempted craftsmen from military service exacerbated the bitterness between skilled and unskilled workers. In a context of the hostility of ‘public opinion’, unusually repressive policing, and inadequate national communication between strikers, Hinton implies, the upsurge of craft militancy here was in a sense bound to be temporary and unsuccessful. The main tangible result was a degree of recognition by the government and (a few) union executives of the necessary role and influence of shop floor committees.
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The movement as a whole was by no means over. Hinton argues (as against Kendall) that the winter of 1917–18 saw its high water mark in terms of the capacity shown for political growth. In conditions of inflation and food shortages, the question of general conscription, and, importantly, the impact of the Bolshevik revolution, the movement concentrated its demands on wage-rates, a larger class perspective than the narrow (and by now unrealistic) aim to limit and control dilution. In Sheffield, for example, engineers voted 35–1 for a strike in support of a 12% wage rise for the unskilled. The growth in unionisation amongst latter sections were similarly based on general advances, and not simply on the response to craft privilege. In conjunction with the demand for a 12½% increase in bonus rates, workers threatened direct action against Geddes’ Military Service Bill (January 1918), and motions of protest against the war and in support of the Bolsheviks were common to committees in different regions. Nothing, however, exerged from this potentially climacteric movement: the somewhat backward sections of the movement (this time Sheffield and Lancs) folded early in 1918 and under the threat of the German offensive rank-and-file support for militancy appeared to be dwindling. With the Allied counter-offensive, the armistice, and growing post-war conditions of unemployment and inflation, it was made extremely difficult for the shop stewards committees to continue in anything like their previous form. Undercut by political division and unclarity of conception about aims and strategy, the basis upon which the movement was formed no longer obtained. This last argument is, to my mind, unsatisfactory. Whatever the important discussions about Russia current in militant circles, the movement remained syndicalist in approach. Despite its advantages over orthodox labourism, this rank-and-file tendency prevented the kind of effective national unity which is as much the product as the condition of a successful political dimension. As Hinton often points out, as late as 1919 (in Direct Action), Gallacher and Campbell at times confused the respective roles of a branch of the revolutionary party and a workers’ soviet – itself conceived largely as a shop stewards committee. When a (belated) centralised body was formed, it took the title of National Administrative Council, and lacked any conception of the kind of political work which Hinton seems to think was a real possibility. I wonder whether in fact this is the right question to pose with regard to a clearly economistic practice? It was in Glasgow and Sheffield, we are told, that political protest against the war coincided with the militant wage struggles. Yet at the same time, the SWC quickly collapsed despite (or because of) continuing concern with craft privilege.46 Workshop ballots in many towns against drastic action over the war confirmed the general overoptimism of leaders.47 In Glasgow alone was there any real co-existence of strength between the workers committee and political movements. Yet the anti-war groups had always been strong, and the CWC, in the wake of the dilution question, not as strong as it once was. The significance of groups such as the Women’s Peace Crusade and the support shown for John Maclean’s election campaign, testifies to the existence of a general political conjuncture – yet by no means ‘revolutionary’ – which cannot be described as a moment or potential moment in the development of one movement, that of the Shop Stewards. That movement, it seems clear, was already in decline. Hinton, I am sure, would not accept a characterisation of his position to the effect that political conjuncture is derived from the immanent potentialities of only one section of the Left, but it does seem to me a tendency in his work, and perhaps his project, to overplay the ‘potential’ of the workers committees. Elsewhere of course, he provides adequate grounds for guarding against such a tendency. His account of 1917–18 would be one location of this ambiguity.48 In general, Hinton ascribes such ambiguity to the shop stewards movement itself, and since, I think, it is (within limits) a clear-sighted analysis, the above points by no means deny
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the overall importance of his argument. In his pamphlet written with Hyman, Hinton contends, on the basis of his explanation of the shop stewards phenomenon, that the conditions for the formation of a mass communist party did not exist, especially in 1920–21, for the reasons indicated above. The conception that the CPGB was and ought to be such a party was widely held by its leaders and members. This mistaken conception led to a number of nuclear policies: over the question of united fronts, for example, or towards the Labour Party, or on the nature of rank-and-file pressure groups such as the National Minority Movement. One result of this was the continual – and continuing – problem of the CP’s selfdefinition as a communist party. In practice, though influential, the Party’s industrial strategy was incapable of giving a clear ‘line’ throughout the 1920s and 1930s. This absence of internal consistency left the Party without political defences with which to argue against the evidently inappropriate directives of the Third International, such as the left turn of Stalin’s ‘third period’. This argument is not, however, aimed against the very idea of a CP at that period: on the contrary, such a party – but a ‘vanguard’ and not a ‘mass’ party – was necessary to prevent the experiences of many of those involved in the Shop Stewards Movement disappearing with that movement itself. And, conversely, that movement was the fundamental factor in the transition to sovietist from syndicalist ideas for a significant number of individual workers. It has been recently asserted49 that Hinton’s work is a naive ‘workerist’ historiography, that it romantically and falsely elevates economism to the status of a politically mature – or at least potentially mature – stage through which revolutionary development necessarily passes. The argument in question is fairly easily and rightly dismissed by Hinton himself as a disingeneous ‘political substitutionist’ distortion of the argument of his book, the purpose of which was simply to analyse the contradictory tension between the economism and sectionalism, on the one hand, and the political intentions and possibilities, on the other, within the stewards movement. Since I would accept Hinton’s ‘rejoinder’, I do not wish to agree with Monds. In conclusion, however, I think it is worth pointing out the shifts in Hinton’s case between the seemingly inevitable limitations of the craft/class contradictions, and the contention that in some sense the movement embodied a necessary stage in the more abstract progression from labourism to revolutionary sovietism. His proposition that this was in fact the case for many individuals is unexceptionable, but there is less substance in the implication that this was a tendency of the movement as such. Indeed, his own research suggests that the very term ‘movement’ is questionable (though ‘phenomenon’ would not be). An economic organisation(s), based specifically on engineers, under war-time conditions of production, with a marked periodic fluctuation in strength and continuity between as well as within regions, does not seem to me – whatever its uniqueness and importance for sections of the working class – the starting point for an analysis of the war-time conjuncture. To consciously or methodologically make it so is to risk a one-side and teleological theory of that conjuncture. The shifts in Hinton’s account are warranted by the internal ambiguity of what he considers to be the properties of the subject itself: yet the way in which he characterises such a discrepancy (the very formulation depends on Leninist tenets) relies on a conception of revolutionary potential and development read into the situation – however negatively – as a ‘problem’. This problem, because of the ‘real’ tensions held within it, is apparently capable of explaining the every twist and turn of events up to the (predictable) acceptance of sovietism by some, and the lapse into quiescent labourism by more. It is a great merit of the account that few moments of doubt arise, but when they do (is the characterisation of 1917–18, the ‘climactic’ period, not something much more than a supposed development of a perhaps waning aspect of working class struggle? Was the ‘experience’ of the movement,
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as a specific movement any special reason for the adoption for revolutionary politics later?), they often rely on insights which Hinton himself has offered. Further, they direct that doubt towards the method by which the development of a section of the working class appears to be the key to the historical meaning of a conjuncture involving much more than that section, and therefore requiring a kind of an analysis that avoids the limitation of a sectional viewpoint. We are certainly dealing here with something more than labour history in Hinton’s mode of procedure. Moreover, its rigorous qualification of the criteria for deriving revolutionary ‘lessons’ militates against arbitrary abstraction. Yet the argument itself is not free from a tendency to endow the phenomenon with immanent properties structured towards an abstractly defined possibility (the real revolutionary situation?) Nor is it free from the tendency to project from a section of labour on the general social conjuncture; and this suggests that, in general, social analysis demands such a perspective. In this essay, I have expressed dissatisfaction with such perspectives: their inadequacies are not entirely overcome in James Hinton’s work.
Section five: Culture or ideology? Gareth Stedman Jones has provided one of the most successful examples of the kind of theoretically-structured history which I have been discussing. His intelligent combination of different aspects of current tendencies within Marxism largely avoids the different dangers of purism and eclecticism. His uncompromising structures on the ‘poverty of empiricism’, including labour history, at the same time rest upon (within limits) the kind of open-ended commitment to serious theoretical reflection which Althusser has with justification claimed is a necessary characteristic of scientific as opposed to ideological problematics. Indeed, Stedman Jones’ writings have assimilated some important features of Althusser’s thought. ‘All great history’, he has asserted ‘is structural history’.50 One of the aims of his book Outcast London was to make connections between a ‘new liberal problematic’ and the material conditions underlying the problem that lay at its heart: that of ‘casual labour’ in London’s east end in the later nineteenth century. The use of the term ‘problematic’ here is explicitly Althusserian,51 and Stedman Jones attempts in that book to demonstrate that such problematics construct ‘false’ problems. His own account is intended to be, not an alternative explanation of the ‘same’ phenomenon, but one which constructs a different (the real as opposed to an ideological) ‘object’ of investigation. I indicated in the Introduction that in certain respects an Althusserian position is compatible with Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. In his paper on popular London culture, Stedman Jones recognises that ideology is not simply falsity, but can be seen as ‘lived experience’, having real conditions of existence, yet being structured, to a large extent, by ideas and values of, or to the advantage of, the dominant class. As in the work of Robbie Gray, the further (if less important for him than for Gray) stress that hegemony is neither guaranteed nor undifferentiated, enables Stedman Jones to develop analyses on the kind of theoretical basis which allowed him to successfully argue against the more contradictory aspects of Foster’s book. Stedman Jones’ account of middle class responses to the question of poverty in London is not easy to summarise. There seems to have been three main stages in the formulation of the problem, each coinciding with a set of underlying economic conditions. The ‘new liberal’ outlook, expressed for instance by T.H. Green or Marshall, replaced the pessimism of the last representatives of Classical economies (Stuart Mill), with optimism about the prospects of improvement of, not just individuals, but of the ‘working classes’ as a whole. In the health of a British capitalism mothered by mid-Victorian morality, the possibility of guided
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individual ethical improvement seemed to them a real proposition. This philanthropic outlook was intimately connected with i) the national emergence of ‘respectable’ labour, and ii) the radical geographical separation of classes in London. Despite the physically observable poverty of London’s working class, it was conceived by the middle class as a moral question of ‘pauperism’ – something assumed to be individually eradicable by (with some outside help) self-discipline and the general adoption of Smilesian values. The boom, however, ended in 1873. Before this time, the problem of pauperisation – really one of casual labour – was seldom seen in economic context. London’s industrial identity as a capital goods centre had long declined, and was replaced by small-scale production, increasingly as ‘finishing’ for consumption. For the east end in particular, the disappearance of shipbuilding and textiles (silk) went without adequate replacement. Already by 1851, 86% of employers used less than ten men. ‘Sweating’ was widespread and intense. The finishing trades were distinctly seasonal, often in accordance with the high-class consumerism which marked the entertaining season in more fashionable districts of the city. Casual work tended to reproduce itself in ever-intensifying cycles. For many reasons (familiarity with local works or foremen, the right ‘time of asking’, local credit, expense of travel, wives’ compensatory market for home-produced articles, etc.), proximity to work was necessary, and despite the seasonal exodus to the country (hops, fruitpicking), casual employment was essentially immobile. The possibility of normal, ‘respectable’ methods of saving was clearly restricted, although, Stedman Jones argues, there was nothing anarchic about family budgeting. On the contrary, it had to be exceptionally tightly accounted (funerals, ever-demanding landlords, spreading resources, pawns, etc.). The moral totalitarianism of middle class philanthropists, it is implied, simply did not see, or necessarily distorted what they saw of, the cultural forms dictated by the economics of casualism. The inherent uncertainty of such an existence was clearly intensified in the ‘depressed’ years of 1873–88. There was a decline and diversification in dock labour, and rural and Jewish immigration (needless to say, seen as the ‘cause’ of emiseration, not least by the working class), and a consequent, significant growth in under-, unemployment, and petty crime. De-housing schemes to make way for railway yards, dock development, slum clearance, warehouses and offices, had the (often inadvertent) effect, not of dispersing the poor, but of an even greater internal concentration in the east end. The availability of work and the cost of transport necessarily exacerbated the ever more vicious circle of casual labour and its impoverished surroundings. In this situation, the east end became a larger blot on the middle class conscience. Theories of hereditary urban degeneration (‘biologism’) took over, in large part, from the individualism of a slightly more comfortable era. Such movements as the Charity Organisation Society and Octavia Hill’s housing schemes followed the breakdown of depersonalisation of the philanthropic significance of ‘the gift’ which accompanied increasing poverty and residential segregation. The self-conscious aim of these movements was to re-establish contact between the receivers and donors of charity. They consisted of people whose professional approach and relatively more ‘enlightened’ recognition of the social conditions of poverty which took on a political dimension in their self-conception as preventors of social disruption. The predominant reaction to poverty in the 1880s was fear rather than guilt. The revival of militant politics in this period made the task urgent. Ironically, the mass unionisation of 1889–90 was welcomed by such people as in some degree an emergence from the dark underworld into the rational traditions of the artisanal union movement. By and large, the reforming schemes failed; the rigorously enforced standards of housing, health, discipline, personal ethics, and, not least, costs, rendered the east end poor more
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‘inward looking’. There thus developed another change, argues Stedman Jones, in the outlook of influential sections of the middle class, from theories of pauperisation, through those of urban degeneration, to those of ‘chronic poverty’. The beginnings of scientific surveys (Booth, for example) were to provide the basis for the re-assessment of the extent of poverty. The shift from general laissez-faire economic and moral conceptions, led by theorists such as Green and Marshall, signalled the emergence of a ‘social imperialist’ solution which not uncommonly and unashamedly advocated labour colonies under state administration as the principle method. ‘Charity’ policies would have to be abolished, as unsatisfactory. Once brought into the open, the question of the east London [poor became less pressing for those classes who feared ‘infection from below’. More objectively, the economic upswing, cheap transport, council-financed housing, and the consequent decentralisation of living quarters, helped reduce the ‘problem’ to Booth’s categories A and B. With the bulk of the class (hopefully) on the lines of its respectable upper layers, what was left of the ‘residuum’ again took on the character of a ‘social minority’, rather than a general (and political problem. Labour exchanges and the end of the Poor Law were not far away. Stedman Jones’ later analysis of working class cultural formations depends on this history.52 I will briefly mention it here before returning to comment on his main work. A distinct cultural identity emerged in the later (1870–1900) nineteenth century which was recognisably a general working-class phenomenon, and not merely that of a fragment (the labour aristocracy, for example). This was clearly the product of circumstances outlined earlier: residential segregation, rejection of reform, etc. It was a culture fiercely resistant to the attempts of other classes to guide it (temperance, housing schemes, and so on). It was a new culture, born of fully industrialised capitalist society. Both artisanal traditions and the legacy of older cultural identities (cruel sports, pubs, ‘St. Monday’) gradually gave way to modern mass cultural phenomena: music hall, spectator sports, professional entertainers, the ever-present but much less interpersonal gambling, or railway excursions. However, distinctive, and distinctively working class, it was, this culture was a-political, based on amusement and sport rather than the workplace, union, or socialist group. The upsurge of ‘new unionism’ very quickly evaporated. The economics of intermittent poverty gave the music hall, with its familiar ‘comic realism’ of the home and family, a definite ‘compensatory’ character. One can see here the creative cultural response of the class to its prevalent life conditions. But, on the other hand, it was a deeply fatalistic and non-combative form of response, open to the ideologies of social imperialism (jingoism was a staple diet of the later music hall). Indeed, it embodied the kind of acceptance of the system, monarchy and Empire present in the seemingly different sphere of working-class activity, namely the labourism of its political development. From these bare bones it can be seen the general debt owed by Stedman Jones to what might be termed a Thompsonian approach to working-class culture. The close attention given to the ‘phenomenal forms’ of the culture (more than I can indicate here) emphasises the importance of the internal ‘feel’ of a culture. Nevertheless, Stedman Jones does not use this dimension as a touchstone or the rationale of his explanation. This, rather, is not to reconstruct a way of life so much as to structurally situate it as an ideological field specified by the changing patterns of relations at other, principally economic, levels of society. If he perhaps underestimates the positive aspects of the culture (its very imperviousness to the formidable morality which supported philanthropy), he has importantly stressed that ‘ideology’ as lived experience of real conditions inaccessible to that experience, is no less ideological for being resistant to any one set of values. That this had negative implications for the strategies of economistically-inclined political practice is also worth pointing out,
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even though (in this case) the price paid is a rather mechanistic conception of the (a-political) nature of working-class culture and ‘labourist’ politics. Taking the arguments of the book and article together, we find a unified account of the ideological forms appropriate to the specific conditions of middle class and working-class London. It is not so easy, however, to locate Stedman Jones’ place in the admittedly not exclusive series of positions I have drawn up as the ‘context’ of Marxist historiography. The reservations which I will now make are therefore tentative, by no means fully worked through. Some of these points are made in an interesting review article by Karel Williams.53 The first point is, however, a general one, and not specific to Gareth Stedman Jones. There is a tendency, perhaps unavoidable in view of the need to escape a ‘vulgar materialism’, to separate the dimensions of ‘cultural formation’ and ‘ideological direction’ in a social configuration. No doubt this springs from the rejection of a ‘social control’ theory of ideology in favour of one explained in terms of ‘lived experience’. Without denying the theoretical and political advances of such a conception, it is difficult to see how there can be a relatively detached procedure of identification of the terms of ideology with those of lived experience. The absence of a satisfactory theory of ideology should not be an excuse to evade the realisation that the two kinds of explanation, sets of concepts, are not of the same order. Whether there is, ultimately, a ‘level’ of explanation appropriate to each set is a further question; but, certainly, in some senses ‘culture’ and ‘ideology’ represent different, and to that extent opposed problematics.54 ‘Culture’ is explained in terms of the responses suitable to a given set or development of economic and social factors. Though not reducible to those conditions, there appears to be an essential ‘fit’ between culture and society. And the task would then be to outline the salient underlying features, and simply chronicle or report the internal meaning of human relationships as various kinds of response to those features. Now, if this description is accurate, it seems that i) and account of ideology as a ‘problem’ for analysis remains, whether to be left out altogether (Thompson), or to be, in the form of more or less intelligent guesses, tacked on to the basic ‘culturalist’ study (and this, to my mind, is the position in which Stedman Jones ends up). ii) Such an account still depends primarily on a historicist (and therefore not necessarily Marxist) conception of the expressive nature of the social totality. In the Marxist-inclined variant, cultural forms, despite their reputed autonomy, are materially – and therefore logically – dependent on the explanatory corpus of economic factors. My point here is not simply to rule out this conception as unMarxist because ‘historicist’. Rather, it seems important to show that if one is concerned to adequately theorise ideology (a basic concept of Marxism), then there are certain basic obstacles to an ‘additive’ combination of a structuralist and a culturalist explanation, because the two modes of analysis are antagonistic. The way forward from such a dilemma must be of concern to Marxists. The consequence of this, in Stedman Jones’ work, is that, despite the extremely important space given over to the treatment of ideological concerns, there is, surprisingly, no systematic account of the concept he has in mind. The most important offshoot here is that his claim to provide an alternative and Marxist problematic, as against an ideological one, is only a partial or formal commitment to an ‘Althusserian’ analysis. Of course, in the absence of concrete examples, we cannot be sure what such an analysis might look like, and therefore criticism on this point can only be negative! In the light of the explicit intention, however, it is one worth making. Karel Williams has attempted to show some of the results of this absence in Stedman Jones’ project. He suggests that we should try to locate the object of a Marxist reading in terms of a ‘terrain’ of historical Knowledge, rather than as a series of ‘revisions’ within a
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well-defined ‘context’ of historical writing. In ‘Outcast London’, such revisions might be within the ‘standard of living’ debate, or ‘middle class attitudes towards the poor’. Now, while Stedman Jones has important things to say about these questions, he is really arguing for a different terrain, a different object of enquiry, from these unproblematically accepted ‘problems’, usually to be decided by the ‘facts’. Clearly, the weight of empirical evidence in the text does not, of itself, disguise what Williams calls Stedman Jones’ ‘hard anti-revisionist intention’,56 and from the latter’s declared anti-empiricism, we should not expect it to do so. The anti-revisionist intention is to locate the systematic ideologies of middle class theorists to the ‘problem’ they constructed, then to show the real basis of their ‘false’ problem. This procedure of unmasking the real in the ideological is in fact the new terrain itself, the organising object of Outcast London. While acknowledging that the organising framework is constitutive of the knowledge produced, and that this itself is part of the knowledge to be gained. I am not sure that Williams can argue that this new terrain – the couplet real/ ideological – is of the same logical status as the terrain (to take his own example) of the ‘standard of living debate’. For the moment, however, it is enough to say that a new problematic is intended, and that any empirical results are necessarily and not accidentally related to it. One consequence is that ad hoc or individual revisionist criticisms (was London really a declining manufacturing centre? Was the middle class response really fear rather than guilt?) do not get to the core of the case.* This is because the empiricism on which revisionism is based (exemplified in Popper’s epistemology) is only capable of judging the adequacy of theories within frameworks, but not between different frameworks. Following Althusser, Williams sees this as the key factor in a ‘reading’ of a text (here, Outcast London), and the question becomes ‘does the text provide an adequate framework?’ Any empirical or methodological problems one finds in Outcast London depends on this question. Williams proposes that the difficulties of the real/ideological problematic are signalled by a number of discrepancies. On an empirical level, Stedman Jones fails to satisfactorily explain how the concern about pauperism in the 1860s was any different from previous concerns. Further, we are only told that there was a change-over from anxiety about ablebodied pauperism to (in the 1880s) to that over ‘chronic poverty’. In the absence of an explanation, this seems arbitrary, because such concerns in very important circles continued well into the twentieth century. Such arbitrariness is not limited to the sphere of ideas. There is a lack of a national, historical explanation of casualism, and an inadequate identification of its economic motor. (Williams refers here to the crucial distinction between ‘private’ costs – those of the individual employers – and ‘social’ costs.) Such objections relate to Stedman Jones’ method of explanation. His discussion of the three problematics on which he focusses is ‘impressionistic’ (What precisely were the differences? Why are they distinct problematics?, as is his account of the internal pressures under which casual labour reproduces itself. In general, it is the adoption of different kinds of social scientific methods which allows this combination of different degrees of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ explanation. The best example of this would be the identification of the ‘crisis’ in bourgeois attitudes brought about by radical residential segregation and the consequent breakdown of the psychology of the ‘gift’.58 However, since this is in fact how the philanthropists themselves
*
These kinds of points seem to be infinitely extendable. From a labour history viewpoint, Royden Harrison (by no means a naive empiricism) centres his revisions57 of this ‘first-class’ book on the absence of Dickensian insights in Stedman Jones’ account, and for its omission of the point of view of the casual poor themselves.
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saw things, the explanation, which is theoretically linked to the anthropology of Maus, is almost the same as the ideologies purported to be explained. Either these ideologies are in some sense correct interpretations of the real phenomena (something Stedman Jones is explicitly arguing against) or the method of explanation is faulty. It would seem to be impossible from this dilemma to ‘demystify’ such ideologies, and moreover, to account for their problematics as ideologies. Neither, in fact, has been adequately achieved. This epistemological insecurity of social science-based analyses, Williams concludes, require a systematic alternative along the lines of complex general (rather than ‘concrete’ or ‘simple general’) frameworks such as that of ‘Capita’. I do not wish to go into the possibility of an epistemologically ‘secure’ history, which these last and perhaps inflated declarations demand. As Williams, thankfully, admits, that is something requiring much theoretical and practical work. It does seem to be the case, however, that the weaknesses of Stedman Jones’ adoption of different (‘sociological’ methods of approach can be connected with his ‘demystifying’ problematic. For, whatever his intentions, he presupposes that there is a ‘real’ object from which the ideologies ‘falsely’ abstract. This also implies the possibility of a valid abstraction from that object. Williams suggests that this might be ‘the tenth in misery’, or some such indication of the true extent and cause of impoverishment. He is quick, enough, to point out that such conceptions (it became the ‘one-third’) are equally open to different criteria which the ‘real object’ is in no position to distinguish between. Whether or not Stedman Jones is guilty of this conception or not (and the uncertainty about what might be his ‘valid abstraction’ is enough to throw doubt on that charge), is less important than the fact that the problematic of the real it entails a ‘demystificatory’ mode of analysis which does not necessarily have different criteria of validation from its ideological and social scientific alternatives. ii) In such cases it may not even be possible, as Stedman Jones intends, to construct a different (non-ideological) object on theoretical grounds. iii) It involves a tendency to remain economistically based, which itself is bound up in the mechanism/ culturalism dichotomy, unable to consider the possibility of a complex articulation of different levels.* If Williams is somewhat harsh and perhaps formalist in his assessment of Stedman Jones, his valuable contribution indicates that the absences or negative qualities of the latter’s work are as theoretically significant as its undoubted positive qualities.
Conclusion I have attempted in this essay to locate the central importance of one general theoretical problem – ‘ideology’ – for Marxist historians. One of the interesting things in current writings is that there is, not one, but many ‘established’ concepts of Marxism which are undergoing critical re-examination.59 My assumption has been that there is no way in which historians, in so far as they claim to be Marxists, can be untouched by such debates, since even those who oppose the primacy of such ‘abstract’ or ‘philosophical’ discussions must do so with reference to certain rational criteria of justification and definite modes of argumentation. And, in many cases, it is just these which are in question. The success – indeed the possibility – of an analytically sound Marxist historical method does, however, depend on *
Williams’ own proposal is that an account of the real problem might stress that ideology (radical pessimism about the motivation to work) was, from the early nineteenth century to the 1880s the relay between the economic (capitalism with wage-labour dominant) and the political (desire for the effective abolition of the Poor Law). Stated as bluntly as this, one would certainly require a good deal of argument to be persuaded that this prospectus does, in fact, provide us with the required ‘object’.
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their resolution. Obviously, such a process – whatever the uniqueness of the resultant ‘knowledge’ – is something which necessarily comes only from ongoing debate and research. To that extent, those writers I have discussed serve a positive function, if, in some respects, only by ‘negative example’.60 Consequently, to attempt an unproblematic ‘conclusion’ to a debate on even one such concept, would be a rash, if not theoretically mistaken enterprise.
Notes and references For those items with bracketed numbers for example, Thompson (7), see Bibliography.
Section one 1 See Althusser (2), esp. Part I.; Hindess and Hirst (1975); and also Hindess 1973, The Use of Official Statistics in Social Science. Macmillan, London and Hirst, Social Evolution and Sociological Categories. These texts have good general bibliographies on questions of empiricism. 2 For more on these issues see WPCS 10 on Ideology, CCCS, Birmingham (forthcoming). 3 For Dobb see Studies in the Development of Capitalism Routledge, London, revised ed. 1963. See also Hindess and Hirst (bib.) pp. 265–6 for a critique of Dobb’s so-called essentialism. For Hill, The English Revolution, Lawrence and Wishart, London 1940. For Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, Weidenfeld, London 1964. Parts of these texts display ‘economistic’ perspectives. 4 For Hilton see the ‘Introduction’ to The transition from Feudalism to Capitalism New Left Books, 1975. For Hill see e.g. The World Turned Upside Down, Penguin 1974, or The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, Panther ed. 1972. For Hobsbawm see e.g. Revolutionaries, Lawrence and Wishart London 1970. These texts show an appreciation of the specificity ‘relative autonomy’ of the political and ideological ‘superstructure’.
Section two 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
Thompson (1), p. 9. See Bib. Thompson (8). K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Weidenfield, London 1971 Thompson’s review, see Thompson (9). P. Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review, 23. T. Nairn, ‘The Nature of the Labour Party’, New Left Review, 27, 28. And ‘The English Working Class’, New Left Review, 24. See esp. Thompson (4). E.g. in R. Williams, The Long Revolution, Penguin ed., 1965. esp. Part I. Thompson (5). In Althusser (2), ch. 4. E.J. Hobsbawm, from ‘Social History to the History of Society’, in Flinn and Smout (eds), Essays in Social History, OUP, 1974. Poulantzas (1). Thompson (1), ch. 11.
Section three 18 Foster (1), p. 2. 19 Marxism cannot be enhanced by the simple addition of statistics. See e.g. Hindess (1973), Chap. 5. 20 E.g. by A.E. Musson in m/s to be published; and John Saville, Socialist Register, 1974. 21 This point is made by most critics.
880 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35
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Saville, op.cit. Foster (1), p. 48. Ibid. p. 131. Ibid. p. 148. Stedman Jones (3). Poulantzas (1), p. 146. See Bib. Foster (3) p. 21. ‘ “Social Imperialism” was the direct expression of the labour aristocracy at this stage in its development’. Foster (1) p. 6. Foster (3) p. 31. See esp. Hinton (1). Poulantzas (1). For a useful, if not necessarily Marxist attempt at such an account, see H. Macleod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City, Croom Helm, London, 1974. I do not wish to imply here that labourism and syndicalism can be equated. Far from it. Within syndicalism itself there were many rival theories. On the former point see, M. Jacques, ‘The Consequences of the General Strike’, in Skelley (ed), The General Strike, 1926, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1976. On the latter, see e.g. Pribicevic, The Shop Stewards Movement and Workers Control, 1910–26, Oxford 1969. R.Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh, Oxford 1976. Lenin, see Bib. Hobsbawm see e.g. ‘The Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth Century Britain’, in Labouring Men, Weidenfield, London, 1964.
Section four 38 Hinton (3). 39 J. Klugmann, The History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Vol. I, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1969. 40 E.g. B. Pearce, The Early Years of the CPGB, 1966. 41 W. Kendall, The British Revolutionary Movement 1900–21, Weidenfield, London, 1969. 42 BSP: British Socialist Party. SLP: Socialist Labour Party. 43 Hinton (1) ch. 5, esp. p. 162. 44 Hinton (2). 45 The policy included a demand for immediate workers control of the industry. 46 Hinton (1) pp. 262–3. 47 Ibid. pp. 261–7. 48 ‘The magnitude of the opportunity missed soon became apparent to some of the movements leaders and sympathisers’ p. 267. ‘In the event the Government did not climb down and the revolution did not occur . . . A closer look at the continuing internal weaknesses of the rank-andfile-movement reveals the justification for the Governments attitude’. p. 261. 49 By J. Monds, Workerist Historiography, New Left Review, 97.
Section five 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58
Stedman Jones (2) p. 115. Stedman Jones (1) p. 16. Stedman Jones (4). K. Williams, ‘Problematic History’, Economy and Society, Vol. I. No. 4 1972. For a useful discussion of this point see S. Hall, ‘Culture, the Media, and the “ideological effect” ’, Open University Reader in Mass Communications (forthcoming). Williams, op.cit. pp. 459, 460. Ibid. p. 461. R. Harrison, Society for the Study of Labour History, Bulletin 19, 1972. Ibid. p. 465: Stedman Jones (1) pp. 251–2.
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Conclusion 59 See e.g. Hindess and Hirst, Bib. 60 The phrase is Perry Anderson’s in an interesting attempt to bridge the dichotomy between Marxist ‘theory’ and ‘history’, Lineages of the Absolutist State, (p. 7), and Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, both New Left Books, London, 1974. The attempt is, in my own view, unsuccessful.
Bibliography A. General Althusser, L. (1) For Marx, Penguin University Books, London, 1969. (2) Reading Capital (with Etienne Balibar), New Left Books, London, 1970. (3) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, NLB 1971. Gramsci, A. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Hoare and Nowell-Smith, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1971. Hindess, B. and Hirst, P. Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, Routledge, London, 1975. Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, Highest Stage of Capitalism, Collected Works Vol. 22, Moscow. Lukacs, G. History and Class Consciousness, Merlin Press, London, 1971. Poulantzas, N. Political Power and Social Classes, NLB, London, 1973. Vilar, P. ‘Marxist History, A History in the Making: Towards a dialogue with Althusser’, New Left Review 80.
B. Specific E.P. Thompson 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.
The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin ed., London, 1968. Whigs and Hunters, Penguin Books, London, 1975. Albion’s Fatal Tree, eds. Hay, Linebaugh, Thompson, Penguin, London 1975. ‘Patrician Society, Plebian Culture’, Journal of Social History, 1974. ‘Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present 38. ‘The Moral Economy of the Eighteenth Century Crowd’, Past and Present 50. ‘Peculiarities of the English’, Socialist Register 1965. ‘Homage to Tom Macguire’, in Essays in Labour History Vol. I eds. Briggs and Saville, Macmillan, London, 1960. ‘Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context’, Midland History, Vol. I. No. 3, Spring 1972. ‘Long Revolution (review)’, New Left Review, May/June, July/Aug. 1961. ‘Measuring Class Consciousness’, Times Higher Education Supplement 8.3.1974. ‘Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski’, Socialist Register 1973. ‘Agency and Choice’, New Reasoner, No. 5, 1958. ‘A Letter to the Philistines’, New Reasoner, 1957.
John Foster 1. Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, Weidenfield, London 1974. 2. ‘Nineteenth Century Towns: a Class Dimension’, in Studies in Urban History ed. H. Dyos, Edward Arnold, London, 1968. 3. ‘British Imperialism and the Labour Aristocracy’, in The General Strike, 1926, ed. J. Skelley, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1976. 4. ‘The State and Ruling Class During the General Strike’, Marxism Today, May 1976.
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James Hinton 1. The First Shop Stewards Movement, Allen & Unwin, London, 1973. 2. ‘The Clyde Workers Committee and the Dilution Struggle’, in Essays in Labour History Vol. II, eds. Briggs and Saville, Macmillan, London, 1971. 3. Trade Unions and Revolution: The Industrial Politics of the Early British Communist Party (with Richard Hyman), Pluto Press, London, 1975. 4. ‘Review of W. Kendall’, Society for the Study of Labour History, Bulletin 19, 1969. 5. ‘Rejoinder to J. Monds’, New Left Review, 97.
Gareth Stedman Jones 1. Outcast London, a Study in the Relation Between Classes in Victorian Society, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971. 2. ‘The Poverty of Empiricism’, in Ideology in Social Science, ed. Blackburn, Fontana 1972. 3. ‘Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (Review)’, New Left Review 90. 4. ‘Working Class Culture and Working Class Politics in London: Notes on the Re-making of an English Working Class’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 7, No. 4, Summer 1974.
42 Women domestic servants 1919–1939 A study of a hidden Army, illustrated by servants’ own recollected experiences Pam Taylor
This is an edited version of a paper given at Ruskin History Workshop, Oxford, in May, 1975 on ‘Britain between the Wars’.
Women make their own history but they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. A slightly altered quotation from Marx (he refers to Men) which highlights the experience of an army of women between the two World Wars. I call them an Army because they entered as young recruits and were trained to accept their place in structured hierarchy. Despite strong internal resistances and reservations, they accepted the discipline, on the whole, without question. In spite of changes in the economy and some enlargement in the range of jobs open to women, large numbers remained in domestic service till 1939. Attitudes of employers, hours and conditions of work seem to me to have changed surprisingly little from pre-war or even nineteenth century days. Robert Roberts1 in The Classic Slum and John Burnett2 in Useful Toil suggest that domestic service as an institution and major employer of women, started to decline after the First World War. It is true that many women entered Industry and the Services during the First World War and consequently servant numbers declined between the 1911 and the 1921 censuses. But they declined from approximately 1.3 million to 1.1 million and by 1931 they had increased again to 1.3 million. There was no Census taken in 1941 but I think it reasonable to assume that numbers could have increased further between 1931 and 1939. For the inter-war years, therefore, numbers of women ‘in Service’ remained very high and domestic service was still the largest single category of women’s employment. My study aimed, primarily, to find out how servants themselves viewed their work and life experience: but in the course of my work I became very interested in how employers created and maintained a light control over work and indeed, our life itself. How did servants respond to this treatment? Why, on the whole, did they acquiesce in the control? My main evidence comes from about 20 accounts of domestic service and is of three kinds: published autobiographies, accounts written specially for me and (the largest proportion) oral evidence gleaned in fairly long interviews with 12 women in 1972. They had been in service mainly between 1916 and 1940: their jobs cover a wide range of geographical areas and types of employer. Over 70 actual situations were covered. My text will
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be illustrated with quotations which are from these three kinds of evidence: they will all therefore be in the women’s own language. Until 1939 then, there was a very large number of girls and women in this peculiar industry with low pay, low status, long hours and no legislation protecting them. With contraction of heavy industry after 1920 and decline in the depressed areas, there was high unemployment. Returning soldiers needed jobs and where women had been exhorted to work in industry and the services during the war, they were urged or compelled to get out and make way for men after the war. My mother worked as a commercial traveller during the war but she regarded it as ‘keeping a man’s job going for him’ As Britain was recovering from the 1920s slump, the world trade recession made its impact in 1929. Unemployment, never below 1 million in the 1920s reached 2.5 million in 1930. In January 1939 it was 2 million. The overall unemployment rate in 1930 was 19.9% of the insured work force but this varied regionally being low in the South East and Midlands and high in the North East and North West and very high in South Wales – 31%. Wages generally during the period were static or being statutorily reduced. Food prices fell, which is a factor that made it possible for families not affected by the slump to feed servants. Mowatt3 refers to the two Englands of the inter-war years – prosperity in the expanding South East and Midlands. Chronic depression in the North and South Wales. Some of the newly prosperous were able to employ a servant for the first time because of the large number of girls and women available. In other words women from the depressed areas were forced by poverty to go into service as it both gave them a home with board and lodging and relieved the family of the burden of keeping them. Surveys in the 1930s by John Boyd Orr and by the BMA4 revealed that 30%–35% of the population or 8 million families were under-nourished: moreover this was due not only to unemployment but to low pay for those actually in work. Against this background it is easy to see why women and girls were still glad to have the refuge of domestic service. Other jobs were fiercely competed for. In 1931, 5000 applications were received by a Birmingham Drapery store for 50 vacancies.5 Orwell6 in Coming Up for Air mentions the girl in Woolworths who dare not answer back for fear of getting the sack. Unemployment affected those in work for they knew they could easily be replaced. Girls from overcrowded families with the father either unemployed or on low pay could help the family by moving out into service and perhaps sending a little money home from their wages. Living in domestic service did in some ways provide benefits – it was sheltered supervised employment. Parents knew their daughters would have board, lodging and a small wage – young girls could not have left home for any other job. So although conditions sounded prison like (and to some girls seemed prison like) there was a certain safety and security. Most women I heard from were well fed and some felt distress that they could not share food with their families. Life was comfortable in my College Hall job. My only pangs came when I scraped out all the custard, with pudding and gravies that were left in the cooking utensils after dishing up. If only, by some magic means, I could send them home. Winifred Foley, A Child in the Forest
Home background All the women I heard from seem to have been brought up strictly but with affection. They were usually from a big family and understood that money was short and life a struggle.
Women domestic servants 1919–1939
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My childhood was happy but there was an undercurrent of tension; an inability on my mother’s part to manage financially; as the eldest child, this fear communicated itself to me.7 Life was wonderful except for one constant nagging irritation: HUNGER. We knew the wages Dad brought home from the pit were not enough to keep us out of debt, let alone fill our bellies properly.8 On the whole children accepted parental discipline and girls, anyway, rarely rebelled. If their parents’ actions seemed hard, children did not seem to resent this. Parents had to be hard. That’s how life was. It seems though that, a hard life and few luxuries could be borne if the children were loved. But if later, in service, girls were worked hard without any kindness being shown, then life to a girl away from home and family could seem grim and miserable. Nearly all the girls were advised or guided into their first job by parents who sometimes had rather rosy ideas of what life would be like. This is Mrs. Doris Grayson who left South Wales in 1929 for London though she had been to a Grammar School. I really can’t imagine what I expected. I only know that my first place was a dreadful shock to me. The advert said ‘Lady’s Help’. My mother, who’s been a Lady’s maid before her marriage was under the impression I would be trained in that kind of work and would travel with the family, as she had done. We were completely misled. I was the only servant kept. I was paid 6/- a week. I felt as though I were in prison.9 Jobs were very roughly of two kinds and the job satisfaction was related to this division. In the country, girls would be taken on by the local ‘Big House’. The fact that the girls’ family and the employer lived in the same community gave some guarantee that employers would show some responsibility towards the servant. Three of my respondents fell in this category. But another factor here was that work itself might be less onerous because shared with other servants and, an important point, there would be companionship. I was working in the village shop you see (in 1929) from 7.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. for 2/6d a week and I had three meals a day because I was delicate. . . . I went to school with the butler’s daughter and Major and Mrs. Evans were coming back from abroad. He’d got to engage three young girls; kitchen maid, under housemaid and parlour maid. He came down to see my mother while I was at work and I said ‘Well I wasn’t going to be a kitchen maid’. I’d asked for a rise at the shop and she couldn’t afford another 6d a week. So Mr. Somersale, the butler, said ‘Will you come and work with me as parlourmaid?’ I said ‘What will I have to do?’ and he said ‘Wait at table and clean silver and look after the Major’s clothes’ I would get 10/- a week and my own bedroom.10 But girls in towns and depressed areas, especially after 1929, had to travel longer distances and used newspaper advertisements and agencies. A girl from Wednesbury in the Black Country working in Moseley, a suburb of Birmingham, though not a great distance from home, obtained the job through an agency and spent a large part of her half day travelling in order to have a few hours at home. Girls from South Wales working in London could not afford the fare home for perhaps nine months or a year. I stayed in my first place nine months. I had saved enough money to pay my fare home and I longed to see my mother, brothers and sisters.11
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If a girl got a post far from home the train fare was sometimes an advance but had to be repaid in weekly instalments out of a low wage. This is so in the following extract which is from Winifred Foley’s book A Child in the Forest. It illustrates both the concern of a young girl to help the family financially and her distress at leaving her poor but loved family in the Forest of Dean to go to a job in London. It starts with Poll’s father talking to her. She was 14 and the year was 1928. ‘Now I don’t have to tell thee ’ow much your mam and I wish we could kip thee at ’ome. We don’t worry about thee being a good wench. We know thee won’tst do anything to let thy old mam and dad down. Our worry is that the job might be no good. Now mind what I do say: if they do work thee too hard or not give three enough vittles, or be bad to thee in any way, thee drop us a line and we’ll scrape the money up somehow to get thee ’ome . . . A year do seem a long way at thy age and it’l seem a long time to we at ’ome but just you think of the excitement when we all come to the station to meet thee.’ I had thought that this journey to the station would be exciting too, all those weeks ago when the pound came from Mrs. Fox for my fare, but as I walked behind Mam and my brother I could only think about Mam’s shoes and how they were down-trodden and worn out completely on one side. Her shapeless lisle stockings hung in loose folds round her thin ankles. Perhaps my new mistress would give me some left off clothes to send home, as some of my Aunties used to for Granny. I noticed too, the thin knobbly legs of my brother emerging like matchsticks from the legs of his patched trousers, and I remembered a time when he’d fainted and gone into a coma. Dad had run, like one gone mad, for the doctor. When the doctor came he said something about malnutrition, and I look it up in the dictionary at school. Under nourished, that’s what it meant. Well, now I would be able to do something about it. Surely I could send home at least a shilling a week; that would pay for three extra loaves. Perhaps I could send more when I had repaid the pound. On we went up the slope by Nelson’s Green and in a moment we should be able to see the station. Oh, if only some magic act had made it disappear! No, it was there. And so, miraculously, was Dad. There he was emerging from a side track on to our path. His face was grey with fatigue and smudged with pit dirt embedded in the wrinkles, but his eyes shone with pleasure as I ran up to him delighted with the surprise. He was sweating, for he’d made a long and hurried detour. Oh what a lucky girl I felt to be so loved. Full of pride and misery, of good intentions and fear of what was in store, full of overwhelming love for everyone and everything I was leaving behind. I stood bemused watching the train chug to a halt. The little platform became the edge of the world, the world I had known as a child in the forest.12
Work, wages, time off It is very difficult to generalise about work because it varied enormously according to the number of servants kept, type of household and employers: a large number of servants meant a division of labour and perhaps less work for the individual. Florence Follett, was a parlourmaid/valet for the Major and did no dirty work. However the kitchen maid at the bottom of the multi servant hierarchy did get all the dirty jobs, low pay and low status. Margaret Powell as a kitchen maid looked scruffy and was shoo-ed out of the kitchen if ‘Madam’ came down.
Women domestic servants 1919–1939
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No one considered that the reason the kitchen looked so clean, the pans shining was the reason I was so scruffy.13 The single servant could be very hard worked – she was expected to do many of the jobs which would be divided up to a larger household and even had to have two sets of uniform. In the afternoon the maid would change out of coloured cotton dress and white cotton apron – into a black dress and white decorative apron and cap. If visitors called the uniformed maid was a sign of prestige. All the girls had work to do before breakfast and would rise at least an hour before the household. Such jobs as sweeping the front step, cleaning the brass door knocker, cleaning out and lighting fires, getting the kitchen range going – all had to be done before any food was taken. If it was a three storey house a lot of carrying of coals, ashes, food and dirty dishes was involved. Before the day of electric household applicances, cleaning was laborious, difficult, frequent and ineffecient. Most methods of sweeping raised and distributed dust. Carpets and soft furnishings were in use decades before any efficient means of cleaning were available. My evidence quotes damp tea leaves sprinkled on carpets before sweeping to prevent the dust rising. Use of electric vacuum cleaners, fridges, irons, washing machines, was not common for long after electricity was available. Many houses had gas lighting and conversion to electricity was expensive (our family did not have a house with electricity in it till 1934). Fred Archer14 in ‘A Lad of Evesham Vale’ mentions the excitement in his village when the whole village was wired for electricity also in 1934. ‘So the cottagers changed from mutton tallow candles to paraffin and now ‘we be on the ’lectric’. Open fires and a smokey atmosphere outside (no clean air legislation) meant everything got much more dirty than now and cleaning, clothes-washing, clothes-drying and spring cleaning were long and tiring tasks. Many employers quoted by my servant employed a ‘woman for washing’ and Gladys Evans was promised when she took a job as a single handed maid that ‘a woman would come in to do the washing’. This woman never materialised and Gladys did the washing, wringing, drying and ironing for an extra 6d a week.15 Many married women went out daily to do scrubbing or washing. Hours were extremely long and it was assumed that maids were there to make life smooth for the family, to cope with visitors and probably three meals a day. Servants were on the go or on call for a very long day, 7 a.m. till 7 p.m. or longer. One half day a week and a Sunday half day a fortnight seemed general for time off and this made an average, at my conservative estimate, of 66 hours a week. Half days did not start till 2.30 or after lunch dishes had been washed and the girl had to be in at 9.30 or 10.30. This time off applied in 1901 and was still in force according to my informants in the 1930s. Wages, while appearing low, roughly equalled wages in factories or shops if one added 10/a week for food, ie a 14 year old girl would receive 5/- which with keep equalled 15/-. A 14 year old shop assistant would have got more than this. But and the qualification, is crucial, the maid worked a 10 hour, perhaps 12 hour day, a 66 hour week and was expected to work Saturdays and Sundays for no extra pay. She was, as I’ve mentioned, working, or on call, practically all her waking day. If she had been paid according to the rates for shop assistants, she should have received, after deductions for food, 16s 6d a week. A standard working week of 48 hours and overtime pay for weekends was recommended by two government committees, one in 1923 and one in 1944 but no action was ever taken to implement this. Just as women’s work in the home was and still is under-valued so, it seems, was domestic service. Control over hours of work, behaviour, clothes worn, time off was quite strong – boyfriends were seldom allowed in the house. But my feeling is that employers could not have imposed
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such tight discipline had not the girls been brought up strictly and already internalised habits of obedience. The employers were away and my sister who worked there said ‘Why don’t you ask Arthur down?’ (Arthur was the man Mrs. Jaynes eventually married) So I did and of course we weren’t on our own though, my sister was married then and her husband – they were in the house – they used to stay in you see if Mrs. Lucas was away. They were sat in the lounge you see and I went in to shut the dining room window. I heard these footsteps on the gravel. Oh! My goodness, I felt as though I had done a crime. Of course, the gentlemen came in and they (boy friend and sister’s husband) were there. You know, I cried all night. It upset me so much. I felt I’d done something wrong but well, others do it. I wasn’t alone because my sister was there and she was married you see.16 I think this is interesting and revealing because the girl felt so guilty – she says twice – we were not alone – and she says in another part of the tape of her employer ‘after all she was responsible for us’. So I am arguing tenuously that parents and perhaps teachers paved the way for employers’ tyranny. Perhaps parents and teachers had inculcated habits of obedience that a young girl in strange surroundings and away from home would easily transfer to an employer or older servant. The tendencies towards obedience and subservience were there. They only had to be reinforced to produce a ‘willing servant’. Thea Vigne17 presented an Open University history T.V. programme which included a live interview. She asked a woman who’d been in service if she remembered having rows with her employer or answering back. The reply was: Not an awful lot. I used to hold my own as I thought now and again but not an awful lot. You see we hadn’t been allowed to cheek at home and – um – it didn’t come naturally. As E.P. Thompson says in another context; 18th Century Men Servants: To eat at one’s employer’s table and lodge in his barn or above his workshop is to submit to his supervision. Recently in 1975, in the William Tyndale School inquiry, a member of the inquiry team asked the Headmaster if he did not consider one of his aims was to train pupils in obedience for this was necessary in the world of work outside. The Headmaster replied that he did not agree with this but he considered that he should teach children to question.18 Many people including parents and teachers, would still hold the first view.
Pleasures and diversions It would be wrong to suggest that life for servants was uniformly hard. As a maid quoted in the 1923 report said:– There is nothing better for the girl if she is with good kind people but nothing worse should a girl find herself in a hard place.19 One of my informants had been in service 50 years from 1916 when she was 13 till 1966.
Women domestic servants 1919–1939
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This was because, from 1934, when her mother died, she had no home of her own. She had many happy jobs which she could treat as home but of course she had to move on because of factors outside her control. Of one job, where she worked from age 16 to age 23 (1919–1926) she says: They were very happy years, very happy years – I couldn’t say that anything went wrong apart from the occasional tiff you get in any household. They were 7 exceedingly happy years. I loved the children and they loved me – (pause) – I left simply because they would not pay a housemaid any more than I was getting, £24 per annum. I did want a little more money as by then Mother was partly dependent on me. I helped her to pay the rent and I wanted more money.20 Later in 1948 the same Linda Rayworth went to be a House-Keeper to Mr. Perkins, a widower and a retired draper. LINDA:
He was 78 at the time and I stayed until his death 8 years later. Looked after him in every way, no-one could have done more. PAM: Did he appreciate you? LINDA: Very much. I was his ‘old woman’ (with a laugh). I did everything – I did the garden – he hadn’t much money – Mr. Perkins was a dear old man. He paid me £2 a week in 1948 and I paid my own insurance stamp (10/-). It was a happy home, it was my home. I had my dog with me. He called me Miss Rayworth to other people but to my face I was his old woman. We didn’t have meals together – only tea. He did like me to have my tea with him. We had our tea together with a tablecloth and a crochet tray cloth and everything as his wife used to do it. I did everything for him; towards the end of his life he had to be treated like a baby. He had to be bathed and shaved and I sat up with him night and day till the end. And I did the last. I laid him out. And I grieved for him for a year. I did. I was fond of him. He needed so much attention. It’s the people that need so much doing for them that you miss.21 But of course the happy home finished when Mr. Perkins died and Linda at 53 had had to look for another job. (She is now 73 and has a comfortable council flat and lives alone). When I asked her how it felt not to have to wait on other people any more, she said – ‘Like Heaven’. Kate Godfrey worked for Lord Boyle in a country house in Sussex only really used when the family entertained. So duties were light when the family were away and Kate learned to drive a pony and trap and met visitors at nearby Robertsbridge Station. She was one of the servants I class as deferential. She was very impressed and honoured to meet important visitors. Winifred Foley worked for a time for an old lady of 91 in the Cotswolds. She herself was 14 and was paid £1 a month. In those days the baker’s man called every day. Twice a week the old lady took a fresh batch loaf from him sometimes still warm from the oven. To sit with her in that dining room with sun streaming through the lattice window, watching the japonica blossoms nod against the panes eating crusty buttered newly baked bread, feasting the eye on a standard tea rose through the open door made up for a lot of life’s drawbacks.
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Pam Taylor There were other pleasures too. I never had any time off, but once a month she sent me into Stroud to get a freshly laundered head piece from a little widow woman who did the hand laundry. At the same time I could send a postal order home to Mam and buy myself black stockings or a pair of shoes. To save her tuppence fare I offered to walk – and so had three miles each way of sheer delight from start to finish. In late Spring, wall flowers, tawny velvet to brilliant flame burst from crevices in dry stone garden walls. Sometimes a lady in one of the gardens would bid me a pleasant ‘Good afternoon’. Of course, they didn’t know I was a mere ‘skivvy’. It was nice to be spoken to as an ordinary human being.22
Certainly where several servants were kept there could be more fun and companionship and a certain solidarity. But often the fleeting pleasures were appreciated because so much of their lives were controlled and supervised.
Discipline and control Why was such pervasive control exerted not only over work but over life itself ? One view is that employers were in loco parentis and were responsible for the servants, and perhaps there’s an element of truth here. But, the employers were part of the larger class system that saw the working class as a race, apart, but necessary, to do unpleasant and laborious work essential for their comfort. Normally the working class lived in different areas and very different houses. In towns they often lived in ghettoes avoided by the better off. One of the duties of the subordinate class was to ‘know their place’ and not overstep the boundary between themselves and their betters. In domestic service, the employing upper class was allowing the lower class to step over this barrier and to enter their homes to work and live. Hence it was doubly necessary to define servants’ subordinate role and inferiority. Status distinctions were carefully delineated and rigidly enforced. The servants must not be mistaken for kin either in the minds of the employer or to the servant herself or to outsiders. Rules about rising, working, time off, uniform, modes of address, eating, all served to define the servant as different. Having different needs and expectations from women of the family. Even if kindness was shown, the control was there, and because the girl lived on the job she was more open to this persuasion. Erving Goffman23 the sociologist calls this situation a total institution or one where all aspects of behaviour are controlled. And where it is difficult not to accept the role defined for you by others. Tone of voice and spoken intimidation were other methods used to imply the servants’ lower status. Robert Roberts mentions this in The Classic Slum. It cannot be proved: only imagined. When Gladys Evans related her experiences to me she assumed the accent of her employer when ‘speaking the employers words’. Margaret Powell relates how her employer reprimanded her about the door knocker not being polished ‘Langley (her surname), you have a good home, good food and comfortable lodgings and you’re being taught a trade. In return I expect the work to be done well.’ By this time I was in tears what with feeling so inferior.24 I am sure this verbal intimidation happened and is stored in the memory of servants but it is something they do not often ordinarily mention. You could say a sort of apartheid ruled in the house and I’ve many many examples, but I had better restrict myself to one kind – eating. Servants rarely ate with the family; moreover
Women domestic servants 1919–1939
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their meals were interrupted to go and clear dishes for the main family. In quite modern and small houses bells were installed so that the servants could be rung for. Miss Rayworth worked for many years for Mrs. Coates and they were the only two occupants of the house. We lived like friends, but we always ate separately except during the war when we ate together to save heating two rooms.25 Gladys Evans: Well you know, in the morning I used to have to get the children off to school and I was supposed to lay the dining room table for them. One morning I thought I’d save myself some work and I laid the table in the kitchen. Well in any case it was the warmest room in the house, but I was ‘caught out’. ‘Children must not eat in the kitchen but in the dining room’ so that was that.26 How did servants perceive this definition of themselves? Some of course accepted it. Upbringing and schooling as girls had prepared them for it. When you enter a set up where rules and customs are already well established it is quite difficult not to conform. But many of the remarks showed that servants did perceive they were being exploited. Very often they couldn’t do much about it because of the difficulty of getting another job and poverty at home. Lilian Cross fiercely resented being treated like this, as she Well, even if I’m praying to Him, if we’re all good enough to do that together in His presence why aren’t we good enough to talk to each other? Miss Robson gave a deep sigh and then a kindly meant lecture on humility. She herself would curtsey to the Queen, we all had our place in Society and ducks could never be happy trying to pretend they were swans. Far better for me if I knew my place and made the best of it. I agreed with her that College Hall was a very good place for servants but she could not offer mine to a more deserving girl as I was giving my notice in there and then. After my previous jobs I thought I had rather cut off my nose to spite my face but I felt a kind of glory in my rebellion. I sang the Red Flag as loud as I dared among the clatter of pots and pans and thought of my dad and all the down-trodden workers of the world and nearly cried. But many girls either because of internalised feelings of ‘respect’ and restraint or because of the job situation externally, felt unable to speak up even if they were badly treated – I end with another quote from Gladys Evans, whose very tone of voice suggested this resignation and powerlessness. PAM(Q): What did she do in the end that made you leave? GLADYS: Well, in the end all the children came home from
boarding school and there was extra work, you know, and one day there was two teacloths missing and I said I hadn’t had them: but it was my habit to hang the day’s tea towels on the triplex oven door to dry: and these two teacloths were missing and Mrs. Kerr said (here Gladys assumed the tone of voice used by Mrs. Kerr) ‘I expect you’ve burnt them on the oven door . . . you haven’t got the brains to own up’. I said ‘I haven’t burned them. I don’t know where the teacloths are’. Anyway, two shillings was stopped from my wages that week. And when the laundry came back on Friday – there was the teaclothes in the laundry basket.
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Pam Taylor They’d probably been put on top of the laundry basket and got pushed in. But, you got no apology. I got the two shillings back but I got no apology.27 No.
Mrs. Evans was talking to me in 1972. But this incident in the 1930s still rankled. I am not suggesting that all servants had a hard time. Some service jobs undoubtedly were more enjoyable and less onerous than some factory jobs. Girls did escape from unhappy or overcrowded homes into service. A kind employer could give the emotional support that was often so desperately missed by a girl leaving home, family, friends and neighbourhood. But approximately 1,600,000 girls and women were ‘in service’ in 1931 (including hospitals, hotels, institutions). Their wages and conditions of work and free time were not subject to any statutory regulation so that if servants were badly treated or overworked there was little protection for them. I said. ‘I can’t stand it much longer’ I said, ‘its getting me down’ cos I had to do my work and sit up with the children til one or two in the morning till she (the employer, a Naval Officer’s wife) came home, then go to bed, then get up at 6 a.m. So I said to her one day ‘well, I’m sorry I shall have to leave’ I said ‘I can’t put up with it’ and she said ‘Well, I’ve no money to pay you’. I says ‘Well, I want my money’ I said ‘Such as it is’, ‘Well’ she said, ‘I shall have to go out, the children must stop in the house and you must meet me down at the Carfax’ (in Oxford) and then she only gave me half of it.28 Add to this neglect over wages and hours of work. The extremely strong control exerted over the girl’s private life (if she could be said to have a private life). And one is left with the feeling that resident women servants were, indeed, a hidden army. Hidden in two senses; – hidden as an element in the work force; domestic servants were not an easily identifiable industry with protective legislation; the fact that they were scattered and ‘living on the job’ made trade union organisation difficult. Secondly, they were hidden in the household from the family and from the order and comfort they created.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
Robert Roberts. The Classic Slum, Penguin 1971. John Burnett Useful Toil, Penguin 1977. C.L. Mowatt. Britain Between the Wars, 1955. In John Burnett, Plenty and Want, Penguin 1966. The Times, 1931. George Orwell, Coming Up for Air, Penguin, 1939. Lilian Cross, South Wales 1920s. Winifred Foley, Forest of Dean 1920s. Doris Grayson on leaving South Wales for London. Florence Follett in a Northants village. Doris Grayson of her job in London. Winifred Foley. A Child in the Forest. BBC Publications 1974. Margaret Powell, Below Stairs, Pan Books, 1968. Fred Archer, A Lad of Evesham Vale, 1972. Gladys Evans, Wednesbury, Staffs. Mrs. H. Jaynes, Birmingham. Thea Vigne, Essex University. This is my recollection from a newspaper report. Not verbatim. (PT). Robert of the Committee appointed to enquire into the present conditions as to the supply of female domestic servants, 1923.
Women domestic servants 1919–1939 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
Linda Rayworth. Linda Rayworth. Winifred Foley A Child in the Forest. BBC Publications, 1974. Erving Goffman, Asylums, 1961. Margaret Powell, Below Stairs. Linda Rayworth. Gladys Evans. Gladys Evans. Mrs. A.D. quoted in W.E.A. West Oxfordshire Oral History Broadsheet No. 4, Spring 76.
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43 What do we mean by popular memory? CCCS Popular Memory Group
This stencilled paper is an edited version of a study which will appear in a CCCS volume on historiography in 1982 (CCCS History Group, Making Histories: Studies in History-Writing and Politics, Hutchinson, forthcoming). The whole article (‘Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method’) is three times or so the length of this extract which consists only of the early, most general sections. The essay is based upon the collective work of the Popular Memory Group in CCCS which met between October 1979 and June 1980. The group consisted of: Michael Bommes, Gary Clarke, Graham Dawson, Jacob Eichler, Thomas Fock, Richard Johnson, Cim Meyer, Rebecca O’Rourke, Rita Pakleppa, Hans-Erich Poser, Horten Skov-Carlsen, Anne Turley and Patrick Wright. This piece was written by Richard Johnson with Graham Dawson.
‘Must become historians of the present too’ Communist Party Historian’s Group Minutes, 8.4.1956 In this article we explore an approach to history-writing which involves becoming ‘historians of the present too’. It is important to stress ‘explore’. It is not yet clear to us whether the study of ‘popular memory’ (our shorthand for this approach) should be pursued as an additional way of writing about history, or should be urged as an alternative to conventional historiography, or is indeed a perspective that should inform all historical practice. It is certain, however, that the arguments we want to put derive in large part from considering the contradictions of academic history, especially where links are attempted with a popular socialist or feminist politics. Our second reservation is that we have no completed project on ‘popular memory’ on which to report. This article is part of an initial clarification; it is not a comprehensive review. We can however point to existing projects which are travelling in the same direction as we would like to go, producing resources and also encountering difficulties on the way. This includes important experiments in oral history, popular autobiography and community-based history, but also certain theoretical debates that bear centrally on these practices. One aim of this article is to bring together these different resources which are often, for reasons we will discuss, held rather separate. What, then, do we mean by ‘popular memory’? In the first few sections of this article we will try and answer this question, viewing popular memory first as an object of study and, secondly, as a form of political practice.
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Popular memory as an object of study So far, in this volume, we have worked with a rather implicit view of historiography, though occasionally breaching it. We understand historiography to be a practice which critically comments on history-writing, including its theoretical premises and political implications. This practical definition has not proved to be particularly limiting, at least for the examples and periods chosen. We have not drawn too formal a distinction between ‘academic history’ and more popular or politicised kinds. Indeed such a distinction would have made little sense for Marx, for the Hammonds, for the early years of the Communist Party Historian’s Group and for much feminist history. Even so, there are some more limiting implications in our choices and it is important to be aware of them. Aside from neglecting a conventional academic and conservative historiography, we have worked with some loose notions of ‘the history-writer’, the practitioner who works under the sign of history as art or science, the historian, perhaps as ‘intellectual’. Even so flexible a definition does set rather too narrow limits, we now think, to the object of study. This is especially true for the present time. The looser and potentially amateur notion of ‘the history-writer’ has hardened into the historian as specialist academic. Left historiographies have not been immune from this process. Left and feminist history had developed within and in connection with the universities, the polytechnics and, especially in the case of feminism, with adult education. The expansion of a left academic constituency, a particular feature of the 1960s and 1970s, has created fundamental tensions which will be all too familiar to most readers of this article. Some of the contradictions and two very different ways of handling them are to be seen, for example, in the contrasted strategies of Social History and History Workshop Journal the one pursuing a cautious historical avant-guardism, the other avowedly socialist and committed to the idea of a genuinely ‘popular’ history.1 For the modern period, then, there is a real problem of the implicitly non-popular effects of focussing on formal history-writing, a practice largely colonised by academic and professional norms. (As we shall see this is also the case with new methodologies, especially ‘oral history’, which are sometimes seen as intrinsically ‘popular’ and democratising.) If we retain this focus, we risk reproducing some very conservative forms: a closed circle of comment between left social historians and what Marx would have called ‘critical critics’. Ken Worpole has pointed out the effects of this in justly sceptical terms: It is obvious to anyone that the last two decades have produced an outstanding growth in the range of work done in the field of Labour studies and the more informal modes of working-class self-organisation and forms of cultural identity. . . . There has been a proliferation of research papers, published essays and full-length books emerging from this powerful intellectual current. Yet . . . I seriously wonder whether we could with any confidence suggest that we have a more historically conscious labour movement now than we have done at previous periods of crisis in the past. I would think not.2 He suggests ‘two observable trends’ that might account for this: the concentration of history in higher education (the move from ‘draught Co-op Halls and Trades Hall to modern Polytechnic lecture rooms’) and the expense of commercially-published books (‘expensive handbooks for the higher education libraries, rather than pocketbooks for the people’). What is so important about these comments is that they direct attention to the form of historical works and the social conditions within which they are produced, distributed and (sometimes) read. These questions are completely taken for granted in the ordinary run of critical
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reviewing, though the problem of the accessibility of language and of ‘jargon’ sometimes stands in for the larger problems. Worpole’s comments show the need to expand the idea of historical production well beyond the limits of academic history-writing. We must include indeed all the ways in which a sense of the past is constructed in our society. These do not necessarily take a written or literary form. Still less do they necessarily conform to academic standards of scholarship or canons of truthfulness. Academic history has a particular place in a much larger process. We will call this ‘the social production of memory’. In this collective production everyone participates, though unequally. Everyone, in this sense, is a historian. As Jean Chesneaux argues, professionalised history has attempted to appropriate a much more general set of relationships and needs: ‘the collective and contradictory relationship of our society to its past’ and the ‘collective need’ for guidance in the struggle to make the future.3 We have already noted a similar stress in Christopher Hill’s work: the recognition of a larger social process in which ‘we ourselves are shaped by the past’ but are also continually re-working the past which shapes us. The first problem, in the pursuit of ‘popular memory’ is to specify the ‘we’ in Hill’s formulation or ‘our society’ in Chesneaux’s. What are the means by which social memory is produced? And what practices are relevant especially outside those of professional history-writing?4 It is useful to distinguish two main ways in which a sense of the past is produced: through public representations and through private memory (which, however, may also be collective and shared). The first way involves a public ‘theatre’ of history, a public stage and a public audience for the enacting of dramas concerning ‘our’ history, or heritage, the story, traditions and legacy of ‘the British People’. This public stage is occupied by many actors who often speak from contradictory scripts, but collectively we shall term the agencies which construct this public historical sphere and control access to the means of publication ‘the historical apparatus’. We shall call the products of these agencies, in their aggregate relations and combinations at any point of time, ‘the field of public representations of history’. In thinking about the ways in which these representations effect individual or group conceptions of the past, we might speak of ‘dominant memory’. This term points to the power and pervasiveness of historical representations, their connections with dominant institutions and the part they play in winning consent and building alliances in the processes of formal politics. But we do not mean to imply that conceptions of the past that acquire a dominance in the field of public representations are either monolithicly installed or everywhere believed in. Not all the historical representations that win access to the public field are ‘dominant’. The field is crossed by competing constructions of the past, often at war with each other. Dominant memory is produced in the course of these struggles and is always open to contestation. We do want to insist, however, that there are real processes of domination in the historical field. Certain representations achieve centrality and luxuriate grandly; others are marginalised or excluded or re-worked. Nor are the criteria of success here those of truth: dominant representations may also be those that are most ideological, most obviously conforming to the flattened stereotypes of myth. Historical constructions are most obviously public when linked to central state institutions. The government and parliamentary systems, especially in their ‘Englishness’, are historical apparatuses in their own right. Aided (sotto voce) by BBC pomposity, they ‘breathe’ a sense of ‘tradition’, guaranteeing the inviolability of the broad ground-rules of formal politics, ‘our democratic constitution’. Actually (and contradictorily) it is not parliamentary institutions that are the important foci for most pageantry, the main form of historical theatre. The monarchy and the military are much more closely involved here, providing the very stuff of
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tradition. Both loom large in the regular metropolitan spectacles and in the more occasional shows: jubilees, royal weddings, state visits, state funerals and commemorative events. Nor are the historical interventions of the monarchy and the military only metropolitan, appropriated by visiting tourists (though they certainly benefit the tourist industries). Loudly amplified through the media, they also intersect with everyday life in the localities. ‘Our Royal Family’ may be cosily consumed at the fireside. Children may learn about a militaristic past at the war museums, through hand-books of military strategy and technology and through the local airshow or open day, commenorating, perhaps, the Battle of Britain. Historical recreations (popular now in the grounds of the better preserved local castles) may figure military moments (the Civil War) or pugnacious popular myth, robbed however, of political significance (Robin Hood versus the Sheriff of Nottingham perhaps). Such events produce too their own historiographies of brochures, guides, official (e.g. regimental) histories and, of course, a massive academic and popular literatures on royal and military personages and themes. Despite their official origins, then, such representations have a real life within the patterns of popular leisure and pleasure. Other institutions, though linked to the national or local state, have a greater degree of autonomy, operating with high-cultural, educational, preservational or archival purposes. We include here the whole world of museums, art galleries, record offices, the D.O.E.’s official preservation orders, the ‘National’ Trust, the ‘National’ Theatre, and in general the sphere of history as ‘cultural policy’ – much of what is explored in the next article as ‘national heritage’. Perhaps the educational system itself belongs here too: the academic producers and all those definitions of historical significance carried in the formal curricula, their own historical and archaeological societies, often with a long nineteenth-century pedigree. Like the Historical Association which links school-teachers and academics these societies draw on a fund of amateur historical enthusiasm, often bounded by a strong sense of locality. To these we must add newer growths: the preservation societies and communitybased groups and WEA classes, including those with socialist and feminist purposes. The growth of ‘oral history’ and of the history workship movement has added whole layers, sometimes of a radically new kind, to these local and participatory forms. As this last set of examples suggest, the various sites and institutions do not act in concert. To make them sing, if not in harmony at least with only minor dissonances, involves hard labour and active intervention. Sometimes this has been achieved by direct control (for example censorship) and by a violent recasting or obliteration of whole fields of public history. More commonly today, in the capitalist West, the intersections of formal political debates and the public media are probably the crucial site. Certainly political ideologies always involve a view of past and present and future. Ranged against powers such as these, what price the lonely scholar, producing (also through commercial channels) the one or two thousand copies of the latest monograph!? There is a second way of looking at the social production of memory which draws attention to quite other processes. A knowledge of past and present is also produced in the course of everyday life. There is a common sense about history which, though it may lack consistency and an explanatory force, may nonetheless contain elements of very good sense indeed. Such knowledge may circulate, usually without amplification, in everyday talk and in personal comparisons and narratives. It may even be recorded in certain intimate cultural forms: letters, diaries, photograph albums and collections of things with past associations. It may be encapsulated in anecdotes that acquire the force and generality of myth. If this is history, however, it is history under extreme pressures and privations. Usually this history is held to the level of private remembrance. It concedes a wider canvas to historian or
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publicist. It is not only unrecorded, but actually silenced. It is not offered the occasion to speak. In one domain, the modern women’s movement understands the process of silencing very well indeed and is now raising the ‘hidden’ history of women’s feelings, thoughts and actions more clearly to view. Feminist history challenges the very distinction ‘public’/‘private’ that silences or marginalises women’s lived sense of the past. But similar processes of domination operate too in relation to specifically working-class experiences, for most workingclass people are also robbed of access to the means of publicity and are equally unused to the male, middle-class habit of giving universal or ‘historic’ significance to an extremely partial experience. But we are only beginning to understand the class dimensions of cultural domination, partly by transferring them in ‘O’ and ‘A’ level syllabuses and examinations, and in the texts that are widely used in schools. In this ‘cultural’ field, the relations between scholarly and dominant historiographies are especially intimate; the historian’s criteria of truthfulness are more likely to prevail here than in the more overtly politicised versions. History, however, is also business. It is important, of course, for the whole range of publishing activity, especially since historical writing retains much more of an amateur or ‘lay’ public than do other social sciences. Best seller lists commonly contain items that are marketed as ‘historical’ especially biographies and autobiographies, historical fictions and military histories. In Britain, much more than in Europe, the Second World War has provided an inexhaustible supply of historical fact and fiction, much of it in heavily militaristic guise and reinforced by the close convergence or war, fighting and a boy culture in men, young and old. (The historical paradigm here is definitely not academic history but the tradition of masculine romance that runs from Boys Own to the super-hero comics of today.) To popular fiction and the modern form of the glossy illustrated documentary book, we have to add the historical movies, somewhat displaced in the block-buster market by the contemporary salience of science fiction. More interesting because less remarked on is the massive contemporary growth of ‘historical tourism’. We mean the way in which historically significant places become a resource, physically or ideologically, for the leisure and tourist industries. The way is led here by the owners of palaces, mansions, castles and other ‘country houses’, and, in its own discreet way, by the Anglican Church, but the last decade or so has seen the commercial colonisation of many lesser sites with historical or mythical capital. The guide books, also commercially produced and with very large and expertly promoted circulations, point us to these places, encapsulating their historical meaning. The public media too – especially radio, television and the press – are a principle source of historical constructions. We include here the intersections of history, journalism and documentary, but also the media arts, especially historical drama. The media certainly produce their own historical accounts – they produce a contemporary history daily, for instance, in the form of ‘news’. But they also select, amplify and transform constructions of the past produced elsewhere. They increasingly draw, for example, from oral history and ‘yesterday’s witness’. They give a privileged space to conceptions of the past which accompany the party-political battles. Of all parts of the historical apparatus, indeed, the electronic media are perhaps the most compelling and ubiquitous. Access there may often be decisive in gaining currency for an historical account. Somewhat more removed from the patronage of state and of capital are what we may term the voluntary associations of the world of history. Most counties and many towns have feminist insights. Nor is this only a question of class or gender positions. Even the very articulate middle-class historian, facing the dominant memory of events through which he has actually lived, can also be silenced (almost) in this way. One telling example is the difficulty of writers of the New Left in speaking coherently about the Second World War.
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One is not permitted to speak of one’s wartime reminiscences today, nor is one under any impulse to do so. It is an area of general reticence: an unmentionable subject among younger friends, and perhaps of mild ridicule among those of radical opinions. All this is understood. And one understands also why it is so. It is so, in part, because Chapman Pincher and his like have made an uncontested take-over of all the moral assets of that period; have coined the war into Hollywood blockbusters and spooky paper-backs and television media; have attributed all the value of that moment to the mythic virtues of an authoritarian Right which is now supposedly, the proper inheritor and guardian of the present nation’s interests. I walk in my garden, or stand cooking at the stove, and muse on how this came about. My memories of that war are very different . . .5 This is followed by a re-assuringly confident passage which is a classic text for studying the popular memory of the 1940s, but the struggle is intense, the victory narrow, and the nearsilencing of so strong and masculine a voice in the shape of its domestication is very revealing. It is, of course, this kind of recovery that has become the mission of the radical and democratic currents in oral history, popular autobiography and community-based publishing. We will look at these attempts to create a socialist or democratic popular memory later in the argument. But we wish to stress first that for us the study of popular memory cannot be limited to this level alone. It is a necessarily relational study. It has to take in the dominant historical representations in the public field as well as attempts to amplify or generalise subordinated or private experiences. Like all struggles it must needs have two sides. Private memories cannot, in concrete studies, be readily unscrambled from the effects of dominant historical discourses. It is often these that supply, indeed, the very terms by which a private history is thought through . . . Memories of the past are, like all common-sense forms, strangely composite constructions, resembling themselves a kind of geology, the selective sedimentation of past traces. As Gramsci put it, writing about the necessity of historical consciousness for a Communist politics, the problem is ‘ “knowing theyself” as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Similarly the public discourses must needs live off the primary recording of events in the course of everyday transactions and take over the practical knowledges of historical agents. It is for these reasons that the study of ‘popular memory’ is concerned with two sets of relations. It is concerned with the relation between dominant memory and oppositional forms across the whole public (including academic field). It is also concerned with the relation between these public discourses in their contemporary state of play and the more privatised sense of the past which is generated within a lived culture.
Popular memory as a political practice Socialist, feminist and radical historians have always understood that history matters politically. History-writing has sometimes been seen as a way of fighting within one branch of ‘science’, an attempt to dislodge ‘bourgeois’ history from its predominant place within the progessional intellectual field. Certainly, left historians have shared a general, often quite vague, sense that a history informed by Marxist or socialist premises must needs serve the politics of the present and future. Only rarely, at least in contemporary debates, has this general association been challenged. The intrinsically ‘historical’ character of Marxism, as science or as critique, has usually seemed to guarantee the connection.
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Actually, the political uses of history do seem to us more problematic even from a Marxist perspective. This is especially the case when history is defined as it is usually defined within conventional historiography, as ‘the study of the past’. We have come to see this as one of the key features of professional history, and indeed, of historical ideologies. Certainly it is deeply problematic from the viewpoint of ‘popular memory’. For memory is, by definition, a term which directs our attention not to the past but to the past-present relation. It is precisely because ‘the past’ has this living active existence in the present that it matters so much politically. As ‘the past’ – dead, gone or only subsumed in the present – it matters much less. This argument may be clarified if we compare a number of approaches to the political significance of history, returning to some of Bill Schwarz’s formulations in his essay on the Communist Party Historian’s Group.6 We may follow Schwarz in distinguishing three main approaches to the political relevance of history. The first approach, while retaining in a quite strong form the notion that the object of history is ‘the past’, seeks to link past and present in the form of salutary ‘lessons’. These may have a negative force, warning, for instance, against returns to past disasters. The contemporary argument about ‘the 1930s’, which draws on a conventional left historiography of that decade, is a case in point. But this argument may also work more positively, typically by identifying ‘traditions’ which then become a resource for present struggles. Raymond Williams’ ‘Culture and Society’ tradition, Edward Thompson’s tradition of libertarian socialism or communism, formed in the junction of Marxism and Romanticism and the socialist-feminist succession uncovered in the historical work of Sheila Rowbotham are salient examples here. An even better case is that already discussed by Schwarz: the communist historian’s construction of a long lineage of popular democratic struggles from the Levellers and Diggers to the socialism and communism of the twentieth century. More generally still, and the move is typical of Edward Thompson’s history, the recreation of popular struggles shows us that despite retreats and defeats, ‘the people’, ‘the working class’ or the female sex do ‘make history’ even under conditions of oppression or exploitation. In the same way, especially if we are conscious of this lineage, we can make history too. The link between past and present, between history-writing and the construction of historical futures today, is in essence, an exhortatory one. A second way of conceiving the past-present relation is to employ historical perspectives and methods as an element in strategic analysis. We start from the need to understand contemporary political problems. We seek to examine the conditions on which contemporary dilemmas rest. In looking at the nature and origins of current oppressions, we trace their genesis as far back as it is necessary to go. Here the relation between past and present is necessarily more organic, more internal. The past is present today in particular social structures with determinate origins and particular histories. This cooler, ‘scientific’ evaluation of the past is best exemplified, as Schwarz suggests, in Perry Anderson’s historical project, from ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’ to his sequence of major studies in the origins of the modern capitalist world. It is characteristic too, of course, of Marx’s own historical projects, Capital itself but also, for example, the essays on French and English politics, though in Marx it is certainly allied with a ‘hotter’ more inspirational or agitational mode of history-writing, closer to the first of our own categories and with a similar risk of triumphalism. A stress on popular memory adds, we think, something to both these conceptions, though it certainly does not displace them. The construction of traditions is certainly one way in which historical argument operates as a political force though it risks a certain conservatism; similarly any adequate analysis of the contemporary relations of political force has to be historical in form as well as reach back to more or less distant historical times. It has also to
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attempt to grasp the broader epochal limits and possibilities in terms of a longer history of capitalist and patriarchal structures. What we may insist on in addition, is that all political activity is also intrinsically a process of historical argument and definition, that all political programmes involve some construction of the past as well as the future, and that these processes go on everyday, often outrunning, especially in terms of period, the preoccupations of historians. Political domination involves historical definition. History – in particular popular memory – is a stake in the constant struggle for hegemony. The relation between history and politics, like the relation between past and present, is, therefore, an internal one: it is about the politics of history and the historical dimensions of politics. Some examples may make the implications of this argument clearer. It can certainly be argued that conceptions of the past have played a particularly central role in political life in Britain especially in popular conceptions of nationhood. The intersections between a popular conservative historiography and the dominant definitions of British (but especially English) nationalism have been especially intimate. One problem of all left historiographies in Britain that retain ‘the nation’ or ‘the nationalpopular’ as a major affirmative category is precisely the thoroughness of this conservative appropriation of nationhood and the more structural conditions, especially the long history of Empire and of cultural separation from Europe on which it rests. The dominant memory of the Second World War (in which the ‘island race’ was united under a great leader, Sir Winston Churchill) and its recurrent re-evocation (they/we really can pull together when its absolutely necessary) is a case in point. Similarly, contemporary racism feeds upon a memory of a nation and a working class that was white, chauvinistic and dominant on a worldwide scale. Indeed ‘the British People’ (to whom the legacy of Alfred, Drake, Wellington and Churchill is bequeathed) is, often half-consciously, a racist construction. The dominant nationalist themes, grown cosy and thoroughly naturalised by repetition, disguise or celebrate the actual history of imperial and colonial domination. They define what it means to be British, to ‘belong’ today. In so doing they marginalise and oppress black people in Britain whose own history is precisely the reverse side of the conservative chronicles.7 More particular political questions are fought out on this ground too. Each major political settlement involves its own historiography, academic and popular. The dominant socialdemocratic and liberal-conservative post-war tendencies, for example, constructed their own history of the 1940s as a period of massive social transformation. For Labour Party ‘revisionism’ particularly, the 1950s were a post revolutionary era, to which, therefore, traditional left analyses of a Marxist kind, were quite irrelevant. The dominance of this historical account (classically expressed in the political writing of John Strachey and Anthony Crosland) certainly helped to marginalise socialist and marxist politics in this period. We can, however, see similar processes at work today. Contemporary Thatcherism has constructed its own historical account that centres on the failure of the whole arc of post-war politics and the growth of a bureaucratic statism. Similarly, attempts to create a new liberal and social-democratic centre in British politics are pursued as Dave Sutton has suggested partly by historical means, including an extensive re-evaluation of the ‘new Liberalism’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.8 The historiography of the Labour Party, too, has taken on new dimensions in the light of the growth of socialist currents within it. The historical debate about the 1930s has acquired a new urgency with the growth of unemployment and the constant referencing (sometimes in very conservative terms) of this decade by Labour politicians and trade union leaders.9 Here again one finds a significant ‘revisionist’ project, now very well launched from a position right of centre in British politics, that discovers that the 1930s were not really so bad after all! If we remind ourselves of the centrality of history-writing
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and teaching for a long succession of left intellectuals in Britain, the fact that Marxism has taken characteristically historical forms and the strength of a feminist, especially a socialistfeminist historiography here, the importance of history as a ground of political struggle seems confirmed. Explanations of this cultural centrality of history are evasive and need a proper comparative context: do all nation states with long histories develop an extensive historiographical culture? Perhaps the very early formation of the nation state and the long subsequent continuities, unbroken, except in the seventeenth century by massive political ruptures and breaks, is one part of an explanation. Certainly, if we are looking to fill the ‘absent centre’ of British national culture, history and the sense of the past might prove a very strong candidate indeed.10 The formation of a popular memory that is socialist, feminist and anti-racist is of peculiar importance today, both for general and for particular reasons. Generally, as Gramsci argued, a sense of history must be one element in a strong popular socialist culture. It is one means by which an organic social group acquires a knowledge of the larger context of its collective struggles, and becomes capable of wider transformative role in the society.11 Most important of all, perhaps, it is the means by which we may become self-conscious about the formation of our own common sense beliefs, those that we appropriate from our immediate social and cultural milieu. These beliefs have a history and are also produced in determinate processes. The point is to recover their ‘inventory’, not in the manner of the folklorist who wants to preserve quaint ways from modernity, but in order that, their origin and tendency known, they may be consciously adopted, rejected or modified. In this a popular historiography, especially a history of the commonest forms of consciousness, is a necessary aspect of the struggle for a better world. More particularly, the formation of a popular socialist memory is an urgent requirement for the 1980s in Britain. Part of the problem here is that such traces of politicised memory of this kind as exist chart, on the whole, a post-war history of disillusionment and decline, in particular a deep sense of loss and alienation so far as the Labour Party is concerned. But the problem is deeper than this difficulty (which, even now, the socialist revival within outside the Labour Party may be lessening). For what are to be the forms of a new socialist popular memory? A recovery of labour’s past will hardly do; nor is it helpful to chart the struggles only of the male, skilled, white sectors of the working class who have formed the main subjects of ‘labour history’ to this day. We need forms of socialist popular memory that tell us too about the situation and struggles of women and about the convergent and often antagonistic history of black people, including the black Britons of today. Socialist popular memory today has to be a newly constructed enterprise; no mere recovery or recreation is going to do. Otherwise we shall find that nostalgia merely reproduces conservatism.
Resources The resources for such a project are great but they are also, in important ways, very disorganised, systematically disorganised that is, not merely ‘lacking organisation’. This has much to do with the diverse social origins of different kinds of resource and the immense difficulties of their combination. For many resources have, in the last two decades, been created through the critical work of academic practitioners – especially, in our field, historians, sociologists, philosophers and so on dissatisfied with the limits and ideologies of their professional discipline. ‘Cultural Studies’ is a growth of this kind but belongs to a very much wider field of radical and feminist intellectual work where much of the stress has been, till lately, upon theoretical clarification and development. But there have been important breaks
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outside the academic circles too, or in a tense relation to them. They have been most commonly connected to adult education (especially the WEA) or to school-teaching or to post-1968 forms of community action. The principle aim of these tendencies has been to democratise the practices of authorship; or lessen or remove entirely the distance between ‘historian’ and what Ken Worpole has called ‘the originating constituency’. The characteristic products of this movement have been popular autobiographies, orally-based histories, histories of communities and other forms of popular writing. But it has also produced a characteristic critique of academic practice that stresses the inaccessibility even of good left social history in terms of both language and price, and the absorption of authors and readers in the product (book or journal) rather than the process by which it is produced and distributed. Partly because of the stress on ‘language’ and the commitment to ‘plain speech’ oral-historical or popular-autobiographical activists are often deeply critical of the dominant forms of theory. It is this division, indeed, that is, in our opinion, a major source of disorganisation. The tensions between the ‘activist’ and ‘academic’ ends of radical historical tendencies are explosive to a degree that is often quite destructive. They are often qualitatively less productive than directly cross-class encounters in which working-class people directly interrogate academic radicals. Even so there is a beginning of useful connections between academic ‘critics’ and community activists (who are not always different persons); where patience holds long enough on either side there are the beginnings of a useful dialogue. Some of this can be traced in the pages of History Workshop Journal, the conference volume to History Workshop12 and in the writings, especially, of some authors whose experience spans an ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ experience. In general History Workshop (as journal and as ‘movement’) has been distinguished by its attempt to hold together these two unaimiable constituencies along with other groups under the banner of ‘socialist’ or ‘people’s’ history. It is in this sense that History Workshop is the nearest thing we have to an alternative ‘historical apparatus’. In what follows we want simply to note some developments, within and outside the History Workshop movement that seem to us to point already towards the study of popular memory. It is oral history – the evocation and recording of individual memories of the past – which seems, at first sight, nearest to the popular memory perspective, or one aspect of it. In fact the term oral history embraces a very large range of practices only tenuously connected by a ‘common’ methodology. What interests us most about oral history is that it is often the place where the tension between competing historical and political aims is most apparent: between professional procedures and amateur enthusiasm, between oral history as recreation (in both senses) and as politics, between cannons of objectivity and an interest, precisely, in subjectivity and in cultural forms. Later, we want to illustrate these tensions by looking at the early work of the oral and social historian Paul Thompson. There are good reasons for choosing Thompson’s work. He is both a socialist and a professional historian. He has done more than anyone to introduce and modify the use of oral methods in this country. With Thea Vigne, he organised the first large-scale SSRC-funded oral history research project. He is also author of the first lengthy ‘introduction’ to the use of oral sources for the historian. He is editor of Oral History, the main medium of communication between oral historians, and is closely associated with History Workshops.13 In focussing part of our argument around Thompson’s work, we do not mean to imply that there are no alternative models. Other adaptations of oral history are, indeed, much nearer to our own concerns. We would cite for example the critique of oral history in its more empiricist forms, to be found in Louisa Passerini’s work. Her pursuit of the structuring principles of memory and of forgetfulness, her concern with representation, ideology and
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sub-conscious desires, her focus on ‘subjectivity which includes cognitive, cultural and psychological aspects’,14 and her understanding of subjectivity as a ground of political struggle, all bring her work very close to British traditions of cultural studies, where they have been influenced by feminism. Her critique of oral history seems to us much more radical than its sometimes guarded expression might suggest. And we agree absolutely with her criticisms of English debates for the failure to connect oral history as a method with more general theoretical issues. The beginning of her analysis of popular memories of Italian fascism in Turin mark a large advance on most thinking about the cultural and political (as opposed to merely ‘factual’) significance of oral history texts. Although there is a beginning of a more self-reflexive mood in Britain, the strengths here lie more in a developed practice of popular history, often building on the social and labour history traditions. This is the case, for example, with the most stunning single work drawing on evoked memories of participants – Ronald Fraser’s Blood of Spain.15 The lessons of this book for future practice lie more in the way it is written than in any very self-conscious prescriptions by the author, a long time practitioner of oral history or ‘qualitative sociology’. What we found interesting in Blood of Spain was the use of oral remembered material in something like the form in which it is first evoked: not as abstracted ‘facts’ about the past, but as story, as remembered feeling and thought, as personal account. The whole book is woven from such stories and retrospective analyses, sometimes quoted, sometimes paraphrased, clustered around the chronology of the Spanish civil war or the make-or-break issues that were debated and literally fought out in its course. There is a sense in which Fraser’s interviewees actually ‘write’ Blood of Spain by providing the author with the cellular form of the larger work: innumerable tiny personal narratives from which is woven a larger story of heroic proportions and almost infinite complication. Blood of Spain is history through composite autobiography, the recreation of experience in the form of a thousand partial and warring viewpoints. But it is arguable that the most significant development has been the growth of community history, popular autobiography and working-class writing more generally, where the terms of authorship have been more completely changed. In one sense, all these texts and projects are evidence for the forms of popular memory; they are all about the relation of past to present, whether self-consciously ‘historical’ or not. Some projects, however, have specifically focussed on these themes: the chronologically-ordered sequence of accounts of work in Centreprise’s Working Lives16 part of the People’s Autobiography of Hackney is one example, the work of the Durham Strong Words Collective, especially Hello Are You Working? (about unemployment) and But the World Goes on the Same (about past and present in the pit villages) is another.17 The Durham work is especially organised around contrasts of ‘then’ and ‘now’, often viewed through intergenerational comparisons. As the editors put it: The past exerts a powerful presence upon the lives of people in County Durham. The pit heaps have gone but they are still remembered, as is the severity of life under the old coal owners and the political battles that were fought with them. As they sit, people try to sort things out in their minds – how were things then? How different are they now? And why?18 Different from either of these projects are the politically-located, culturally-sensitive projects around history and memory that have developed within the contemporary Women’s Movement. There is already a strong past-present dialogue at work within contemporary feminism
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as the previous article in this book shows. Much feminist history also draws on oral materials, sometimes using them in innovative ways.19 The autobiographies evoked by Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham, and published as Dutiful Daughters are framed by the editors’ feminism and by a distinctive politics of publication. The aim is to render private feminine oppressions more public and more shared, thereby challenging dominant male definitions and the silencing of women.20 Works like this continue a long feminist tradition of writing about past and present through the autobiographical form. We might also note in this collection, in the Durham work, in Jeremy Seabrook’s What Went Wrong? and elsewhere the beginnings of an interest in a specifically socialist popular memory. It was interesting that both Dutiful Daughters and What Went Wrong were the subjects of ‘collective reviews’ at History Workshop.21 Not all relevant practices and debates belong to what would usually be thought of as ‘historical’ work. Indeed, there is a real danger that ‘History’ who is often a very tyrannous Muse, will draw the circumference of concerns much too narrowly. That is one reason why the broader categories – black, or women’s or working-class ‘writing’ for example – are sometimes preferable. Even here, though, there are unhelpful limitations: the commitment, for example, to the printed word and the tendency to neglect other practices including the critique of dominant memory in the media. It is here that debates on ‘popular memory’ that come out of a completely different national and theoretical tradition are so important, especially debates in France around Michel Foucault’s coinage of ‘popular memory’ as a term.22 French debates focus on such issues as the representation of history in film and around the ‘historical’ policies of the French state – for example the Ministry of Culture’s promotion of popular history and archival retrieval during the official Heritage Year of 1979.23 Another important French voice for us has been Jean Chesneaux’s Pasts and Presents: What is History For? a militant and sometimes wildly inconclastic attack on French academic history, including academic social history written by Marxists. One importance of the French debates is that they have directed attention to the possibility of radical cultural practice of an ‘historical’ kind outside the writing of history books.24 It is important to note developments of this kind in film, community theatre, television drama and radical museum work. The film ‘Song of the Shirt’, the television series ‘Days of Hope’, the television adaptation of Vera Britain’s Testament of Youth, the strong historical work of radical theatre groups like 7:84, Red Ladder, and The Monstrous Regiment are examples of ‘history making’ often with a real popular purchase, yet usually neglected by historians. Innovations in this area are intrinsic to popular memory both as a study and as a political practice. They should certainly receive as much interest and support from socialist and feminist historians as the latest historical volume, or of the newest issue of ‘the journal’.
Difficulties and contradictions What, then, are some of the difficulties in realising the potential of these resources? Oral history and popular autobiography have, after all, now been around for some time, initially generating a real excitement. Why have the political effects been fairly meagre? What are the remaining blocks and inhibitions here? There are, perhaps, four main areas of difficulty. Very often these have to do with the tensions that exist between the academic or professional provenance of new practices and their adaptation to a popular politics. We will summarise the four areas of difficulty briefly here, then in the rest of this article, consider each at more length.
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The first set of difficulties are epistemological in character. They arise from the ways in which ‘historical’ objects of study are defined. They revolve around the empiricism of orthodox historical practice. They are not purely technical matters for philosophers to adjudicate. The historian’s empiricism is a real difficulty. It blocks political progress. That is why it is so important to return to these questions once more, showing the political effects of this persistently empiricist stance. The second set of difficulties derive initially from the form in which the ‘raw material’ of oral history or popular autobiography first arises: the individual testimony, narrative or autobiography. This poses, in a very acute form, the problem of the individual subject and his or her broader social context. In what sense is individual witness evidence for larger social changes? How can these changes themselves be understood, not as something that evades human action, but also as the product of human labour, including this individual life? This difficulty runs through the oral history method and through the autobiographical form. It is also reflected in larger divisions of genres: history, autobiography, fiction (with its particular experiential truth). Such divisions in turn encapsulate hierarchies of significance. The oralhistorical witness or the autobiographer, unless held to be a personage of exceptional public power, speaks only for herself; it is the historian who, like the Professor in Lucky Jim, speaks literally for ‘History’. Some resolution of this persistent problem, some way of thinking the sociality of individuals, would be an important additional resource. We have already touched on a third set of difficulties: the tendency to identify the object of history as ‘the past’. This largely unquestioned feature of historical common sense has extremely paradoxical results when applied to oral history or popular autobiography. Indeed it shows us that this definition cannot be held without a radical de-politicisation of the practice of research. What is interesting about the forms of oral historical witness or autobiography are not just the nuggetts of ‘fact’ about the past, but the whole way in which popular memories are constructed and reconstructed as part of a contemporary consciousness. In this section we will look at some of the characteristic ways in which a sense of the past has been constructed in private memories. The fourth set of difficulties is more fundamental. It concerns not just the manifest intellectual and theoretical blockages, but the social relations which these inhibitions express. In oral history and in similar practices the epistemological problem – how historians are going to use their ‘sources’ – is also a problem of human relationships. The practice of research actually conforms to (and may in practice deepen) social divisions which are also relations of power and of inequality. It is cultural power that is at stake here, of course, rather than economic power or political coercion. Even so research may certainly construct a kind of economic relation (a balance of economic and cultural benefits) that is ‘exploitative’ in that the returns are grossly unequal ones. On the one hand there is ‘the historian’, who specialises in the production of explanations and interpretations and who constitutes himself as the most active, thinking part of the process. On the other hand, there is his ‘source’ who happens in this case to be a living human being who is positioned in the process in order to yield up information. The interviewee is certainly subject to the professional power of the interviewer who may take the initiative in seeking her out and questioning her. Of course, the problem may be solved rhetorically or at the level of personal relations: the historian may assert that he has sat at the feet of working-class witnesses and has learnt all he knows in that improbable and uncomfortable posture. It is, however, he that produces the final account, he that provides the dominant interpretation, he that judges what is true and not true, reliable or inauthentic. It is his name that appears on the jacket of his monograph and his academic career that it furthered by its publication. It is he who receives a portion of the
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royalties and almost all the ‘cultural capital’ involved in authorship. It is his amour propre as ‘creator’ that is served here. It is his professional standing among his peers that is enhanced in the case of ‘success’. In all this, at best, the first constructors of historical accounts – the ‘sources’ themselves – are left untouched, unchanged by the whole process except in what they have given up – the telling. They do not participate, or only indirectly, in the educational work which produces the final account. They may never get to read the book of which they were part authors, nor fully comprehend it if they do. We have deliberately overdrawn this case, to make the point polemically. But we do not describe an untypical situation for the more professionalised types of oral-historical practice. The question is what are the wider effects of such social divisions? Are they transformable? To what extent, locally, fragilely have they already been transformed? And what are the difficulties and opportunities involved in further transformations? Much is at stake here. We are discussing a particular form of class relation (that between working-class people and sections of the professional middle class) and how it can be transformed into a more equal alliance. It is an alliance that happens to have been a crucial one in the history of left politics and one which is certainly central to the future of socialism and feminism today.
Notes 1 Compare the editorials in History Workshop Journal, no.1 (1976) and Social History, no. 1 (1976). 2 Ken Worpole, ‘A Ghostly Pavement; The Political Implications of Local Working-Class History’ in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 23. 3 Jean Chesneaux, Pasts and Futures or What is History For? (Thames and Hudson, 1978) especially pp. 1 and 11. 4 We draw here on the work of Rita Pakleppa and Hans-Erich Poser who were members of the Popular Memory Group in 1979–80. Their presentations on representations of the Second World War in Britain and West Germany enlivened and informed the work of the group. We hope their study will eventually be available in English. 5 E.P. Thompson, Writing by Candlelight (Merlin, 1980), pp. 130–131. 6 This refers to a preceding article in Making Histories, Bill Schwarz ‘ “The People” in History: The Communist Party Historian’s Group 1946 to 1956’. 7 For an example of a popular Conservative history with a proto-racist character see the works of Sir Arthur Bryant (e.g. English Saga, Collins, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1940). But this is also part of the more familiar modern repertoire of racism, in, for example, Enoch Powell’s nationalism. 8 This refers to another essay in Making Histories: David Sutton ‘Radicals, Liberals and Fabians’. 9 See especially Chris Cook and John Stephenson, The Slump: Society and Politics During the Depression (Johnathan Cape, 1977). 10 Perry Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, in A. Cockburn and R. Blackburn (eds.), Student Power (Penguin, 1969). 11 Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (eds. and trans.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), passim but especially pp. 324–25. 12 See especially the debate between Ken Worpole, Jerry White and Stephen Yeo in Samuel, People’s History, pp. 22–48. 13 See Paul Thompson, The Edwardians (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1975); Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford University Press, 1978); Oral History: The Journal of the Oral History Society (First published 1971). Much of the later parts of the article from which this is an extract considers Thompson’s early practice and advocacy in oral history. But we do not imply that his work is peculiarly flawed in some way: we are interested in it as typical of the tensions between oral history as related to socialist politics and oral history as an academic and professional practice. 14 Luisa Passerini, ‘Work Ideology and Consenus under Italian Fascism’, History Workshop Journal, no. 8 (1979) pp. 82–108; ‘On the Use and Abuse of Oral History’ (mimeo, translated from L. Passerini (ed.), Storia Orale: Vita Quotidiana e Cultural Materiale delli Classe Subalterne, Rosenberg & Sellier, Turin,
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1978). We are grateful to the author for sending us a copy of this paper. See also her position paper at History Workshop 13 – ‘Oral History and People’s Culture (Mimeo, Nov/Dec 1979). Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain: The Experience of Civil War 1936–39 (Allen Lane, 1979). ‘A People’s Autobiography of Hackney’, Working Lives, 2 vols. (Hackney WEA and Centreprise, n.d.). For Centreprise more generally see Ken Worpole, Local Publishing and Local Culture: An account of the Centreprise Publishing Project 1972–77 (Centreprise, 1977). Keith Armstrong and Huw Beynon (eds.), Hello, Are you Working? Memories of the Thirties in the North East of England (Strong Words, 1977); Strong Words Collective, But The World Goes on the Same: Changing Times in Durham Pit Villages (Strong Words, 1979). ibid., p. 7. e.g. the use of autobiographical materials in J. Liddington and J. Morris, One Hand Tied Behind Us. (Virago, 1978). Jean McCrindle and Sheila Rowbotham (eds.), Dutiful Daughters (Penguin, 1979). Jeremy Seabrook, What Went Wrong? Working People and the Ideals of the Labour (Gollanz, 1978). Michael Foucault, ‘Interview’ in Edinburgh ’77 Magazine. See also Radical Philosophy, 16 (1975). Phillippe Hoyau, ‘Heritage Year or the Society of Conservation’, Les Revoltes Logiques (Paris,) no. 12 (1980), pp. 70–77. Hence the debate in Britain on radical filmic practice and historical drama. See the collection of articles in Tony Bennett, et al. (eds. Popular Television and Film (British Film Institute and Open University Press, 1981).
Section 7
Education and work
Introduction The books at the end of the shelf Paul Willis
Some time around the early 80s in the UK, I remember hearing Richard Hoggart participating in a BBC Radio 4 discussion programme dealing with educational reform. Almost as an afterthought it seemed Richard referred to ‘the books at the very end of the shelf which don’t get read too much’ and which raised the troubling possibility that state education might not always be in the complete best interests of the working class. I remember thinking that this revealed more about Richard’s relation to and view of the Centre (peripheral) and the way he organised his bookshelf (left, extreme left) than about anything else but I recollected his words on re-reading the papers which follow. Now the books will have tumbled right off the end of his shelf into the trashcan along with the hopes they carried and expressed of linking educational policy and practice to critical debate and popular elements outside the educational establishment and the state. Twenty five years and more ago at the Centre we were like Arthur Dent from the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, enjoying a drink we could not imagine would be our last in our local pub that we took, astonishingly, to be somehow organically connected to a more or less stable wider community. Then the Tory demolition squad arrived to change the educational world as we knew it. Now in the refabricated world of the ‘commodisation of everything’ mysteriously replacing the one we thought we knew, our practical politics have veered around one hundred and eighty degrees. Where before we were targeting social democracy and its trust in the state to deliver education to the working class, we now vociferously defend the very same even more tattered, contradictory, undermined (not least by us) state forms against rampant privatisation and, horrifyingly, the ‘slow reach for control’, not least through New Labour, of schooling by capitalist and traditionalist interests bent on the re-introduction of selection, high academic standards for the elite and vocationalism with progressive trappings for the masses. Any hope or even rhetoric of education as a means for the collective emancipation of the popular classes has simply evaporated1 and we are forced to fight to hold absolutely minimalist positions in what would have been seen before as an unrelieved flat plain of unremitting defeat. Contemporary research writings seem to have come from a different planet and have lost their interest in overarching questions, the big issues and any sense of optimism that agency from below always registers its presence, if not in direct mobilisation then in one way or another and through myriad cultural manifestations. For, driving everything, the basic sense of all our centre work on education was precisely to show and argue for this interest, force and presence from below. Only too clearly our centre work showed the history of how the ‘bottom up’ organised forms representing (in both senses), organising and meeting, organic feelings and interests from below were progressively displaced by state forms, especially in education. The Education Group depicted how the ‘invisible social services’ of the friendly societies, ragged schools and provident associations were run over by the state
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juggernaut, waved through by approving social democrats often in official uniform, but they did not foresee how the same continuing juggernaut, now in neo-liberal livery, would also squash the very remaining organs,2 atrophied and ailing as they were, to which they were appealing for an educational renewal from below. With the extinguishing of their last remnants it seems that the very existence and possibility of feeling and interest from below (except as deficit or pathology to be remedied) has been destroyed, leaving the field open only for continuous educational reorganisation, mind-numbing technical initiatives for the never ending, though automatically self-limiting, ‘raising of standards’ and the subordination of education ever more fully to the perceived needs and interests of neo-liberalism and the elites it creates or sustains. All of this makes this introduction rather hard to write. If only, as it may be possible to argue in other sections of this book, these early works had laid foundations upon which others have built in more or less straight lines upwards! If only it were possible to indulge an historicism which sees in present full flowerings the genetic seeds of our early pioneering work. Still, even if we did not found an accomplished orthodoxy, certain things have to be said today about the achievements of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the education field. Further, casting caution aside, let us test out a counter-factual line of thought as if we really still do have an ‘organic’ audience in the partial hope, at least, thereby of newly bringing into being at least a portion of it. Of course the following articles, which I have been asked to introduce, vary in type, arose in somewhat different problematics, and differ in how far they address, explicitly, immediate and longer term policy issues. But we must salute the enduring strengths of what runs through all of them, perhaps most clearly articulated in ‘Social Democracy, Education and the Crisis’, the first major presentation of a worked through, historically based and critical educational analysis from the Centre. Though they failed as effective policy interventions and bids for leadership of organic popular elements, these achievements certainly endure as academic and intellectual accomplishments and remain, for those with eyes to see, as a powerful means to strip away the ‘modernising’ humbug of today to reveal contemporary educational issues and stakes with clarity from a subordinate point of view. I will be drawing out elements of the enormous strengths of the Centre’s work on education to indicate patterns and modes of thought which have a high relevance to the current conjuncture, even if they lie as unused tools for most. First, though, let me quote at length from the inaugural Professorial lecture delivered recently by my colleague at Keele, Ken Jones3 who has also generously advised me throughout the writing of this Introduction. Much more assiduously than I, and with an international comparative perspective, he has followed the history of British educational provision and policy development as well as the arc of critical intellectual work upon them – arguably reaching its apogee in Unpopular Education, the book-length full development and exposition published in 1981 of the arguments of ‘Social Democracy, Education and the Crisis’ reprinted here. He sums up the historical formations of thinking and academic work on education and educational policy over the last thirty years most eloquently and in a way which could almost have been written specifically to frame in historical context the papers which follow. I think the large-scale educational shifts of the late twentieth century have provided the conditions for a (. . .) sort of theorisation that corresponds, from the point of view of ‘popular struggles’, to a period of defeat. Edward Said once wrote critically of Foucault that he ‘more or less eliminates the central dialectic of opposed forces that still underlies modern society’ and in place of an analysis of contestation offers a ‘fascinated
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description of exercised power’ [Said, 1983: 221–2]. I often wonder whether there is a similar fascination revealed by the many critical accounts of the neo-liberal policy consensus, of new public management, of technologies of school effectiveness, and so on (. . .) their cumulative effect is to constitute the field of research in ways that make it difficult to retain a fully effective sense of education as an area of contestation, and to this extent the insights of an earlier period are left unsaid. (. . .) The fascinated – albeit ethically engaged – description of exercised power may really be all that is left to critics of the new educational order. ‘Resistances’ might then be identified, by those of leftist disposition and micro-political analytical capacity, but they would add up to no articulated challenge, would form no historic, potentially counter-hegemonic bloc. And, in this sense – the sense of educational change as the product of collective social actors, working in parallel with the broader movements of social transformation – educational history would have reached a kind of premature or unexpected terminus. I cannot say that the articles collected here are exclusively pre-terminus in Ken Jones’ terms.4 They also chart a desperate rear guard action, attempting to rally or at least trumpet call the retreating or disappearing or mythic organic troops. They also chart the beginnings of an astonishing re-construction of a Thatcherite world, pre-figuring a wider global turn towards neo-liberalism, after the end of the world as we knew it. But what I want to do is to recognise the trenchant power and illumination of the last flowerings of the pre-terminus world before the bulldozers moved in. After media studies and sub-cultural analysis, perhaps Education was the single biggest focus of CCCS work, certainly the single biggest institutional focus mobilising a full range of historical, ideological, discourse analytic and ethnographic approaches. In a sense this makes the CCCS education work a model for a complete ‘Cultural Studies’ focus showing the depth and range that has sometimes been found lacking in other applications of the perspective. For me this fullness and encompassing quality of the education work arises in large part from its mobilisation of something now unfashionable, even discredited: a trenchant class perspective which gathers together under a single banner otherwise apparently unrelated aspects of discourse, argument and experience.5 Though Marxism can seem to adopt something of a scorched earth policy in ignoring complexity and the interconnections of other oppositions, divisions and classifications [including, actually, my own interest in the autonomies of lived culture], how refreshing it is to read, and how one longs to hear the question asked today: what’s the point of all this for the working class? Apart from possibly another grade or two on a meaningless and inflated GCSE (General Certificate in Secondary Education, a subject-based school level qualification taken at 16 in the UK) what do these current ‘reforms’ do for the emancipation of the working class as a whole? What a guilty satisfaction to read again of class; single, whole, unadulterated class. This is more appealing, actually, for any failure adequately to address or do more than provisionally bolt on Patriarchal, race and sexuality issues and concerns. It can be argued that all the complexifications and hybridisations of a class thematic actually weaken the latter’s visceral power as a relational concept whose fundamental, almost hypnotic appeal is to present the world in binary simplification. Especially powerful is the ability to laser in on the inadequacies and absurdities of social policy/sociological classificatory views of social class as multiple categories of lessening values on a finely calibrated vertical scale. Calibration as social class! Calibration is all when simple social oppositions are banned. Spouting clotting euphemisms of ‘deprivation’ ‘underprivileged’ (a good one that, as it is only a few easily supplied privileges that they are lacking), ‘educationally challenged’, ‘socially disadvantaged’; those who should know better cannot bring themselves to utter the
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class word, unadulterated, and convince themselves instead that a progressive politics can be undertaken in very small (to disappearing) bite size bureaucratic chunks. There is assumed a never ending empirical scale that figures an abundance at its top and an ever diminishing curve below of lessening attributes, dipping below degree zero now in ASBO6 culture, with suitable cases for state treatment presenting themselves at the bottom, absolutely not as working-class heroes but as pathological, throwback deviants from acceptable [middle class] standards. All this was addressed in, ‘Social Democracy, Education and the Crisis’ head on and speaks directly to today, loudly if unheard. Sociology is a target: Within sociology (. . .) the various sub-disciplines relating to social policy worked within intellectual fields which specified quite narrow empirical problems. Working with specific methodologies and addressing particular ‘technical’ problems, evidence and recommendations were advanced, ‘objectively’, to inform the process of political decision-making. Thus, the ‘problem’ of poverty was divorced from that of ownership; the ‘problem’ of working-class educability was divorced from that of real, ongoing, class relationships, and so on. Pge 27 Educational policy and practice is a target: ‘Failure’ is seen as socially determined – by the ‘cycle of deprivation’ of the ‘culture of poverty’ – and is considered amenable to social policy and educational approaches. Underpinning this assumption is a view of class which sees it as a combination of cultural and material deficiencies – the response is to compensate for the deficiencies, via the schools and social policy. Pge 38 Above all the Labour Party is a target: (. . .) British socialists have repeatedly rejected or ignored some of the categories which might really illuminate their dilemmas. (. . .) What if classes are intrinsic to the production of material life itself ? What if they are systematically and daily reproduced as part of the organic workings of the society along with their concomitant inequalities? What, in short, if class is rooted in social relations of production, a category which is quite invisible in social democratic ideology? From the stand-point of such a conception of the social formation the futility of social policy can be fully grasped. It can deal with no more than occasional symptoms which must constantly re-appear and must serve to hide what lies beneath them. More absurd still must be the attempt to ‘equalise’ through an education which is supposed also to serve to reproduce relations within capitalist production. Pge 48 Oh, what fun throughout these articles it is to see exposed (usually at great length!) the contortions to which gurus, educational experts and philosophers, political writers and politicians subject their consciousness and prose in order to deny, conceal or camouflage to themselves and others that class exists, turns on exploitation and that their very capacity to write instead of undertake their share of socially necessary labour connects umbilically to
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these arrangements. Even our friends, even we, ourselves, these days sometimes pretend that in our comforts the elephant of class exploitation is not in the room – only the products of mysterious discourses of science and technology (magically applied to unseen production processes) and the global fruits of far away (but locally gratefully received) arrangements for bringing development at last for those who laboured previously in some kind of disconnected pre-history. This, or we affect that lesser animals, or new hybrid animals, deserve our exclusive attention and careful nurture. So, here’s an antidote: turn to the books at the end of the shelf to straighten out basic ideological illusion. Very importantly, though, and guarding against an overly reductionist or ‘non-complex’ reading of the Centre’s work, this class focus works through a powerful sense of contingency in the articles reprinted here. Belying the usual bifurcations of Centre work into ‘culturalism’ or ‘structuralism’, these articles show the undoubted power of a class subject, as in the above quotations, but one which moves not in unified, essentialist expressive ways but through different conjunctural moments and through layered and differently articulated social mediations – not least in and through political parties, wider intellectual debate and layers of state formation and institution – which help to constitute the power and form (or lack of power and lack of form) of class actors. At the same time, though, what follows also reminds readers that the range of work at the Centre included a focus on the ethnographically registerable level of the agency and the lived cultures of ordinary individuals and groups as articulated within daily lives and milieus, not least school and work, showing the complexity this must bring to larger ‘system’ views, whether theoretical or political. Educational elites may have clear(ish) plans for educational logic and provision but once operationalised these plans face at every turn the unintended consequences and unexpected dialectics of the relations of culture, class and institution.7 Also to be noted is that this collection of papers has been billed by the editors as Education and Work so underlining that a working class agentive perspective on education was employed by the Centre across the board of social domains and experience. Education could not be understood alone or as standing on its own feet. Interspersed with the indignities of welfare dependence, the Education Group well understood that class experience is structured centrally by the reality of wage labour, its pains and sacrifices, the cultural collectivisation it brings, as well as access to the wage, enabling economic survival as well as some limited enjoyment of the pleasures of consumption. Actually, for the class as a whole and from a broad historical perspective, it is hard to see that educational provision has made much of a difference to its relational and material position within the broad sweep of capitalist industrialisation and urbanisation, or that state education for the majority has been much more than an inconvenience clapped on from above, interrupting but not changing the patterns of its own transitions between life stages, and warrening cultural adaptions to industrialisation (now de-industrialisation) and the finding of all kinds of nooks and crannies for dignity and expression within hostile regimes of wage labour. These articles remind us of these broad perspectives, that both too little and too much is claimed for education and that it must always be understood, not in its own internal terms but in its ‘junior’ articulations with other realms, not least production, the reproduction of the relations of production and the cultural formation of labour power appropriate to particular kinds of productive needs. If state education offered what could not for the Education Group and cannot now ‘compensate for society’, nor decisively intervene against deep rooted and predictable processes of social and cultural reproduction, then what could be offered and could have been offered by other forms of education, especially internal to the class, for social development and emancipation? Whilst depicting the demise of its historical institutional forms and unconsciously
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embodying their last gasp, the Centre’s work nevertheless kept alive, and keeps alive, if by no means resolving, the crucial issue of just what is and might be ‘really useful’ knowledge for the working class. Again the political failures and containments take centre stage and are explicitly recognised in ‘Social Democracy, Education and the Crisis’: It [the British Labour Party] did not have a starting-point in some conception of socialist education. Nor did it set out from the cultural and educational resources of existing working-class communities. Its educational policies, like its general policies, were posited instead on a pre-existing machinery – in this case a structure of State schools and a particular distribution of formal ‘educational’ opportunities. It was these that the party set out to reform. Thus the party began as and remained an educational provider for the popular classes, not an educational agency of and within them. Original emphasis, pge 9 For the Education Group ‘really useful’ working class knowledge had to deal with the skills needed to gain access to the wage, but also with a range of social and cultural knowledges and various possibilities for emancipation. You could argue that a greater weighting of the ethnographic element and sensibility and more work addressed to the recording and understanding of creativities of class experience and culture in the nooks, crannies and warrens of subordinated social and symbolic space, rather than a rather dry and flat logging of the exigencies of working class life judged to be crucial by intellectual vanguards, may have allowed for more advance in filling in some of the many blanks of what might constitute a desirable, broad proletarian education from the point of view of the working class, connecting the really existing with what might be possible. But let us not underestimate the unparalleled breadth of scope that the Centre’s work did encompass; that, for all the methodological difficulties, day to day consciousness, culture and experience (if not quite warts, sweet spots and all) at least roughly from the bottom-end-up point of view was considered alongside the development of political parties, state forms and social democratic ideologies. What can we say looking forward in the new world of the commodisation of everything and rudely expelled from the warmth, as well as illusions, of our imagined local pub of organic connection? Short of any real link with coherent social groups struggling from below for change, in the emergent social kaleidoscope we must nevertheless keep open the possibility of connection. We are in a world of global flows of people, goods and labour, electronic ethnoscapes and commodity production of culture, and new as yet socially un-self recognised orders of subordination orchestrated by trans-global oligarchies. My argument would simply be that fragments of a CCCS-like approach can be applied in yet unforeseen ways to emergent cultures, educational forms and relations so helping to facilitate new currents of understanding, digging out some of the ground works for the possibility of building alternative organisational forms. Of continuing importance, learning directly from the CCCS Education Group, is the need to reach for clarity in the formulation of the educational interests, both narrow and broad, of subordinated groups. All reservations aside, eschewing all ‘modernisations’ which masquerade merely as forgetfulness of the past, remembering class only as calibration, let us recognise an unfashionable ‘social fact’, a traditional fact: that there is a working class ‘position’ in education whose relations, meanings and experiences are quite different from those associated with middle class position(s). This is so even if individual students move between positions or even ambiguously occupy, in some way, both. This is so however we categorise the empirical details of the bodies that sit in these positions: white, black, male,
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female, illegal, transient, gay, straight or tran. But let us be ‘modern’ in a recognition of the complexity, now more than ever, of the forces, interests and cultures which play across that position. We have to recognise at least a ‘triple truth’ of education for those in workingclass educational positions. All at the same time, simultaneously, all such educational experience is about: (a) being subject to dominant technical and social formations of a lowpriced, willing and accessible, pool of labour power for application to capitalist labour processes; (b) the acquisition, by individuals and groups, of skills, contacts and attitudes needed from their point of view to minimise the pain and maximise the possibility of selling at the highest possible price the only asset they possess, their labour power; (c) individual and collective glimpses of an emancipation from all restrictions for free human development. All three aspects of the educational triple truth are defined in specific and contingent ways for specific people in specific locations and all are understood and responded to through the creative utilisation of symbolic resources to hand, inherited, ethnic, local as well as, very importantly now, market mediated. This is the field of subordinate cultural production which must always be understood in relation to the official field in which it operates (see Note 9). Usually ‘truth (a)’ presents itself as ‘truth (b)’ or surprisingly frequently as ‘truth (c)’. These attempted category shifts have real effects, so a representational and ideological level of analysis for understanding how the three aspects of the education ‘truth’ interact with each other on the ground is required, as well as a cultural analysis. Constituting the case of particular empirical groups should be an end point of analysis showing the shared relations of complexity, not a simple starting point thereby producing theoretical paralysis, atomisation and the danger of a mindless empiricism confounding all possibility of indicating interests in common and a common template for thinking through subordinate educational interests. There are subordinate interests [‘truth (b) & (c)’], as the article reproduced here by Mariette Clare shows so clearly, in learning to read and write for sided individual and collective purpose. For the foreseeable future, though, such interests in critical literacy are forced to try to find grounds in or work through alien and distorting forms and discourses organised under ‘truth (a)’ often claiming the legitimacy of ‘truth (c)’. These include: everreorganised forms driving ever closer to selective schooling, squeezing the majority out of exposure to literary humanist perspectives; dominant, if mystified and contradictory, calls and institutional initiatives [including handing over chunks of control] responding to the ‘needs of employers’; never-ending drives to increase discipline and to ‘lift standards’, turning schools into new kinds of rote-learning, power point, panopticon, testing factories; commodisation of knowledge chunks presented as ‘neutral’ inert things; civics and citizenship devoted to responsibilities not rights; temporary fads and fashions, the writings and policies of often privatised ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ pushing their self-justifying and selfvalidating programmes. But even through these shifting and ever rightwards shifting grounds, there continue to exist overlaps in the educational field between subordinate interests and dominant ones – the latter’s own contradictions and mystifications adding further scope for exploiting commonalities. Some aspects of literacy are important to ‘truth (a)’ and so are officially promoted, but once acquired in whatever way can be turned to relevant purpose in ‘truth (b)’ and critical purpose in ‘truth (c)’. There are wide overlaps in the human and communicative skills involved in capitalist production where the dominant need for access to and peaceful exploitation of appropriate labour power covers the same social relation, in reverse direction, of the subordinate need for access to the wage and a stake in social production. The point must be that, always hybrid and complex, educational interests are separable and their separation, or working for their separation to reveal a subordinate
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pedagogic point of view and set of interests, whatever the rough edges, is a basis for plotting at least partially alternative direction and purpose for the ‘compulsory’ institutions from whose contradictions there is currently no escape. The critique of the existing educational apparatus and its directions of change, as well as their sided simultaneous use for the direct purpose of skill acquisition for wage labour survival, may give a critical route into wider political perspectives and an edge to the possibility of a different kind of knowledge, for a different kind of learning. As the remarkable document from UNESCO quoted by Mariette Clare puts it: It is true that all social structures give rise to the type of education which can maintain and reproduce them, and that the purposes of education are subordinated to the purposes of the dominant group; but it would be incorrect to conclude that there is nothing to be done within the existing system. Literacy . . . is not the driving force of historical change. It is not the only means of liberation but it is an essential instrument for all social change. Literacy, like education in general, is a political act. It is not neutral, for the act of revealing social reality in order to transform it, or of concealing it in order to preserve it, is political. Bataille, 1976: pge 274 There are many potential opportunities for such ‘revealing’ and disclosure. The angry and restless contradictions of neo-liberal millennial capitalism all the time throw off or burst their ever renewed covers. Or, great holes are torn in them from below by experience, by first hand ‘knowledge’ of abrupt disjunction and poverty-threatening economic change. Even restricted and conventional forms of state training and education can yield real opportunities for a subversive and sideways looking, an informal educational politics of disclosing what is covered, and disclosing why what is shown is shown. In his article James Avis examines the ways in which progressive education was hijacked in the UK by the ‘new vocationalism’ of the 1970s and 1980s. ‘New vocationalism’ adopted and adapted ‘real world’, ‘activity-based’ and ‘student-centred’ approaches but focussed them only the exploration of occupational roles and functions basically from an employer’s point of view, rarely extending to a specific consideration of the employee’s interests per se, still less to a critical engagement with the changing and intensifying nature of modern work processes. And yet, and yet . . . James also indicates that radical teachers can focus on ‘fissures and tensions’ in these programmes to reveal the realities of modern wage labour and open up pathways to renewed views of what might constitute the ‘really useful’. Mariette Clare gives a detailed and personal account of the impact of the Adult Literacy Campaign in the UK in the 1970s on the Adult Literacy Service of Leicestershire in the late 1970s. The dominant meanings and discourses posed and presented adult literacy students as missing something in their internal individual make-up, as being deficient in some way. The official documents and pronouncements justified remedial intervention in terms of labour market needs and the breaking of cycles of deprivation. But, again, Mariette refers to both ideological and practical contradictions, which created spaces in which it was possible to transcend the orthodox definitions. These are spaces, she argues, which can radicalise both students and teachers to understand the social purpose of literacy, that having something to say and a reason for saying it come before and motivate the need to spell, and that literacy itself can literally be a social activity – relating in both form and spirit to real themes of collective emancipation. These articles suggest practical ways forward in the disaggregation of the dominant common sense unity of ‘Education, Education, Education’8 to identify,
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protect and where possible promote some of the alternatives within the ‘truth’ of education for subordinate groups. I return to such possibilities again below. An ethnographer of culture and theorist of subordinate cultural production has been asked to introduce these articles, so forgive me for ending with a riff on a cultural note. I argue strongly for the continuing need for detailed cultural records and analysis of forms of living, not textual, common cultural experience, development and constitution, not least their manifestations in schools and other state institutions and sites. Twenty five years ago the education group at the Centre saw correctly that apparently unconnected, often ‘problem’ cultures can be understood as broadly ‘educational’ forms from the perspective of ‘material culture’, and the practical guides supplied therein for negotiating life’s problems as seen from the worm’s eye of those who suffer them. Quaintness aside (my direct address to an assumed and shared organic community), my article reproduced here on forms of male counterschool culture seeks to show the vibrancy and creativity of cultures at the bottom of social space as well as their ‘knowingness’ in context and often ironic but umbilical connectedness to social process. The article is also interesting in that the approach and methodology of the research from which it is drawn was thoroughly field based and ethnographic, with at least an attempt (supported by an SSRC grant, courtesy of Stuart Hall’s scholarly and application drafting skills) at an anthropology-level-of-seriousness planning and execution of a prior research design – a practice much less common at the Centre than various mythologies suppose. Generally the orientation to popular experience was mostly carried textually, theoretically and analytically, with empirical support supplied often by personal recollections, serendipidities of ‘found’ data, anecdote, and quick and sometimes dirty ‘interview raids’. Planned long-term diversions to ‘the field’ of ‘field workers’ (rather than ‘commentators’ sitting at their desks) from their routine and habitual, chosen fields of social interaction were not the order of the day. After all, there was always the imaginary pub to compress all social distance! Today we are under a different set of orders. Now the social gaps are ever wider and more brutally plain. Care and planning in building ethical two-way methodological bridges across these gaps is more crucial than ever. Subordinate cultures, their creativities, social effects and relevancies, unfold under conditions of a new authoritarianism supplied by an increasingly hostile and centralising state and the universal commoditisation and digitalisation of ‘mediatised’ popular cultural forms and materials. But underneath the noses of the over-mighty state and the over-mighty corporations, I must believe, still beat hearts of subordinate cultural production9 with electronic and commodity born and borne, semiotic blood cells differently formed perhaps from the old ‘organic’ ones but still pulsing in veins different from the dominant vascular systems. The state and commercial legislators of culture and consciousness are not lords of all they survey. The destruction of a meso level of representation and transmission of experience and interest from below – the varieties of ways in which working class interests and perspectives were still registering at the time of the Centre’s educational work – has lessened, not increased actual control. Instead the transmissions from below now appear – erupting, chaotic, violent – in new public realms, physical and representational, as new kinds of social threats producing moral panics about ‘unruly’, ‘mindless’, ‘yob’, and ‘chav’10 creatures who seem to have appeared from outer space, not from the very bowels of our ‘new times’ body-politic. New, usually young ‘folk devils’ are being demonised and pushed to the edges of the civilised rim. The same broad educational issues of the disclosure of that which is meant to be covered arise again. What is the social and symbolic context of ‘indiscipline’? Trapped between the new and harsher disciplines of the state on one side and the globalised labour market on the
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other, what ‘freedoms’ remain for working class and subordinate groups to exercise? What are the exploitative and cynical capitalist circuits of consumption and production, which locate the apparently voluntary choices through which that ‘freedom’ is exercised? What of the evident ‘anti-social’ contents of textual cultural forms carried in capitalist media and distribution channels, which help to produce surface styles of rebellion, disaffection and apparent rejection of dominant norms of behaviour – on Saturday night at least? Under what conditions can their licence to cause immediate offence or transgression be turned into a licence to explore the deeper social meanings, frequently anti-capitalist and anti-statist, which franchise the surface style? Even in the tightening circumstances of neo-liberal domination and widening social distance we cannot understand culture merely as a passive reflection or homology of structure or of the internal codings of commodified forms. Through the dynamic of cultural production, culture must be understood as a creative and unpredictable producer of new or different meanings, not only with respect to its own practices but also with respect to larger societal or structural change. Now more than ever we must allow an independent social and aesthetic energy to subordinate groups, so often assigned the worst hands, and put in category boxes of appropriate behaviour, culture and meaning. The political economy pessimists and the ‘kids are OK’ culturalists will have to find a common ground to understand the limits and potentials of creative ‘commodity culture’ forms and their possible ‘educative’ contents, broadly considered. New developments of community and feelings of authenticity are possible. Though always in danger of producing their own lived fetishistic breaks in communication and history11 practices of creative consumption and extension can push back textual forms of fetishism, claim particular meanings against the grain of what is offered, and edge back the coverings of what is hidden. Theoretically informed cultural ethnography can find and extend these grounds. I am arguing, then, that theoretically re-tooled ethnographic antennae must be raised to register new forms of subordinate cultural production. An important area is simply the textures and differences in consumption practices of working class and subordinate groups, where they may well explore in their own ways the possibilities on the further side of postcommodity, post-electronic worlds, less constrained by convention and ideology than the dominant controllers of the new symbolic relations. What new ways are being crafted for occupying concrete sexed/raced/classed bodies; what new sensuousness embodiments of a working-class manualism are forming, not in production but in consumption? The nooks and crannies of the new relations of symbolic domination are being explored and warrened under our noses. Ambiguous in their politics, rhythmed and constrained as well as enabled by commodisation, they are picked up, in their turn (much better than we can manage), by the commercial style entrepreneurs trawling the streets for material to re-cycle in further rounds of commodisation. Socially embedded ‘educative’ forms of unrecognised social understanding and social knowingness try to catch up, struggling to understand as well as act on their own location in baffling historical formations, not least to still the churnings of their own meanings by the cultural commodity mill. Can we not direct at least some of our academic efforts to recording these struggles, the stillness of their transient successes, augmenting them by supplying a technology for thinking, for suspending the commodity mill for a moment, for straightening out social aspects of cultural production even if large parts of culture, their internal histories and operations, remain mysterious, arcane or impenetrable, their fascinating textures besetting and besotting most of our academic efforts in atomised involutions of study which push social theory ever further from the social?
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The possible new ‘organic’ meanings ‘from below’ of lived popular or common culture and their shifting, fragile, breaking and re-newing patterns of meaning are, of course, different from those entertained and theorised by the Education Group. There are many differences, some of them already covered, but a very important one is simply that the Education Group at the Centre still believed in some continuing relationship between the ‘organic’ and the ‘organised’. Raised very sharply here to my mind is the common root of the stem ‘organ’ both in ‘organ-ic’ and ‘organ-isation’.12 The two words and associated concepts have always been connected, though often in unruly and disputed ways. Certainly they have a common provenance. But now they have been split asunder. I believe that ethnographic sensibilities and research action do, can and will show new organ-ic meanings, even if bound by circular digital and commodity forms, but they will not show organ-isational forms, still less public realms, for their collective expressive outlet and recognition of interests in common for those who share organic cultures and experiences. That is really the historical lesson taught to us, consciously and unconsciously, by the Education Group. But here I return to the importance of newly tuned ethnographic antennae and to the complexity of the ‘truth’ of education in schools (also actually in all non-commercial sites of subordinate welfare, development and recreation). Let us bring these two together. Basically I ask of cultural ethnographers: what are the more enduring forms of informal cultural production that manage to freeze or outrun the commodity cycle? Can these be understood as nascent quasi-institutions; if so, how can they be stabilised and where? And I ask teachers within existing institutional sites of all kinds, perhaps with the help of cultural ethnographers, within the ‘fissures and contradictions’ of their workplaces can there be found corners to colonise, symbolically and physically, as grounds for the gauging, stabilising and enabling of more enduring informal forms than the street can sustain? The state, at least in the UK at this conjuncture, attempts a centrally organised mediation and regulation of problematic social relations and their reproduction, most obviously in education, and so begets, unwillingly, myriad sites for heightened contradiction and the playing out of wider cultural forces and symbolic meanings. Schools and other sites, used differently and utilising the different facets of the ‘triple truth’ of education, might supply to informal cultural production the best hope it has for an extension which, even if deadening street vitality, might allow an approach of the ‘organi-ic’ to the ‘organ-ised’ – paralleling, in its turn and in minor key, the ways in which commercial predators extend the ‘organ-ic’ into the ‘organ-ised’ of their institutions of the production of cultural commodities. Media studies, cultural studies, ethnographic texts, principled analysis of popular cultural materials, activities in the newly burgeoning field of ‘creativity studies’; all of these undertaken in such a framework of understanding and action may offer really interesting possibilities in the ‘interesting times’ ahead. All the complexities of lived common or popular culture play not only in relation to the school with respect to its ‘triple truth’ of education, but also in direct relation to the world of work. For the working class, work is never far away, really or in the curriculum. A pregnant set of potentially educative and generative contradictions cluster around the contemporary cultural formations of labour power, within and without the school, in relation to the needs of old and new kinds of production. To be summary: there is a mismatch between the informal cultural production and reproduction of ‘modern’ classed, raced, gendered bodied, labour power and the places waiting for them in rapidly changing ‘modern’ economies. The cultural formations and informal reproductions of labour power in the popular classes and related strands of meaning and action in the bottom of social space, may well be at odds with not only the formal provisions and aims of education under educational ‘truth (a)’ but
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also with, by no means the same thing, the actual requirements for particular kinds of labour power in private production and state provision of goods and services, some of the latter being developed actually to contain and ‘re-educate’ emergent popular forms in guise of the unacceptable habits of the new ‘folk devils’. Paradoxically the ‘oppositional’, ‘anti-social’, rebellious and dis-affected forms of the informal production of labour power, pace their discomfiture in the official moulds of school, may sometimes actually suit quite well the needs of the cultural industries and wider labour roles requiring expressive or socially sympathetic communication. But there are many combinations and variants of the continuing and emergent contradictions between informal cultural production and material production which do not coincide, ironically or otherwise, so readily with formal labour market needs, so creating and revealing the jagged edges which drive most of our ‘social problems’. In the older industrial areas of the UK we may see for some young men a retrenchant and recombinant return to traditional certainties of more strongly held gendered forms of the subjective occupation of a manualised labour power which is more school-resistant than ever. This is hugely surplus over, but refuses to move on from the hope of a job in the sped up and dwindling manufacturing sector that remains. At the same time new formations of culturally expressive labour power generate new armies of ‘wannabes’ with mostly illusory hopes to join the cultural industries ‘one day’, and who will likely find no interest in, but feel forced to take, existing low paid ‘MacDonald jobs’ and other menial service jobs, not least in servicing the personal, household and gardening needs of those who oversee and operate the new divisions of cultural and communicative labour. ‘Cultural sabirs’,13 strange mixtures of both the latter, may find no destination at all and suffer from being out of tune with both the old and the new! All of these possible patterns provide sites and tensions requiring sympathetic work to maximise actual employment opportunities even as their associated cultures and dissatisfactions offer possibilities for exercises of disclosure and opportunities for the validation of alternative knowledges. Adding urgency and another reminder against humanist romanticism, though, is that all this unfolds under the shadow of contracting state benefits for the young unemployed, harsher prison sentencing policies and burgeoning prison populations. These are ever more favoured labour market options for ‘encouraging’ the un- or low qualified into low paid repetitive labour. These tears (in both senses) of experience and their cultural premonitions underlie all lived cultures, their creativities too, and mediate how the ‘triple truth’ of education takes form in lived experience. The ‘books at the end of the shelf ’ should move to the cultural centre of these concerns, thereby perhaps moving themselves more to the centre of academic attention today. Then, maybe, we might catch Richard Hoggart’s eye again and cause a change in how he orders his bookshelves today. Paul Willis is Professor of Socio-Cultural Ethnography at the University of Keele. During the 1980s he served as youth policy adviser to Wolverhampton Borough Council in the English Midlands. There he produced The Youth Review (published by the Council and Ashgate) which formed the basis for youth policy in that city and for the formation of the democratically elected Youth Council, both still functioning. During the 1990s Paul served first as Head of the Division of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies and then as a member of the Professoriate at the University of Wolverhampton. He has held a variety of consulting posts including: membership of the Youth Policy Working Group of the Labour Party (1989–90); at the English Arts Council (1992–3); at the Tate Gallery of the North (1995–6). In 2000 he co-founded the Sage journal, Ethnography. Paul Willis’ work has focussed on the mainly but not exclusively ethnographic study of lived cultural forms in a
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wide variety of contexts, from highly structured to weakly structured ones, examining how practices of ‘informal cultural production’ help to produce and construct cultural worlds ‘from below’. Currently he is working on conceptual and methodological ways of connecting or re-connecting a concern with identity/culture to economic structure, with particular reference to ‘shop floor culture’.
Notes 1 This is not entirely true and were it not for some remaining glowing embers of collective organisation representing feeling at the grass roots, the tenor of my writing and appeals to continuing and new forms of organicism/organisation, for finding new optics for connecting them, at the end of this piece would make even less sense. Local campaigns against proposed, free standing, employer led, ‘academies’ (schools independent of the local state and backed by charitable foundations), the latest stage in Tony Blair’s and New Labour’s neo-liberal offensive against traditional, non-selective, ‘bog-standard’ community comprehensive schooling, have achieved some tactical victories. Though the central state continues to trample over local feeling, the latter is still reflected in some local agencies and pockets of the local state which have managed, in episodic acts of courage, to hold back the full frenzy of marketisation. Such feelings of opposition are also registering nationally with revisions to the Schools Reform Bill now passing through parliament that limit the power of ‘academies’ to operate untrammelled selection. Though there is no sign whatsoever of even a luke warm commitment to the educational comprehensive movement championed by Old Labour, there are signs of growing unrest on Labour’s back benches about the scale of the continuing right-wards dash to the market in education. 2 I am thinking of grass roots union and labour party groups, local manifestations of social movements, local teachers’ groups, and local activist groups often combining academics with practitioners. In those days of ‘teacher autonomy’ and local control of curricula these groups generated real local arenas of radical educational thought and culture resting in some way on, and assuming, principles of local democracy and pushed, with some success, for the introduction of working-class experience and interests as practical presences in educational debates and work in schools. 3 This was later published in the European Educational Journal (Jones 2005, passage quoted: 228 & 9). 4 It is hard to locate a definitive point at which a leftish, organically connected, major organisational project of critical thought and action in and on Education collapsed. The project was certainly unravelling during the life span of the Education Group at the Centre and the failure of the miners’ strike in 1984–5 delivered a stunning blow to local activism across the board. The settlement of the successful (in wage terms) 1987 Teacher’s strike involved a move towards tight contracts regulating employment conditions physically ensuring, actually, that teachers lost much of their ‘professional and goodwill’ control of their workplaces and out of, or after, school contact with their charges. The 1988 Education Reform Act entrenched central state control and bracketed teacher autonomy and its influence upwards formalising central features of marketisation, testing and inspection. Perhaps in the UK the final coup de grace was also curiously self-inflicted and came as late as 1993–4 when the teachers unions failed to support spontaneous local teacher boycotts against the central imposition of SATS – a comprehensive, multi-age national testing framework now dominating curricular provision, teaching and learning in schools. 5 There has been some recent work on class analysis in relation to education, which is very interesting. This has not dealt with working-class positions, subjects and interests, though, so much as with the ideological and material processes of the generational reproduction of middle class ones. With the normalisation and ideological universalisation of individualistic middle class values and aspirations, so the argument goes, the many who fail to achieve relatively high levels of material success are pre-disposed simply to see themselves as isolated failures (not victims sharing experiences in common with a societal group). The universal insecurity this provokes in all social groups, alongside the marketisation of educational provision, leads middle class parents to pursue highly focussed and selfish strategies in the placing of their own children either in private schools or selective (often postcode selected) state schools. This is undertaken not as part of a shared class strategy or collective ontology but out of simple naked fear. These processes are then presented back to society as a political demand from below for more selection and ‘choice’ in education! Of course the implications for working-class positions and their occupants are grim, not only for the
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self esteem of individuals (unredeemed losers) but for their chances of achieving access to quality educational provisions since they have neither the material nor cultural capital to compete against middle class parents utilising all of these advantages in ever more feral ways to protect themselves and their families from the ruthless horrors of downward class mobility in an unforgiving market economy. The general position I am adopting in this piece, of the necessary registering of working class agency on historical forms, albeit mediated for the moment in uncertain and ambiguous cultural forms, would seek substantially to qualify or add certain aspects of the effects of subordinate agency to this nevertheless illuminating set of arguments. For an excellent review of recent work see Savage 2003. With young anti-social ‘yobs’ firmly in mind and as part of the Blair government’s ‘respect’ agenda, the Home Office introduced Anti Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOS) in 1999. ASBOS offer a new kind of official instrument aimed at controlling apparently threatening, disruptive, antisocial or potentially criminal behaviour without need of the usual high standards of proof required for regular court proceedings. The police are empowered to apply to courts, reporting only their own view of the evidence, for the issuance of orders against specific named individuals or groups banning them from undertaking specified behaviours, such as playing ball in the street or gathering in certain neighbourhoods. Offenders can then be prosecuted, not for any actual criminal offence, but merely for breaching the ban. Children as young as 13 have been given ten-year ASBOS. Shami Chakrabati, Director of Liberty, the human rights group, says that the ‘criminalising of children has become a national “obsession” ’ (Independent 2006: 7). These issues are dealt with fully in Willis 2003. This was Tony Blair’s battle cry in his victory in the general election of 1997. Of course, for Blair this ‘tripling’ of education is not aimed at a differentiation of class interests but is utilised as a mantra for repeating and normalising a dominant, sociologically blind, view of ‘top down’ education as a simple, self-evidently ‘good thing’ for everybody. This and theoretical categories to do with comprehending the creativities of lived forms in a commodity-dominated digital culture are developed and analysed in Willis 2000. This currently hugely over-worked term in the popular press in the UK denotes a stereotype of poor people with attitude and ‘vulgar’ tastes in fashion and ‘bling’ (flashy jewellery). It also denotes the disappearance of respectful terms for referring to working class people and reflects, generally, their declining social status and social power. For a very interesting application of this perspective to the case of English club football see Marcus Free and John Hughson 2006. I am indebted to Marcus Free for pointing out this common root and for re-directing me to Raymond Williams’ early illuminating discussion of precisely these issues in Culture and Society. I am borrowing this term from Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad (2004) to explore and pose possible parallels in the cultural formations of labour power in colonially dominated Algeria in the 1950s with those in modern Britain, subject in very different ways to its own violent changes and dominations. Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad utilised the term in the context of French colonial policy in Algeria to highlight the objective and subjective dilemmas and instabilities of the formation of labour power in the indigenous population whereby, amongst other policies, forced re-settlements, urbanisation and the monetarisation of exchange combined to ‘depeasantise’ subjects (men are the focus of their argument), so removing their ability to cope with traditional forms of production but not equipping them properly to undertake modern forms of work governed by capitalist wage labour, either. . . . of the modern economic system, always perceived from the outside in its most external manifestations, he has a necessarily truncated vision such that he can only grasp decontextualised scraps of it . . .: of the traditional system, he has retained only scattered fragments and only resistance and fears, rather than a living spirit. In short, for lack of speaking the two cultural languages well enough to keep them clearly separated, he is condemned to the interferences and incoherencies that make a cultural sabir.
References Bataille, L. (ed) (1976) A Turning Point for Literacy. Oxford: Pergamon Press Bourdieu, P. & Abdelmalek, S. (2004) ‘Colonial rule and cultural sabir’, Ethnography 5 (4)
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Free, M. & Hughson, J. (2006) ‘Common culture. Commodity fetishism and the cultural contradictions of sport’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 9 (1) The Independent, 23/4/2006 Jones, K. (2005) ‘Remaking Education in Western Europe’, European Educational Research Journal 4 (3) Said, E. (1983) ‘Criticism between Culture and System’ in The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press Savage, M. (2003) ‘A New Class Paradigm?’, British Journal of Sociology 24 (4) Williams, R. (1958) Culture and Society 1780–1950. London: Chatto and Windus Willis, P. (2000) The Ethnographic Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Willis, P. (2003) ‘Foot Soldiers of Modernity: The Dialectics of Cultural Consumption and the 21st Century School’, Harvard Educational Review 73 (3)
44 Social democracy, education and the crisis Dan Finn, Neil Grant, Richard Johnson
Preface This stencilled paper is a revised version of an article which first appeared in Working Papers in Cultural Studies No. 10, On Ideology, 1977. Written in late 1976 the article was centrally concerned with explaining the genesis and constituents of what was then publicly conceived of, and defined, as a ‘crisis’ in education. We attempted to explain the political and ideological nature of that ‘crisis’, against explanations which, on the one hand simply identified the debates on education as a smokescreen for the massive cuts in educational expenditure, or on the other hand identified the ‘crisis’ as the political projection of a unitary and monolithic state apparatus simply responding to the ‘needs’ of capitalist production. That is to say, we took as our object ideologies about education – which we approached historically and politically. Notwithstanding the errors and simplifications that this focus on ideology generated – which have been pointed to by many critics – we were concerned with the social and political effects of these ideologies. These effects can be identified in debates about education, which have through policies a real effect on the educational system itself, and which constitute an important part of more general political arguments. At the moment the narrowly party political character of the issues has never been clearer. But education is political in a broader and more significant sense. Education often acts as a kind of metaphor of national destinies. It seems to be a particularly appropriate vehicle for taking about the future of society in general. It is no accident that those social forces which are intent on a major rightward shift of our society choose to lay such stress on education. And it is easy to see how this centrality arises: education does concern future workers and citizens (even if educators sometimes exaggerate their role in ‘producing’ them). The preparation of future workers and citizens necessarily involve some more or less explicit vision of the general social future. But that, in turn, is the very stuff of politics in the broadest and widest sense. So, contrary to what a narrow view of teacher professionalism would suggest, education is fully and properly a ‘political’ question. Hence the way it attracts the (professional) politicians like bees to the honey-pot, and hence the need, certain instincts notwithstanding, for teachers to think more politically too. In the post-war period education falls into two distinct phases: the long period of expansion following the 1944 Act and continuing into the early 1970s; and the more recent shifts which mark the beginning of a massive, seemingly long term restructuring of the education system as we have known it. These moves have so far given rise to an all-out attempt by both major political parties – but particularly the Labour Party – to win the consent of people to this new educational order. It has involved the mounting of a huge media offensive, with
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leading members of the government, including Callaghan himself, calling into question the existing system and seeking publicly to re-define its aims, objectives and means. We would argue that the present moves to re-structure the educational apparatus, initiated by the Great Debate, cannot be understood without an effective critique of social democratic ideology on education. For it was the Labour Party which presided over the era of massive educational expansion, and it is that same political formation which has slashed educational expenditure and is redefining the nature and purposes of that schooling. For these reasons we thought it important to make our analysis available in a relatively cheap and accessible format. We have also taken the opportunity to make a number of revisions to the text, not to answer the many accurate criticisms which have been made of it – particularly those pointing to the absence of any analysis of the relations between patriarchy and schooling – but to redress some other absences and inadequacies which have become apparent. Most notably we have expanded our discussion of the Right’s ideological offensive, from the ‘consensus’ period of the 1960s to the onslaught of the Black Papers. It is important to stress that the stencilled paper has been produced as part of the collective work of the Education Group at the Centre. This work involves an analysis of post-war educational developments which will be published as the next issue of our journal. There we will be exploring other more fundamental processes and determinations of the educational ‘crisis’, in addition to the themes we discuss here. Another major absence in this paper is the lack of any coherent analysis of changes in the nature and structure of the labour market, and of the capitalist labour process in the postwar period. For it is around understandings of these development and their political and economic relationship with schooling, that the major rationale for educational restructuring has come, both in the 1960s and in the 1970s. The currently developing crisis of youth unemployment, and the criticisms of schooling, have been paralleled by a massive expansion of work experience and training programmes orchestrated under the auspices of the Manpower Services Commission. These changing and contradictory ‘demands’ of industry for new forms of labour-power (with the correct habits, dispositions and work disciplines necessary in a ‘crisis’ ridden economy) and the new educational and training structures they call forth, will be at the heart of our analysis in the journal. However, we still wish to stress the political importance of ideologies in the construction of the educational ‘crisis’, for the ‘ideological’ dimensions are often inadequately considered in relation to grass-roots political strategies. Since the late 1960s this has, it is true, begun to change: one very recent symptom is the increasing concern among politically aware teachers about the importance of sexism and racism as ideologies with a relation to education. Yet there is still a tendency, not least among left groups, to focus too exclusively on issues of resources and of organisational control – hence the salience for some groups of campaigns around ‘the cuts’. The structure and purposes of the trade unions within which most politically active teachers work, favours the emphasis on combating the most obvious and immediate pressures. To raise broader questions, in a union context, often seems divisive or unlikely to win the maximum support. One of our arguments in this paper is that the issues should be raised much more often. In what follows we seek to clarify a few of the issues around ideological struggles, mainly through a critical account of the dominant ideologies of the educational region. We have also added, to our original account, a brief conclusion concerning some of the political implications of our analysis (see pp. 981–6).
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Introduction There is a challenge to us all in these days and a challenge in education is to examine its priorities and to secure as high efficiency as you can by the skilful use of the £6 billion of existing resources. Let me repeat some of the fields that need study because they cause concern. There are the methods and aims of informal instruction. The strong case for the so-called core curriculum of basic knowledge. What is the proper way of monitoring the use of resources in order to maintain a proper national standard of performance? What is the role of the inspectorate in relation to national standards and their maintenance? And there is a need to improve relations between industry and education. James Callaghan, Ruskin College, October 1976 The leading questions of Labour’s Prime Minister marked a fundamental shift in the field of the debate about educational means and ends. They marked, at the ‘highest’ political level, the end of the long post-war phase of educational expansion which had been largely promoted by Callaghan’s own party. His speech, banal enough in content, was nonetheless a well prepared media event, delivered in an appropriate place, important more in the anticipation than in the speaking. Intended, then, to be a signal event – a public re-definition of educational objectives – the speech was also a response to more immediate events: the history of economic crisis and of cuts in public expenditure and, Callaghan’s own real challenge, the polemical weight of the Tory critique of Labour’s educational past. If we understand it correctly, Callaghan’s speech crystallized many aspects of the current situation. We wish in what follows, as a political-intellectual project, to contribute to an understanding of this conjucture. We write especially for people, like ourselves, who work in an educational system under siege or who are blocked from entering it. For all of us the awareness of educational crisis is enforced by daily experience of insecurity or the loss of apparent autonomies. But our contribution is of a particular and limited kind: we take as our object ideologies about education; we approach them historically; we see them as having determinate (or ‘material’) social bases and effects. It is important to say a little, at the outset, to characterize this approach. There are two main ways of talking about ideology in relation to education. We can stress the actual cultural processes of schools and colleges. This would include all the formal work of school and all the avowed intentions of the more orthodox kinds of professional teachers: in other words what is meant to happen in schools. But it should also include the informal cultural level too – the ‘hidden curriculum’ (what pupils learn from teachers and others while they are learning) and the active, ‘lived’ cultural responses of the pupils themselves, their frequently ungovernable and contradictory behaviour. Together these form the immediate content of the grass-roots experience of schooling. But, on top of this, we must also consider the more public and ‘visible’ debates about education. Schools are plainly an issue in the media and a ‘stake’ in political disputes. Party politicians and the media build all kinds of arguments around them. Thus educational aims and objectives loom large (especially during the last few years) in attempts to construct political alliances, cultivate the consent of the governed and secure bases of power through publicity and the routines of formal democracy. So it happens that the actual workings of education are also re-presented both to the educational agents themselves (teachers, pupils and parents) and to that mysterious (but actually structured) thing – ‘the public’. We might sum all that up by saying: there are cultures of schools and ideologies of schooling.
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Some useful things can be said about the ideological level in general. First, ideologies of schooling are constructed a long way from the processes they are meant to represent. There are some easily verified symptoms of this – apparent enough to media watchers who are also teachers. Characteristically, the media or the politicians fix on a particular example. They remove it from the very complicated context in which, in the real world, it is placed. They slot this example into some argument of their own. It becomes a cause célèbre: a Tyndale or a Tameside. It becomes a symptom of a deeper malaise. A quick look at the Daily Mail would refresh the mind, for the Mail with its stories of illiterate, disaffected and ‘incompetent’ teachers, pioneered the genre of ‘schools as scandal’ in the Right critique of educational developments in the 1960s. Despite the common protestation that ‘education should be kept out of politics’, the Mail’s campaign was undoubtedly aided and fostered by Tory councillors and MPs. All this reminds us of another set of meanings of the term ideology: ideology as inadequate and ‘partial’ knowledge – ‘partial’ in both senses of that word. Although representations like these are in part ‘constructed’, they do have very important effects. We must view them in relation to policies – to politically determined actions of an administrative kind which have the force of law or at least of authoritative direction. Policies in turn affect grass-roots resources and opportunities. As we will show, Labour’s ‘Great Debate’ is an excellent example. It was at once a response to the Right critique, occupying some of the same ground, and a process of preparing the basis for policies which had, strategically, already been decided upon. One role of ideological work, then, is to prise open the limits of the politically possible. In the course of such work a whole field of thought may be transformed, and we have evidently lived through such a shift in the educational field since the early 1970s. Such shifts are not wholly ideological in character. They are also attempts to solve problems of economic structure. But they do require an ideological strategy, actively promoting new understandings, fixing them in people’s minds, giving to the novel the status of the axiom. This essay therefore is mainly concerned with what we have called the ‘ideologies of schooling’. We will refer occasionally to our own understanding of primary educational processes mainly to highlight the inadequacies of ideologies about schools. Our position is best sketched where it is relevant and where it enters our critique of other positions. But there are two main features which we see as essential to an adequate theory. First theory must grasp the relations between school and other sites of social relations. The most important of these can be specified: family, work and the formal political sphere. But these sites themselves will be inadequately grasped unless viewed in their relations within a particular social formation. These are some of the reasons why we choose to work within the Marxist problematic of reproduction while recognising that there are more or less adequate variants of it. This takes us to our second principal point. One of the weaknesses of some versions of this theory, Althusser’s for instance, is that they appear to have little place for that capacity for resistance which may be exercised by children and teachers in schools (Althusser 1971, Willis 1977). Further features of our approach – a concern to define our object historically and relate it to a particular social base – are best introduced more concretely. The ideology of the education system which is our principal object has a particular history. It was constructed by particular agencies and produced by a particular social coalition. All of the elements in this coalition had their provenance in the years before the Second World War: two of the three, indeed, have a considerably longer history. But it was only in the post-war world, and especially in the 1960s, that these combined elements acquired hegemony over educational
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policy as a whole. The educational crisis of the 1970s is, in part, a crisis of this formation and of the social coalition that underpinned it. Each party in the alliance made its own contribution, but the effective nucleus was the Labour Party. The ideology of progress through education was a regional expression of what critics to the left of the party have dubbed ‘Labourism’, and which we see as a variant of the general category ‘social democracy’. As we show in more detail later, Labour’s education programmes bear the stamp of the internal formation of the party and of its relations within British society. Its politicians and intellectuals have been the main bearers of these ideologies. Before the professionalisation of educational report and inquiry it was intellectuals of a Fabian or British Socialist persusasion who supplied the main source of the party’s policies. The absence of a more than passive contribution from working-people is a matter which will concern us later. The party, itself a complex social alliance, was joined by other agencies. These do not constitute, in any useful sense, organic classes or even fractions of classes; rather, specialised intellectuals of a particular tendency and the organised professional interests of the educational sphere. The emergence of a specialist, academic sociology of education was, in our view, one of the most significant developments in post-war education. The sociologists of education replaced or at least supplemented the intellectuals of an older kind. They worked in a more technical manner within an intellectual field which specified quite narrow problems. It was this alliance with sociological expertise which gave to Labour’s post-war programme much of its tone and shape. The third component in the alliance was the teaching profession itself, or, more specifically, the tendency to teacher professionalism. If the Labour Party supplied the general political-ideological context and the sociology of education specified some short and medium term objectives, teacher-educationalists supplied much of education’s content. They supplied the obvious absence in the more politicised contributions. They cultivated ‘the secret garden of the curriculum’. In what follows we develop the sketch outlined above, considering each of the agencies in the post-war coalition in turn, examining their particular contributions. In Part IV we show how those elements were articulated in the policies and reports of the 1960s. Although it is impossible to divorce exposition from critique in earlier sections, we then show, in Part V, some of the intrinsic inadequacies of the social-democratic position. Finally we analyse the crisis itself from this perspective – as a crisis of social democratic ideology and as a splintering of its social base.
The Labour Party We do not intend, in this section, to recount the familiar history of the Labour Party, nor in detail its educational policies. The general history of the party has been much studied (Pelling 1965, Nairn 1964, Coates 1975, McKibbin 1974, Howell 1976, Miliband 1972). There are useful accounts too of its contribution to State educational policies especially for the period up to 1951 (Barker 1972, Simon 1974). The aim is rather to examine, more ‘structurally’, certain key features of the party which seem to have determined its educational stance. We are less concerned with shifts of policy than with their continuities – the pattern of emphases and absences which was the party’s particular contribution to post-war educational ideologies. Our account is not intended to be ‘original’ except in so far as it may render problematic a pattern of assumptions normally taken as self-evident. This pattern of assumptions was initially formed in the early years of the party and reinforced during its
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inter-war history. This is why, in this section of our paper, we choose to concentrate on the period before World War II. The Parliamentary route One of the crucial determinants of Labourism has been the party’s relationship to the working class. Despite appearances to the contrary and especially the post-war attempts of ‘democratic socialists’ to ‘broaden the base’ of the party’s electoral support, it has remained dependent upon a working class vote and an historical alliance with trade unionism. The growth of its support from the First World War to the early 1930s rested in part on the enfranchisement of new sections of the class and in part on a shift of popular allegiances away from the Liberal Party, the traditional, nineteenth-century focus of the politics of organised labour (McKibbin 1974 pp. 236–47). Even the post-war strategies of the party aimed at other class fractions have still retained the older identifications, and in the case of trade unionism has even developed them. The second crucial determinant of the party’s ideologies has been its acceptance of those concepts of legality and political – constitutional conventions which Miliband (1972) has termed ‘parliamentarism’. These assumptions were materialised in British political practices long before the emergence of the Labour Party itself, though they were only completed or realised in the full, late achievement of universal adult suffrage and the emergence of the party as a ‘legitimate’ representative of the working class. Notions like the sovereignty of parliament, and especially of the House of Commons, derive in fact from the days of a propertied parliamentary system, representative of different fractions of capital. Other elements – formal equality before the law for example – have a still longer history. The insertion of working-class politics into this structure also pre-dated the emergence of separate labour representation. The party’s parliamentarism was pre-figured in the midnineteenth century alliance of radical popular liberalism with the bulk of organised labour. The formation of the Labour Party, however, consolidated this relationship rather than challenged it. As Miliband puts it, characteristically over-emphasising the enigma of Labour’s leadership: Of political parties claiming socialism to be their aim, the Labour Party has always been one of the most dogmatic – not about socialism, but about the parliamentary system. Empirical and flexible about all else, its leaders have always made devotion to that system their fixed point of reference and the conditioning factor of their political behaviour. This is not simply to say that the Labour Party has never been a party of revolution: such parties have normally been quite willing to use the opportunities the parliamentary system offered as one means of furthering their aims. It is rather that the leaders of the Labour Party have always rejected any kind of political action (such as industrial action for political purposes) which fell, or which appeared to them to fall, outside the framework and conventions of the parliamentary system. The Labour Party has not only been a parliamentary party; it has been a party deeply imbued by parliamentarism. 1972 p. 13 It is worth digging behind the term ‘parliamentarism’ and considering what it entails. It involves, firstly, a belief in the neutrality or the potential neutrality of the State apparatus: there is nothing in this ‘machinery’ which prevents it from being used for the benefit of all. It
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also involves a faith in legislative-administrative procedures as the main route to the solution of ‘social problems’ or the equalisation of conditions. This in turn gives a primacy to formal political processes – basically the marshalling of a popular vote at elections as the means to a Labour hegemony. Accordingly less mediated forms of class power are regarded with distrust: at best they are an embarrassment to parliamentary proprieties, at worst they constitute a really undemocratic threat. The only clear exception to this inhibition are working-class actions which are held to be industrial. These are the proper concern of the party’s alter ego – the trade union movement. The force of this analysis may be seen if we review the party’s relation to other tendencies in working-class politics in the period 1910–26. Throughout this period, forms of workingclass politics arose that differed markedly from what became the dominant Labourist adaption: a trade unionism which united industrial action and political aims; rank and file movements, suspicious of officialdom and challenging the war-time State; the evolution of British communism and a tradition of industrial direct action and mass sympathy strikes. Without these legacies the General Strike would not have taken place; its defeat was one of the ways in which tendencies like these were educated out of the class’s repertoire. This pattern cannot be explained here in full, but it is important to place the Labour Party within it. We may note that the party’s policies were not directly related to these struggles, although they necessarily affected them. From 1910 the State increasingly intervened in major industrial conflicts, workers themselves demanded the State re-organisation of their industries, and the class as a whole was involved in bitter fights to defend existing wage levels and hours of work. In practice if not in theory, this opposition involved a repudiation of the economic policies that made wage-cutting ‘necessary’. One role for a political party in these circumstances would have been to back and organise such demands, re-think economic orthodoxies and combine agitation with the (necessarily) political strike. Labour, rather, began the long haul to parliamentary respectability, avoiding ‘unconstitutional’ action. Its marginality during the General Strike was only a signal instance of a general situation. All this was skilfully played upon by bourgeois politicians for short-term tactical advantage, the appeal to the ‘constitutional’ against the ‘revolutionary’ being the key propaganda theme. There was no full hegemony in these years; rather there were successive crises and partial stabilisations heavily backed by force. The high points of conservative strategy were those periods of Labour minority government when it was permitted to ‘rule’, but remained too weak, irresolute and baffled by underlying economic problems to pursue its own policies of reform with any force. In 1931 a section of the party’s leadership was actually recruited to the side of a bourgeois coalition to help perform tasks which Conservatives could not have performed on their own. Hence for the Labour Party, the political debacle of the early 1930s, the loss of electoral support and the need for a major recuperation thereafter. The result, by the 1940s, was a form of Labourism more self-confident than at any time since 1918, but it is clear that the main long-term consequences of the inter-war years was an education into ‘legitimate’ trade unionism and the necessities of the parliamentary road. These relations, to the working class and to the State, underlay the party’s educational stance. Educational tendencies within the class were neglected and a form of educational politics was constructed within the State. To grasp the particularity of this adaption, we need to compare it with other historical experiences and another way of thinking the role of a working-class party. It is useful to compare what Marx satirised as ‘parliamentary cretinism’ with Gramsci’s theory of ‘the new Machiavelli’. The choice of Gramsci and the Italian Communist Party at a contemporaneous moment is especially apt since the relation of a party to its class was Gramsci’s central problematic. It specified most of his major concerns:
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the role of the party itself, its relation to the State, the problem of the intellectuals and the master category ‘hegemony’. Parties, politics and education According to Gramsci parties arise on the basis of particular social classes. He himself was especially concerned with the working-class parties of the era of the transition to monopoly capitalism and their appropriate strategies. Parties always control and direct their class, always have a ‘policing’ function. Yet this function can be performed in different ways. In ‘regressive’ modes of the relation, an external control of the class by the party is uppermost. The party’s ‘educative’ function is negative. Accepting existing definitions of legality, possessed of only a partial analysis of the place of its class within the social formation, pursuing immediate, limited reforms, the party acts to hold the class within the existing order. Gramsci’s alternative was a working-class party whose role was positively educative. Such a party directs, educates and ‘civilises’ its class, raising its activities to a new level of legality. It works within the grain of common-sense conceptions of the world held by worker or peasant but raises them to a higher power of critical self-awareness and coherence. It teaches the classes their place within the social formation and within ‘history’ as a whole. It adopts ‘global’ functions, beyond the ‘economic-corporate’, embraces in its programmes the whole range of social issues and develops a particular vision of the future. Such a party forms a state within the state, a state in preparation. Since the state is an ‘ethical’ as well as a coercive agency, the party must possess a ‘philosophy’ of its own, capable of becoming the cement of a new social order. Such a philosophy should be rooted not only in Marxism (‘the philosophy of praxis’) but also in the conditions of existence of workers and peasants. It can only be developed (‘developed’ because not given in existing forms of Marxism) and propagated by ‘organic intellectuals’ who share the conditions of existence of the popular classes. Their production and their articulation with other groups (notably with intellectuals of an older more ‘traditional’ kind) are, pre-eminently, the work of the party. Such a partyclass will already have developed an effective cultural and political control or ‘hegemony’ over ‘civil society’ especially over intermediate or subaltern classes before it acquires State power. The main aim of the party may be defined, indeed, as the construction of such a counter-hegemony or hegemony-from-below. This strategy is very different from the forms of class activity specified by economistic forms of Marxism, or the anarcho-syndicalism of early Italian trade unionism or the Fabianism of the English Labour Party. Many of the differences are summed up in Gramsci’s common (and commonly misunderstood) duo: ‘economic-corporate’ and ‘hegemonic’. It is important to stress too Gramsci’s distance from the common language of the revolutionary political left – ‘trade union consciousness’ versus ‘revolutionary class consciousness’ or the ‘reformist’ party versus the revolutionary one. Gramsci was, of course, a revolutionary, but he had an unusually complete and subtle sense of what such a transformation required. The value of his formulation for our purposes lies in his stress on ‘education’ as a necessary aspect of political transformation. This use of ‘education’ is of course a very expanded one. Education happens not only in schools but also through law and other State practices and through all those agencies of civil society – including the cultural apparatuses of different classes – which, in their different ways, cultivate consent. It happens, pre-eminently, in political parties of all classes. In this way Gramsci refuses the restricted notion of education which has actually been constructed around State schooling as part of the ideology of the region. (In some ways, indeed, his actual discussions of schooling are disappointing – see
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Gramsci 1971 pp. 26–47.) Yet if we follow him in rejecting the identification education = school, or college or university, the expanded definition gives us a real analytical purchase on the ‘educational’ strategies adopted by any party. We can see, for instance, through this set of categories that the British Labour Party’s educational object was not, and never has been, its own class, or classes. It is interesting to find Labour intellectuals, later in the tradition, actually disavowing what they regard as a 1920s ‘continental’ and Marxist model – the model of the PCI and early SPD (Crosland 1962 pp. 210–11). As a national party (as opposed to an agglomerate of groups and tencenies) it never was an educational-agitational movement. It did not have a starting-point in some conception of socialist education. Nor did it set out from the cultural and educational resources of existing working-class communities. Its educational policies, like its general politics, were posited instead on a pre-existing machinery – in this case a structure of State schools and a particular distribution of formal ‘educational’ opportunities. It was these that the party set out to reform. Thus the party began as and remained an educational provider for the popular classes, not an educational agency of and within them. This displacement has been reproduced throughout the party’s history and has had major consequences to which we shall return in Part VI. We can understand it more concretely if we note the main absences and presences in the part’s inter-war educational strategy. The major absence was the party’s inability to connect, as an organised whole, with a revived tradition of collective working-class self-education which was a marked feature of the period 1880–1926. The major presence was the first full elaboration of a policy for state schooling in the shape of Secondary Schools for All, R. H. Tawney’s book, published under the party’s auspices in 1922. The Labour Party and ‘counter-education’ According to some views of the British working class which threaten to become an orthodoxy, British working-class politics and culture were formed in an undyingly corporate mode and have never shifted out of it since (Nairn 1964, Anderson 1964, Stedman Jones 1974 – but there is more than a hint of this interpretation in most ‘Marxist’ accounts of the Labour Party and Trade Unionism). The formative moment has been variously identified: the defensive tendency of ‘Labour Representation’ (a response of trade unionists to the employers’ 1890s counter-offensive and the Taff Vale judgement); the ‘re-making’ of the class under imperialist ideologies at the turn of the century, or even the original defeat of the ‘first’ working class in the Chartist crisis of the early 1840s. One of the problems with such interpretations is that they overlook the ‘education’ (in something like Gramsci’s sense) that accompanies the trade union expansion and the formation of the Labour Party. From the 1890s there was a marked revival of a radical or socialist educational and cultural politics. It resembled, in many ways, the radical counter-educational impulse of the early nineteenth-century in which the popular classes had developed their own conceptions of knowledge, their own educational forms and a critique of ‘provided’ schooling (Johnson 1976). The late nineteenth-century upsurge had no single organisational focus, was organised by a plethora of groups to the left of Labour’s ideological centre of gravity, but was massive and diffuse and is still under-recorded. It included the educational work of socialists who led the pre-war ‘new unionist’ and ‘syndicalist’ insurgencies. It included the Marxist study groups promoted by the Social Democratic Federation, the socialist league, the socialist Labour Party, the British Socialist Party and the early CPGB. It included the tendency to a self-governing education for working-class adults represented
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by the Plebs League and the Labour Colleges and, finally, the more diffused, ‘brotherly’ cultural politics of the Socialist Sunday Schools, Labour Churches, and Clarion Movement. We still lack as full and as integrated a picture of all this as we have for the Chartist-Owenite phase (but see E. P. Thompson 1960 and 1976; Simon 1974; P. Thompson 1967) though some features are clear enough. Once more a radical and socialist press was very important; once more critiques were launched of orthodox educational forms. Anti-imperialists and radicals and the Labour Colleges contested the liberal humanism of ‘university extension’ and the Workers’ Educational Association. This process of education must have played a part in winning working people, ‘converting them’ in the contemporary phrase from Liberal and Conservative allegiances. It certainly, in the early days supplied the leadership of trade unionism, and many later labour stalwarts have recalled their early conversions. Without the whole movement it would be difficult to understand the Labour Party’s greater sense of assurance immediately after the war and its break with the Liberal Party. Yet once fully formed on the political scene, the party’s relation to a continuing education-agitational work was indirect and even, where rivals were involved, hostile. This followed the logic of the political adaption we have already examined but the party’s educational inertia, outside moments of electoral mobilisation, also rested on the trade union alliance. Increasingly after 1918 it was the large trade unions, themselves increasingly bureaucratic and stabilised, that supplied the party with its local and national organisers. As McKibbin has shown (1974) the party increasingly depended on this alliance and modelled its organisation on the trade union pattern. The party rested, then, not upon an active ideological recruitment but upon a type of class support similar to the loyalties of a fully formed trade unionism. This essentially passive relationship to its class can be seen in the fate of its more agitational elements: the decline of the ILP, the subordination of the Daily Herald to party and union officialdom, the expulsion of the Labour Research Department, the suspicion of ‘socialist intellectuals’ and their marginality in the party’s organisation. Such a party was hardly adapted to the production of Gramsci’s organic working-class intellectuals. Significantly, continued working-class education owed more to the Communist Party and to certain Trade Unions than it did to Labour. All this is not to suggest that ‘independent’ working-class education could have substituted for an educational provision through the State. Even if adapted to that purpose, the Labour Party would hardly have been wise to adopt a free-schooling strategy with schools under working-class control. Chartists and Owenites had explored that route almost a hundred years earlier. What had sustained them then, in the face of pitifully few material resources, had been an expectation of imminent political success. Within its own logic the Labour Party’s emphasis on increasing opportunities within the State system was quite rational and a position already reached by later Chartists and popular Liberals. The gross unfairness of the system and the opposition of Conservatives, economising governments and many fractions of capital made the struggle necessary and compelling. Yet, as we shall see, the party’s relation to the educational system was similar in form to its relation to Parliament. It accepted State Education in toto, including many of the ideologies of the region. This involved the disseverance of a whole number of relations essential to a successful socialist strategy. It divorced (as State Education itself does) the education of children from the education of adults. Any connection between the content of schooling and the conditions of existence of the popular classes disappeared. This made it impossible to draw on the ‘independent’ tradition in order to wage struggles in the schools. But all these points, consequences of a fundamental orientation, will only really become clear at the end of this essay.
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Secondary schools for all There are several reasons why Tawney’s text is exemplary. First, Tawney himself was the most important ‘philosopher’ of British Social Democracy in the inter-war period. Gaitskell called him ‘the Democratic Socialist par excellence’, though he ought to have added that Tawney often found himself on an anti-Fabian end of what he himself liked to call ‘British Socialism’. He was the author of two socialist classics, The Acquisitive Society (1921) and Equality (1931). As an intellectual he was typical of his time and the movement he served. His most enduring intellectual work was in history and not ‘theory’. His attitude to Marx, though occasionally appreciative of the latter’s ‘genius’, was more distant than his relation to Weber. He is properly placed by Raymond Williams in the English culture-and-society tradition (1968). An intellectual of a ‘traditional’ kind, an idealist and a moralist, he was recruited to the side of labour as an external educator of it, first as a WEA tutor, then as a party adviser. Secondary Schools for All was also in itself a significant text. It was produced by a Labour Advisory Committee which Tawney himself seems to have dominated and, as one recent commentator has put it, is ‘a perfect illustration of the character of the Labour Party’. It expressed sentiments that were to remain typical of its educational policy long after Tawney’s direct influence had ceased (Barker 1972 p. 37). Finally, it arose at a significant conjuncture. It was very much the product of the Labour Party’s formative phase in the immediate post-war period. At the same time, it was written in the aftermath of a more widespread working-class mobilisation. As we have seen, this was manifested in part by independent educational movements, but it also took the form of demands for full educational rights by working-class organisations and the growth of popular pressure on existing secondary school places. There is no doubt that Tawney’s document mediated and shaped this pressure from working-class organisations and a section of working-class parents. We wish to stress five main features of the text: Tawney’s critique of English education in terms of persistence of a Victorian inheritance; his identification of a progressive educational consensus opposed to this ‘fatal legacy’; the over-whelmingly mechanical nature of Tawney’s solutions – his stress on the means of access to education or ‘the material scaffolding of policy, administration, organisation and finance’; the text’s main absence – Tawney’s inveterate lack of clarity on the content and purposes of secondary education; finally, the general character of Tawney’s arguments on such things as selection compared with other positions within the Labour Party. Tawney’s analysis was phrased, characteristically, as a history. Education had developed along class lines in the nineteenth century, as a system of social apartheid. There were two separate sectors: elementary education was the training of ‘a special class’, of workmen and servants; secondary education was the preserve of their masters. The systems ran parallel; no progression was possible between them, even for the individual child. The assumptions of this system – ‘the doctrines of 1870’ – had been somewhat undermined since 1902. Despite the recent mangling of Fisher’s inadequate proposals, some bridges had been built between the two systems. But the elementary/secondary division remained substantially intact: ‘exclusive’ forms of selection, building bridges for the exceptionally able, were a compromise that served to perpetuate it. So too did piecemeal schemes like day continuation or the extension of education within the elementary system. For most children ‘elementary education’ was all that could be expected; secondary education remained ‘an exceptional educational privilege’. The task then, was to secure ‘a living and organic connection’ between elementary and secondary schooling, re-classifying them as successive, age-defined stages
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through which each child should go. Only thus would the illegitimate intrusion of ‘class’ into ‘educational’ matters be ended. It is worth stressing at this point that though ‘class’ is one of Tawney’s key words, he uses it very loosely. In Secondary Schools for All it is most commonly used to denote assumptions and prejudices, especially where these are seen as archaic or otherwise irrelevant to the question in hand. Thus, though Tawney sometimes refers to ‘class stratification’ in the sociological manner, his typical use is idealist and moralist. Class is an invariably pejorative term: ‘the vulgar irrelevances of class inequality and economic pressure’, ‘the odious doctrine of class domination’, ‘the vulgarities of the class system’. Sometimes class is counterposed to ‘community’, division against a social harmony: ‘Its (Labour’s) policy is not for the advantage of any single class, but to develop the human resources of the whole community’ (p. 64, underlining supplied and cf section on ‘class’ in Equality). Against the residue of the class-bound doctrines of the past, Tawney discerned (and helped to marshal) an increasing movement of opposition. Sometimes this was presented as but another aspect of ‘community’ – ‘our common sense and our humanity’, a vehicle for values assumed to be agreed on, outside certain vested interests. But the supporters (and the opponents) of educational progress were also identified more precisely: Both in the criticisms passed upon the present system and in proposals for improving it there are signs of a fundamental agreement which did not exist ten, or even five, years ago. In England it is not ungentlemanly to steal halfpennies from children, and industrial interests, it may be assumed, will oppose any reform which inteferes with the supply of cheap juvenile labour. But among educationalists and teachers, economists and social workers, administrators and, not least, the parents themselves, there is not a wide diversity as to the main weaknesses of the existing system. p. 18 Throughout the text, this dual identification is maintained: the progressive consensus includes on the one hand parents and the Labour Movement and on the other all those who are professionally concerned with the educational system: ‘Nearly all enlightened educationalists’ (among whom Tawney manages to enlist the Times and the early intelligence testers); teachers and social administrators. The arguments of each are duly presented. Parents, having, with a Biblical vagueness, ‘tasted of the tree of knowledge’, will not now be fobbed off with ‘educational shoddy’. The Labour Movement should fight class domination in the class room, just as it fights it in Parliament and the factory. Educationalists mostly favour major extensions of secondary education. Educational psychologists have revealed the random distribution of ability and argue that ‘a great deal of educable capacity misses education’. Social inquiry has shown the disastrous results of educational neglect, especially for the adolescent. ‘Common sense’ and ‘humanity’ do indeed support reform. We should note two main things about Tawney’s progressive alliance. First, it prefigures in an oppositional form, precisely the type of dominant coalition we have discerned in the period since the Second World War. Especially significant is the way he treats the teachers. He spends a whole chapter on their position and prospects. Labour supports their Legitimate demands including professional aims like the defence of the Burnham scale, the search for secure tenure, the opposition to ‘secret reports’ on practising teachers, and the strengthening of teacher autonomy. The uniting of the profession is seen as the natural corollary to breaking down barriers in school organisation. Tawney ends this section with a perforation that pointed significantly to future relations between Labour and the teachers:
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Secondly, we should note the conspicuous absence of any industrial interests from the alliance. Industry indeed, especially the Federation of British Industries (the inter-war CBI) was the main butt of Tawney’s satire. The progressive consensus was articulated against industry and those who were held to represent it in the government and the Conservative party. As we shall see, it is precisely Tawney’s purpose to rescue the children from the clutches of employers, and to define an education against the demands of employment. The actual proposals of Secondary Schools for All focus exclusively on questions of access. Such essential if mechanical matters are distinguished by Tawney from ‘imponderables of personality, spirit, and atmosphere’ which are still more important but impossible to legislate for. His writing is similarly chock full of metaphors of access and exclusion, somewhat more homely than later cliches: secondary schools are ‘a landing without a staircase’; primary schools ‘a staircase without a landing’; education in general is a ‘cul-de-sac’; scholarship systems are ‘bridges’, ‘frail hand-rails’ or even ‘greasy poles’. Primary schools are, again, ‘like a rope which the Indian juggler throws in the air to end in vacancy’. How, then, to end this segregation? The aim should be to secure the transfer of all (or most?) children from the primary to the secondary stages as part of a continuous full-time education to the age of 16. All the proposals flowed from this: regarding of all schools into secondary or primary; the abolition of secondary school fees; the increase of maintenance allowances; the increase of secondary school places. Despite his title, Tawney remained vague about the universality of secondary schooling. Sometimes he seemed to accept that only 75 per cent of children were likely to benefit, a figure drawn from some psychologists. Sometimes he presented this as an interim target to be achieved as an ‘instalment of reform’, and then surpassed. We shall return to consider this ambivalence. Most of the book was taken up in discussing the feasibility of these proposals. They were presented in a careful, pragmatic way, with a weight of argumentation and under the slogan ‘idealistic but not visionary’. Yet the discussion of what the schools were to be for, of the content and purposes of the education was, by contrast, cursory and vague. Tawney’s own assumptions on these matters have often to be inferred from his treatment of other themes. His direct attempts at definition were formalistic, tautological and rather feeble: Defined by the stage of life for which it provides, it is the education of the adolescent. Defined by its curriculum, it assumes that the preparatory work of developing the simpler processes of thought and expression has been accomplished, and that its pupils are ready to be introduced, at least in outline and by degrees, to the subjects which will interest them as adults, and an acquaintance with which may reasonably be expected from educated men and women. Defined by its purpose, its main aim is not to impart the specialised technique or trade of any particular trade or profession but to develop the faculties which, because they are an attribute of man, are not peculiar to any particular class or profession of men, and to build up the interests which, while they may become the basis of specialisation at a later stage, have a value extending beyond their utility for any particular vocation, because they are the condition of a rational and responsible life in society. p. 29
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At first sight this and other passages seem contentless, and in a sense they are. Their meaning is almost entirely negative. What is significant is what is denied. In particular Tawney opposes definitions of secondary education that are derived from the children’s future employment. Labour must reject, he later writes, ‘the vulgar commercialism which conceives of the manufacture of efficient typists and mechanics as the primary object of adolescent education’ (p. 111), in other words the legacy of Central and Junior Technical Schools. The doctrine of the determinacy of occupation is ‘fundamentally vicious’, robbing children of their chances for a fuller human development in the interests of producing ‘cannon fodder’ for industry. Tawney’s anti-industrialism produces a particular tangle of arguments. On the one hand education is seen as a sphere whose autonomy from economic and social (ie. ‘class’) considerations must be defended. This pushes him into defining certain criteria as purely ‘educational’, so that, for instance, psychological notions of ‘natural development’ are appealed to against considerations of economic utility. The ‘experts’ of the region are also proportionately exalted along with ‘the progress of educational science’. The tendency of this part of the argument is radically to separate the social formation and a principal mean of its reproduction, an odd position for a socialist who seeks to change the world! On the other hand, education is seen as having some pertinent effects at a more than individual level. It does (if of the right kind) develop and improve the social order. Tawney is quite as capable as any economist of coining the ringing phrase about education and human capital: It is possible for the personnel as well as the material equipment of industry to be undercapitalised, and a nation which has the courage to invest generously in its children ‘saves’, in the strictest economic sense, more ‘capital’ than the most parsimonious community which ever lived with its eyes on the Stock Exchange. p. 144 In this sense, education is seen as increasing the productiveness of labour power ‘it adds to that particular type of productive power on which the ability to use all other natural advantages . . . ultimately depends’ (p. 145). Yet these contradictions in Tawney’s version of the relations of school to economy were never fully explored, neither by Tawney himself, or any other intellectual in the tradition he helped to found. Tawney’s failure to specify, positively, an educational content can be explained in a number of ways. He refused, on principle, to specify any precise curriculum in the interests of variety. He insisted on the importance of trusting teachers. It is also clear that he was heavily influenced by the developmental psychology of the period, hence the definition of secondary education as ‘adolescent education’, appropriate to a stage in the child’s maturation. But if ‘nature’ in very general terms specified what should be learnt, there is little need to worry about what ‘society’ (or class interests and experiences) might demand unless indeed it conflicts with ‘nature’. The argument from nature seems to have been reinforced by one from ‘culture’. For Tawney undoubtedly conceived of culture in a thoroughly Arnoldian manner: it was a potentially classless inheritance which schools (or the WEA) could bring to everybody. Unlike ‘utilitarian efficiency’ it had an unproblematic content. Thus, in the last resort, he was quite happy to endorse the Board of Education’s list of secondary school subjects without further comment. Finally, we should note the complementarity of all this to the notion of ‘rights’ informing Tawney’s whole position and that especially of more working-class egalitarians. What was claimed as a right was evidently what some privileged children already possessed. Secondary education after all, already existed; the problem was to generalise it.
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But the consequences of this absence were very important. In this phase and thereafter, social democracy possessed no conception of the nature and purposes of education which could be said to be its own. It was reliant on the liberal humanism of sympathetic intellectuals like Tawney or on the educational professionals themselves or on altogether more subterranean social processes by which the real meaning of school was fixed. It lacked therefore the one really essential component; a conception of really useful knowledge to set against both capitalist utility and the attractive but impossible idea of a classless ‘culture’. It is important, finally, to set Secondary Schools for All within a wider context of Labour Party thinking on education. We may start by recalling the fact that Labourism in general is a complex of ideologies. As several commentators have noted, much of the character of the party itself can be understood in terms of a persistent duality. On the one hand Labour has embraced a broad ethical anti-capitalism, concerned, above all with social justice and egalitarian in temper. This tendency has been represented by the radical ILP-ish tendencies in the party and by more or less independent English intellectuals like Tawney, G. D. H. Cole or George Orwell. On the other hand, Labour’s repertoire has included the tradition of Fabian social engineering, best understood as a drive for ‘national efficiency’ and scarcely incompatible either with a corporate liberalism or a State capitalism. This dichotomy has certainly been visible in education and we shall analyse it in much more detail later in this essay. For the moment we may follow Rodney Barker (1972) in noting the opposition between an educational egalitarianism and the more elitist or meritocratic emphasis of Sidney Webb and the early LCC. Tawney was well aware of this opposition, wrote eloquently of the differences between ‘equality’ and mere ‘equality of opportunity’ and stigmatised the LCC’s policies as inegalitarian. Yet his treatment of the crucial matter of selection was very curious. He identified two kinds: ‘exclusive selection’ which was a way of building bridges which individual children might cross and ‘inclusive selection’ that would almost amount to universal provision. (The 75 per cent target for children in secondary schools was presumably a case in point.) The peculiarity of these formulations is that although they are clearly egalitarian in spirit, they fall short of explicitly advocating universal provision. The whole tendency of Tawney’s argument and rhetoric and moral stance was egalitarian, yet at the level of practicalities even his work seems to illustrate the power of the categories of the intelligence testers and their construction of broad types of children. As Tawney’s own acceptance, later, of tri-partitism suggests, even Social Democracy’s leading ‘philosopher’ did not quite escape the duality of Labour’s educational thinking. It is perhaps a measure of his status, however, that the tensions and contradictions appear more honestly here than at other moments in the tradition. Post-war ‘affluence’ and revisionism Some fundamental features of the policies of the 1960s were already present in Secondary Schools for All. Post-war development was, in many ways, an elaboration, in radically changed conditions, of that basic stance towards the State and the educational system. The party’s subsequent history constitutes a prolonged testing of the adequacy of social democratic politics. It is important to emphasise, however, if only in outline, the changes of context in the post-war period. If more powerful determinations are ignored, there is a risk of overestimating the contributions of teachers or educational ‘experts’. First, and most obviously, the war-time coalition, the victory of 1945, and the period of the third Labour Government, transformed the party’s place on the political scene. In the
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inter-war years, despite the periods of minority government, it had been a party of opposition, subject to ridiculous charges of Bolshevism and identified with the poor and oppressed. Political success and governmental responsibility strengthened the liberal, ‘progressive’ elements in the party, at the expense of its socialism. Labour made a contribution to the postwar consensual hegemony, accepting the ‘mixed economy’ and building ‘the Welfare State’. A fuller incorporation within the forms of the capitalist State and the achievements of many social democratic goals meant, among other things, that the tendency to identify working-class with ‘National Interests’ was all the stronger. War, recovery and the post-war boom also transformed the character of the ‘economic problems’ with which the capitalist State had to deal, whichever party was in power. Keynesian solutions mitigated the main source of inter-war discontent – massive and structural unemployment. The problem pushed to the front was now that of ‘growth’, or a rate of accumulation comparable to that of other capitalist economies and free from inflation or from monetary crises. Despite the 1930s shift into monopoly, the War, and the long boom, British industry and perhaps the social formation as a whole, seemed to remain ‘archaic’. Even Marxist commentators accepted this diagnosis in the mid-1960s (Anderson 1964). Labour policy was increasingly framed by this analysis. What was needed was a massive social economic and educational ‘modernisation’. The whole cast of Labour’s ideologies was similarly affected by the party’s fortunes after 1951. The party helped to construct the post-war hegemony, but it was Macmillan’s conservation that completed the edifice and presided over it. In what has been called: ‘one of the few privileged phases of hegemony by consent in recent British history’ (Hall 1975 pp. 21–22), that is 1951 to 1960, Conservative success, under the banners of ‘affluence’, ‘embourgeoisement’ and ‘political consensus’ precipitated Labour’s ‘revisionism’. The most significant Labour theorists of the 1950s, like Crosland, accepted much of the affluence myth and sought to provide political programmes acceptable in ‘present-day, as opposed to capitalist, society’ (Crosland 1962). The programme that resulted has been very adequately summarised as ‘an attack on the ascriptive elements of British society which were presented as causes of economic inefficiency and offensive social distinctions’ (Howell 1976 p. 193). Finally, it is important to note that Labour’s own legislation of the 1940s eroded much of the ground of its traditional ideologies. Working-class support in the inter-war period had depended in large part upon the very open and conspicuous exclusion of working people from anything like a full citizenship. The War, the removal of the ‘Old Gang’, Labour’s reforms and post-war prosperity undoubtedly produced a real amelioration in some of the more contingent and phenomenal aspects of class relations, giving a greater appearance of equality. In this sense ‘revisionism’ was a sensible enough adaption, more convincing than anything the ‘left’ could offer, and perfectly consistent with the party’s fundamental reformism (Howell 1976). In so far as the old egalitarianism was to be retained, it had to take somewhat finer and more discriminating forms – either that, or the nature of class had to be grasped more completely. These changes had three main effects on the party’s educational thinking. First, they tended to change the balance of emphases within the social democratic repertoire. The assumption of economic responsibilities (or their prospect) together with the whole modernisation argument, laid an overwhelming emphasis on the economic reasons for educational expansion. Economic considerations, however, were not seen as in any way incompatible with educational goals. Crosland, while invoking Tawney’s general argument, did not share his suspicion of industry. On the contrary, there was assumed to be a quite unproblematic
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harmony between the equalisation of educational opportunities and the necessities of ‘growth’. The first was a necessary condition of the second. Secondly, education had, by the later 1950s, assumed a very prominent place in the party’s total strategy and it became, in its way, the success story of the years that followed. In general, ‘revisionism’ presented Labour as a party of ‘social reform’ and gave education a priority within that definition. Education did in fact become a site of policy innovations that spilled over into other fields, ‘positive discrimination’ and ‘priority areas’ for instance. Education was designated the key area of remaining class inequalities, ‘the greater divisive influence’ (Crosland 1962). Moreover there is no doubt of the substantial success, at an ideological level, of this part of the party’s programme. From the early 1960s to the appearance of the first Black Papers and the new educational radicalisms, social democratic conceptions of education acquired an almost monopolistic dominance. In this sense, education provides an important exception to the conventional leftish account of Labour’s fortunes from 1945 to 1965 – a descent from epic heights to bathos. Finally, of course, post-war changes shifted the actual terrain of Labour’s policies. Labour’s initial programme of ‘secondary schooling for all’ was pre-empted by the Butler Act of 1944. The major issue thereafter became the forms of secondary schooling, a battle fought out first within the party itself. It was in these conflicts and in the crystallisation of Labour Party solutions that the teachers and the sociologists were so important.
The sociology of education In this part we shall examine the emergence of the sociology of education, its institutional location, and its characteristic intellectual paradigms. But at the same time we wish to stress that the sociology of education was a developing tradition of inquiry, with shifts of emphasis and method as well as limits and continuities. In this internal history, it is possible to distinguish two main phases, with a shift in the early 1960s. An awareness of this shift has structured our account. Though in both phases the intellectual paradigm was broadly ‘functionalist’, the early functionalisms took a classically institutional form, dealt with problems at a ‘macro’ level, and drew heavily on quantitive techniques. Latterly, sociologists drew on a functionalism of ‘norms’ and ‘value systems’ to explain more microscopic or local features of the educational system and its relation to ‘class’. At the same time methods became more ‘qualitative’. We have sought to sketch the main external determinations of this change. But we are also concerned with the relation of the sociology of education to social democracy and to Labour Party policy. At almost every level, including the actual careers of individuals as both sociologists and advisers to Labour, the relation was, as we shall show, peculiarly close. Ideologically, too, there were both convergences and shared presuppositions and influences. The Fabian tradition, for instance, was a constituent in the actual formation of the sociology of education. Even so, the sociologists did make their own specific contribution to the post-war pattern, and it is this that persuades us to view the whole constellation Labour Party/Sociologists of Education as a coalition and not, simply, as a unity. Sociologists were not simply party advisers – the academic wing of the party. Often they were further from this role than the inter-war Labour intellectuals. They were also academics of a particular kind, appearing as the ‘experts’ of the region, winning a wider currency and authority for their work outside the party. Their ideas came to be dominant within the educational apparatus. So far as the party was concerned it was through their work that further objectives were added to the inheritance of ‘secondary schools for all’ and Labour’s
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post-1944 goals were given precision. Although the fit with ‘revisionism’ was very close indeed, the contribution was nonetheless specific. In what follows we deal first with sociology and the sociologists, then with their influences within the educational system and on Labour Party policy. Developments The sociology of education had its roots in the ‘political arithematic’ tradition of empiricist sociology, which had concerned itself directly with questions of poverty and social inequality. It was during the 1930s, following the establishment of a Department of Social Biology at the London School of Economics, that systematic efforts were made to investigate the part played by education in maintaining and perpetuating the class structure, and in promoting social mobility. It was in this context that the findings of mental testing, usually cited in support of a selective system, were turned to an opposite use. In 1935, Gray and Moshinsky, in their key article, ‘Ability and Opportunity in English Education’, combined psychological and sociological techniques in a survey of the relationship between ability and attainment. They concluded that there was a ‘large reservoir of unutilised ability’ (1936 p. 364). The institutionalisation of this fact-finding project at the LSE, and its subsequent development after the 1944 Education Act, marked the birth of the sociology of education as a legitimate academic discipline. In terms of the problems that were initially addressed, the emergent sociology of education was greatly influenced by its antecedents in Fabian socialism and its links with government educational policy: on the one hand a concern with equal opportunities, and on the other a concern with problems generated by the gradual transition to a peace-time economy. In the case of the latter there was an imperative to increase productivity to meet the demands of the internal economy and also to re-establish links with external markets. At a time of full employment, the response to these ‘needs’ involved two strategies: firstly, increasing the individual productivity of the labour force, and secondly, efficient utilisation of technological skills and developments. Crucially, the success of this strategy was seen to be largely dependent on increasing the supply of highly skilled technologists, and in this respect the education system was seen to be inadequate. Thus the primary focus of sociological research, particularly that sponsored by official and semi-official government agencies, was upon those handicaps which prevented a perfect relationship between measured ability, educational opportunity, and performance. The sociology of education of the Halsey, Floud and Anderson era was directly concerned with the relationship between education, the economy and the social system. As Floud expresses it, they were ‘fascinated by the spectacle of educational institutions struggling to respond to the new purposes of an advanced industrial economy’ (Floud 1961 p. 60). From this perspective – broadly structural functionalism – society is viewed as a system of interrelated parts each of which performs some function for the others and thus for the society as a whole. So, in these terms, it makes sense to talk about the ‘needs’ of the economy, the ‘functions’ of the educational system, and so on. Characteristically demographic in approach, the sociology of education attempted to analyse the influence on educational attainment of components such as the child’s age and sex, the size of the family, and the parents’ education and reading habits. They identified and documented the under-representation of working-class children in selective secondary and higher education; the gap in the attainments of children from different social backgrounds; and the widening of this gap as children progressed through the education system. As Halsey and Floud pointed out: ‘Widespread social amelioration since World War II
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has not removed persistent class inequalities in the distribution of ability and attainment’ (1961 p. 7). An unselected reserve of educable talent was being wasted. Thus working-class failure in education was viewed as a wastage of ‘society’s talent’. Parallel with this work were the investigations by other agencies into the validity of the selection mechanism itself. In 1957 research reports from the National Foundation for Educational Research and the British Psychological Association disputed the reliability of the eleven-plus as a predictor of educational capacity. These findings fuelled growing middleclass dissatisfaction with the selection process and the eleven-plus. Previously, they had been able to purchase a secondary education, but the abolition of fees, and the operation of the eleven-plus, prevented this. This position was exacerbated by the uneven grammar-school entrance rates in different authorities – varying from 10% to 45% of the total intake. The impact both of the educational sociologists’ findings and of the general discontent in relation to selective education was not confined to the Labour Party. The myth of ‘parity’ between the different schools had been exploded, and by the early 1960s concern was again being expressed about the shortage of scientists and technologists, a concern which received added emphasis in the light of Britain’s developing economic problems. In 1961 the Conservative Education Minister, Eccles, asked the Central Advisory Council to report on the ‘average and below average pupil’ (Newsom CAC 1963). Macmillan also commissioned a special report on higher education, to consider how the system could be brought up to date (Robbins 1963). The Nuffield Foundation sponsored the first curriculum development projects concerning themselves particularly with science teaching, and in 1963 the Schools Council on Curriculum was established. Thus, by the early 1960s the nature of the educational debate had already shifted fundamentally. Sir Edward Boyle, Eccles’ successor, made the point: After 1963 it was hardly controversial to say that you had massive evidence of the number of boys and girls who were being allowed to write themselves off below their true level of ability. I think 1963 was a watershed here, Newsom and Robbins both coming out in that year. It was those reports that really cemented the work that educational sociologists had done in previous years. Kogan 1974 p. 91 There were however further shifts in the early 1960s which provided a new context for the developing sociology of education. The dominant assumptions underlying the ideology of affluence were systematically attacked on both theoretical and empirical levels. The rediscovery of poverty, growing industrial militancy and the appearance on the political arena of a series of social problems, previously submerged, contributed to a ‘rediscovery’ of class. Within sociology this ‘rediscovery’ focused on the community. Whilst it was accepted that working-class material standards had improved, it was argued that they still constituted distinct social groupings. Throughout sociology – from the Affluent Worker monographs to the poverty investigations – a re-engagement with the reality of class was initiated. Within the sociology of education this shift was apparent in a move away from the ‘macro’ concerns of the orthodoxy, to small-scale studies of educability – a move away from the ‘needs’ of post-capitalist society to the ‘definitions’ of the local community. This is epitomised, for example, in the work of Jackson and Marsden (1966) and the earlier work of Halsey and Floud (1961). Both studies are directly concerned with the relationship between workingclass children and the grammar schools, but their methodological approaches to the problem are fundamentally distinct. Similarly, this shift in approach and emphasis paralleled a change
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in the structural position of the sociology of education. Like the other social sciences it was expanding with the institutional growth of higher education. Specifically, it was increasingly incorporated into teacher training colleges and university education departments, and this also had significant implications for the nature of the ‘problems’ to which research was addressed. Thus the changing theoretical frameworks and institutional basis meant that by the 1960s investigation no longer focused on the material handicaps traditionally underlying educational inequality. Research now attempted to identify social factors impinging on the intellectual developments of individuals, and also explored the social and cultural circumstances affecting working-class pupils’ attainment at a given level of ability. The research attitude, that is the theoretical paradigm employed, had important implications for the way in which class was viewed. As one sociologist put it: Given the kind of educational system and the kind of relationship between school and home which exists . . . differential educability is linked to social class background. But social class is just a shorthand way of referring to a complex of factors which correlate with occupation. It describes the distribution or incidence of a phenomenon but does not explain its occurrence in any causal sense. Sugarman 1966 p. 287 So the task was to explain the occurrence in a meaningful way, once more sociologists drew on the functionalist paradigm, but less overtly and crudely, asslimilating the sophistications of the small-scale studies conducted by the social anthropologists. From this perspective social behaviour is structured by norms, enforced by implicit or explicit sanctions which organise, in a regular and predictable fashion, the social life of individuals and the relationships they enter into. Thus, the analysis focuses on rules of conduct as mechanisms of social control, on the constellation of rules that govern particular forms of social grouping, for example kinship; and on the effects which these norms have for the structure of social relationships in given areas of social life. The ‘meaningful’ fabric which constitutes social life was therefore found, not in culture, but in institutions considered as regulative social relationships. This largely descriptive approach to social phenomena is given a certain dynamic by the use of the concept of function – the ‘adequate causal mechanism’. Institutions are seen as functioning parts of a social whole such as the community, which serve to maintain it in a more or less stable condition. The logic of the approach then becomes circular, because in so far as these institutions continue to contribute to the maintenance of the social system, that is, if the system ‘works’, then they are seen as functional for it. This approach, by definition, leads to a focus on the mechanisms of control that serve to ensure conformity to the prescribed normative order. In practice this approach leads to a concentration on ‘normative’ facts (‘treat social facts as things’) so social structure refers to relations between actual, empirically given, social phenomena. These relationships are either given in the facts as directly observed, or arrived at by simple abstraction from the facts. Thus social structure, when used in a functional analysis, refers to no more than the actual organisation of a social system – ‘you too could see it if you took the time’. To give a short example of how this approach is used, and how it actually obscures that which needs to be explained, we can look at those parts of J. Klein’s survey Samples from English Culture, dealing with education and mental activity. Traditional working-class communities, for example the mining community studied by Henriques et al (1956) are seen to be
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inward-looking, with a social structure based largely on ascribed roles. These workers have short term rather than long-term goals, they do not discuss these rationally, and insists on a high degree of conformity. Klein describes this mental state as ‘cognitive poverty’ – an intellectual stagnation precipitated by the conformist pressures of this type of community. Apart from the obvious criticism that the level of educational experience is not considered in the original study, or by Klein, the implicit suggestion is that ‘cognitive poverty’ arises inevitably from the conditions of working-class life. As she makes clear: Even the most sympathetic writers on working-class ways of life remark on what appears as a stubborn determination not to develop – and not to allow others to develop – attitudes or behavoir that would make for a richer and more interior life. 1965 p. 7 But this does not explain anything. It gives us a necessarily determinist picture: ‘That’s the way workers are in traditional communities’. The question still to be answered is ‘Why are they that way?’ To return to the main argument, the starting point of research was that schools and education were ‘good’ things. Thus it was assumed that the factors inhibiting the educational development of the working-class child were external to the school. So it was necessary to go outside the school and analyse the pupils’ social environment. To understand their attitudes to education and their behaviour in the school it was necessary to understand the values they received from their homes and local communities. An implicit acceptance of the present social and economic structure of society led to a simple comparison of the cultures of those who succeed in school and those who do not. Thus, to our surprise, we are told that the working-class have certain deficiencies, vis-a-vis their middle-class counterparts – in linguistic competences, in values and so on. Even when the impact of the school experiences was examined, their effect was seen to reside in compounding these cultural deficiencies through, for example, streaming. The academic sociology of education developed initially as a response to post-war economic ‘problems’ as perceived within the apparatus of the State. It was also shaped by the meritocratic ideologies present in the Fabian end of Labour Party traditions. For sociology this dual problematic had important consequences for its understanding of the relationship between the education system and working-class children. The initial demonstration of an untapped pool of ability identified certain statistical correlations associated with workingclass failure, but provided no explanatory power. Importantly, class was understood not as a dynamic relationship, but as a number of variables correlated with income. Thus the search was on for the adequate causal mechanism, and in line with developments in sociology generally, the cause of failure was located in the attitudes, values, and language of the local working-class community. Subsequently, these findings were articulated more clearly in theories about a ‘culture of poverty’ or the ‘cycle of deprivation’. Working-class failure in education was precipitated by the deficiences in their cultural and linguistic backgrounds and, logically, policy should aim to compensate for these deficiencies. Impacts The impact of these findings needs to be assessed at two levels: in relation to policies about the internal organisation and activities of the school, and in relation to Labour Party policy. In the first case it broke the stranglehold of psychology on school organisation and on
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progressive teaching methods. As Simon (1974) demonstrates, the development of intelligence testing and its related selection procedures generated the introduction of internal streaming, and subsequently legitimated the tri-partite system. Sociologists criticised these practices, by pointing out the unreliability of the selection mechanisms, then by questioning the whole basis of differentiation, and finally by demonstrating their ‘self-fulfilling’ quality. So for J. W. B. Douglas, the selection and streaming reinforced, and was largely based on, the cultural/material deficiencies of the working-class child (1964). Secondly, child-centred teaching had been advocated in government reports since the 1930s, alongside proposals for classifying children by intelligence levels. Both concepts were related to a psychological understanding of man as a creature with innate, determinate capacities. Intelligence level was, however, pivotal, and set limits on the capacities and potentialities that could be drawn out by a child-centred approach. Thus, intelligence determined structure and organisation, and within these confines a child-centred approach could be utilised. The compatibility of these views is demonstrated by the joint appendix to the Hadow Report (1933) written by Sir Cyril Burt, ‘the father of intelligence testing’, and Susan Isaacs, one of the most influential progressives. Sociology, then, by undermining the concept of intelligence, removed the theoretical linchpin which legitimated the organisational structure, and consequently released progressivism as a method from its constraining and determining influence. Thus, sociologists were able to demonstrate that it was the school’s reinforcement of working-class deficiencies, rather than innate incapacity, which contributed to working-class failure. Consequently, the structural and internal organisation of schooling should be reorganised to compensate for these deficiencies, rather than compound them. The political force of this argument was augmented by governmental reports in the later 1950s and early 1960s, which not only recognised the need for more highly-trained technologists, but also argued that a higher level of attainment was necessary for even those of average ability. They were able to do this by pointing to the decrease in absolute number of unskilled jobs and a rise in the level of skills demanded by the occupations which had emerged as a direct consequence of technological developments. Previously, reports of this nature, such as the Norwood Report, had presupposed a belief in three broad categories of children whose intellectual capacity and potential were largely predetermined. However, by the time of the Newsom Report we find that this assumption has been undermined and that: ‘intellectual talent is not a fixed quantity with which we have to work but a variable that can be modified by social policy and educational approaches’ (1963 p. 6). That is to say: The evidence of research increasingly suggests that linguistic inadequacy, disadvantage in social and physical background and poor attainment in school are closely associated. Because the forms of speech which are all they ever require for daily use in their homes and the neighbourhoods in which they live are restricted, some boys and girls may never acquire the basic means of learning and their intellectual potential is therefore masked. 1963 p. 15 Therefore, the Newsom Report, with its sociological definition of capacity, is able to argue that the ‘average and below average pupils are sufficiently educable to supply the additional talent’, and thereby meet the needs of the labour market. This was seen to require more
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flexible and ‘relevant’ education programmes, the raising of the school leaving age and the provision of adequate staffing facilities. From an original limited concern with selection and social mobility, attention was now given to education as a preparation for life – particularly economic life. So the theoretical position developing within sociology was mediated by government reports and translated into policy for the schools. In looking at the impact of the educational sociologists on Labour Party policy, it is important to recognise the implications of the sociologists’ structural position. We have already identified the link between Fabianism and the work of the LSE, and it is widely acknowledged that most orthodox educational sociologists had some degree of commitment to comprehensive reform and the Labour Party. However, the relationship differs significantly from that of the pre-war Labour intellectuals whose work was organically connected both theoretically and practically, to the politics of the Labour movement. Indeed, this point is recognised by Crosland when he argues: Educational research, in any case a very new tool, can give new facts, illuminate the range of choice, show how better to achieve a given objective, but it cannot say what the objective ought to be. For this must depend . . . on judgements which have a value component and social dimension. Crosland 1974 p. 207 The emergence of a specialist, academic sociology of education, carried with it commitments to objective professional work, implying a definite division between institutional research and political activity. The consequences of this for the work produced are significant. Importantly, by working within an institutionally and professionally delimited field of knowledge, which specifies key problems and approaches, the work is distanced from the direct political/moral/philosophical discussions which characterised the work of people like Tawney and Webb. Furthermore, the technical concerns and professional expertise required by writing within sociology, the need for an ‘objective’ and fair treatment of the material and subject, generates political ambiguities, but at the same time gains legitimacy as being ‘scientific’. Labour’s alliance with the sociology of education in the post-war period – its use of the technical expertise and the findings – directly influenced the direction and implementation of its educational policy. Kogan, in his interviews with Crosland and Boyle (Kogan 1974), points to the growth of a new educational establishment in the late 1950s and 1960s made up of social scientists and the like, drawing on the work of professional experts such as Vaizey and Halsey. Furthermore, this process was accelerated with Labour’s return to office. Crosland tells how, when in office, he effectively exploited the ideas of sociologists like Halsey and Burgess and constituted an informal consultative body made up of similar ‘experts’ such as Young and Donnison. Indeed, Crosland attributes the successful undermining of the eleven-plus to such ‘experts’: It wasn’t the Department, in fact, that cracked the Eleven Plus doctrine, but it was mainly such outsiders as Vaizey, Floud, Halsey and the rest. Kogan 1974 p. 186 More importantly, the framework of assumptions within which the sociologists worked was compatible with, and complemented, Labour’s post-war revisionism. Both accepted the
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framework of Welfare State capitalism and its hierarchical occupational structure, which was seen, somehow, to reflect directly the technical requirements of the production process. Having accepted this stratification as given, the question posed for political policy is access to positions in the hierarchy. Equality of opportunity, in this perspective, is understood as equalising chances in the lottery of job allocation. But now the basis of differentiation in education, the IQ test, has been undermined and shown to be largely a function of the environment. Therefore education takes on a new role: we must allow, as Crosland says, ‘the beneficial influence of education to compensate for the deficiencies of upbringing and early circumstance’ (Crosland 1974 p. 199). From these1 assumptions flows the argument for comprehensive and other policy initiatives. If we consider Crosland’s major speech in 1966 on the necessity for comprehensives, we find that he argues that the research of the sociology of education, and the government reports, prove that working-class children, for various reasons, are unable to exploit their educational opportunities effectively. Therefore, policy must necessarily be aimed at ameliorating those factors inhibiting the ‘equal’ chances of the working-class child. Yet the abolition of fees and the provision of ‘secondary education for all’ have not, as educational sociologists have conclusively and ‘scientifically’ demonstrated, improved the relationship between working-class ability and attainment. Research has also demonstrated that the eleven-plus is unreliable as a predictor of capacity, and furthermore, that the tri-partite division in education perpetuates anachronistic class privileges and divisions which are no longer relevant to a modern post-industrial society. Finally, the demands of the economy in terms of the average level of skill required necessitate the provision of a more effective, and efficient, education for the ‘average and below average ability’ pupil. Thus, he concludes that the tri-partite system is ‘educationally and socially unjust, inefficient, wasteful and divisive’ (Crosland 1974 p. 165). These arguments and assumptions, widely held in the Labour Party, represent and epitomise a shift in the way Labour understands inequality and social change. From the pre-war emphasis on wide-scale redistributive policies, we now have an emphasis on a technical/ organisational problem in a relatively discrete social policy area. This fracturing characterised Labour’s response to the ‘social problems’ confronting the political system. These discrete areas reflected, and in part generated, the intellectual fields occupied by organised professional interests. Within sociology, for example, the various sub-disciplines relating to social policy worked within intellectual fields which specified quite narrow empirical problems. Working with specific methodologies and addressing particular ‘technical’ problems, evidence and recommendations were advanced, ‘objectively’, to inform the process of political decision-making. Thus, the ‘problem’ of poverty was divorced from that of ownership, the ‘problem’ of working-class educability was divorced from that of real, ongoing, class relationships, and so on. The sociology of education not only provided the ‘legitimate’ rationale for Labour’s comprehensive programme, but also, crucially, helped to generate the political consensus on education characteristic of the 1960s. In responding to the economic, political, and social ‘problems’ of the period, the characteristic assumptions and palliatives of the ideological alliance precipitated the era of educational expansion
Teachers and teacher professionalism Before attempting to locate the specific contribution of teachers to the ideological coalition we are describing, we feel it is necessary to say something about their class location. Apart
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from rejecting the simplistic thesis that class is a familial characteristic passed on from one generation to another, we would also argue against the thesis that teachers, because they are wage-earners, are unambiguously members of the working class (Teachers’ Action Collective 1975). Whilst it may be useful to see them, alongside the family, as playing a crucial role in the production of labour-power, in the production of value which later appears on the market, we would argue that it is an error then to assume a direct correspondence between the school and the factory. Fundamentally, the school is not a factory, characterised by the appropriation of surplus value and by capitalist relations in the classical sense, and furthermore teachers are not proletarians, they are ‘unproductive’ labourers. Similarly, the reduction of teachers to the unambiguous status of ‘workers’ neglects the particular determinations of what Poulantzas (1975) describes as the political and ideological levels. Centrally, the whole tendency of teacher organisation has been to define themselves as professionals, experts, and so on; to reinforce the fact that in terms of the work they are firmly distinguished from manual labour. Their class location is not simply given by their economic position as wage earners, but is also defined both ideologically and politically, and their place on the mental-manual labour divide in this context is crucial. Thus, it is an error to characterise ‘professionalism’ as a ‘wrongheaded and subjective term which is used to place teachers into a classless limbo’ (Lawn 1975). Rather, teachers and their organisations have emphasised (with fatal continuity) their professional status, the mental-manual labour divide, their distance from parentdom, and so on, so that teaching has been ideologically constructed to emphasise differences from the working class. The ideology of professionalism has been used by the teaching organisations to either defend their middle-class status, or to assimilate themselves into that class. Trapped between the developing power of monopoly capital and the advances of the working class, professionalism can be understood as a petitbourgeois strategy for advancing and defending a relatively privileged position. For the teachers it has manifested itself as an occupational strategy aimed at creating a unified and self-governing profession. Reviewing the achievements of the NUT in its centenary year, Sir Ronald Gould, the retiring General Secretary, felt able to comment that with two exceptions the original aims of the union had been largely met. The exceptions he noted were the failure to secure adequate salaries for all members, as well as the failure to secure control over entry to the profession and over teacher registration. One of the aims which he assumed as being long secured, a pre-requisite for the pursuit of the others, was the right of teachers to be free from ‘obnoxious interference’. In the light of recent events, Callaghan’s speech in particular, Gould’s assumption seems unwarranted. The Callaghan speech signals a direct confrontation with the practice of teachers as well as a challenge to the autonomy which they exercise in the control over their own affairs, both inside and outside the classroom. Though this confrontation has been experienced differently by the various sections of the teaching force, their responses have operated on one base-level assumption. This assumption, common to the different teaching organisations, is that of the professional nature of teaching – albeit unrecognised in any formal structure – as a counter to suggestions of outside interference or direction. Professionalism and educational reform The struggle for professional status has characterised the teaching organisations since their emergence as a force on the political landscape during the educational debates of the late nineteenth century. Their initial interventions in the debate on the Revised Code were
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dismissed, characteristically, by Robert Lowe, in the following terms: ‘teachers desiring to criticise the Code were as impertinent as chickens wishing to decide the kind of sauce in which they would be served’ (Coates 1972 p. 8). This cynical response emphasised the lack of status and effective power of the National Union of Elementary Teachers. Its very title reflected the internal divisions among teachers. Separate organisations represented teachers in the private and secondary schools, and in their case there was a real determination to defend their status and relative privilege against the expanding body of elementary school teachers. Furthermore, within the ranks of the elementary teachers sectionalism was rife. The division between certified and unqualified teachers produced, not only two distinct organisations, but continual conflict over ‘dilution’ issues. Even when this was resolved by the NUT’s acceptance of uncertified members, the issue of equal pay for women precipitated another split with the formation of the National Association of Schoolmasters. Out of this alignment and re-alignment of forces a relatively coherent policy on professionalism emerged. For the elementary teachers the notion of professional self-government, with teacher control over professional standards and a register of qualified teachers, was seen as a means of equalising conditions within teaching and thereby raising the status of the elementary sectors. Thus the aim of a single profession and the unification of the schools into one system was central to the development of their occupational strategy. While the grammar-school teachers argued for keeping the primary and secondary system distinct, elementary teachers and those in the higher grade schools called for the integration of the two, with the right of automatic transfer from one stage to another as a means of extending overall educational provision. It was in this educational context that the first calls for ‘equality of opportunity’ were heard from outside – the TUC making such a call as early as 1897, demanding that secondary education be placed within the reach of every worker’s child. The co-existence of these demands, one articulated from within the education system by the unions and the other politically expressed by the Labour Party, was a key feature of educational politics in the inter-war period. But whereas the Labour Party’s educational policy was part of a broader social and political strategy, of which education was an integral and important part, the unions’ policy was essentially an educational one with its own discrete rationale. The major practical aim of the teachers’ organisations and the Labour Party during this period was the expansion of secondary education, with the ‘ultimate’ objective of ‘secondary education for all’. The contentious area was the nature of the provision to be implemented by the proposed expansion. The teaching organisations broadly supported ‘multi-lateral’ or ‘multi-bias’ proposals, where one school could cater for a whole range of abilities in the same building or on the same site, albeit internally divided into academic and non-academic sections. The Assistant Masters’ Association expressed support for this scheme as early as 1925, and the NUT was similarly in favour. The ‘multi-bias’ proposals, as well as potentially offering the equalisation of working conditions, also offered the possibility of extended job opportunities for women, hence the support of groups like the Association of Assistant Mistresses. Similarly, the division between the Higher Grade schools and the secondaries could also be overcome with the implementation of a system of ‘common schools’; thus within the NUT the teachers in the Higher Grade Schools were particularly vociferous in their support for the proposals. It is important not to exaggerate the distinction between professional and political interests. Indeed, one of the characteristics of these years was the general drift of teachers towards electoral support for Labour – underpinned by the party’s opposition to cuts and
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economies, and by its commitment to reform the education system. This trend, particularly in the early 1920s, provoked consternation in Government circles, and alarm amongst Conservative teachers. Speaking of this drift, one ex-NUT President was moved to argue that there ‘will be a danger not only to the teacher themselves but to the State generally’ (Simon 1974 p. 120). This concern with the political orientation of teachers as a group prompted, among other things, Special Branch surveillance of the activities of the Teachers’ Labour League. A group of Tory MPs even tabled a ‘Seditious Teachings Bill’ directed at preventing the diffusion of anarchistic ideas among the young, on pain of imprisonment. Within the Labour Party it was only the Teachers’ Labour League which consistently raised the ‘content’ of education as a matter for political debate. Their ‘proscription’ by the party in 1927 signalled Labour’s evacuation of that area. For the party, therefore, the intermediate level between the scale of provision and what went on in the classroom, namely the level of the curriculum, remained uncontested. The subsequently re-constituted teachers’ interest group, the National Association of Labour Teachers’ concentrated almost exclusively on the organisational form that ‘secondary education for all’ should take. While the teachers’ union stressed the educational and professional benefits of multilateralism, the NALT, as the main spearhead of Labour’s educational policy, was eager to pursue the ‘common school’ as a means of mitigating the divisive social effects of the existing system. However, in implementing the 1944 Education Act the new Labour Minister of Education did so on the basis of the Norwood Report (1943), which had recommended the tri-partite system. Controversy raged – on the one hand the Minister emphasised the ‘parity’ of the separate schools, that is their financial and organisational equality, and on the other hand, successive NALT Conference resolutions were passed rejecting the tri-partite system and calling for the rapid development of comprehensive schemes. The end result was that during Labour’s period of office only thirteen comprehensives were established, with eight more granted to the LCC on an interim basis. It was during the period of opposition in the 1950s that the Labour Party became firmly committed to comprehensivisation and the abolition of the eleven-plus. Those revisionist changes in the party, and the findings of the educational sociologists and psychologists, discussed above, saw the ‘right’ and ‘centre’ of the party, under Gaitskell, unite around the call for comprehensivisation. However, while it is obvious that NALT teachers enjoyed membership of the NUT it is clear that the over-riding rationale employed by the teachers’ organisations in support of ‘secondary education for all’, was of securing equalised conditions, as well as furthering their longer-term professional and educational aims. Teacher autonomy and progressivism In this section we wish to examine those longer-term professional and educational aims which occupied a central place in the teachers’ support for education reform. Crucially, we want to look at the development of teacher autonomy over, and control of, the curriculum. The demand for professional status was closely related to the struggle for autonomy. More importantly, it was the teachers’ control of this area, coupled with the development of ‘relevance’ and ‘progressivism’, which provided the missing centre of social democratic policies in the 1960s, that is, the content of the curriculum. However, it is important not only to analyse these developments at the policy level, but also to consider the immediate school context in which they operate. Control of the secondary school curriculum was relinquished by the Board of Education
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in 1917, when offective control passed to the examination boards. These institutions ensured that the secondary school curriculum was appropriate for university preparation and, since the boards determined syllabuses their control might have been indirect but it was absolutely effective. Likewise in the elementary schools, the concern was, after 1907, not only to instil good conduct and discipline but more specifically to win the maximum number of ‘free’ places at the grammar school, which was now required to offer a quarter of its places, free, to children from the public elementary schools. The winning of free places as a primary concern of elementary schools led to the internal organisation of the school being subordinated to this aim. In this respect streaming represented the ‘pragmatic’ solution, though the increasing numbers of children qualifying for scarce places resulted in the introduction of more sophisticated selection mechanisms, particularly intelligence testing. Thus, whilst in the inter-war years no ‘formal’ prescriptions existed about what had to be taught, a very real set of determinations operated on the teaching situation through the elementary and secondary stages. The public recognition of teacher ‘autonomy’ in this respect came from Lord Percy in 1927: If government, whether local or national, began to prescribe to the teacher a certain method of teaching, or even attempt to influence such matters, we run the risk of all those evils that we have seen in various forms, both in the Prussia of the past and in the Russia of today. Bernbaum 1967 p. 90 The curriculum was to remain, in Sir William Pile’s words, a ‘Secret Garden’, into which politicians entered at their peril, since any incursion could be represented as totalitarian in nature and intent. For teachers, in the inter-war period, one of the main sources of dissatisfaction with the ‘educational’ practices of the unreformed system was the concern to secure greater freedom within the curriculum. The all-pervasive influence of the examination boards, and the effects on the elementary and secondary schools of streaming and selection, provided ready arguments for a move towards institutional arrangements whereby the direction of the examination boards could be circumvented. Furthermore, in those areas of the schools least affected by the external determinations – the lower streams of the elementary schools – experimental curricular reforms demonstrated the viability of alternative modes of teaching. As the teaching force expanded, pupil-teacher ratios decreased. Coupled with the introduction of ‘progressive’ methods, via the training colleges and the Inspectorate, the elementary school curriculum began to develop in a child-centred, inquiry – based direction. However, this movement was not universal; reports as recent as Plowden (1967) still called on teachers to adopt such an approach. The pressures to enter more and more pupils for the selection exams, and the demand for more educational qualifications, inhibited the spread of these methods. Thus, within the education system the struggle for comprehensivisation was one directed not only at the formal organisation of schooling, but also at the external control exercised over the curriculum both by the selection procedures, and by the examination boards. The NUT, for example, called in 1946 for the abolition of external examinations. In the post-war period the proliferation of external examining bodies intensified the problem and it was not until the Beloee Report in 1960 that the teachers gained control of their own examination system – the CSE. This was followed by another success in 1963 when, after considerable controversy and argument, the teachers gained control of the Schools Council on
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Examinations and Curriculum. This Council, as one of its working papers makes clear, has no direct power to influence the curriculum: The Council’s intention in all its development work is not to impose a new curriculum, but to reinforce the freedom of the head in making his own decisions by extending the range of courses and materials from which he can choose. Schools Council 1971 p. 5 So, whilst the Council is concerned to promote and initiate curriculum developments, its constitution and position act to reinforce and enhance teacher autonomy in the classroom. These developments in the education infrastructure were paralleled by the organisational changes promoted at the policy and political levels. Particularly in the 1960s, the introduction of comprehensivisation and other reforms opened up areas and spaces within the schools requiring a new content, and it was this area which the teachers controlled. However, this ‘control’ is not an abstract quality, but a freedom which operates in a specific context – the school. Obviously, activity within the school is structured by powerful external determinants, but it also contains within it social and cultural processes of considerable complexity. One of the most important of these is the characteristic resistance of a large number of working-class children to the overt aims of schooling (Hargreaves 1967, Lacey 1970, Willis 1977, Hammersley 1976). This resistance cannot be simply explained by the working-class ‘deficiency’ model, which assumes that if the child fails or succeeds, then it is something external to him which is responsible – be it cultural values from the home and the community or a simple structural determination, such as status achievement or deprivation. Even where research is carried out in the school, it is the institutional practices of streaming, for example, which are seen as wholly responsible for his success or failure. Hargreaves (1967), for example, argues that the peer group reinforces and is predicted on failure. Failure, and the concomitant rejection of the school’s values, provides the organisational focus of the group, status in the group being accorded with the degree of rejection. The implication being, seemingly, that there was some original ‘fall from grace’. Within these frameworks, no understanding can be developed of the ways in which these children create a culture in response to the institutional practices and organisation of the school. An analysis which reduces this culture to inherited values or a simplistic acceptance or inversion of the ‘official’ message of the school basically rejects the role and nature of subjective experience. Fundamentally, the actions of the pupils in the school must be viewed as intentional, logical and geared to doing or getting things done. In this sense, subjective experience provides and informs the active, day-to-day process of the creation of frameworks of meaning, which, in the case of the ‘anti-school’ culture, under-mine the teachers’ expectations and the school’s objectives, and provides the pupils with attitudes, practices and evaluations whereby they make sense of their own situations. Similarly, it would be dangerous to see the ‘achievers’ as simple vacuums for the overt messages of the school. Here too, though with important differences, cultural meanings are created through subjective experience. The school’s objects and the teachers’ expectations achieve a particular resonance, but in many areas, ambivalence and even opposition are generated. The configuration of peer groups in the social landscape of the school provides meanings and affiliations of considerable complexity. Apart from this overlapping and social interpenetration amongst the pupils themselves, it must be remembered that the home, neighbourhood, class, etc., provides a reservoir of
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accumulated meanings and cultural practices which are used, changed and appropriated by the children in creating their own practices and meanings, to come to terms with and, in certain cases, subvert, the official organisation and ideology of the school. In this sense the cultures of the pupils’ social groups can be seen to draw upon, and be situated within, the wider context of working-class culture. It would be wrong to suggest that these children have total autonomy and freedom in developing their cultural responses to the schools. The process of cultural response occurs strictly on the terms and parameters delimited by the structure – ‘It is a‘stony desert’, which they have to make habitable by their own efforts’. Thus, a hidden curriculum comes into play – other people organise their life, they are streamed by ‘ability’, it is legitimate for teachers to make demands on them and so on. Paradoxically, the creation of meaningful frameworks, within these parameters, implies an accommodation to these forces. It submerges the potential oppositional stance of cultural responses – not inevitably, but practically. Again, as Paul Willis has attempted to demonstrate in his study of working-class adolescents: ‘it is not so much that the creation of subjective meanings and its related actions reproduce the existing social relations of production, so much as that in their outcomes these things maintain – indeed are – the fabric of the present structure’ (Willis 1976 p. 8). Thus, the ‘success’ of the ‘habitation’ created by the anti-school culture, the informal group culture, leads into and prepares the way for the culture of the shop-floor. These processes – manifestations of class struggle at the level of the classroom – are ‘hidden’ to the educational policy makers. They are unable to conceptualise class as a relationship, rather it is a complex of variables which impinge on the school from outside. The policy thrust is to accommodate the variables, through resource-based learning, a relevant curriculum, school assessment schemes, remedial departments and so on. Thus areas are opened up within the school which can be colonised and invested with meaning. The ‘achievers’, however, must tread the line between the arid instrumentalism of commitment to exams, and the pull towards, and partial adoption of, cultural meanings visible on the social landscape. It would be too simplistic to infer that these were the only cultural options, but what we want to indicate are the unintended consequences of reform – their use and appropriation by the pupils. That is to say, while the schools reproduce the social relations of production, ‘behind their backs’, they also reproduce historically specific forms of resistance. It is within this school context that the policy prescriptions outlined in government reports, Schools’ Council documents, and so on, have to be translated, via the teachers, into actual classroom practices. In this context, there have been three basic developments feeding into the curricular work of the school – the science curriculum work of the early 1960s, the prescriptions about ‘relevant’ working-class education outlined in government reports, and the curriculum work of the Schools Council. However, the relationship between the curriculum projects and proposals generated by ‘researchers’ and their reception in actual classroom practice is complex. This curriculum work has been framed within certain assumptions about the teachers’ pedagogic stance and relationship with his pupils. Importantly, this work has been designed for use in a ‘child-centred’ approach, where the older, traditional mode of education as the performance of hard labour has been replaced by a ‘community of interest’ between teacher and taught. These pedagogic assumptions say more about the distance from the school of the researchers, than they do about the actual classroom situation. Progressivism as an ideology has a history distinct from the more utilitarian concerns of
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professionalism. Its roots in romanticism can be traced back to the Rousseau of Emile, or even further. However, its articulation as a pedagogic style and approach is much more firmly rooted in the period of compulsory State education. Its initial reception and development in the educational infrastructure during the 1930s was constrained and channelled via its subordination to the central concept of intelligence. Its prescriptions, and its acceptance in the training colleges, partly fuelled the teachers’ demands for autonomy in the classroom. Without that autonomy, the flexibility demanded by this approach was sharply limited by the external determinants on classroom practice and organisation. In the post-war period, with the attack on the concept of intelligence and the divisive structures of school organisation, progressivism was increasingly presented, via the training colleges, the ‘specialists’, and so on; as the desirable mode of teaching. Indeed, government reports recognised and argued that the external determinants were preventing the more widespread adoption of these methods. Crowther made the point in 1959: the most promising part of the educational system for experiments in new methods of teaching relatively difficult things will be in the middle streams of the modern schools – but only if they are left free from the cramping effects of a large-scale external examination. 1959 p. 94 Thus, the policy arguments about the forms of secondary education were informed by an implicit assumption about the new modes of teaching this changed organisation would require. This aspect, however, was separated off as a professional concern, and was only developed and extended by the research and training industry which emerged in the wake of institutional reforms. This approach, which acquired its own hegemony in the regions of the training colleges and research institutions, particularly in the 1960s, corresponded with the real power and space of teacher autonomy and was directly related to the relatively spontaneous ideology of romanticism, common to students and teachers. However, if we look in particular at the work of the Schools Council, the major institution in this field, we find complex mediations between the findings of research and their implementation in the classroom. The first point to note is the distance of research from the classroom. If we look at the document Projects, issued in June 1971, we find that of the 111 projects discussed 76 were situated in universities, 11 in colleges of education, and two in schools. Furthermore, as Jenkins and Shipman point out: The Schools Council lacks the infrastructure, the advisory staff, and the local support to go far beyond projects that develop ideas, methods and materials . . . and leave behind publications and evaluations. The consequent take up remains largely in the hands of the teachers themselves. 1976 p. 53 This position is reinforced by the central principle enshrined in the Schools Council, via the voting power of the teaching unions, of teacher autonomy – its proposals have to be designed on a voluntaristic basis. The contradictions in this stance have been outlined by M. F. D. Young (1972), who points out that whilst it is legitimate for the unions to have a policy on exams, they would be infringing autonomy if policy decisions were made on the curriculum of the school. This individualistic notion of autonomy turns out, in practice, as
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the right not to do something. Curriculum developments are received, and then rejected or accepted. This involves the teacher responding, not initiating. So for example, faced with RSLA pupils, he must choose between resource-based learning, integrated studies, and so on. Yet the choice is made within the parameters of the particular projects, and the parameters of his, and his pupils’, past experience. The levels between the research bodies and the school are occupied by a complicated web of institutions – from the local ‘advisers’ to the teachers’ centres; from the subject bodies’ publications to the local examining board committees. Even within the school, complex hierarchies operate; from the curriculum innovations of the Deputy Head, to the innovations of the remedial teacher. It is within this context that we have to see the practice of progressivism, which may be far removed from the theoretically coherent accounts developed in the original research. At this point it is important to stress the distinction between ‘progressivism’ and ‘professionalism’, neither of which is simply reducible to the other, even though they share roots in petitbourgeois ideology. Professionalism, as such, is not concerned with the method or content of teaching per se, its central concern is with the economic status of teachers. Similarly, progressivism is an educational and ideological approach to the technical and pedagogical problems of teaching which is not concerned with the occupational position and status of the teacher as such. Both ideologies, as they are expressed in the educational apparatus, have institutional supports and generators – in the training colleges, in the unions, in the research institutes, and so on. It is through these bodies that they exert a powerful influence on the conduct of teachers and on what happens in the classroom. At the same time, it is important to note the disjunction between the level of practice and ideology. The incorporation of progressivism into classroom practice, as an approach and a method of control, takes place within the determinants of the class struggle in the classroom. We have argued that the occupational strategy of the teachers’ organisations was implicitly tied up with the rationalisation and equalisation of the educational system. Furthermore, we have argued that around this assertion of professionalism – institutionally supported by a separate form of education – has been constructed a teachers’ educational policy and ideologies. Importantly, the struggle for autonomy has been closely linked with the development of the ideology of progressivism. Thus, the teachers’ ability to respond to the ‘needs’ of their pupils was enhanced by their control over their own exams and the curriculum. This flexibility, though more apparent than real, has had important consequences for the internal development of the schools. While it was possible for the Labour Party to avoid the question of content, the teachers were obliged to translate policy prescriptions into actual classroom practice.
Educational expansion in the 1960s In the preceding discussion we have tried to identify certain key elements and institutions which, both ideologically and materially, legitimated the educational expansion and ‘consensus’ of the 1960s. Crucially, the convergence between these elements, both institutionally and politically, provided a framework of basic assumptions within which educational ‘problems’ were understood and policy prescriptions formulated. The political dominance of this framework was assured with Labour’s return to office in 1964. In this section, via a brief outline of Labour’s policies, we want to extract the fundamental assumptions underlying those policies and subsequently, by looking at a key text, to see how those assumptions were articulated or submerged within the ideology.
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On return to power Labour was committed to the abolition of the eleven-plus; the introduction of comprehensive reorganisation; the expansion of further and higher education; a massive increase in teacher training to reduce class size to 30; and the raising of the school leaving age. This was the ‘new’ Labour dedicated to the eradiction of the archaic hangovers which frustrated Britain’s technological development. The new government was there to lead, and to protect and advance the national interest. Nowhere was this more evident than in education; it introduced sweeping reforms and embarked on massive expansion plans. For the first time expenditure on education was to outstrip that on defence. Labour’s commitment to make British capitalism work, and its meritocratic impulse, had increasingly identified education as the lever for social change, as against the redistributive policies of the pre-war period. The 1960s was also characterised by educational consensus, as well as expansion. Apart from its general acceptance of the meritocratic argument, the Tory Party’s policy on comprehensive education changed dramatically. Conservative spokesmen at both national and local levels increasingly recognised that the principle of early selection was no longer viable, educationally or electorally. A grudging acceptance of the ‘good’ comprehensive school crept into their speeches in the early 1960s, and by 1967 the approach of the 1958 White Paper Secondary Education for All: A New Drive which had aimed at the vigorous development of secondary modern schools towards ‘parity of esteem’ with grammar schools became Heath’s ‘it has never been a Conservative principle that in order to achieve (selection or grouping by ability) children have to be segregated in different institutions’ ( Jenkins 1973 p. 131). The parties still disagreed over the pace and details of comprehensive reorganisation, particularly in its effects on the status of independent and direct-grant grammar schools, but on most educational issues there was consensus. Even in 1970, a year after the publication of the first Black Paper, both Manifestos were fundamentally similar – more resources for nursery and primary education, raising the school leaving age to sixteen, expansion of further and higher education; – the only difference was Labour’s commitment to legislate for compulsory comprehensive reorganisation and the Conservative pledge that local authorities would have the right to determine their own form of secondary schooling. In summarising the practical policies of the Labour Party in power during the 1960s we can note that it postponed RSLA until 1972. It endorsed the Robbins Report (1963) and transformed the Colleges of Advanced Technology into universities. It issued a White Paper in 1966 establishing the binary system in higher education, whereby universities retained their independence and other sectors remained under the control of LEA’s. Similarly, it created the new polytechnics and the Council for National Academic Awards, and expanded teacher training. As regards comprehensivisation it issued Circular 10/65, which initiated the phase of reorganisation, and set up inquiries into the status of public and direct-grant grammar schools. When Labour came to power there were 189 comprehensives in 39 authorities. By the time it was defeated in 1970 the number of comprehensives had risen to 1,300 educating 35% of children (though some existed alongside selective schools). Finally, the development of pre-school education was encouraged, particularly after the publication of the Plowden Report in 1967. This Report also had implications for the schools, through its endorsement of progressive teaching methods and its suggested policy of positive discrimination. Its basic idea, the Educational Priority Area, indicated that policy should intervene in social inequalities. It designated areas where positive discrimination, in the form of better school facilities, more teachers, greater resources, etc., should be implemented. The Government responded with a £16m. programme. The policies pursued by Labour in office can be seen as a response to certain ‘problems’
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impinging on the educational apparatus. Their status as ‘problems’ is delivered by their effects on the ‘national interest’. That is to say, there is an economic problem about the manpower requirements of the economy, and at the same time, a political and social problem about equal opportunities and the ‘realisation of individual potentialities’. These problems are articulated as a concern with working-class failure in education. Centrally, this ‘failure’ is seen as socially determined – by the ‘cycle of deprivation’ or the ‘culture of poverty’ – and is considered amenable to social policy and educational approaches. Underpinning this assumption is a view of class which sees it as a combination of cultural and material deficiences – the response is to compensate for the deficiencies, via the schools and social policy. However, the present educational structure is seen as irrelevant and in certain instances damaging – through streaming, selection, etc. – so it must be moderniced, both in terms of relevancy and organisation. Crucially, the response to working-class failure is to change the structure of education and to provide more of it. Thus, if working-class failure in education can be overcome through more resources, better teachers, a relevant curriculum, etc., and if at the same time a more educated labour force is a crucial determinant of our economic success, it is not only logical to call for more ‘investment’ in education, but that redirection of resources becomes a moral and economic imperative, This logical process is underpinned by a view of education as self-evidently a ‘good’ thing, a view which constantly displays itself as naive optimism: The Government believe that better educational provision can by compensating for the effects of social deprivation and the depressing physical environment in which many children grow up, make an important contribution to over-coming family poverty. Better education is the key to improved employment opportunities for young people in these districts and to enabling them to cope with the social stresses of a rapidly changing society. Department of Education and Science 1967 Now, when the explicit link between education and the economy is made, in terms of ‘investment’, it necessarily opens up the content of education, to see ‘if its doing its job’. At the same time, report after report had stressed the need for a ‘relevant’ education for ‘average and below average’ pupils both to realise their individual potential and to dredge the ‘pool of ability’. Also these reports, and political developments, created institutional areas within – the schools requiring a new content, for example the ‘social’ education side of the comprehensives, the CSE’s, etc. However, these areas are not amenable to policy prescriptions, but fall within the expertise of the teaching profession. Whilst curriculum innovation and research can be organised and disseminated, and ‘good practice’ encouraged by the Inspectorate, in the final analysis what is taught in the classroom is, theoretically at least, the teacher’s autonomous domain. A domain jealously guarded by the teachers’ organisations, and extended by their control of the Schools Council and CSE’s. Even the external examining bodies were under attack in this period. For example, the Labour Secretary of State, Edward Short, in October 1969 referred to them as ‘a millstone round the necks of the schools’ and hoped that before long people in education would apply themselves ‘to ridding our secondary schools of the tyranny of the examination’ (Locke 1974 p. 8). Teacher autonomy was rarely questioned in the 1960s. Throughout the reports and policy documents it is assumed that given adequate facilities and training teachers can do the job – what happens in the school is their domain of expertise. Recommendations can be made and
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structures changed, but it is the teachers who control the implementation of these changes at the ‘chalk-face’. During this period the most influential body which articulated the relationship between the political problems about education and the changes necessary within education, via its reports, was the Minister of Education’s Central Advisory Council, established under the 1944 Act. During the 1950s and 1960s the Council issued a series of influential reports which provided the rationale for major policy initiatives, such as RSLA, and provided guidelines enabling the schools to develop their internal responses to these changes. It was this body, according to Crosland, which documented ‘the good and the bad of the system and, in particular, legitimised the radical sociology of the 1950s and 1960s’ (Kogan 1974 p. 174). Fundamentally, these reports displayed those central assumptions which characterised the basic elements of the ideological convergence that was taking place during this period. We now wish to look at these assumptions as they are articulated in one particular report – the Newsom Report – the central importance of which has been indicated in an earlier section. The Newsom Report, Half Our Future was commissioned in 1961 to advise the Minister on the education of pupils aged 13 to 16 of average and less than average ability. The report itself adopts a problem-solving stance, though the problems to which it is addressed are never clearly spelt out. However, two central concerns do stand out. Primarily, ‘our children’, as the report describes them, are seen to be bored, apathetic and rebellious in school, and this is seen to be a ‘bad’ thing and damaging to the individual’s personal potential. (It should be noted in this context that the late 1950s and the early 1960s witnessed a visible increase in delinquency rates, with their associated moral panics – the Teds, the Mods etc.) Furthermore, the demands of a rapidly expanding technological economy are seen to be creating the need, not only for skilled workers, but also for a much higher general level of skill in the average worker. Thus: the future pattern of employment in this country will require a much larger pool of talent than is at present available; . . . and at least a substantial proportion of the ‘average’ and ‘below average’ pupils are sufficiently educable to supply that additional talent. The need is not only for more skilled workers to fill existing jobs but also for a generally better educated and intelligently adaptable labour force to meet new demands. 1963 p. 5 Importantly, the solution to these problems is seen to reside in the schools, particularly as ability and attainment are now thought to be amenable to the initiatives and activities of social policy. The greatest barrier to ‘our children’ in the schools is seen to lie in their ability to participate and communicate effectively, due to linguistic inadequacy and the schools’ lack of relevance to their real needs: There is a gulf between those who have and the many who have not, sufficient command of words to be able to listen and discuss rationally; to express ideas and feelings clearly; and even to have any ideas at all. . . . This is a matter as important to economic life as it is to personal living; industrial relations as well as marriages come to grief on failures in communications. 1963 p. 15
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Thus a longer period in schools which have adequate resources, coupled with curricular and internal organisational changes, is necessary if ‘our children’ are going to be able to develop their potential. The writers of the report are not naive, in that they recognise that for most of ‘our children’ the world of work will not offer them great opportunities for personal expression and realisation: In any immediately foreseeable future large number of boys and girls who leave school will enter jobs which make as limited demands on them as Arthur Seabon’s: can their time in school help them to find more nourishment for the rest of their personal lives than loony-coloured phantasies? 1963 p. 27 To this question, they answer with an unqualified ‘yes’. The schools must provide, not only instruction in the three Rs, but experiences which ‘will help them to develop their full capacities for thought and taste and feeling’. So, on one level, the schools will provide curricular relevance, through work-experience, craft training, domestic science, etc., yet on another level, they must also provide a social education which will help ‘our children’: to develop a sense of responsibility for their work and towards other people, and to begin to arrive at some code of moral and social behaviour which is self-imposed. It is important that they should have some understanding of the physical world and of the human society in which they are growing up. 1963 p. 27 We can see, then, that the report is concerned with the social and economic role of the working class. Though class is submerged in euphemisms such as ‘socially deprived’, ‘disadvantaged’, etc., the report acknowledges that ‘five out of six are likely to be children of manual workers, skilled or unskilled’. Throughout, the report displays a consuming concern with control – to stop the pupils being bored and rebellious, education must be relevant, to stop workers having ‘loony-coloured phantasies’ in dead-end, repetitive jobs, they must have outside cultural/social interests which compensate for job deprivations, and so on. Though couched in the language of equal opportunities, its policy prescriptions reinforce status and economic hierarchies. Indeed, its very title Half Our Future, reifies those educationally created categories which differentiate between ‘those who work with their heads’ and ‘those with their hands’. It is the future work situation which is the determining factor – it is the natural and unproblematic needs of the labour market and domestic production which structure the suggested educational reforms. To achieve these objectives the report argues that we need to invest more money in education and that the teachers who deal with ‘our children’ need a more appropriate training coupled with an improved financial and social status. Not surprisingly, these teachers, during their training, ‘should have some introduction to sociological study . . . in order that they may put their own job into social perspective and be better prepared to understand the difficulties of pupils in certain types of areas’ (1963 p. 103). The value of this perspective was no doubt underlined by the nature of the evidence supplied to the committee by people such as Jean Floud, Brian Jackson and Basil Bernstein. Throughout the report there is an implicit reliance on the professional expertise of teachers. Whilst it is legitimate to
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suggest both improvements in training and curricular materials, the ability of the teachers to carry out the work suggested is never questioned. So the assumptions – that education is a ‘good’ thing, that we need to ‘invest’ more, that the teacher can do the ‘job’ with the right materials, that intelligence is amenable to policy initiatives, and so on – provide the ideological framework of the report. Contradictions are neatly resolved, or do not surface. Opposed class interests are collapsed into an inability to communicate. So: Given the opportunities we have no doubt that they (‘our children’) will rise to the challenge which a rapidly developing economy offers no less to them than to their abler brothers and sisters. But there is no time to waste. Half our future is in their hands. We must see that it is in good hands. 1963 p. xiv
Critique From time to time through this essay we have noted assumptions that have underpinned the prescriptions of ‘experts’ and politicians. These assumptions have been surprisingly constant within the social democratic tradition. We wish, in this section, to recapitulate the more deep-rooted presuppositions and to establish a critique of them. We shall argue that social democratic ideology attempts to reconcile contradictory goals, poses objectives that cannot be realised by the means that are proposed, misrecognises the cultural processes which generates ‘failure’, and fails in its political purposes – the mobilisation of popular support. This analysis of ‘theoretical’ or intrinsic inadequacies will be followed by a practical demonstration of the weakness of social democratic positions. For the ‘education crisis’ is in large part a crisis of social democracy, in which the ideological initiative has passed to rivals. Recapitulation: the dual repertoire Social-democratic ideology is a complex formation. Much of this complexity arises, as we have seen, from the heterogeneity of its supports in a particular social coalition and political alliance. But the ideology has been complex in another sense: it has revolved around a persistent duality of ideas which, we will argue, has been rooted less in any direct social basis than in the external and internal relations of the Labour Party as an organisation. This duality is by no means limited to the educational region of Labour’s ideology – it spans the whole range of its political discourse – but is particularly evident there. Labour’s educational rhetoric has always moved, as we noted at the start, between two poles. These poles may (in a convenient and familiar shorthand) be dubbed those of ‘equality’ and ‘equality of opportunity’. The demand for ‘equality’ has been essentially social and cultural in nature, a demand for ‘community’, for the equalisation of conditions, for the forging of a ‘common culture’. Equality has been valued because it is a source of cohesion; inequality opposed because of its divisiveness. Such notions have their ultimate point of reference in a social organicism shared with more conservative philosophies and they have been carried in England typically in the culture-and-society tradition. ‘Equality of opportunity’ by contrast, is best understood as an economic goal, based on the conception of education as a ‘good’ which ought to be more fairly shared, the use and consumption of which has pertinent economic effects. The ultimate point of reference for this series of notions has been an essentially liberal conception of society as a market, within which individuals
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compete. The point, according to this ‘philosophy’, is to enable them to compete more fairly. For both positions, then, ‘class’ is a problem. But it is a problem in different ways. For egalitarians it is a problem because it creates social conflicts, envy and domination. For ‘Fabians’ (we use the term in the most general sense) it represents a range of artificial restrictions on the acquisition of skills or the employment of talent. For both positions, likewise, education is a very important means to reformation, but is somewhat differently envisaged. Egalitarians stress acculturation and the absorption of democratic values; Fabians stress skills, especially ‘useful’ ones. In matters of ‘scaffolding’ too, there are differences of emphasis between those who see limited resources as the only bar to universal provision (the egalitarian position) and those who see selection as necessary, while hoping it can be made more flexible and fair. In general egalitarians view education as a ‘right’ co-extensive with citizenship or ‘humanity’, in general Fabians view its distribution as ultimately, a matter of utility. The two poles may, in summary, be presented as follows: Egalitarians ‘equality’ social/cultural goals class as division education as attitudes-rights social order or ‘community’
Fabians ‘equality of opportunity’ economic goals class as inhibition education as skill utility market or ‘efficiency’
It is possible to cite relatively pure examples of both positions, especially in the early history of the repertoire. As we have seen, Tawney, in his general moral stance, if not always in his detailed proposals, personified-educational egalitarianism. Sidney Webb personifiedFabian ‘capacity-catching’ and a unity (of a rather modern king) of ‘national efficiency’ and meritocratic arguments. The distinction is also inherent in more recent debates. Defenders of ‘community schooling’ or of de-streamed comprehensives, for example, may be counted egalitarians (Jackson 1970, Midwinter 1972); defenders of streaming or, in another sphere, of the binary system and the ‘new polytechnics’, may be deemed out-and-out Fabians (e.g. Robinson 1968). Much more typically, however, and especially among the politicians, the two strands have been combined and even conflated. To Crosland, for instance, comprehensives are necessary to remove the waste of talent revealed by Robbins and Crowther and ‘to increase the sense of social cohesion in contemporary British society’ (1974 p. 206). But Sir Harold Wilson supplies us, as usual, with the classic instance of Labour’s dualism, speaking to the party faithful in the run-up to the 1964 election: we cannot afford to force segregation on our children at the 11+ stage. As socialists, as democrats, we oppose this system of educational apartheid, because we believe in equality of opportunity. But that is not all. We simply cannot as a nation afford to neglect the educational development of a single boy or girl. We cannot afford to cut off three quarters or more of our children from virtually any chance of higher education. The Russians do not, the Germans do not, and the Japanese do not, and we cannot afford to either. The movement of the argument is typical: first the ‘gut’ appeal to the party’s egalitarianism (‘segregation’, ‘our children’, ‘educational apartheid ’); then the invocation of WHERE WE STAND ‘as socialists’ (and in case this is a bit too strong for all present, as ‘democrats’ too);
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finally, the slide, through ‘equality of opportunity’ with its fundamental ambiguity, into the most obvious of ‘national efficiency’ arguments. The interest in the analysis of this repertoire lies, then, more in its internal relations than in the disappearance of whole components. One such change has already been noted: the shift to dominance of ‘equality of opportunity’ after the War, together with a more markedly economic or technocratic inflection within this complex itself. But even at the height of Labour’s enthusiasm for ‘modernisation’, the egalitarian rhetoric (as the quotes from Crosland and Wilson show) was not abandoned. Politically, indeed, the co-existence of the elements has been of crucial importance. The party’s egalitarianism has ‘spoken’ to rank-and-file socialists who constitute its most active workers and, more residually perhaps, to working-class parents. Its retention has much to do with the party’s need for a popular base and its reliance on trade unionism. Labour’s Fabianism, on the other hand, reflects quite directly the party’s structural and historical commitment to managing and reforming a capitalist society. This involves securing, through appropriate social and educational policies, a really progressive capitalist adaption. The chance or reality of office and the inescapable exigencies of governing within the structures of an untransformed capitalist State have rendered this part of the repertoire dominant. In this way, social democratic ideology in education is very much an expression not of workingclass educational ‘demands’ (itself a wholly problematic concept), nor of a pure capital logic or interest (an even more problematic idea), but of the particular place of the Labour Party in British society and politics. Critique I: the elements are contradictory It is a commonplace of social philosophy that the two kinds of equality represent different positions and point to contradictory outcomes. In Equality, Tawney identified equality of opportunity as a fundamentally bourgeois creed, born in the struggles with the ancien regime, particularly over legal privileges. His dismissal of its relevance to more popular needs stands as a classic and ought to be quoted: Slavery did not become tolerable because some slaves were manumitted and became slave-owners in their turn; nor, even if it were possible for the units composing a society to be periodically reshuffled, would that make it a matter of indifference that some among then at any moment should be condemned to frustration while others were cosseted. What matters to a nation is not merely the composition and origins of its different groups, but their opportunities and circumstances. It is the powers and advantages which different classes in practice enjoy, not the social antecedents of the varying individuals by whom they happen, from time to time, to be acquired. Till such powers and advantages have been equalized in fact, not merely in form, by the extention of communal provision and collective control, the equality established by the removal of restrictions on property and enterprise resembles that produced by turning an elephant loose in a crowd. It offers everyone, except the beast and his rider, equal opportunities of being trampled to death. Caste is deposed, but class succeeds to the vacant throne. 1964, p. 111 As an invocation of an historical transition, and for the moral security of its humanism, this is superb. But long after the publication of Equality in 1931 (and despite frequent official recapitulation of Tawney’s truths), Labour Party leadership has continued to combine
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‘bourgeois’ attacks on ‘privilege’ with the more ‘socialist’ conceptions which, rightly, Tawney saw as incompatible with them. Whatever the slips and slides of language, there is a real, substantial and irreducible difference between the two conceptions. Equality challenges (however futilely in practice) the distribution of ‘powers’ and advantages’ which divide classes, while ‘equality of opportunity’, though it may be pressed toward equality in practice, is concerned merely with the occupancy of class places. Politically, Labour’s ideological mix was quite successful. In retrospect, however, it is easy to see that this success rested on historically specific conditions. Some of the relevant contingencies were quite apparent, acknowledged within the ideology itself. It was overtly part of social-democratic ideology, part of the bargain struck with ‘the people’, that a faster rate of ‘economic growth’ was necessary in order to pay, as the saying went, for ‘more hospitals and schools’. In other words the strategy of educational expansion and of ‘equalising’ social policies in general was dependent upon economic success, the success, that is, of a basically capitalist economy. Yet, as we have already noted, by the mid-1960s the inverse relation was also assumed. The expansion and equalisation of education would make a tremendous contribution to economic success. It would cure the ‘waste of talent’ and remove ‘the scarcity of skills’. At the same time it would secure something that was important for its own sake – a greater social justice. We may recall, once more, Crosland’s formulations of 1966: But there is also . . . a wider social waste involved. If ever there was a country which needed to make the most of its resources, it is Britain in the second half of the twentieth century; and the chief resource of a crowded islands is its people. Moreover the proportion of relatively inexpert and unskilled jobs to be done declines from year to year. To believe in these circumstances as though there was a fixed 25 per cent of top ability at eleven not only flies in the face of the evidence which I have quoted; it amounts to feckless prodigality. 1974 p. 200 Before examining these assumptions more closely, we ought to note the absolute centrality of Crosland’s argument about ‘skill’. The notion that late capitalism required, generally and not merely for its elites, a wider diffusion of ‘skill’, and that the education system could supply it, was completely taken for granted. Moreover this assumption held together all the main elements in the repertoire. First, it provided a thoroughly hard-headed and vulgarmaterialist justification for equalising policies – ending or mitigating selection, comprehensivisation and even the EPAs. Without this, the charge that such policies were ‘doctrinaire’ and even ‘socialist’ was liable to stick. Secondly, it reconciled the inevitable tension between the characteristic humanist/ideology of educational practitioners – the importance of doing your best for the personal development of each individual child – and the world of work afterwards. For educators were informed (whatever their more direct experience might suggest) that there would always be plenty of up-skilled and interesting jobs for their pupils to enter. Thirdly, since the form of the relation of school to production was left extremely vague, teachers could conscientiously fill the empty spaces with stimulating and relevant activities, reassured by a sense of their usefulness, even though their pupils might appear inexplicably uninterested in what was on offer. Finally, the education – growth combination fitted perfectly the kind of alliance which the Labour leadership in this phase sought to build: workers, especially those in the newer technologies, petit-bourgeois professionals like the teachers, and the more progressive, modernising sections of management and national capital.
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In fact, as events have shown, educational expansion which is egalitarian in form and more or less indiscriminate in content is by no means self-evidently beneficial to capital. Labour’s recent volte-face marks a recognition of this. It is now easy to criticise the older view, but it is much more difficult to establish some alternative conception of this important set of relations. What is involved is not merely the substantiation of a critique of social democracy, but the development of a whole theory about the post-war movement of capital and its relation to educational expansion. We offer here a few pertinent points. First, the 1960s argument was based on a limited, reductive and largely unexamined concept – ‘skill’. As Ted Benton (1974) has noted in an excellent critique of social democracy, the 1960s saw a heavy emphasis on ‘technical development’ and, in effect, upon a technological determinism. Just as the general economic problem was analysed in terms of the need for progress in technique, so occupational roles were narrowed to ‘skill’ or ‘technical knowledge’. While we doubt whether in the 1960s the ‘technological ideology’ was as pervasive within education as Benton argues (it seems to us a good deal stronger in the 1970s), its effect was undoubtedly to mystify the whole relation of school to production and to hide altogether, at this moment of analysis, the relation of school to the social relations of production. As Benton argues, drawing on Althusser, the reduction to ‘skill’ neglected ‘the crucial ideological training for the place that the student is to occupy in the structure of power and authority relations which is woven into the occupational structure’ (1974 p. 25). If we are to think the school-production relation more complexly, it is probable that the category ‘skill’ will have to be abandoned altogether in favour of more precise categories: technical knowledge, ideology and control. The everyday inventiveness of ‘awkward’ children in a classroom is, after all, quite as much a ‘skill’ as the ability to read. What is true of learning ‘skills’ is true also of their exercise. ‘Skilled’, ‘unskilled’ and ‘semiskilled’ are among the least precise categories of industrial sociology. Again other concepts are necessary that stress the extent of the workers’ or capitalists’ control of the labour process or the extent to which the conception and execution of tasks are divorced. Using Marx’s categories, Harry Braverman (1974) has argued, with great power, that post-war capitalism in the USA has seen a tendential process of de-skilling, an increasing dependence of labour on managerial control and a more complete division, even within the ‘mental’ side of labour, of conception and execution. The logic of such a process is systematically to lower the educational requirements of the mass of occupations, including many white-collar jobs. More detailed studies will probably reveal an altogether more complex and uneven picture – skills recomposed as well as destroyed – yet the general tendency which Braverman describes seems at present altogether more plausible than the sociological orthodoxies of which he disposes. We may conclude that the assumption of an unproblematic complementarity between educational expansion (in its 1960s forms) and economic growth was almost certainly incorrect. It seems quite as likely that the 1960s was a period of the marked autonomy of the educational system. The ultimate determinations from the movements of capital and from the forms of class struggle remain to be examined. But it is clear that they worked in altogether more mediated and subterranean ways than the determination through the need for and evocation of ‘skills’. In the early 1970s, by contrast, a strenuous work began of returning to a closer conformity between the educational system and the necessities of production.
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Critique II: the objectives cannot be realised We insist here on the utopianism of the social-democratic position, especially of its egalitarianism. This is best considered through the notions of ‘class’ which inform equalising strategies and party rhetoric. Without these conceptions, ‘equality’ cannot be thought at all. For social democracy, class is inequality. It is inequality, especially of culture and of social condition. Its economic content is reducible to income or, at best, the reductive view of ‘occupation’. But the economic criteria are usually limited to the sphere of circulation. Class, then, is an essentially distributive term. It follows that one can have more or less of it and that it is meaningful to speak, with Crosland, of ‘the distribution of wealth, power, and class status’ or even of ‘a more classless society’ (1974, p. 107, our emphasis). It follows that class is removable. In some versions indeed it dissolves at the sociologist’s touch, in a scatter of variables, emerging only in social work euphemisms like ‘deprivation’, ‘social handicap’ or ‘disadvantage’. In the more culturalist versions, educational solutions may suffice. In the post-war social policy mainstream, concerted attacks on cultural and material deprivations (which always assume the inferiority of the ‘sufferer’) are envisaged, the strategy implying the possibility of an ultimate success or at least ‘a more classless society’. Sometimes, ‘class’ is not merely removable, but actually archaic and residual, a passive reminder from the past. As in the case of ‘equality’ there are several, sometimes contradictory, conceptions here. No full anatomy can be attempted. We merely note, speculatively, four main tendencies: the more technical, sociological conceptions we have already described; the liberal attack on privilege (‘class’ as it is used in the public-school debate for instance); the anti-industrial (and hence anti-class) organicism of the culture-and-society tradition; and barely visible under all this, the relatively spontaneous, grass-roots egalitarianism of working-class culture, especially of the culture of work. All these traditions, except perhaps the last, while acknowledging ‘class’ as important, emasculate it severely, or render it rather ephemeral. Thus when ‘divisions’ repeatedly re-appear (even after their end has been celebrated), explanations seem quite inadequate. In the absence of anything better, stress is sometimes laid on amazingly persistent national traits. As Crosland put it (1974, p. 44) ‘British Society-slow-moving, rigid and class-ridden has proved much harder to change than was supposed’. In the same way, it is hard to explain, within the built-in optimism of the social-democratic framework, why compensatory policies fail to remove the inequalities which are diagnosed. As Marx said of the French social democrats of the mid-nineteenth-century: ‘No party exaggerates the means at its disposal more than the democratic party; no party deludes itself more frivolously about the situation’ (1973 p. 176). It is always open for social reformers to plead for another trial. But it is possible2 that in modern Britain this particular repertoire is exhausted. It has moved all the way from ‘secondary schools for all’ to Priority Areas and ‘Action Research’, the latter a kind of agitational community politics actually displaced, in an extraordinary manner, into the State apparatus itself ! As the current fate of Community Development Projects suggests, action research represents the outer limit of social policy solutions – the point where they start to change into something else, and have therefore to be stopped. In fact British socialists have repeatedly rejected or ignored some of the categories which might really illuminate their dilemmas. Both Tawney’s socialism and Crosland’s revisionism, the latter quite explicitly, were constructed as answers to (a kind of) Marxism. Crosland’s work is full of attacks on ‘Marxists’ and the ‘New Left’. But what if class in capitalist society is neither residual, nor passive, nor removable but an ever-present source of transformations? What if classes are intrinsic to the production of material life itself ? What if they are
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systematically and daily reproduced as part of the organic workings of the society along with their concomitant inequalities? What, in short, if class is rooted in social relations of production, a category which is quite invisible in social democratic ideology? From the stand-point of such a conception of the social formation the futility of social policy can be fully grasped. It can deal with no more than occasional symptoms which must constantly re-appear and must serve to hide what lies beneath them. More absurd still must be the attempt to ‘equalise’ through an education which is supposed also to serve to reproduce relations within capitalist production. Critique III: why do children ‘fail’? There were two main absences in the accounts of ‘failure’ offered by the sociologists of education. The first absence was the actual views or cultural worlds of the pupils who were identified as ‘failing’. It was only in the late 1960s and early 1970s that processes within schools were looked at, and even then the work was framed by the familiar assumptions. The focus has been on the cultural or psychological effects of failure (Hargreaves 1967, Lacey 1970). One of the few studies to break from this – Paul Willis’s study of the school-based cultures of conformist and disaffected white working class-boys (Willis 1977) – shows very clearly how the anti-school culture is predicated on the boys’ refusal to accept what school has to offer, not on their failure to get on. They prefer their own style of life to that of the ‘earoles’ (pupils who listen to and accept the legitimacy of teachers). They share a jocular, ‘matey’, masculine culture, subversive of established authority often to a ‘shocking’ degree, but also shot through with sexist and racist elements and some ultimate conformities. Even so, the findings of this work are an important corrective to the ways in which the whole question has been framed in the past. The second major absence is the relation between educational processes and the economic prospects (as opposed to backgrounds) of working-class children. By supplying this dimension the rationality of the anti-school culture becomes apparent. For once we cease to believe in the availability of all those pleasant up-skilled jobs, we soon see that most schoolchildren are inexorably destined for tasks with very little intrinsic satisfaction. Nothing would be more embarassing for educational reformers and ‘manpower’ planners than success, in terms of education’s formal objectives. What on earth would ‘society’ do with thousands of eager and ambitious school-leavers equipped with ‘O’ levels and C.S.E.s., but with the objective chance of only the most simple and repetitious labour? In practice, as Willis shows, many working-class children prepare themselves for labour in the surest way they know how – by equipping themselves with the cultural resources needed to make the workplace, like the school, a place of some enjoyment and satisfaction. But that also involves the rejection of most of what school has to offer. Armed with that kind of insight – a ‘materialist’ understanding of cultural processes – we can see some of the inadequacies of the ideological representations. In themselves neither comprehensivisation nor compensatory provision will out the circle of culture and circumstances. Similarly, we might expect that newer policies, especially those pursued by the Manpower Services Commission, will have all kinds of unintended and unexpected results, passing as they must through the attitudes of school-leavers themselves. Finally, much the same argument seems to apply to the reproduction of sexism and sexual inequalities: working-class girls ‘choose’ femininity and a romantic orientation to ‘love’n marriage’ (in practice, very often, extremely oppressive forms of monogamy) as better than the sexist predations of boy-groups and the irrelevance and boredom of school (McRobbie
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1977). But we know still less of the deeper determinations in the case of sexual relations – the force of specific family forms for instance – and we have hardly begun to examine the relationship between class and gender relations. Critique IV: the policies must fail Initially, so we have argued, Labour’s commitment to educational expansion was attuned to organised working-class demands and, to some extent, to parental aspirations. Latterly, expansion was argued for, among other things, as responding to the interests and ‘needs’ of ordinary parents and children. Yet there has been little sign since 1944 of large-scale popular support for comprehensivisation or any other aspect of Labour policy. Parents have usually been indifferent; their children have actually resisted the effects of policy, as the school counter-culture and opposition to RSLA suggests. If we recall the argument at the beginning of this essay this apparent paradox need not surprise us. Nor need we invoke some notion of the natural apathy of working-class parents to an education of any kind. The fact is that the Labour Party has never sought to educate the popular classes from within, but has sought access to the state to educate them from there. But this state is not the neutral ‘machinery’ which Social Democracy takes it to be: it systematically transforms the political demands that are made on it on behalf of subordinate classes. What is claimed ‘as of right’, returns in unrecognisable forms. Of this process education is the best example. In a general sense, pressure for the extension of social rights and for greater ‘equality’ has fuelled the long-term growth of the state system. But in practice this process has been inflected and given its content by specific features of the state in the educational region. The key features have been the structural separation of the schools from other kinds of learning and their tendency to monopolise the whole notion of education; the professionalisation of the teachers and their pursuit of sectional interest within the apparatus; and, above all, the structural necessity for educational policy-makers and administrators to take account of capital’s interests. So it happens that, as in production so in school, a nature-imposed necessity – to learn – is experienced as something quite alien. School becomes, moreover the site of class struggle. The divisions of parent, teacher and child, barely disguised antagonisms, are intrinsic to the apparatus itself. The general tendency of Labour’s policy in concert with the teachers, moreover, has been to exalt the ‘experts’ of the region over the mere parent and to devalue the common sense of the parental culture. The social reforming tendency in the party’s ideology does this in an absolutely insulting way, scarcely compensated for by a romantic opposition (Bernstein 1973, Rosen 1973). At the same time progressivism has rendered schooling more and more esoteric. In this way, Labour’s whole educating stance, not only vacating the ground of agitation, but actually sponsoring new forms of oppression, has opened up massive opportunities for demagogic, anti-bureaucratic, anti-statist Toryism.
The crisis In the preceding sections we have offered an account and critique of the salient features of social democratic educational ideology in the 1960s. In doing this we have sought to point out the inherent theoretical weakness of the social democratic perspective, and its ramifications in educational policy. In this section we therefore wish to address ourselves to the nature and form of the current ‘crisis’, in the light of the analysis already offered. When we speak of a crisis we are referring to more than the individual experiences of those in education, to
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which we alluded in the introduction, though this subjective dimension is important. The crisis of the educational sector is bound up with the overall crisis of the economy and the State. But while we recognise that the specific form of the educational crisis has its determinations in the general crisis, we must insist that the educational crisis is also a regional one. It is a crisis which is not simply reducible to financial retrenchment or the breakdown of a consensus, but which must be examined in terms of its own social base and the coalition which gave rise to it. Social democracy and its enemies Recently the assumptions which underpinned Labour’s educational programme have been increasingly attacked, from both inside and outside the Party. Our awareness of this has been greater during the least two years because of the increased intensity of that critique, and Callaghan’s speech formally signalled a sort of ‘open season’ on educational issues – intended to further the overall policy shift already in motion. But Callaghan’s sentiments were not original for Labour politicians, even if his tone was during 1969, for example, suggestions that tighter controls on teachers might be forthcoming were made to curb an increasingly militant teaching force. Edward Short addressing the 1969 NAS Conference, refered to the adoption by teachers of trade union modes of struggle, and pointed out that this could involve unpalatable consequences for them: Do we really want a rule book which will lay down the minutiae of how the teacher is to do his job? Let me assure you that you are within weeks of considerable pressure to introduce one . . . once begun the process might be difficult to halt and impossible to reverse. Burke 1971 p. 49 Later in the same year Harold Wilson pointed out the curiously exposed nature of teachers’ work and the vulnerability of their situation – an implied warning that should ‘professional’ standards be eschewed in favour of traditional methods of wages struggle, then public opinion could easily be mobilised against them. Callaghan’s speech shows how far the Labour leadership has moved from the ‘velvet glove’ approach. Instead of the advice and ‘persuasion’ offered to teachers in the late 1960s, the choice is now for a much more robust challenge. Though this shift does have an immediate political character, in making a pre-emptive move to wrest the initiative away from the Tories, the underlying change is contingent on a series of other developments. These are essentially concerned with the systematic challenge to the assumptions of the previous educational programme – a challenge which has developed since 1969. We can see that the assumptions which gave rise to the Newsom Report, discussed earlier, have been found wanting, and therefore the institutional forms which they gave rise to have come under attack. Thus, from viewing the schools as the means of solving a problem, namely working-class failure and its attendant economic and cultural consequences, the emphasis is now one which charges the schools with failing to do this, despite the resources which have been invested. Concretely the shift has been marked by a series of educational ‘events’ which have been identified against a background of dissensus. Through the period of the Tory government, and the industrial struggles which marked it, but also during the late 1960s, the Right came to identify education as an important causal factor in the ‘moral crisis’ of the period. The
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Black Paper of 1969 was able to identify the subversive effects of egalitarianism in the ruptures of 1968/69, while the associated moral panics of the period around the issue of ‘youth’ all served to reduce the causal base to the institutional framework of education. It is in this context that educational events have been publicly defined. The allegations of a decline in reading standards in ILEA schools between 1968 and 1971 touched an exposed nerve – because of the emotive connotations of reading as perhaps the raison d’etre of schooling. Thus when Start and Wells had their findings published by the National Foundation for Educational Research in 1972, Thatcher was able to exploit the ensuing controversy by setting up the Bullock Committee to inquire into the whole question of literacy, its assessment and control. More recently, in the wake of Bullock’s findings (1975), the focus on schools was accentuated by the events at William Tyndale and by the reception accorded Bennett’s report on teaching methods (1976). Continued failure of working-class children, and the apparent lack of impact of the compensatory programme, all validated charges that the internal organization of the school, and specifically the teachers, were at fault. The culpability of schools, in facilitating educational failure rather than success, had been a central theme in the Black Papers since 1969. Their equation of progressivism as a method with anarchism and moral disintegration as consequences, was coupled to a general critique of declining standards in higher education, this latter phenomenon being reduced to the nature of the post-Robbins expansion. In the 1975 Black Paper, marked by the emergence of Boyson as co-editor, this analysis was given a programmatic political dimension. A much more populist line was espoused, parental involvement in the work of schools becoming a basic tenet of the programme. Legitimacy for the Black Paper positions was no longer sought solely through explicit and rather academic discussions of the political and philosophical issues, but rather through criteria of parental approval for the work schools were seen to be doing. Thus popular definitions of the purpose of education and of the most appropriate teaching methods, were invoked against the alleged orthodoxy of progressivism, as practised by teachers owing responsibility to no one outside the school. The call was therefore for ‘public accountability’. These changes in the mode of discussing educational problems and policies by the political right, specifically the Conservative Party, should be viewed not only in relation to their educational targets but also to wider areas of policy. It is therefore necessary to say a little about the overall direction of Tory policy in this period – the dilemmas encountered – as well as examining some aspects of the way in which Tory educational thought has developed. The right and education In a sense it is paradoxical to speak of right wing educational thought, as during this century the right has usually wanted little of education except the inculcation of a certain brand of English values. There has certainly been no right wing equivalent to Tawney. Instead the right has typically offered complaints about the dangers of education – in falsely arousing expectations, or in too actively promoting critical thought – or of the failures of schools to keep order, and in letting standards drop. These complaints come round again and again; now muttered, now shouted and fulminated over, as circumstances permit. The steady drip effect of such an ideology, in its common sense forms – ‘discipline never did us any harm’, or ‘they don’t seem to learn anything these days’ – is easily underestimated. It may even be that as a conventional wisdom, as a stock of grumbles, it has
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retained a real purchase among some parents and teachers while social democratic ideas took hold elsewhere: ‘up there’, in the colleges, in government and the liberal media. In this respect the banality of right wing views on education, their lack of subtlety or originality, is beside the point. They are also likely to survive Nigel Wright’s extremely clear plotting of the intellectual weakness, and fraudulence of the recent right polemics (1977). The movement from the vague circlings of the first Black Paper (1969) to the confidence and range of Boyson’s Crisis in Education (1975) has been rapid and substantial. By the mid-1970s the central concepts of the right – concerned mainly with ‘standards’ – and their wide ranging demands for ‘more control’, seemed close to being uncontested at all. An originally discredited group of right authors found themselves in a position where they were near to dictating the terms of debate, and able to identify the issues for a number of unusually direct political interventions in schooling. This was justified by reference to a ‘mounting public concern’ as expressed in the press reports of the period – a form of coverage which itself, to a considerable degree, actively constructed and articulated this concern. Schools were coming close to being indicted: ‘children are not naturally good’ was the swaggeringly archaic and ‘unfashionable’ opening credo of the 1975 Black Paper, which noted with satisfaction a wider realisation that education ‘had not delivered the goods . . . there was now a case that had to be answered’. The potency of the right’s ideas was to prove threefold: in discrediting the purposes, needs and achievements of the school system as they had been represented throughout the 1960s – the heyday of the social democratic consensus; in suggesting new limits and constraints within which schools ought to operate; and in generally sanctioning the changed terms of educational reference which subsequently came to be formalised during the period of the ‘Great Debate’. But so rapid a shift could not have occurred without fertile conditions on which to work. Of central importance, in this respect, was the distance of all parties in educational policymaking and practice from the attitudes and anxieties of parents. Indeed, many of those committed to comprehensives, with a fair degree of backing from parents, found no ways of acknowledging real concerns about large schools, mixed intakes and new methods. The rapid changes in school structures and teaching methods, not to mention the new forms of examination, could quite reasonably provoke bewilderment on the part of those not directly involved in the everyday work of schooling. It was in these circumstances, at the turn of the decade, that both younger radicals and the new Tory right were for very different reasons articulating their strong distrust of both schools and teachers. The 1969 Black Paper 1 evoked a combination of teachers and Labour politicians bent on ‘egalitarian destruction’. But this was a convenient fiction, since by then many senior Labour advisers and also many of those entering teaching were becoming critical of the educational developments of the 1960s. Schooling was increasingly expensive, in no clear way assisting the reconstruction of a battered economy, and had not notably improved working-class access to higher education or better employment. In addition, while Britain enjoyed no equivalent to the French May 68 ‘events’, university disorder and disaffection, and a mounting interrogation of the system and its purposes were fairly widespread. Education Ministers dropped in cabinet ranking as the conviction set in that education was failing to deliver: attention turned to Whitehall and to the sheer expense of it all, while student radicals fiercely criticised education’s role in the reproduction and maintenance of privilege which Tawney had wanted it to help abolish.
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Heath and the division of the Conservative Party The visible radicalisation of part of a generation in the late 1960s coincided with a strenuous attempt to restore and reinstate a genuine right ideology against the grain of the middle-ground occupied by the Conservative Party in the mid-1960s. Tory educational policy before the war had been mainly defensive, restricted to resisting educational demands on financial grounds and making concessions when driven to it. But the 1944 Education Act in part typified the emergence of a new kind of conservatism. A dominant group in the post-war party was determined that the Conservatives should lead, through the state, in the restructuring of capitalism. In order to do this it was necessary to break the party’s identification with elites, which had been so damaging in 1945. Rather, the party’s cross class ‘modernising’ purpose and vision was stressed against the ‘archaic’, ‘divisive’, ‘backward-looking’ policies of Labour. Given the electoral risks in merely defending grammar and public schools, the Conservatives were willing to seek comprehensives by the 1960s, and Crosland’s 10/65 circular – requesting the submission of comprehensive plans – was a follow up to initiatives by his Conservative predecessor, Boyle. But in the late 1960s the Conservatives were driven, by intensifying economic problems and by widespread signs of social and political dissent, to break with the consensus oriented reforming middle ground. It became a main part of Tory strategy to identify Labour rule with ‘breakdown’ at many levels, from inflation and strikes to permissiveness. The party’s Bow Group yielded ground to the Monday Club, one of whose members argued in 1969 that ‘modifying socialism is not enough’: there was a need for a ‘superhuman labour of rescue and an end of consensus politics’. After 1970 Heath led a party explicitly and toughly determined to re-establish firm control and take charge, not least against ‘union might’, in a general reshaping of the social and industrial order. But, as anticipated, such government was abrasive, and it came closer to setting class against class. In addition, Heath’s proEuropean ideology was markedly managerial and technocratic – narrow in appeal, and raw edged in its wish to see the industrial GNP upped at almost any price. The party, likely to lose in elections in this shape, badly needed a broader based ideological appeal, legitimated by a claimed support in ‘public’ fears and anxieties. The result has been a search for likely winners in different policy areas: always a flexible combination of experimentally strong postures with a soft liberal underbelly; always a probing of possible parameters towards a redrawing of the ideological maps. In this respect education and race have been central and, for Tory ideologists, politically fruitful. Thus Thatcher’s withdrawal of the 10/65 circular on taking office was largely gestural, and her period in office in some ways lacked real initiatives or direction. It took longer to build up a distinctively Tory educational ideology, even though the arena was, as we have seen, already largely vacated. But with some shrewdness schools could be used as a focus for a wide range of worries conjured from the dramatic social conflicts of the late 1960s, and compounded by the confrontations of Heath’s first years and by continuing economic failure. ‘Youth’ could be represented to connote a general violence and unrest; teachers, the penetration into the ‘non-political’ schools of a trendy, progressive or militant left; large schools, a threat to individual freedoms. Above all, right ideology voiced again the importance of aspirations to a better life, with schools as the central site of their fulfilment, but currently of their frustration because of the ‘holding back’ of the clever child – and whose child, for a parent, is not? The new Tory educationalists had not as yet felt obliged to produce new policies, nor did they work centrally through argument. The amplification of their new strands and emphases
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took place primarily through the media’s willingness to highlight school ‘problems’ during the 1970s, especially through its emphasis on reporting issues such as truancy or educational research like Bennett’s. In this respect Tyndale became the central spectacle, offering a view of teachers who were at worst ‘dangerous ideologists’ and at best ‘sincere but misguided’, of parents who were kept out of school decisions, and of managers and inspectors who were failing in their statutory duties. But through the media’s handling of these complex events a ‘coherent’ account and remedy was under construction, with a powerful spokesman. Rhodes Boyson and Black Paperdom As polemics, the Black Papers argued for what they represented as awkward truths forgotten by mealy mouthed theorists. Central to their view of education were certain alleged ‘facts’ of inequality, taken as demonstrably established. The claim in Black Paper 2 was that workingclass children are on average innately less intelligent, and according to Boyson in 1975 genetic differences accounted for ‘70–80%’ of intellectual abilities. To deny these data was to be guilty of ‘social engineering’ – the manipulation of the young for ulterior motives. Second, competition was essential to learning (without it the bright are held back) and to Britain’s international economic struggle. Thus, in a new version of social Darwinism, the intellectually able should climb on the backs of the weak. In the right’s view this (vigorous, healthy) process had been stunted by the rise to power of ‘progressive’ teachers – variously cranks, anarchists, sentimentalists and in general permissive – colluding in the weakening of authority and the rejection of traditional, Christian values. ‘Evidence’ for this was seen in a broadly painted picture of school truancy, anarchy and violence, and by repeated claims of a decline in standards of attainment in basic skills. Nigel Wright has analysed the systematic misrepresentation of highly ambiguous evidence in this debate and he has shown how, at other times of social unrest, there have been panics mounted over school ‘standards’. ‘Remedies’ for this alleged decline lay in firmer controls, and educational growth needed to be curbed: ‘It is no good educationalists clamouring for more money when education increases problems, lowers standards and increases widespread cynicism’. It was argued that traditional examinations, not run by teachers, would provide a goal for learning and a hope for ‘clever’ working-class children, while saving money for employers. Schools should be inspected and monitored more closely, and parents given more information and closer contact with the school. There should be a voucher system allowing parental choice, and the popularity of particular schools would become a ‘test of their efficiency’. The right’s ideas continue to be centrally contradictory, and this needs saying clearly and often, and in as many contexts as possible. In schools, the right may take up the cause of the able but frustrated working-class child, yet in no way increase their structural chances of educational progress, and therefore has to fall back on monstrous claims about genetics. This argument, fostered in the Black Papers by Cyril Burt, and further promoted by Eysenck, Jensen and others in the educational area, has not significantly entered into popular conservatism. It does, however, provide an alternative explanation for the failure of social democratic policies. Its reappearance in the USA was precisely in the context of opposing the reforms associated with compensatory programmes. More generally the right combines a populist identification of problems – the exclusion of parents from a say in what happens in schools (an exclusion brusquely confirmed by some teachers insisting on their professional skills) – with a set of authoritarian solutions involving enlarged state interventions and control. It still remains to be seen whether a Tory
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government could integrate these various motifs into new policies, especially in the wake of the pre-emptive Labour strategy subsequently enacted. New sociology and de-schooling While the political Right had been developing its own ideological initiative, a critique of a different order had acquired a currency within the sociology of education. The emergence of the ‘New Sociology’ (Young 1971), with its emphasis on epistemological questions, and its rejection of positivistic assumptions which under-pinned much previous work in the sociology of education, challenged the hegemony of those assumptions which were so important in the social democratic/sociology of education coalition. Instead of providing the ‘scientific’ and theoretical rationale for the specific forms of expansion adopted, such as comprehensivisation, the new sociology argued that such policy shifts did not fundamentally alter the previous situation. The performance of working-class children had not improved dramatically, and the reasons for this lack of success should be sought in the specific political location of schooling. The implication was, therefore, that remedial action could not simply be enacted by policy prescription. Consequently the logical continuity between sociological research findings and overall policy development, so central to the main thrust of social democratic expansion in education, was lost. The new sociology, itself, had no clear policy implications; if anything it pointed to variants of de-schooling (a complicated transplant from South America and the USA). Making its appearance in England to the abhorrence of Labour Party reformers like Vaizey: ‘I not only disagree with them I disapprove of them’. Writers across the range from Holt (1964) to Reimer (1971) argued the damage done by school behind its declared purposes: indoctrination through a ‘hidden’ curriculum, divisiveness through tests and exams, knowledge made useless and privatised because of schools’ separation from family, work and the learning needs of adults. These ideas in the English context of the late 1960s were to be fertile in arousing distrust of schooling as a regulated work of the state. The energies of the de-schoolers were variously directed towards experimental schools, children’s rights and the need to democratise school government. Certainly the political bearings of deschooling and the ‘New Sociology’ were various and ambiguous – deschooling ranging from the support of distinctively working-class schooling as a ‘left’ priority, to an interest in parental voucher schemes, soon to be taken up by Rhodes Boyson. But both questioned and outflanked the central social democratic hopes and strategies. The subsequent emergence of Marxist and neo-Marxist critiques of these positions and of social democratic perspectives, have in turn further removed sociology from the persisting assumptions of social democracy, and from any immediate political articulation with the Labour Party. While the expansion of the 1960s was seen as offering qualitative change through quantitive provision, the evidence emerging in the 1970s was that this qualitative change had not in fact occured. The conclusion seemed inescapable that ‘equality of opportunity’, even if accepted in principle, could not be secured by institutional arrangements, universal access or compensatory programmes. The significance of Bullock The disintegration of the sociology/social policy coalition can be concretely identified in the official policy formation process. The Bullock Report (1975), a report as symptomatic of the 1970s as Newsom was of the 1960s, was concerned with the fundamental issues of language
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development and educational achievement. It relied on the old repertoire of compensatory theory so generative in the Plowden Report. Conceptual innovation was, however, replaced by a much harder set of policy proposals for the implementation of the old theory. The suggested programme of intervention assumed that the causal chain of educational failure could be traced back to the pre-linguistic stage of child development, specifically to the antenatal social environment of ‘the home’. The appropriate remedial action was seen to take the form of systematic intervention in the home environments of the target population, that is, the homes of unskilled manual workers in the Educational Priority Areas. The purpose of this intervention was to restructure the early linguistic environment of those infants who were ‘at risk’. Such a programme would have required a considerable expansion in the number of visitors and counsellors, and would have amounted to the reduction ad/absurdum of a ‘compensatory education for the foetus’. Despite the revival of genetic explanations of inequality, Bullock maintained its commitment to compensatory education, but at the same time it explored the contemporary educational determinations of failure. In this respect teachers were identified as the crucial variable, whose skill in teaching could offer the possibility of longer-term success for children otherwise handicapped by environmental factors. The report noted that because of the predominance of progressive teaching methods, and the inexperience of many young teachers, considerable confusion existed about the most effective teaching methods. This situation could best be resolved through the development of teaching schemes, at the level of the school, but the report also proposed the desirability for regular, national, monitoring of standards of attainment in schools. The assumption, so apparent in these proposals, was that the competence of teachers could no longer be automatically relied on. Teaching was basically too important to be left to the teachers. In this last respect the report was a signal one, providing legitimate strategies for intervention within the home and within the school. It is therefore surprising that the reception accorded to Bullock, by both the national and professional press, failed to seize on the longer-term implications of the report’s recommendations. The main discussion revolved around the contentious issue of whether standards had fallen, while the expandionist aspects of the recommendations were generally welcomed – especially by the NUT. However, it was clear from Prentice’s remarks in accepting the report that, in the context of financial retrenchment, the major proposals were inoperable because of the prohibitive costs involved (£100m. according to the NUT). Although the analysis of teacher failure and the proposals for assessment and monitoring were to prove perfectly suited to a situation where efficient control of public spending had become a major issue, at the time of publication they were referred to the Assessment of Performance Unit at the DES, the significance of which was only later to emerge. Callaghan’s critique, two years later, was clearly informed by Bullock’s analysis and internal DES responses to the ‘public panics’ around Tyndale and other causes celebres. In giving concrete expression to efforts directed at restricting teacher autonomy, Callaghan was able indirectly to invoke Bullock to lend legitimacy to his proposals. This is not to suggest that this was the purpose or the intention of its authors, but their work made available the detail for a political campaign. The report was appropriated selectively, rather as Robert Lowe once appropriated the report of the Newcastle Commission in support of the Revised Code of 1862.
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The DES and the ‘Great Debate’ We have now seen how the hegemony of the Labour Party, teachers and educationalists collapsed in the 1970s. The economic crisis undercut its first premise that an expansive capitalism would supply the means. At the same time an extraordinarily successful and (in its own terms) accurate Tory critique, forced Labour’s leadership to shift its ground. It became obvious, too, that social democratic solutions had almost reached their necessary limits, or now involved, as in the case of Bullock’s proposals, a quite disproportionate expenditure. Within the sociology of education, the dominance of what had once been a ‘radical’ tradition was ended by still ‘newer’ sociologies, and by revived Marxism, always social democracy’s hidden antagonist. The collapse of these orthodoxies posed acute political problems for the Labour Government, whose general political position was in any case quite perilous. What was to replace the old hegemony? Some new inflection had to be given to the social democratic ideology; some new combination of elements or some drastic simplification. Similarly there was a need for new (or refurbished) agencies of control, to steer the whole system onto a new tack. The key solutions were, in fact, a reassertion of control from the DES and the ideological work of the Williams–Callaghan ‘Great Debate’. It is important to note that during the 1960s the DES had come to take a ‘back seat’ when it came to taking specific initiatives within schools. For example when the Curriculum Studies Group was established in 1962, by the Ministry of Education, to examine the question of curriculum organisation and reform, it was strenuously opposed by the teachers’ organisations. The major result was the abandonment of the CSG and the establishment of the Schools Council. The subsequent development of CSE courses from 1965 onwards, and the implementation of the Mode 3 (teacher assessed) schemes in 1970, were further pointers to the shift away from external controls, towards regulation originating within schools. The final stage of this development was seen in the reception of the 16-plus examination proposals, which if accepted would have given almost total control of the curriculum to the teachers. The response to this proposal tended to crystallize the various concerns about teacher autonomy, and the extent to which teachers should be in control, as opposed to being merely the functionaries at the ‘chalk face’. In the ‘Yellow Book’ of 1976, prepared by the DES, teacher control is the major issue, especially the domination of teachers’ interests on the Schools Council. The success of the Schools Council in its development of curriculum projects, and its initiation of reform through non-statutory means, had systematically eroded the influence of external agencies – the DES and the Examining Boards. Moves to re-establish external control have been fuelled by the Auld Report into William Tyndale. This report precisely addressed the problem of teacher autonomy, its function of maintaining ‘proper standards’ in schools. These proposals have already been taken up in London, where there has also been a considerable increase in the size of the Inspectorate’s establishment. Thus the role of the DES and the Inspectorate has been systematically highlighted as a centre of ‘sanity’ and arbiter of standards, checking the excesses of the teachers. The urgency of the demand for a new strategy had also been emphasised by the increased intervention of representatives of employers’ organizations, and other voices of industrial interests. They echoed many of the themes established in the Black Papers, and elsewhere, especially the theme of accountability, but also stressed their own theme: the need to restructure the relationship between education and industry. In early 1976 a TES article by Arnold Weinstock, managing director of GEC, entitled ‘I
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Blame the Teachers’, suggested that the shortage of skilled workers – especially in engineering, could be explained by the anti-industry attitudes of many teachers. These teachers, he charged, not only lacked practical experience of industry but operated in a very loose organizational structure, free from immediate control over what they taught the children and unaccountable to the wider ‘community’. The malaise, he argued, could be countered in some practical ways. His prescription in this respect were subsequently to become characteristic of educational discussion in the following two years: Experience indicates that tightly administered organisations, in which you get on if you are good and get out if you are bad, have higher morale and provide more job satisfaction – than their opposites. So perhaps a re-look at this side of the education system would be in the best interests of teachers as well as the community. Times Educational Supplement 23.1.76 This focus on the shortcomings of teachers and schools, namely that they failed to prepare young people for the demands made upon them in the real world of work, also involved other dimensions. John Methven, Director General of the CBI, followed the theme later in the year but also stressed the demarcation line between the responsibilities of employers and those of schools: Employers are firmly of the view that shortcomings in the vocational preparation of young people are basically an educational problem which cannot be passed on to employers under the guise of training and induction. TES. 29.10.76. While the argument that education should deliberately and selectively prepare the workforce of the future was becoming established, another rationale was presented to emphasise the legitimacy of the project: the concern for ‘social justice’. The failure of education to respond to the pressing needs of the economy could be represented as not only weakening the prospects of economic recovery, but also in failing those children who were subject to that form of ‘non-relevant’ education. Joe Rogaly of the Financial Times suggested that the question of curriculum content was therefore of central importance, since: . . . industry is suffering from an undereducated workforce, while many working class children are being given the added disadvantage of a non-education on top of all their other burdens. FT. 3.1.76. During this period therefore the discussion of the social purposes of education, and the assumption that schools were failing, became very much part of the wider political discourse. The anxiety about standards of numeracy and literacy, orchestrated in press campaigns, served to establish the political climate in which new forms of intervention became both possible and desirable. It was on this basis that the plans for the ‘Great Debate’ were laid. Shortly after taking over as PM, Callaghan instituted a series of meetings with ministers, the first of which was held with Fred Mulley, the then Secretary for Education. Following this meeting the PM called for a paper to be prepared on four aspects of the educational scene. These areas – primary education and the ‘3 Rs’, the later years of compulsory education, examinations, and the education of the 16 to 19 years olds – were discussed in what came to
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be known within the DES as the Yellow Book. The report, prepared by the Inspectorate, offered a wide ranging critique of schooling and its problems, and offered a series of proposals which the government could take up in policy. The way in which the Inspectorate sees itself operating illustrates the kind of thinking behind the plans for the Great Debate, more through the use of existing controls and ‘persuasion’, than through formal intervention or reorganization: No exercise of power is involved in this search for improvement; the Inspectorate, by tradition and by choice, exerts influence by the presentation of evidence and advice. Guardian 13.10.76. This influence was to be pursued through an increase in the work of the Assessment of Performance Unit at the DES, which was charged with the identification and definition of standards which children might be expected to achieve in the different areas of their work. Since 1975 the APU had been considering the recommendations of the Bullock Report into literacy, recommendations which emphasised the desirability of measuring standards, as we have already noted. In addition to the assessment of standards, the Yellow Book also proposed that the workings of the Schools Council should be re-examined, and that use should be made of every opportunity for extending the links between schools and the world of work. This briefing document therefore served as a guide to the themes which Callaghan took for his now notorious Ruskin College speech of October 1976. The speech was to serve a signal purpose: the public redefinition of educational objectives through the device of the ‘Great Debate’. Callaghan’s intervention into the debate was, as we mentioned earlier, a carefully managed media ‘event’. Having assumed Boyson’s populist mantle for the occasion, he was able to set the ‘legitimate’ concerns of the parents against the actual organisation of the school and its relative inaccessability to them. The proposals for a ‘core curriculum’, a necessary precondition for any national comparison of ‘standards’, were presented as equalising conditions, serving the interests of both parents and children, and in the process the political and economic strategy of the state. It is clear that in initiating the ‘Great Debate’ on educational issues, the Prime Minister was also concerned with the wider cultivisation of political consent. However, in the Regional Conferences subsequently announced, the initial implication that the debate might be an exercise in participatory democracy was reinterpreted somewhat – only 200 guests and the press being invited. Likewise, the conference agendas; concerned as they were with the curriculum, assessment, teacher training and the relationship between schooling and Life, addressed issues which have been developed as of concern to parents, but which do not necessitate parental involvement to resolve them. It is implicitly assumed that the ‘interests’ of parents are represented through the rational organisation, by the State, of the school/work transition, and the matching of the appropriate skills to the requirements of the labour market.3 The ‘Great Debate’ crystallised many aspects of the current situation, serving as a response to the Tory critique of Labour’s educational policy, and also as a justification for tighter controls over educational finances – the cuts in public expenditure. However, it also very significantly marked a shift on the part of Labour’s leadership into policies which would allow new forms of intervention in education, promised on the analysis that the quality of the labour force was a major part of the problem encountered by industry in a period of crisis.
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While the ‘Great Debate’ was under way, and attracting considerable media attention, the existence of a confidential Whitehall document was revealed which explicitly set out some of the thinking behind the Great Debate, especially the non-educational dimension. The memorandum, revealed in a Guardian story, was prepared jointly by civil servants in the Treasury and the Departments of Industry, Education and Employment and was intended for very limited circulation. It openly identified the relationship between the governments economic strategy and the current educational debate as important in the winning of public support, and as a means of allaying fears about the future of the country. So in addition to any real reforms being promoted, the process was equally one of cultivating and winning consent: The industrial strategy needs to be developed in a way which can provide a confident vision of the future and awaken a sense of national pride which we have not seen since the last war was won and the Empire was lost. Guardian 13.2.77. Though the necessity for winning consent was expressed in more strident and wide-ranging terms than the more ‘educational’ ones of the Yellow Book, there is a similar preference for less formal and more subtle pressures: The existence of national monitoring should provide a psychological impetus for the teaching profession which, coupled with greater stability in the profession now that posts are more difficult to find may help to raise standards more than any amount of overt exhortation. Guardian 13.2.77. This less formal approach to the problems of curriculum control, via the creation of ‘climates of opinion’, was not of itself sufficient, but illustrated the problem of formal interference and direction which could easily be characterised as totalitarian in intent, as well as rigid and counterproductive, especially when faced with calls from industry for an adaptable, ‘flexible’ workforce. This need to secure education to its economic role was a concern also taken up by other areas of government, in addition to those already mentioned. The primary work of the ‘great Debate’ is clear in the lines of argument which subsequently emerged as non-contentious, namely the legitimation of policy changes which had already been prepared. The TES, in a review of the events of 1977, pointed out what was then self evidently true: The trappings of the ‘Great Debate’ are unimportant alongside the climatic changes in received opinions which it was intended to proclaim. TES 30.12.77. The main ideological shifts contained in the ‘Great Debate’ were the retention and further stress, but in more precise forms, of the education-equals growth arguments; the attempt to cover the major weakness over parental involvement and the almost total disappearance of the Labour Party’s egalitarianism. Callaghan’s targets – the teachers and their autonomy – have proved incapable of making any coherent response, beyond economic struggle and calls for opposition to any formalisation of central control of curriculum. The National Association of Schoolmasters even colluded with calls for greater accountability, in order to
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establish its members’ professional competences, if only in opposition to the alleged dillettantism of the typical NUT members Similarly, the generally conservative stance of the NAS/UWT against progressive methods, and their hostility to any radical educational content, has facilitated an expedient alliance between them and the Labour Party’s new strategy. This weakness in the teachers’ organisations is exemplified by the Schools Council’s ready acceptance of the need to reform its own structure, in the light of the Callaghan critique. The ‘Great Debate’ has revealed the metaphorical character of education. Education, the universal, unifying experience, has become the vehicle, par excellence, for the exploration of wider social questions. The relationship of education to the economy, the relationship of the individual’s development to the ‘national interest’, captures other themes which are currently part of the political discourse. The bidding for consent, the forging of a new hegemony on the basis of a corporate capitalism, can be seen through the educational debate. Central to both are themes of discipline, and the subordination of the individual to the collective interest. The collective interest is now defined, however, less in Labour’s old terms of a ‘More equal society’, but more in terms of the survival of a capitalist economy. Conclusion: some political implications of the analysis In revising this paper we planned to end it with some directly political comments about the current situation in education and about the broad features of an adequate socialist strategy. But we found a conclusion of this kind extremely difficult to write and to agree on. Some of us found the same, or similar difficulties in talking about our findings to different kinds of groups – teachers, academics, researchers, adult education students, political groups. This led us to think quite hard about the sources of these difficulties and it is worth recounting some of our conclusions as these, indeed, concern the position of education researchers now, after the collapse of the 1960s alliance. There are, perhaps, two obvious traps. One is simply to leave the analysis as it stands. After all people can draw their own conclusions. And wasn’t the analysis posited on some political assumptions anyway, in the first place? It was indeed written under the pressure of real political events and contingencies. There is much truth in all this, yet this option seemed to us unsatisfactory. First, we feel an obligation to try to close, a little more, that continuing and maybe necessary gap between intellectual analysis and political practice. We want at least to make the political implications of the analysis clear enough so that people can get a more complete view of what, politically, we are saying. At the same time such an exercise is important for us too, since the writing of a text like this is also, for the authors, a kind of political education: it is not the case that we can see the full implications of the analysis, even now. All this pointed, then, towards some attempt to sum up, politically. The second danger is to attempt to say too much, beyond our own competences. One form of this would be to attempt to prescribe, for this group or that, what it should or should not be doing in the aftermath of the education crisis and at the beginning of some new settlement. But the fact is that there is a large distance fixed between the position of researchers, even those who are trying to make their research a resource for a more grassroot constituency, and the grass roots itself. Only some of us have the kind of close located experience of day-to-day school or teacher politics, for instance, that would be necessary for such a job. We simply cannot know enough in detail about the immediate and pressing tangles of issues that constitute an educational, let alone other kinds of politics, at the ‘lived’ level. It is significant that when we tried to write this sort of conclusion, it tended to degenerate into that kind of moral exhortation that is a sure sign you are making prescriptions for
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someone else to follow. All this suggests a quite limited exercise in which we try to cash in the strengths of our position – the fact that we have the time and resources to take a relatively wide and broad view of issues, somewhat removed from the immediate demands of the job. This means that we will concentrate mainly on the implications of our own analysis. This is a long way from anything as grandiose as ‘devising a socialist strategy for education’; but it may have its uses. The central implications of the study were addressed to ‘social democrats’ themselves; that is people on the left wing of the Labour Party or, while outside it, seeing it as a means to ‘socialism’. We think that we have shown, quite conclusively, that the educational politics of the 1960s, formed, after all in a period of Labour Party defeat and ‘revisionism’, were totally inadequate to their avowed aims and had very little to do with the creation of a socialist society. The period did see the achievement of some gaols that are worth having from a socialist perspective: we would count the abolition of the 11+ and the expansion of further and higher education as real gains of this kind. It is important to oppose any tendency to roll them back. Nor would we automatically oppose ‘compensatory’ policies, for though they will not achieve the kinds of pacifications that are intended, they may well increase local and race-specific resources for resistance organisation and struggle. Similarly, though the moves towards comprehensiviation did not and could not achieve all that was expected of it, it was a change worth having and a necessary base-line for further progress. What was wrong about the 1960s strategies was, quite simply, the attempt to serve two masters – to secure some kind of equalisation of life chances and to provide capital with the required forms of labour power. Beyond a certain point – and that point has clearly been reached in the 1970s – these goals are incompatible. If we continue to think in purely ‘educational’ terms, the choice is now much starker than before: it lies between serving capital’s needs (which involves for most people minimum skills and knowledge and the maximum of induction into fundamentally unrewarding labour in family and/or factory) and securing an education worth the name. The Labour Party leadership seems to have chosen, equally starkly, the first of these routes. But the other feature of the 1960s was the enormous over-loading of the educational issue itself. Education was represented as a solution to a myriad of national problems. It follows that education, in the 1970s, has a kind of scape-goat role, blamed for a whole range of national failures. Either way the fault lies in ascribing altogether too determining a role to education itself: this leads to what we called earlier and ‘educational utopianism’. It has had its ‘answer’ in an extreme educational cynicism. Against this, it is important to argue that many of the determinants on education – on the failure or success of working-class children for instance – lie outside the educational system or process itself. They are the ‘fault’ neither of parents, nor of teachers, nor, indeed, of the children themselves. They are a regular and predictable effect of class and gender relations which are reproduced more broadly within the society as a whole. ‘More education’ will never be a solution to the problems that result. We need, rather, to reverse the arguments of those who seek a new settlement in education: it is not the quality of schools or teachers or parents that is a fault in relation to ‘the needs of industry’ – it is those ‘needs’ themselves that ought to be questioned. It’s not just a question of fitting education to ‘the fact’ of massive youth unemployment and a continued trend to ‘enforced leisure’. If that is accepted, education becomes a scapegoat for problems quite extrinsic to schools. The problem is why mass unemployment in the first place and how can it be avoided? All this points to the necessity of an altogether broader socialist politics, even if the starting-point, for some of us, is the massive condensations of issues around education and schools. There is also a second general implication for ‘social democracy’ which concerns the
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actual forms of state power. One of the things we have argued is that because educational demands have always been relayed through a particular form of the state, they have tended, systematically, to return in unrecognisable forms. It is as though what is demanded as a ‘right’ is imposed, now, as a quite objectionable duty. One of the reasons why this is so must be because there is no really living popular democratic connection with the schools of their infrastructure at state or local state level. This in turn implies that one feature of a socialist strategy would have to be some form of the democratisation of control over schooling. We’ll return to this point in a later context. The point to note here is that the classic socialdemocratic illusion concerns the neutrality of the state; that in education this can be shown to be quite false and that the implication is for some qualitative transformation of state forms, a process likely to be achieved only by long and protracted struggles. But our analysis does carry some implications for educational politics more narrowly. We hope to have shown, for instance, that one of the weaknesses of teachers in the current situation is that they have come to be defined as ‘failed’ experts, implicated in the general shift of the policies of the early 1970s. This typification has been exploited by critics of educational expansion who seek to ‘represent’ parental interests. If this analysis is correct, everytime teachers take a public stand on autonomy and against some move (like the Taylor Report) towards involving parents or others in the schools, they re-inforce the arguments of the right and encourage fresh forms of control. Tactically, the insistence on professional autonomy may stem the encroachment of state and capital; ideologically and in the long run, it is hard to see how it cannot but fuel the case of the controllers. More generally, our argument suggests the need for a critical re-evaluation of ‘professionalism’, its strengths and its limits. It certainly provides a pervasive vocabulary of teacher politics and teacher self-identifications. But actually it is a deeply ambiguous and contradictory set of attitudes, with very different political implications. It is worth thinking how the different elements could be distinguished, prised apart and given a rather different political logic. One element in professionalism, for example, is simply the search for status, whether this is individual (careerism and anti-unionism) or collective (a corporate interest). Teacher unionism, in turn, may be a way of emulating higher paid professions and stressing the mental/manual labour divide. It can be a way of linking teachers to the labour movement. Professionalism contains too a kind of mystique of knowledge which draws lines against the ‘laymen’ and may oppress them. It may exclude from the dialogue those with whom we should be working. This applies as much to the powerful internal hierarchies between different kinds of intellectuals and teachers (academics/lectures/secondary/primary/nursery nurses) as between teachers on the one side and school children and parents on the other. Yet there are clearly positive aspects of ‘professionalism’: an individual and collective sense of responsibility, a stress on competences and a willingness to stand up to pressure from industry and the bureaucracies. We would argue that these different elements are separable and that the expertise of teachers, like that of researchers, could and should be redefined. That involves shifts within the profession itself – struggles with colleagues in fact – but also answering responses outside from a larger constituency. The natural constituency, of a popular kind, for teachers is, of course, the children, the parents and the locality. We would argue that part of such a redefinition would be a changed attitude among teachers towards the question of the nature and extent of involvement of parents (and indeed others) in schools and the encouragement of parental involvement as ‘normal’. In this way, though this is not a sufficient condition, it is more likely that struggle within gand over the schools will become part of a broader popular socialism linked to the local labour movement as well as a natural arena for a teacher politics itself, as it were, a part of the ‘job’. This part of our
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argument connects with what we said earlier about the long-term need to occupy and transform elements of the local and national state. Finally, our study has important, if very general implications, around the term ‘ideological struggle’. We have tried to emphasize throughout that a politics that is not informed by this dimension will be very inadequate. It is worth trying to spell this out in relation to education. First, most generally, an emphasis on ideological struggle constitutes a criticism of mechanical or purely organisational forms of politics – those that consist mainly of setting up committees, or getting people on them. We have in mind strategies which would stop short at, say, securing trade union representation on governing bodies of schools. It should be one aspect of a policy, but the trouble is, in itself, it would do little to shift opinion, win consent to new ways of thinking about education, or even create any kind of popular support for schools. In other words, mechanical forms of politics don’t transform situations nor open up new possibilities. They consist rather of the very conservative activity of moving around preconstituted blocks of power or influence – blocks which may actually dwindle before our very eyes. The history of the Labour Party is full of episodes that illustrate this process precisely. Secondly, it’s worth saying a little about what we take to be the characteristic process of ‘ideological struggle’. It might be described as the process by which unconscious or halfconscious assumptions or divisions or contradictions are raised to the level of full consciousness and made the explicit and knowing object of a politics, what Gramsci often referred to as ‘education’. The effects of such a practice – whose systematic character we have hardly begun to explore – is to broaden the sphere of the political, that is the sphere over which we can struggle. One such complex of relations concern the inter-sections of career and control hierarchies within teaching with the sexual divisions of labour, the specific place of women as the subordinated majority of the profession and the particular experience of girls within the school system. As we have noted, but not yet adequately explored social democracy even at its most generously egalitarian was blind (or worse) to sexual inequalities. That was sufficient to disqualify it as an adequate educational politics for socialists. It may well be that there are particular features of education that make sexism and sexist practices there peculiarly opaque and therefore difficult to struggle against. But all such divisions – race is the other salient case – have an objective existence in relations of power and oppression and an everyday effect in the experience of black people or women. They won’t just go away if we ignore them. So it is not being, as is sometimes said, racist or sexist to point to their existence: what matters is the context in which this is done and for what purpose. Such divisions have to be seen and recognised before they can be acted upon, and this is a form of politics which we can practice, every day and all the time. It requires us to struggle against the forces that simplify or suppress such issues as they operate within ourselves, among our colleagues, and within the developed institutionalised forms of the schools themselves. Thirdly, we have noted throughout our analysis that the major absence in the socialdemocratic complex has concerned the actual content of schooling. In many ways this is the most important dimension of ideological struggle in education. We have already argued that education is inescapable a political question. We can’t teach in a non-political way. So this politics of teaching, of content, and of pedagogy should actually be thought about in a more collective way. This means considering, if not the content of a socialist curriculum, certainly a curriculum and a pedagogy that is compatible with socialist principles and which tends to aid a socialist transition. Such practices are unlikely to develop among isolated individuals within the schools system. This is one reason why it is important to build on a recurrent socialist and current feminist practice: the development of informal, adult, independent
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educational forms, with the dual function of self-education and informal support/for struggles within the existing apparatuses. We certainly have in the development of radical teachers journals and socialist teachers groups the beginnings of one such ‘regional’ development. But teachers and other intellectuals have an important role to play in a much wider development of this kind of activity, as extension of their more formally defined roles as teachers and researchers. Finally, ideological struggle in education does mean combatting adverse and selfinterested public definitions of education of the kind cultivated by the right-wing press and politicians over the last few years. Such a defence has to take account of arguments of a more qualitative kind such as we have marshalled here. We have to take account of the fact that education (or more correctly schooling) is experienced by most children for most of the time as boring and oppressive. In a longer historical perspective we have to recognise that education has not been an unmitigated good, it has, in an important sense, been imposed. This helps to explain why working-class attitudes to schooling have been and remain very ambiguous: on the one hand education, in itself, may be a good which parents desire for their children; on the other hand it is actually experienced by children, and in the event, by parents, in alien forms. It is important to distinguish, then, between schooling as it is and education as it might be. Schooling is formed in a contradictory set of compromises between what are seen as the requirements of industry and the need to win the consent of parents and children to successive educational settlements. In the 1970s it is easier to see through the logic of these compromises as they become more overtly concerned with the control and reproduction of Labour power. Our response to the argument that education should be developed to secure economic growth by increasing capitalist efficiency, can now be quite brusque and decisive: capitalism is not ‘efficient’ (otherwise it would be unnecessary to plan for the long-term unemployment of the young, to reduce expenditure on schools, and to so starve absolutely necessary health-care as actually to cause avoidable disease and indeed death). Besides, capitalism does not actually require, as part of its logic, the development of a more egalitarian system of education. The educational ‘logic’ of capitalism divorced from specific historical contingencies, remains what it has always been: a supply of managers and controllers and technical workers, some system of induction into fairly standardised labour for the majority, either for the sphere of social production or for the reproduction of fresh workers in the home. The ‘profile’ of desired skills and attitudes has, of course shifted, but capitalism is best served by selective not egalitarian systems. Schooling has a particular place in this process of selection or distribution but it also happens by other means, chiefly through the effects of the structures of economic life on the expectations of parents and children. In so far as education has pushed beyond these simple functional relations, this has been achieved not through some economic logic but through real struggles and forced compromises. The whole history of Labour’s educational policies clearly reveals this pattern, for Labour, more than any other party, has been continuously caught between the aims of maintaining a popular and working-class base (and so ‘representing’ the working class in some sense) and seeking some progressive capitalist adaption. It was not education that failed in the 1960s but this utopian dream: of a more equal citizenry under some modified ‘more classless’ form of society. If this analysis is correct it follows that there are a whole series of important alliances to be make on the basis of an opposition to capitalist schooling. This is not an opposition to schooling in itself, since our analysis suggested that schools are shot through with alternatives and even oppositional elements. It is an error to make this simple identification of the educational system as a whole with a set of functions for capital. Schools do not simply function for
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capital, though capital does have a major stake in the schools. The problem, then is how to articulate, to bring into forms of union, the various and contradictory elements that stand against and interrupt this ‘reproduction’: an alliance which should be made, not only in education but within a wider socialist and feminist politics.
Notes 1 It is acknowledged that we do not supply an adequate explanation in fully Marxist terms of the postwar expansion of the educational system. This is an important absence to which further work will be addressed. We would note that our object here is primarily a study of educational ideologies, not the educational expansion as such. So far as the larger process is concerned, we reject simplistic explanations of the type, for instance, which reduce the phenomena in question to the effects of a onedimensional tendency in the economic base, e.g. de-skilling. 2 The Sillitoe reference comes from the introduction to Chapter 4 of the Report which is introduced with the following quotation from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: ‘If your machine was working well . . . you went off into pipe-dreams for the rest of day . . . You lived in a compatible world of pictures which passed through your mind like a magic lantern often in vivid and glorious loonycolour’ (p. 27). 3 The involvement of parents in school government was considered, among other things, by the Taylor Committee, which presents its report to the Secretary of State during the latter part of 1977. This was rather too late to give parents a voice in ‘the Great Debate’.
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Department of Education & Science 1975 Bullock Report: A Language for Life (HMSO) Douglas, J.W.B. 1964 The Home and the School (MacGibbon and Kee) Floud, J. 1961 ‘Sociology and Education’ Sociological Review Monograph Gramsci, A. 1971 Prison Notebooks (Lawrence & Wishart) Gray, T.L. & Moshinsky, P. 1938 ‘Ability and Opportunity in English Education’ in L. Hogan et al. Political Arithmetic (Allen & Unwin) Hall, S. et al. 1975 ‘Mugging & Law’n’Order’ (CCCS Stencilled Paper, Birmingham) Halsey, A.H., Floud, J. & Anderson, C. 1961 Education, Economy and Society (Collier-Macmillan and Free Press) Hammersley, M. and Woods, P. 1976 The Process of Schooling (Open University RKP) Hargreaves, D.H. 1967 Social Relations in a Secondary School (RKP) Henriques, P., Dennis, N. and Slaughter, C. 1956 Coal is our Life (Eyre and Spottiswoode) Holt, J. 1964 How Children Fail (Pitman) Howell, D. 1976 British Social Democracy (Croom Helm) Jackson, B. 1964 Streaming: An Education System in Miniature (RKP) Jackson, B. and Marsden, D. 1966 Education and the Working Class (Pelican) Jencks, C. 1975 Inequality (Peregrine) Jenkins, D. and Shipman, M.D. 1976 Curriculum: An Introduction (Open Books) Jenkins, S. 1973 ‘Conservatives and Comprehensives’ in Bell. R. et al Education in Great Britain and Ireland (Open University and RKP) Johnson, R. 1976 ‘Really Useful Knowledge’, Radical Education 7 & 8 Klein, J. 1965 Samples from English Culture (RKP) Klogan, M. 1974 The Politics of Education (Penguin) Lacey, C. 1970 Hightown Grammar (Manchester U.P) Lawn, M. 1974 ‘Educational Worker’ Radical Education 2 Lister, I. 1974 Deschooling: A Reader (CUP) Locke, M. 1974 Power and Politics in the School System (RKP) Marx, K. 1973 Surveys from Exile (Pelican) McKibbin, R. 1974 The Evolution of the Labour Party (CUP) McRobbie, A. 1977 Working Class Girls and the Culture of Femininity. Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Birmingham Midwinter, E. 1972 Priority Education (Penguin) Miliband, R. 1972 Parliamentary Socialism (Merlin Press) Ministry of Education: Secondary Schools Examination Council (Beloe Committee) 1960 Secondary School Examinations Other than the GCE (HMSO) Nairn, T. 1964 ‘The Nature of the Labour Party’, New Left Review 27 and 28 Pelling, H. 1965 The Origins of the Labour Party (Penguin) Poulantzas, N. 1975 Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (New Left Books) Reimer, E. 1971 School is Dead (Penguin) Robbins, Lord (Chairman) 1963 Higher Education Report of the Frime Minister’s Committee on Higher Education (HMSO) Robinson, E. 1968 The New Polytechnics (Penguin) Rosen, H. 1972 Language and Class: A Critical Look at the Theories of Basil Bernstein (Falling Wall Press) Schools Council 1971 Choosing a Curriculum for the Young School Leaver (Evans/Methuen) Simon, B. 1974 The Two Nations and the Educational Structure 1780–1870 (Lawrence and Wishart) Simon, B. 1974 Education and the Labour Movement 1870–1920 (Lawrence & Wishart) Simon, B. 1974 The Politics of Educational Reform 1920–40 (Lawrence & Wishart) Stedman Jones, G. 1974 ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class’, Journal of Social History Sugarman, B. 1966 ‘Social Class and Values as Related to Achievement and Conduct in Schools’, Sociological Review 14 No. 3 Tawney, R.H. 1922 Secondary Schools for All (Allen and Unwin)
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Tawney, R.H. 1964 The Acquisitive Society (Fontana) Tawney, R.H. 1964 Equality (Allen and Unwin) Teachers Action Collective 1975 Teachers and the Economy Thompson, E.P. 1960 ‘Homage to Tom Maguire’ in A. Briggs and J. Saville (eds.) Essays in Labour History (Macmillan) Thompson, P. 1967 Socialist Liberals and Labour: the Struggle for London 1885–1914 (RKP) Thompson, P. 1976 The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (Weidenfeld and Nicholson) Williams, R. 1961 Culture and Society 1780–1950 (Pelican) Willis, P. 1977 Learning to Labour: How Working-Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Saxon House, forthcoming) Willis, P. 1976 The Main Reality: Transition from School to Work (CCCS Stencilled Paper, University of Birmingham) Wright, N. 1977 Progress in Education (Croom Helm, London) Young, M.F.D. 1972 ‘On the Politics of Educational Knowledge: Some Considerations with Particular Reference to the Schools Council’, Economy and Society Young, M.F.D. 1971 Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education (Collier-Macmillan)
45 Perspectives on schooling and politics CCCS Education Group
In this chapter we explore some of the general problems of writing a critical study of post-war schooling. We do not want to produce, in advance, a general, formal theory of education, but to sketch some key features of our own approach. These have been formed in a three-sided engagement. We have learnt, first, from the theoretical debates of the last ten years, especially from the proliferation of sociologies of education, old and new, and from the revival of Marxist analysis. Second, we have drawn on these theories to the extent that they have helped us to make sense of the pattern of post-war changes. We have valued or criticized them for their explanatory power or weakness. Third, our approach has been formed by the very events we describe, especially, of course, by the developments of the 1970s. Like all students of social developments, we stand inside the social relations we describe, not outside them. We have consciously taken sides and have not held back from arguing political preferences. In particular, we have been influenced by a growing sense of the need for a more adequate socialist politics of education. Chapter 1 is the most theoretical part of this book, but we will not spend a great deal of time describing the arguments of other theorists; we will concentrate instead on saying what, from our point of view, has proved useful or problematic in them.1
Approaches to policy There is a large literature on state education policy and policy-making. Until recently most of the historical writing on education has focused on these topics at the expense of a more social history of schooling.2 There are many similar studies for other policy areas and similar paradigms operate in orthodox political science.3 The main feature of most of this work is that it is written from a standpoint internal to the policy-making process itself. Our attention is directed to the most apparent generative processes – to legislation, administration and the formal politics of education – and towards the most immediately responsible persons and organizations: politicians, civil servants, departments and boards of government, local authorities and the various organized interest groups. We stand at the elbow of the policymaker; certainly the policy-makers’ voices reach us most insistently from the sources. It is difficult to emancipate ourselves from their assumptions, or transcend their limitations of vision. So politics tend to be treated as a specialist, expert realm into which the rude noises of ‘the population’ rarely intrude, or, if they do, they do so mainly as ‘constraints’ on policymakers’ solutions or through accredited representatives or the media. As I.G.K. Fenwick has put it, in a useful study of the politics of comprehensive schooling: For the most part it is necessary to concentrate on interested groups, parties, Parliament,
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In the older histories of education reconstructions of the intentions of authors may stand in for more complicated accounts of why changes happened. Active and concerned persons deal with passive but potentially dangerous problems (which are actually constituted in the life activity of the underlying social groups and classes). Events are characteristically coupled with key authors: from Forster’s or Fisher’s or Butler’s Education Acts to the Geddes Axe. Even the best histories of policy-making resemble the most traditional, conservative and widely read of historical genres: biographies or autobiographies of leading public figures.5 Certainly it is important not to lose a sense of authorship or agency, or of the rush and muddle of decision-making ‘at the top’. Both are correctives to the tendency to ascribe perfect knowledge and conspiratorial intent to politicians or to ‘the state’. But this type of account is deeply problematic, theoretically and politically. It excludes the living, active force of the vast majority of historical populations and tends, qualitatively, to take the side of the dominant and articulate minorities. This can happen even where there is no deliberate attempt to uphold the status quo. It follows from accepting, as given, features of politics, ‘education’ or social conditions in general, which ought to be appraised critically and which have an intricate history of their own. One example is the tendency to identify the peculiar British post-war combination of parliamentary democracy and bureaucratic statism with ‘democracy’ or ‘the modern political system’, and therefore to accept as given the political disorganization which occurs when ‘the gates’ are kept only too well. It is not enough to note, as Fenwick does, ‘the largely negative role played by large numbers of legitimate participants’ and to concentrate, therefore, on ‘the major elements of the population actively interested in education, the education public’.6 We have to ask how and why educational politics have been constructed in this way, why there has been no vigorous post-war popular politics and what, in the absence of such movements, the more diffused forms of resistance have been. Another example of the same conservative form is the tendency to identify ‘education’ with the work of schools, colleges and other formal ‘educational’ institutions. As we shall see, this reduction was characteristic of the ‘old’ sociology of education, but it has also been a persistent feature of public debates, as everyday language testifies: ‘education system’, ‘education cuts’, ‘education debates’, etc. It is, in fact, very important to distinguish more carefully between ‘education’ and ‘schooling’; the first term refers to all forms of learning, the second to that specific historical form which involves specialized institutions and professional practitioners. Mass, public, compulsory, state schooling is a still more specific educational form, limited historically to the last 150 years or so. The identification of schooling and education is very conservative in its effects. It tends to present schools as natural rather than as historical products. It tends to devalue and marginalize the more spontaneous and more diffused ways of learning. It constructs a very sharp divide between school-like institutions (where we learn/are educated) and life outside these walls (where we work/play). It enhances the professional teacher and the organized curriculum over other sources of wisdom and, often, over practical knowledge as such. Above all, it hides from view a whole history of the construction of schooling – or encourages the belief in some simple history of progress, a history with no costs, no struggles, no ambiguities. Throughout this book, we shall explore the gap between capitalist schooling and education. We shall also present modern educational arrangements in the form of state schooling as particular historical products.
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There are, more generally, three main ways of breaking out of the conservatism which we have described. Each involves a more critical or ‘external’ way of writing about policy or about the state. The first strategy is to continue to inhabit the world of the policy-makers but with a more critical eye. This approach reads policy statements, public debates and professional discourses not as they present themselves (as a humanitarian concern for ‘the poor’ or as a preoccupation with ‘equality’) but according to the underlying logic or ideological character of a practice or a text. The focus is less on intent than on tendency; less on what is said than what is hidden or implied. Critiques of this kind have been common within the radical sociology and social history of the last decade or so,7 but it is worth looking, briefly, at a very sophisticated variant, the work of the French historian Michel Foucault.8 In his more historical work, Foucault is especially interested in areas which are often taken to be natural but which, as he shows, have been socially constructed: the definition and regulation, for instance, of sexuality, of childhood, of criminality or of madness. The subjects of Foucault’s histories are not individual politicians, authors or even social classes or groups, but what he calls ‘discourses’ or ‘discursive practices’. In using these terms Foucault insists on the intimate connection between knowledge and power, between the defining of a practice and its regulation. ‘Discourse’ includes worked-up forms of knowledge, usually those associated with a professional practice such as law, medicine or religion, but also the material or bodily concomitants of such power: imprisonment, hospitalization or the act of the confessional. These ‘modalities’ of control and incitement are minutely described, each discourse having its own peculiar character. Foucault thus preserves and explores the complexity of regulative disciplines without accepting their legitimacy, either as scientific knowledge or a necessary means to social order. Foucault is interested in the knowledges of policy-makers not because they are true but because they create ‘regimes of truth’ and are part of the operation of a ‘micro-physics of power’. Foucault’s histories suffer, however, from problems common to all abstracted or decontextualized studies of ideologies or policy statements. The micro-physics of power are supposed to work in the way described in the official manuals of method or the authoritative description of ‘the system’.9 Foucault retains a place – in theory – for relations or forces that exist outside the discourses he describes, but in his histories these are rarely elaborated. Recent work in Britain, owing much to Foucault’s method and style, has tended to accentuate this problem rather than solve it.10 In such work we stay inside discourses, unconcerned with their adequacy as knowledge and ignorant of the forms of resistance to them. We stay, in other words, in the fool’s paradise of the powerful. It is impossible to explain, from this perspective, why regulative practices and their attendant knowledges collapse or are forced to innovate. A Foucauldian critique of post-war educational policy could certainly show us how certain professional knowledges and practices were implicated in a logic of domination. It could not tell us why the 1960s’ policies fell apart or were transformed. This was not a product of discourse alone, but also of powerful social forces which the dominant knowledges failed to anticipate. Certainly a non-purist Foucauldian method may contribute to a history of policy but it provides no complete model. We do have to attend closely to the internal logic of public knowledge, but we also have to move it away from the centre of the stage to consider agencies and determinations which it does not describe. We need accounts of these too, as complex and subtle as Foucault’s own histories of discursive formations. A more common riposte in Britain to state-orientated research, and the second main tendency on which we draw, has been to take the side of ‘the people’. The writing of popular, working-class or labour history has been a longstanding preoccupation of intellectuals within, or to the left of, the Labour Party. The tradition of sympathetic social
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histories of popular experiences and movements goes back at least as far as John and Barbara Hammond and the inter-war founders of ‘labour history’. It remains a lively and growing historiographical presence today.11 The focus here is upon the experiences of the governed. In itself this standpoint renders problematic a view from ‘above’, but much more is involved than an inversion of perspective. The popular histories have often been written by socialists or Marxists who have seen the struggle of classes as the principal historical dynamic. E. P. Thompson’s polemical and historical writing, for example, is a sustained exploration of these themes.12 The emphasis is on the working class or the populace as an active force which has shaped social institutions and values. Far from being a docile object of policy, popular struggle constitutes the policy-makers’ problems in the first place. It builds its own resistances, modifies the direction of social development and sometimes forces the law to perform in practice what its rhetoric of impartiality declares. Without abandoning a notion of the state as a means of control, Thompson presents popular struggles as actually constitutive of state policies and state forms. They are a principle of movement in the whole system. We have taken a great deal from the popular histories and from radical sociologies with a similar perspective. We have tried to view post-war history from a standpoint on the side of subordinated or oppressed classes and social groups. We have stressed the formative influence of popular interests and experience as the ground or basis of politics itself. We have looked at a long history of popular educational struggles, including working-class countereducation of an independent kind. In general, taking the popular standpoint seems to us a prerequisite for any socialism worth the name. Yet, taking the viewpoint of the people is a much more complex business in analysis today than, for example, in writing about the counter-revolution in the 1790s or the Chartist insurgency of the 1830s and 1840s. It necessarily involves lengthy evaluations of the agencies that claim to represent working-class people, especially, nearer the present day, the Labour Party and the trade unions. It involves the recognition that whole sections of the population, with specific and important interests in education – most working-class mothers for instance – are not represented adequately at all. It necessarily involves looking at struggles, in and around the schools, that are not normally regarded as political, but exercise their own force on outcomes at an individual or structural level. It may involve, in the end, a quite fundamental questioning of what passes as politics today – of the content of policy, but also of its peculiar political forms. Such questions are best discussed in particular cases. The problem of the popularity of the Labour Party, for example, is a key issue for this book and the whole question of the nature of popular interests in education and of the ways in which they might be represented is, similarly, central to the argument. Although there are important and interesting examples, notably the work of Brian Simon,13 popular histories have not been the most common way of writing about education in the 1970s. The dominant tradition, especially on the left, has been more ‘sociological’. We do not intend, in this introduction, to review the field of the sociology of education – partly because sociologists will figure as active makers of history in the account that follows! We want, however, to stress our debts to, and our quarrels with, a third body of critical writing relevant to our theme: Marxist, neo-Marxist or Marxist-feminist accounts of the state, the state’s ideological functions and of the relation between state policy and the requirements of capitals. If the historian’s question has been ‘how was this system produced?’ these theorists have concentrated on the question ‘how does the education system function?’ or ‘what work does it perform for other institutions or interests?’ This investigation has rarely been concerned
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with the experiences of the policy-makers or of the dominated: it has rested on a more external appraisal of the structures of domination. Since most of the theorists have been Marxist or Marx-influenced, they have been interested mainly in the functions which education performs for capital, capitalism or for the reproduction of social classes. The intellectual pedigree of much of the writing can be traced back to Marx’s discussion of ‘reproduction’ in Capital, especially the discussion of the reproduction of labour power and of the working class, texts to which we will return. We have, then, accounts of how the schools, as ‘ideological state apparatuses’ reproduce capitalist relations of production.14 We have an important history of schooling in the USA, organized around the argument that schools replicate, in their social relations, the conditions and mentalities of capitalist labour.15 We have an extended sociological investigation of schooling as a form of ‘symbolic violence’, reinforcing the unequal distribution of cultural resources and securing the existing relations of power.16 As part of a long British tradition of the investigation of schooling and class, we have Bernstein’s arguments that schools reproduce inequalities by institutionalizing the cultural criteria of sections of the dominant class.17 Latterly, similar questions have been posed by feminists and Marxist-feminists concerned to understand the systematic disadvantages of girls in schooling, or to relate an analysis of sex-gender relations or ‘patriarchy’ to the traditional Marxist categories of class and exploitation.18 Work on schooling has formed a relatively small part of a more general revival of Marxist theory and research. Much of this has focused on the labour process and the conditions of work, on the nature of the state in ‘late capitalism’, on the meaning of welfarism in the post-war period and on the character of the political crises of the 1970s.19 Our approach has been formed, in large part, by debates within these currents. Specific debts will become clear in the course of the argument, but we also share a rather widespread dissatisfaction with some features of this theoretical work, despite the real deepening of knowledge which it represents. With notable exceptions, much of the work has been very abstract and very unhistorical. It has often been informed by the grand ambition of presenting working models of large social totalities – hence a stress on the systematic logic or structure of social processes. A strongly conservative, or, more correctly, pessimistic strand has been present in the theories, coexisting oddly with a more hopeful tone. The force of the arguments often makes it very difficult to see how a popular politics (of education or of anything else) may interrupt or modify the work which schools carry out in the reproduction of capitalist relations, of political domination, or of existing structures of material and cultural inequality. Paradoxically, the critical power of these theories reinforced their pessimism. In a sense, indeed, pessimism was the mission of the theorists. In Britain, North America and France, main targets have been liberal or social democratic expectations about progress through schooling. The older ‘utopianism’ was replaced by a realism bordering on despair. Capitalist societies were seen as deeply and intrinsically unfair; schooling mirrored these inequalities, reinforcing or reproducing them, making change more difficult by hiding injustice or rendering it legitimate. There was no lack of sympathetic identification with the subordinated populations in these accounts, but there was a virtual suppression of the possibility of struggle. Very often, indeed, agency and politics, as such, disappeared, or was supplied in a postscript.20 Those who looked to theory for practical guidance were told mainly about the constraints on their action and the huge and marvellously intricate apparatus of social control. They learnt plenty about what was not worth doing, much less about what to do. All this poses considerable dilemmas for anyone wanting to understand recent developments in a way that may help to inform political practice. If we are interested in the
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explanation of continuity and change in the history of schooling, modern Marxism offers very powerful tools of analysis. Politically, however, this contribution is problematic: much of the knowledge has remained too abstract and too purely critical to help in the development of alternative practices. The problem is now to draw on these insights in a way that gives a central place to struggle and to a conscious willed politics, to disorganized and diffuse resistances, but also to more organized political forces with their own theories and strategies. More abstractly, the problem is to combine a concern with structural conditions, and the logic of process or function, with a concern with agency, will and active human energies. We do not attempt to solve this problem in this chapter (or this book), but it is worth presenting, in advance, some of the general arguments which underpin our more detailed historical accounts.21
Conditions, needs and requirements A useful starting point is to consider the uses made of notions like conditions, needs and requirements. They are often discussed in the context of the problem of reproduction, or of the way in which societies, particular social relations or institutions are perpetuated or maintained. This form of analysis is not necessarily conservative (as in structuralfunctionalism) or pessimistic (as in much Marxist theory). It allows us to identify certain structural features or mechanisms (in capitalism the subordination of the labourer to the capitalist) and therefore to envisage how such a society might be transformed. The argument takes this form: ‘if this condition and that condition continue to be met, the society will remain a capitalist one; if this set of relations is no longer sustained, then some of the conditions of transition are present’. This is a common way of arguing in Marx’s Capital.22 Capitalism requires fresh supplies of labourers, appropriately skilled and willing to labour. The reproduction of the working class implies not only biological procreation (about the conditions of which Marx has very little to say), but also ‘the transmission and accumulation of skills from one generation to another’.23 It involves the reproduction of a whole class of wage labourers and a particular social relation between labourer and capitalist which Marx calls ‘the capital-relation itself ’.24 This very abstract, simplified discussion of what Marx calls ‘simple reproduction’ is helpful for more concrete analysis. It draws attention to one set of connections that link educational arrangements to the conditions of capitalist production. It shows us that capital, or more correctly, different capitals, have stakes in the cultural forms in which labour is reproduced. Historically we find an almost continuous concern, especially in debates about schooling, with the quantity and quality of labour power. There is a recurrent image of the perfect worker, from the self-respecting ‘mechanic’ of the mid nineteenth century, through the militaristically marshalled mass workers of the 1890s or the upskilled comprehensively educated school leavers of the 1960s, to the modern subjects of the Manpower Services Commission complete with ‘employability’ and ‘social and life skills’.25 However we cannot go on to construct a whole account of the development of schooling from these very slender materials. This is clear from a second type of discussion of conditions in Capital, which takes the form of ‘historical sketches’. The objects here are not the logical conditions of capital accumulation, but the detailed circumstances in which these needs were met, or transformed. Marx’s account of ‘the so-called primitive accumulation’ traces how the conditions for early capitalist development were established through bitter and prolonged social struggles over the concentration of capital and the expropriation of
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small independent producers. His account of the Factory Acts and the limitation of the length of the working day shows how popular struggles actually modified the way in which capital employed labour, giving rise to new requirements and needs.27 These two forms of analysis – the logical and the historical – are distinct but interdependent: the first gives us knowledge about what is at issue if capitalism is to survive or develop; the second gives us an account of how certain outcomes actually occurred. Our point here is to indicate some pitfalls in arguments about requirements which are not always avoided in the theoretical writing on education. The chief danger is to move imperceptibly from one form of analysis to the other, without fully marking the difference: from conditions to outcomes, from theory to history. Two main transformations may then occur. First, it is assumed that conditions are continuously met and that the ‘system’ reproduces itself in the same old forms. ‘Conditions’, in other words, cease to be conditional: they become functional necessities. The sense that their realization depends on the outcome of struggles, which include but are not limited to forms of willed and conscious politics, may be altogether lost. Second, there is too swift a move from simple description, theory, or abstraction to the full account of complex, concrete historical events and determinations. The relations described in a logical, simplified and schematic way are held to work, just like that in the historical sequences, uncomplicated by further relations and determinations, many not yet grasped theoretically. Theory is realized in history without additions to and transformations of the categories. This tendency, which we would call in a general way ‘functionalist’, involves a drastic simplification of history. It also tends to make historical social relations more or less self-reproducing, eternal and immune to collective human control. According to Marxist accounts, the system which is reproduced is fundamentally unfair and contradictory – whereas in structural-functionalist sociology or pluralist political science, the system is basically liberal, progressive and easily reformed. But as critics have often pointed out, particular forms of functionalism are indeed common to both traditions, or to tendencies within them.28 One corrective to all this is to write and think more ‘historically’. By historically, we do not merely mean in a way that is concerned with the past, though this longer historical reach is important. We refer to two main features of the best historical work: first, a concern with close and detailed description and analysis, firmly set in time and place and, second, a preoccupation with continuity and especially with change, with crisis and with transformations. There is, in our view, a close association between historical understanding in this sense and a hopeful, progressive, politics. Historical work should not however be thought of as antithetical to theory.29 All historical accounts have premises of their own about the nature of knowledge and about the general characteristics of societies or of social relations. It is equally important to close the gap between theory and history from the other, theoretical, side: to make theories more complex as well as histories more theoretical. The more subtle and more complex our general thinking becomes, the better we are able to make sense of the confusion and muddle of everyday life and immediate appearances. In the context of this book, we aim for a complex Marxism, modified by what can be learned from other traditions and from the theorization of further contingencies. This means, among other things, that it is useful to think about determinations on or within ‘education’ aside from capital’s requirements for self-reproduction. Only when we have done this can we return to ‘capital’s needs’ with a more developed sense of their conditionality and their dependence on struggle. In the rest of this chapter, we try to make explicit our view of these other determinations on schooling’s outcomes, some of which can be considered within the terms of a Marxist
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tradition, others of which require theoretical innovations. Our account here is bound to be somewhat truncated because our priority is to deliver a critical history. But there are four main areas of elaboration: 1 2 3
4
A more complex view of capital’s needs and strategies. A view of the place of schools in society which stresses the relations of the family to the school and the centrality, in schooling, of age and gender relations. A drawing out of the implications of the structural location of school for the popular politics of schooling, especially the political importance of representations of parenthood and the centrality of cultural and ideological processes. The dependence of educational politics on the conditions of formal politics more generally.
A more complex view of requirements In any specific historical situation industry’s needs for labour power are themselves extremely complex: these are not so much a question of the ‘requirements of capital’ as the needs of different, coexisting capitals. A different ‘educational’ logic attaches to different forms of capitalist business, depending on technical organization and the hierarchies of labour. Labour-intensive industries, employing large numbers of routine labourers, have different needs to those of highly automated technically sophisticated industries. Both forms, however, may be served by the same set of institutions. There is therefore a problem, of satisfying or approximating to different demands, which is resolved only by political means. State agencies, where these conflicts are condensed, become a site of struggles between different sections of capital. Demands in relation to labour power are never simply a matter of skill or technique. Recent analyses, including those developed later in this book, stress the subjective aspects of the preparation of labour power, the ‘need’ to win the consent of the human bearers of labour power to tasks which rob them of control over their labour, over their life activity itself.30 If schooling is to contribute to reproducing the hierarchies of control, it faces acutely contradictory demands: to develop in some the desire to manage the labour of others, in others a limited technical mastery and, for the great majority of young people, to ease the transition towards essentially subordinate positions in the hierarchies of labour. Capital’s needs moreover are not adequately grasped from this viewpoint alone, the viewpoint of labour and production. Capital also has requirements in relation to consumption: expanded consumption involves the creation of new needs, new pleasures, new desires, If schools ‘produce’ labourers, do they not ‘produce’ consumers too?31 A similar argument applies to the conditions of the production of fresh labourers and consumers, to biological procreation, to sex–gender relations and to particular forms of the family. As we shall be arguing, the significance of gender relations in education is by no means exhausted by their intersections with capital’s requirements, but the connections are, nonetheless, very close. Since at least the late nineteenth century, the figure of the perfect worker (usually male) has been accompanied by the figure of the perfect reproducer of labour power, the ‘mother’ as constructed by discourses about ‘population’ or ‘national efficiency’. In the era of mass consumption, women have also acquired a key significance as buyers and consumers, while capital’s labour forces have been deeply structured by sexual divisions especially as more women have entered waged work since the war.32 Again, in
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concrete analyses, the picture is extremely complex, but capitals certainly have a stake in the forms of sex–gender relations and therefore have ‘needs’ in relation to them too. There are two further sets of relations to be considered. We have assumed so far that what capitals ‘need’, schools and colleges can indeed deliver. It will be one of the themes of this book that, especially in the 1960s, the tightness of this relation was enormously exaggerated. Schools are very specific kinds of institutions, capable only of very specific effects. They cannot, for instance, ‘reproduce the relations of production’.33 Schools do not themselves create the complex structures of labour and management, or the social places of shopkeeper and technician, mother and father. These are reproduced in other social sites in quite other processes.34 The characteristic contribution of school systems is to ‘prepare’ persons to occupy these places, but even this ‘function’ has to be understood complexly. As we shall see, much more is involved in schooling than that. Beyond a certain point, the language of requirements and needs is itself likely to mislead. If we view the matter from the standpoint of an agent of capital, we will find different possible strategies for accumulation rather than singular, inflexible requirements. Some of these may involve educational solutions; but most will not. Some possible solutions, ideal perhaps from the perspective of production requirements, will be limited or blocked by the need to attend to other considerations, notably the resistance of workers, or consumers, or conservative family forms. Historically, capitalism has always attempted to remove inhibitions to its self-expansion, but finds limits to it both in those social spaces it has not yet fully transformed and in those groups whom it dispossesses and threatens to throw hither and thither in conformity with its needs. Our ideal capitalist agent (nowadays a panel of experts perhaps) must attend to all these features and contradictions, but we should not assume that a perfect knowledge of them is possessed. Some solutions, which are possible structurally, may not yet have entered the conscious knowledge of the panel, nor of the highpowered think-tank that advises government ministers planning for a higher rate of growth. Experts are often simply wrong. It is, however, in the course of such calculations that a particular regime of needs is defined. It becomes part of a conscious strategy for expansion or survival and may be pursued and argued for in appropriate political forms. This may be clearer if we return to our historical cases of the perfect worker and the perfect mother. These historical constructs have always been accompanied by others which reveal the presence in workers, in parents and in children of qualities quite the reverse of those required. The distance between ideal and reality is testimony to capital’s ‘need’ to put up with adverse conditions, to adapt around them, to find another route to expansion. In this context, the definition of ‘need’ belongs also to political processes, designed to convince fellow managers, or politicians, or populace that desirable outcomes really are absolute necessities. All this is not to abandon a more careful analysis of conditions which may show, precisely, the limits of adaptability – but it is a major theoretical and political error to give to every feature of society that seems favourable to a capitalist future the status of a necessary condition. One effect of this ascription is to deny the possibility of major structural change and to abandon what, for socialism and feminism alike, is an important ground of argument: that current problems can be solved only if certain fundamental conditions are transformed. We may say that although schools do not simply function for capitals, and could never do so without contradictions, capitals certainly have stakes in schooling. How real these stakes become, how tightly schools are reduced to their training functions, how far education becomes capitalist schooling depends on the strength of resistances and the resultant balances of forces. It is to these non-capitalist or popular elements in schooling that we must now turn.
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Schooling in society Just as historical accounts depend upon theoretical positions (which should be openly argued), so more abstract thinking always refers to historical situations (of which theory should always be conscious). In what follows we assume broadly ‘modern’ conditions – for Britain mainly post-Second World War, except where we specifically refer to earlier periods. We assume a developed system of state schooling at primary, secondary and tertiary levels, with universal (but unequal) access to the first two. We assume compulsion to attend school and a developed ‘democratic’ educational climate in which access to schooling is seen as a universal right of citizenship. We assume a formally democratic political system with its own developed relations of power and legitimation. We also assume the massive post-war expansion of the means of public communication as an organic part of broader political processes. We assume, finally, the characteristic modern separation, in terms of geographical place and dominant social relations, of the social sites of the family, the school and waged labour. (‘Site’ indicates a particular social space but also has useful connotations of institutional or material hardness – literally ‘the school down the road’. The play on building [as in ‘building site’] is also intended: sites have always been constructed, always have a history, involving destruction and renovation. They are also sites of particular kinds of labour. Sites may be analysed in their relations to economic activity – hence the sites of production or consumption or reproduction – but may also be defined by legal and other regulative practices. We find this notion useful – if still underdeveloped and imprecise. When we refer to schools as sites we want to draw attention to all these features. Central to the question of the place of schooling in society, then, is its relation to other social sites from which, historically, it has already been distinguished.)35 By making these assumptions we do not wish to imply that what has occurred historically is natural, necessary or desirable. One of our recurrent arguments will be that it is necessary to question separations such as these, in thought and practice, in order to act constructively for better educational (in the broader sense) solutions. This will relate closely to our criticism of dominant left strategies in education which, initially for good reasons, have deepened these divisions so that they have come to tyrannize over us. The equation of schooling with education, and even with knowledge as such, is a case in point. Another is the tendency to believe, on the basis of the very existence of ‘the education system’, that education is a matter which concerns mainly teachers, children and adolescents and concerns other adults only in their capacities as parents. As we shall see, there have been historical alternatives to these ways of thinking which it is important to recover. We may start from the recognition that the modern school faces two ways: towards wage labour and the tasks of housewife and mother on the one side, and towards the child’s family of origin on the other. We have seen that capitals have a stake, particularly, in the relation of school to wage labour. There are popular interests too in this relation, but as with all popular interests in education, they usually find expression in a highly mediated or indirect form. Direct popular organization around the school–work relationship has, historically, been quite rare and, in this significant absence, attention to the school–work relation tends to mean attention to the needs of capital and of organized bureaucracies in the professions and in the state. Much more commonly, popular interests have been expressed in relation to the family, and particularly through the crucial figure of ‘the parent’. It is for this reason that we wish to stress the importance of the family in the school–family–production complex. As we suggested earlier, social sites may be distinguished in part by the dominant social relations to be found there. These differences are never exclusive and, in historical analysis,
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social relations of different kinds are hard to disentangle especially in their combined effects. Nonetheless, it is useful to think of ‘the factory’ (in shorthand) as the main site of the reproduction of class relations, and the family as strongly organized around relations of gender, sexuality and age. By ‘gender’ we mean the socially constructed forms of masculinity and femininity. By ‘sexuality’ we mean the bodily capacities of males and females for sexual pleasure and for procreation as these too are shaped by social relations and by culture. By age we refer mainly to child–adult relations, which, though they have a physiological aspect, have also been historically very varied. The child–adult difference, for example, has been more or less accentuated, or defined in different ways. The main historical form of both sex–gender and child–adult relations has been patriarchal. The forms of patriarchy have differed historically and, within the same society, by class, status and ethnic group. They are continually modified, even in the intimacy of ‘the couple’, by what an older common sense used to call ‘the battle of the sexes’. There are common elements across these diverse situations, however, which warrant the (sparing) use of a single general category – ‘patriarchy’. Complexly different arrangements have produced similar results: the dominance of the husband–father–male and, more specifically, his control of the labour, the means of subsistence, the procreative capacity and the sexuality of other members of the family–household. These are certainly some of the main structural supports of the persistent historical fact of the subordination of women.36 It is important that we are not misunderstood at this point. We are not saying that relations of class have no influence on the forms of familial organization (or, for that matter, that patriarchy has no effects on women’s waged labour!). Gender is intimately connected with class. Gender differences, indeed, are partly constructed in relation to the class organization of economic life. The salience of waged labour for the construction of working-class masculinity and the salience of ‘work’ (or its refusal) for all men is a case in point. Rather we want to assert the absolute centrality of patriarchal relations for the family and to insist that this accentuating of gender and age has effects in other social sites.37 The family is not, therefore, a merely dependent institution, with no determinacy of its own. It is not merely transformed by capitalism and by the development of schooling: it, or its salient relations, also contribute to the complex of determinations on schooling in absolutely central ways. Indeed, it has systematically shaped the very conception of ‘education’ itself. We can now look at this from the vantage point of the history of schooling and the modern character of the school. Historically, a useful illustration is compulsory attendance. Compulsory attendance, generally enforced in Britain between the 1870s and 1900s, was certainly a breach of the father’s right to dispose of the labour of his children. It also radically reorganized the family economy, especially of the poor. But the authority of the modern school was also founded upon the father’s authority. The first official image of the professional schoolteacher was the substitute parent;38 even now the authority of the school over the child is exercised in loco parentis.39 The actual practice of enforcement, in past and present, has also been deeply influenced by the different familial roles of boys and girls, not only by official definitions, but also by a popular common sense.40 Similarly, schools now take something of their character from each adjacent site. On their homely side, they are places for the care of children and the development of aptitudes and sociality. This involves practices that are thought appropriate for women and are, in fact, commonly performed by them. Nursery, infant and junior schools are especially appropriate foci for the development of child-centred and humanistic educational ideas which have, as Bernstein has suggested, a definite relation to the family life of sections of the professional middle class. Age and sex–gender relations organize schools, including secondary schools,
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in almost every aspect of their operation, shaping the school experience quite as powerfully as relations of class. Working-class girls are bound into a particularly tight circle here: from dependent, but often ‘responsible’ positions in their family of origin, by way of a characteristically feminine path through school, to a destiny that is usually thought of in primarily gendered terms as ‘girlfriend’, ‘housewife’ and ‘mother’.41 Relations of age are equally important in structuring the experience of school. They are intimately involved, for instance, in the way education prepares a future work force. We have already argued against an abstract functionalism here, but school is certainly one site, perhaps the most important one, where young people acquire an orientation towards places in the adult world. These subjective orientations are marked out by examination results and certificates which become signs for employers. There is a growing body of research which argues that the subjective identifications of young people constitute the decisive moment of preparation for different forms of labour. Even resistance in school, for boys and girls alike, takes the form of the assertion of adulthood.42
Political implications of the structural location of school The politics of schooling are deeply influenced by the family–school connection, and, more specifically, by the social construction of childhood as a stage of dependence on adults and by that semi-possession of a child which is parenthood. The salience of child–adult relations means that there are always two levels of struggles in relation to schooling: there are struggles within the schools, in which children and teachers are the most active participants, and there are struggles over schooling from which children and adolescents are excluded and in which the figure of the parent carries the full weight of popular interests. It is parents who are directly addressed in debates about schooling; it is their consent, on behalf of ‘their’ children, which is won or lost. There is, however, nothing self-evident about the character and content of parental interests in education. Versions of parenthood differ greatly. Parents may be addressed, as in discussions of ‘parental choice’, as individuals responsible for their children. But they may also appear as a group with a larger social responsibility for ‘our’ children, even for all the children. In the 1940s, for example, parents were addressed as active, participating citizens, contributing not just to their own child’s welfare, but the shape and character of the system of schooling as a whole.43 The content of parental wishes may also differ radically. One common polarity, for example, is that between humanistic views of education (wanting an all-round development of faculties) and a stress on future occupation (wanting an appropriate training). Similarly, the definition of parental interests may take an oppositional and even a socialist form, or be more or less in conformity with capitalist requirements. The construction of parenthood will be a recurrent preoccupation throughout this book, but it is a specific instance of a more general problem: the relation between popular knowledge and experience on the one hand, and the representation of educational issues in public debates on the other.
Culture, ideology and the field of public representations We will be centrally concerned, in this book, with these three key terms and with the processes they designate. By culture we understand the shared principles of life, characteristic of particular classes, groups or social milieux. Cultures are produced as groups make sense of
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their social existence in the course of everyday experience. Culture is intimate, therefore, with the world of practical action. It suffices, for most of the time, for managing everyday life. Since, however, this everyday world is itself problematic, culture must perforce take complex and heterogeneous forms, ‘not at all free from contradictions’.44 This usage is close to those of the founding texts of ‘cultural studies’ and much recent social history.45 It is also similar to what Antonio Gramsci, the theorist and leader of Italian communism in the 1920s and 1930s, called ‘common sense’ – ‘the “spontaneous philosophy” which is proper to everyone’. Under common sense Gramsci included ‘language itself ’ as ‘a totality of determined notions and concepts’, popular religion and ‘the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of “folklore” ’.46 By representations we understand conceptions of the world which in a different moment of their circulation take on a different form.47 Ideas and feelings may be distanced from immediate practical activity. They may appear, for example, in popular television programmes or as academic books. This depends in part on a social division: the division of mental and manual labour, and the emergence of what Marx called ‘the thinkers of the class’, ‘active, conceptive ideologists’ and ‘producers of ideas’: in other words, ‘intellectuals’ of different kinds.48 Gramsci makes a similar point when he distinguishes ‘common sense’ and ‘philosophy’, associating the latter with coherent and developed intellectual forms, though for Gramsci the term ‘intellectual’ is much wider than its ordinary English usage.49 In modern societies this division of labour has acquired very elaborate forms: whole sets of institutions are organized around the production of ideas, especially education systems and the modern media. If we are interested in the ways in which consciousness is formed, we cannot stop at the level of lived beliefs. Beliefs, conceptions and feelings are not only carried in the minds of human subjects; they are also written down, communicated, ‘put into circulation’, inscribed in physical objects, reproduced in institutions and rituals and embodied in all kinds of codes. They can be studied in ‘texts’ of all kinds; not only books, pamphlets or newspapers, but also visual images and aural media. Indeed, there is hardly a human product that cannot be analysed in this way since all have a symbolic or communicative value whatever else they are useful for.50 Certain forms of representation are closely associated with formal politics and ‘public life’. This is especially the case with the press and television. It is this sphere, the sphere of ‘public opinion’, which we call the field of public representations. It has its own characteristic practices and its own patterns of inclusion and exclusion. Those who are involved in practical activity may find their own activity re-presented back to them by the media, not simply inverted or reflected as in a mirror, but always systematically transformed according to the practices of the medium itself. By ideology we refer to particular forms of such transformations. Ideas are properly called ideological when they can be shown to conceal or to resolve in an idealistic or imaginary way the problematic character of social life. In the process of presenting a particular social order as harmonious, natural or in need of rescue from subversion or decay, ideological accounts serve also to secure the position of dominant social groups. Ideology is necessarily, in this view, a critical concept with a particular and limited scope of application.51 In this book, we are especially interested in the ideological aspects of the field of public representations about ‘education’. In the 1970s, as recurrently before, schools figured very largely in public debates – as news in the media, as issues in party politics. The actual workings of the schools (including the cultures of schooling) were represented to teachers and pupils, to industrialists, to ‘parents’
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and to the ‘public’. We shall be looking at this process in more detail in Chapter 10, but we should note, in advance, two main features. First, public representations of schools are constructed at some distance from the processes they are meant to describe. The media fix on a particular example. They rip it from its concrete context. They connect it, as a signal instance, to a whole field of pre-formed arguments. It becomes a cause célèbre or further evidence of a generalized malaise. Such representations are always highly constructed and may be heavily ideological. Yet, our second main point is that we have to take seriously the effects of such representations and their attendant ideologies. They are intimately linked to political processes and ultimately to policy. The history of the last fifteen to twenty years is an example of this: over this period the whole field of debate about education has been transformed and this has been accompanied by an equally dramatic shift in the direction of state policy. Charting this history, we have looked closely at public discourses of all kinds: political programmes and debates (‘great’ and puny), media representations and the professional knowledges of the field, especially the sociology and economics of education. The nature of this work produces a characteristic temptation: to infer the state of popular opinion about schooling from the field of public representations. There are several reasons, however, why this is a completely illegitimate procedure. First, we know enough now about processes of cultural struggle and reproduction to say that all models which assume a system of perfect communication or transmission are hopelessly crude. Work on education processes, for example, the paradigmatic case of the transmission model, shows that all pedagogies involve transformations, blockings, inversions and complex reproductions, never simple teaching and learning.52 We can now see that cultural moments which were previously thought of as passive, including the stereotypical case of ‘watching television’, involve active appropriations and transformations of meaning. ‘Reading’ itself (which in this context includes listening and watching) is a process of cultural production, or the production of meanings. There is, perhaps, nothing particularly surprising in this discovery; if we think hard for five minutes about what happens in our heads when we (not some mythical passive other) read a book, the active character of reading can be swiftly recalled. Second, to infer popular knowledge from public representation, as if the first were an effect of the second, is to neglect the possibility that the causal sequence may run the other way. The media themselves may (and in fact commonly do) appropriate elements of common sense understandings, transform them and offer them back to ‘the public’ in this different form. We have, in fact, to think of these transformations as part of a complex circuit running either way, not as a one-way sequence. Third, inferences of this kind take no account of the different social positions occupied by collective ‘audiences’. It is a feature of public representations that they conceal these differences, especially differences of class, gender and race. A good example is the figure of the parent itself as it appears in public discourses. It is a deeply ideological figure. It systematically conceals the different relations to schooling of middle-class and working-class parents.53 It disguises the very particular stake which mothers have in the education of their children, the way in which schooling regulates the mother’s own life at every turn. It homogenizes the ‘parental community’ in a way that is completely misleading. It also makes it difficult to think freshly and clearly about child–adult relations themselves, naturalizing the noncitizenship of the child and the exclusive public responsibility of the parent. After all, why should it mainly be parents who, on the popular side, have a right to a say in educational arrangements? Should not all citizens, irrespective of their familial status, have such a say?
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What appears as a ‘democratic’ image in education debates, is in fact a very restrictive one, which defines and regulates at the same time as it gives ‘rights’. One problem for an adequate popular politics is to break out of ‘parentdom’ or transform the category itself.
Education and formal politics We can look at popular interests in education from the point of their (more or less ideological) definition, but we can also consider their ‘representation’ in another but allied sense of this word: the extent to which they are expressed in formal political arrangements. It is useful to think of formal politics too as a social site with its own characteristic social organization. By formal politics we mean political arrangements in the narrow sense: the apparatuses of parliament, political parties, electoral procedures, voting and party-political combat. We can look at these political arrangements with two related questions in mind: the extent to which parties represent the range of relevant interests, and the extent to which the rules of formal politics exclude whole areas of legitimate struggle and define them as ‘non political’. Clearly, some relevant educational interests are not represented at all. Children and ‘young people’ are a very clear case. The political position of persons under 18 is still that of women before 1918. Other groups are formally represented (they have the vote) but not effectively. They are lumped in with other constituencies in a way that makes it impossible for their distinctive interests to be expressed. We have already noted the case of mothers, especially working-class mothers, but this argument would also apply to black people as a whole. Feminist and black organizations have started to raise such issues, but politics tends to be dominated by masculine and white middle-class definitions of political significance: by principles of policy and ‘great public issues’ rather than the daily grind.54 Historically, the Labour Party has played the most important role in representing popular educational interests. From its foundation to the end of the Second World War it formed part of a progressive educational alliance (discussed in Chapter 2), demanding the expansion of schooling. The Conservative Party was, by contrast, the party of educational reaction in this period.55 That these associations were a matter of history and contingency and not a matter of an inexorable class logic comes out very clearly from the post-war story. The erosion of the Labour Party’s popular base and the rise of an educational Toryism claiming popular support are among the organizing themes of this book. If we are thinking of the connection between political parties and popular interests (which parties also help to define), we need to consider and to qualify the general adjective ‘popular’. So far we have used this term mainly in opposition to others: to mean, in fact, ‘not directly related to the needs of capital’. But we have also suggested, in the discussion of parentdom, that unspecific terms like this may be very treacherous. Their advantage is that they allow us to include constituencies usually excluded from consideration altogether, not just ‘the working class’, but also black people, women in different classes and ethnic groups, children, ‘intermediate’ social groups (like teachers) and so on. There may also be a sense in which all these groups – ‘the people’ – do have certain interests in common against, say, large capital and the state bureaucracies. In what follows we use the term ‘popular’ to refer to such constituencies. We use the term ‘populist’ with its somewhat pejorative connotations to designate forms of politics which systematically disguise the complex and antagonistic formation of popular forces. For there are undoubtedly major differences of interest between these forces too; witness the way
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gender-based struggles out right through any popular alliance of this kind. In education differences of interest by class, race and gender are particularly important. Finally, in this section, we want to draw attention to the strategic location of certain social groups in the popular politics of education: narrowly, those who perform predominantly intellectual functions in the society, and, more broadly, groups we will refer to as the professional middle class. Intellectual functions (thinking about politics) are important in all political struggles. Education is peculiar, however, in actually being about the social constitution and distribution of intellectual functions: the production of ‘intellectuals’. Schooling is a particular form of such production and reinforces the strong division of labour between intellectuals and notintellectuals-at-all which is especially sharply accentuated in cultural life in Britain. Struggles over the education system are struggles over intellectual functions, monopolies, distribution, qualification and access, and also over the dominant forms of intellectualism itself.56 Teachers, especially where they are also active in trade unions and professional bodies, are obviously central to the popular politics of schooling, not least because they combine the two levels of struggle: struggles in and struggles over schools. Their relation to other popular constituencies, especially working-class parents, is peculiarly contradictory. But this goes for other professionals too, especially educational researchers and educational experts in universities – academics who make a profession of the study of pedagogy or curricula. This ‘educational interest’ belongs to a broader social milieu with two major characteristics: first, a relative distance from the management and control of economic activity, whether financial activity or productive industry; second, a high degree of dependence on personal skills which are closely associated with formal education and certification.57 Such groups have a particularly intimate stake in the education system, both in terms of their own employment (many are employees of the state if not of the education system) and in terms of family strategies for their own children. They are likely to be more knowledgeable than others about the internal working of schools and about the complexities of individual advancement by this route. They are likely to play a particularly important – and also highly ambiguous – role in educational politics as a whole.
Hegemony, settlement and crises We can now see something of the complexity of the determinations on educational policy. As we shall be arguing, throughout this chapter, but especially in relation to the 1970s, the needs of capitalist industry do exercise a major influence on the character and structure of the education system. This influence operates in a number of different ways: through the commitment of governments to secure national economic goals in capitalist terms, through the political pressures exercised by representatives of capitalist business, through the structural over-representation of dominant interests in the apparatuses of the state and, at a deeper level, through the life experience of parents, pupils and teachers whose educational expectations are necessarily shaped by the social relations in which they stand. These relations involve power and dependency. They confer unequal powers to achieve desires or satisfy needs: class over class, men over women, white over black, adult over child. These inequalities are condensed and reinforced in formal political processes and in the apparatuses of the state, but they have, as we shall see, a deep influence on the aspirations and subjectivities of those in dependent positions. The sheer solidity of capitalist social organization and of the structural subordination of women has itself a massive ‘educational’ influence.
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Human beings are implicated in these social relations, but actively; because the relations are unequal or asymmetrical, activity involves struggle. For this reason, the power of dominant interests is never secure; it always has to be won. Following Gramsci, we use the term ‘hegemony’ to sum up this process on a societal level.58 Hegemony involves securing both the conditions for future capitalist production and the consent of the subordinated population to the social and cultural implications of ‘progress’. It is exercised not only through law and coercion, but also through ‘educative’ processes in a larger sense, including schooling, the media and, centrally, political parties. It necessitates the building of alliances that may be active in promoting new solutions. Hegemony is not uniquely a product of ‘the state’ but involves the institutions of ‘civil society’ too. If hegemony refers to the overall relations of force in a society, we wish to use the term ‘educational settlement’ to refer to the balance of forces in and over schooling. Settlements entail, at this ‘regional’: rather than ‘global’ level, some more or less enduring set of solutions to capital’s educational needs, the putting together of a dominant alliance of forces, and a more widespread recruitment of popular support or inducement of popular indifference. Settlements are highly unstable and deeply contradictory arrangements which easily pass into crises. One way of understanding the history of educational policy is in terms of the succession of crises and settlements. In the post-war period, we identify four such phases: the educational settlement of 1944 and of the 1950s, with origins going back to the 1930s, and a generative moment in the war itself; the critique of this settlement, and especially of tripartitism that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the installation of educational expansion of an avowedly egalitarian kind in the 1960s; and the collapse of the 1960s’ settlement and of its associated alliance in the 1970s. One of the purposes of the later sections of this book will be to consider the forms of and the conditions of struggle over, the emergent educational settlement of the 1980s.
Notes and references 1 For more complete maps of theoretical tendencies in educational research see the long introductory chapter in J. Karabel and A. H. Halsey (eds.), Power and Ideology in Education (Oxford University Press 1977) and Stuart Hall, A Review of the Course, Open University Course E202, Unit 32 (Open University Press 1977). 2 For an interesting review from the standpoint of a more social history of education see Harold Silver, ‘Aspects of neglect: the strange case of Victorian popular education’, Oxford Review of Education, vol. 3, no. 1 (1977), pp. 57–69. But the situation has been changing very fast in the last few years. 3 We include here many texts on the history of social policy and ‘the rise of the welfare state’, studies of particular government departments, biographies of policy-making politicians or public servants and many more theoretical studies of ‘government’. An interesting example, germane to our themes, is I. G. K. Fenwick, The Comprehensive School 1944–1970: The Politics of Secondary School Reorganization (Methuen 1976). 4 ibid., p. 3. 5 See, for example, the stress on the evaluation of the roles of individual politician-authors in Gillian Sutherland, Policy-Making in Elementary Education 1870–1895 (Oxford University Press 1973), and in J. S. Hurt, Education in Evolution (Hart-Davis 1971). 6 Fenwick, The Comprehensive School, pp. 3–4. 7 It is important to stress this against the tendency to overrate the novelty of later analyses of ‘discourse’. 8 Especially interesting in relation to our own concerns are Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Allen Lane 1977); The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (Tavistock 1973); Madness and Civilisation (Tavistock 1971); I, Pierre Rivière . . . (Peregrine Books 1979); History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (Pantheon Books 1978).
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9 See, for example, the discussion of the educational technique of monitorialism and of military models of discipline in Discipline and Punish, pp. 135–69. Later in the same book, there is an interesting discussion of radical working-class attitudes to crime and of the inversions of dominant definitions that occur there. Even in these sections, however, Foucault’s account remains ambiguous. On the whole, we agree with Michael Ignatieff that Foucault’s conclusion appears to be that regulative sciences ‘exclusively define the modes of public perception’. Certainly Ignatieff ’s own account of the rise of the penitentiary lays much more stress on the determinacy of social struggles, including struggles within the prisons themselves. See Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (Macmillan 1979), especially p. 220. 10 For example, much of the discussion of Foucault’s ideas in the journals Ideology and Consciousness and M/F. On educational and allied themes, see especially Nikolas Rose, ‘The psychological complex: mental measurement and social administration’, Ideology and Consciousness, no. 5 (Spring 1979) and Karen Jones and Kevin Williamson, ‘The birth of the schoolroom’, ibid., no. 6 (Autumn 1979). More relevant to our period (and more aware of the limitations of the approach) is James Donald, ‘Green Paper: noise of crisis’, Screen Education, no. 30 (Spring 1979), pp. 13–49. This article also contains useful criticisms of our own earlier formulations (ibid., pp. 16–17). 11 For accounts of these traditions see Raphael Samuel, ‘British Marxist historians, 1880–1980: part one’, New Left Review, no. 120 (March-April 1980), pp. 21–96, and Richard Johnson, ‘Culture and the historians’, in John Clarke, Chas Critcher and Richard Johnson (eds.), Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (Hutchinson 1979), pp. 41–71. Recent developments may be followed especially in History Workshop Journal. 12 See especially E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Gollancz 1963) and the more political and polemical pieces recently issued as The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (Merlin Press 1978). The essay ‘The peculiarities of the English’ contains especially interesting passages in which Thompson’s general stress on popular struggle, worked through in great detail in The Making, is applied to other historical periods. 13 Brian Simon’s work in the history of education is important for combining a stress on ‘policy’ (including the high-political level) with a concern for the educational strategies of ‘the Labour movement’. Later we draw on Brian Simon, Education and the Labour Movement 1870–1920 (Lawrence & Wishart 1965) and The Politics of Educational Reform 1920–1940 (Lawrence & Wishart 1974). 14 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, in his Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New Left Books 1971). 15 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1976). 16 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. R. Nice (Sage 1977). See also the many other works on these themes from the Centre for European Sociology, ibid., pp. 237–41. 17 B. Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, vol. 3, rev. ed. (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1977). 18 Anne-Marie Wolpe, ‘Education and the sexual division of labour’, in Annette Kuhn and Anne-Marie Wolpe (eds.), Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1978); Eileen Byrne, Women and Education (Tavistock 1978); Rosemary Deem, Women and Schooling (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1978); Sue Sharpe, Just Like a Girl (Penguin 1976); and, as a useful review, Mica Nava, ‘Gender and education’, Feminist Review, no. 5, pp. 69–78. 19 Research on labour processes in Britain and America was greatly stimulated by the publication of Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (Monthly Review Press 1974). For the state, welfarism, etc. see N. Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (New Left Books 1975); J. Holloway and S. Picciotto (eds.), State and Capital (Edward Arnold 1978); Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (Tavistock 1977); Mary McIntosh, ‘The state and the oppression of women’ in Kuhn and Wolpe (eds.), Feminism and Materialism; Philip Corrigan (ed.), Capitalism, State Formation and Marxist Theory: Historical Investigations (Quartet 1980). This is only a small fraction of the relevant work: there is an excellent bibliography in Corrigan, State Formation. 20 Or, in subsequent self-criticisms, for example, Lenin and Philosophy, postscript to the essay on ideological state apparatuses; Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, vol. 3, p. 174; Herbert Gintis and Samuel Bowles, ‘Contradiction and reproduction in educational theory’, in R. Dale, G. Esland,
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R. Ferguson and M. MacDonald (eds.), Education and the State: Schooling and the National Interest (Open University Course Reader for E353, Society, Education and the State, Open University/Falmer Press 1981). Some parts of the arguments that follow are developed in more detail in Richard Johnson, Education and Popular Politics, Open University Unit, Course E353, Unit 1 (Open University Press 1981). The sections on Marx’s view of ‘conditions’ and on function and cause were written before we had read the excellent discussion in G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford University Press 1978). The simplest form of the argument is to be found in the chapter on ‘Simple reproduction’ in Capital, vol. 1 (Penguin 1976), pp. 711–24. It is useful in this edition to turn next to Appendix, ‘Results of the immediate process of production’, pp. 1060–5, but there is a sense in which the whole of Capital is an elaboration of the simple model of reproduction found in vol. 1, ch. 23. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 719. ibid., p. 724. For the 1960s’ images see Chapter 4; for the Manpower Services Commission see Chapter 11. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chs. 26–32. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 10 and ch. 15. For a particularly polemical version of this argument, by which ‘Althusserianism’ is identified with ‘bourgeois social science’, see Simon Clarke, ‘Althusserian Marxism’, in Simon Clarke et al., One-Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and the Politics of Culture (Allison & Busby 1980). For a more careful evaluation of the question of Marxist ‘functionalism’, see Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History. This has been one of the issues raised by Thompson’s ‘Poverty of theory’ and the debate on history and theory in History Workshop Journal. Our own position is similar to that developed very clearly in Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism (New Left Books 1980). See especially Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs (Saxon House 1977). There is an increasing recognition among Marxist and feminist writers of the importance of consumption as an arena of the creation and satisfaction of needs and therefore as an important site of struggles. In this, as is quite often the case, they lag behind more conservative social theorists and well behind the practical consciousness of businessmen and advertisers. Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and motherhood’, History Workshop Journal, no. 5 (Spring 1978), pp. 9–65; Lucy Bland et al., ‘Women “inside” and “outside” the relations of production’, in CCCS Women’s Studies Group, Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women’s Subordination (Hutchinson 1978). For an excellent discussion of one circuit of effects between capitalist forms of production, consumption and reproduction and specific forms of femininity, see Janice Winship, ‘A woman’s world: Woman – an ideology of femininity’, ibid., pp. 133–54. Compare the argument in Althusser, ‘Ideological state apparatuses’. In the case of ‘the capital-relation’ between labourer and employer, for example, in the actual circuit of production and consumption which reaffirms the labourer’s dependence on the wage and on employment. See Marx, Capital, vol. 1, pp. 161–4. For a more elaborate definition of particular sites see Gintis and Bowles, ‘Contradiction and reproduction’. Our formulations here owe much to positions developed within the Women’s Studies Group in CCCS, to the work of individual women in the Centre and to discussions in the Family–School Group. We see the family as the main site of the reproduction of existing forms of relations between the sexes, agreeing in this respect with the feminist materialism developed by Christine Delphy. But we also agree with those feminist and Marxist-feminist historians and theorists who argue that concrete forms of family relations are also constructed in relation to capitalist social organization and have differed significantly by class. Similarly, we agree with Delphy that the exploitation of women’s labour within the terms of the marriage contract is a key source of the subordination of women, but would add that accounts of patriarchy must also grasp the conditions and relations in which human life itself is reproduced. Christine Delphy, ‘The main enemy: a materialist analysis of women’s oppression’ (WRRC Publication 1977) and compare CCCS Women’s Studies Group, Women Take Issue, especially Rachel Harrison, ‘Shirley: relations of reproduction and the ideology of romance’, ibid., pp. 176–96.
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38 Richard Johnson, ‘Educational policy and social control in early Victorian England’, Past and Present, no.49 (November 1970), p. 112. 39 For a full discussion of this relation see Jenny Shaw, ‘In loco parentis: a relationship between parent, state and child’, Journal of Moral Education, vol. 6, no.3 (1977), pp. 181–90. 40 Jenny Shaw, ‘School attendance – some notes on a further feature of sexual division’ (paper given at a Conference on Patriarchy, Capitalism and Educational Policy, Institute of Education, University of London 1978). We are grateful to the author for making available a copy of this paper. 41 For chartings of this circle, see Sue Sharpe, Just Like a Girl; Angela McRobbie, ‘Working class girls and the culture of femininity’ and Dorothy Hobson, ‘Housewives: isolation as oppression’, both in CCCS Women’s Studies Group, Women Take Issue. 42 See especially Paul Willis, Learning to Labour and Angela McRobbie, ‘Working class girls’. 43 For the best example of this form of radical populist address in the 1940s, see the discussion of G. C. T. Giles, Chapter 4. 44 Alfred Schutz, ‘The stranger – an essay in social psychology’ in Collected Papers of Alfred Schutz, vol. 2 (Martinus Nijhoff 1971), p. 93. There are striking similarities between Schutz’s description of common sense and that of Gramsci. 45 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (Penguin 1961); Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Penguin 1958); Thompson, The Making. 46 Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (eds.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Lawrence & Wishart 1971), p. 323. 47 In previous versions of this argument, the distinction we make here between representations and culture was identified with the distinction ideology and culture. This involves a very expanded use of the term ‘ideology’ to include all more formal discourses and systems of representation. It also implies that there is nothing ‘ideological’ in ‘common sense’. In this version, we prefer a more limited and specific definition of the ideological (see page 272, note 51), a term which may apply both to elements in the field of public representations and to practical common sense views. See also the discussion of public opinion and popular knowledge pp. 208–9. Compare Richard Johnson, ‘Cultural studies and educational practice’, Screen Education, no. 34 (Spring 1980), pp. 5–16. 48 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (Lawrence & Wishart 1970), p. 65. 49 This is because Gramsci makes a distinction between intellectual activity (which all share in) and intellectual functions (which only some perform under a specific social organization). Intellectual functions are also thought of, however, in an expanded way – not as the production of knowledge or ideas alone, but as directing activity: hence industrial managers are ‘organic intellectuals’ for capital (Prison Notebooks, pp. 5–14). 50 Such analyses, however, do not exhaust the significance of productive activities which, from another point of view, may transform elements of nature, sustain material life, reproduce or modify social relations, etc., etc. The omnipresence of signifying activity is not a warrant for the reduction of all social activity to discourse, signification or language. 51 This view is argued (against more expanded uses following Althusser) in Jorge Larrain, The Concept of Ideology (Hutchinson 1979). We are also grateful for discussions with the author which have helped greatly to clarify our own thinking. As Larrain puts it: ‘For ideology to be present, the two conditions which Marx laid down should be satisfied: the objective concealment of contradictions, and the interests of the dominant class. Ideology is not a simple error. It is a particular kind [our emphasis] of distortion, dependent upon real contradictions, which demand their solution in practice before it can be overcome’ (ibid., p. 210). 52 See especially the discussion of teaching paradigms in Willis, Learning to Labour, pp. 62–85. 53 This difference of class ‘orientation’ to schooling is a persistent finding of educational research over several decades. For the finding (and the absence of adequate explanations) see Chapter 6. 54 This applies especially to social democratic politics in its most middle-class forms. See the analysis of class-based styles in local Labour politics in B. Hindess, The Decline of Working Class Politics (MacGibbon & Kee 1971). 55 See pp. 41–2. 56 This is not to say that it is only in ‘education’ (that is, in systems of schooling) that intellectual capacities are developed. In relation to working-class needs, it may well be the case that they are
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best developed in what we later call ‘substitutional’ activity which may take a counter-educational form, opposed to the dominant schooling system. 57 For valuable discussions of the particular position of such groups in relation to the education system see Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Cultural reproduction and social reproduction’ in R. Brown (ed.), Knowledge, Education and Social Change (Tavistock 1973); Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (New Left Books 1975), part 3; Magali Larson, The Rise of Professionalism (University of California Press 1977). 58 Hoare and Nowell-Smith (eds.), Prison Notebooks, passim, but especially pp. 242–76.
46 The Adult Literacy Campaign Politics and practices Mariette Clare
Abbreviations used: AAE ALBSU ALRA ALU ATTI BAS LEA MSC NARE NIAE OU TES UKRA VWB WEA
Association for Adult Education Adult Literacy and Basic Skills unit Adult Literacy and Resource Agency Adult Literacy Unit Association of Teachers in Technical Institutes British Association of Settlements Local Education Authority Manpower Services Commission National Association for Remedial Education National Institute for Adult Education Open University Times Educational Supplement United Kingdom Reading Association Voluntary Workers Bureau Workers Educational Association
Introduction: Adult literacy 1972–1980 This paper was first written nearly three years ago, in the Spring of 1982. It was basically an attempt to analyse my personal experience as a literacy worker and to set the conflicts and quandaries involved in a wider context. It is, therefore, a specific story, set in a particular place and time. Nevertheless, the issues which I faced, both at the time, and in subsequently writing about it, have a far wider pertinence and show no signs of going away. They include the relationships of power that exist in the possession of skills and knowledge, and the conditions under which people are allowed to learn; the place of volunteer work and its relationship to such categories as professionalism and trades unionism, especially in the current context of high unemployment, state cut-backs, and a conservative version of selfhelp; and finally, the concept of literacy itself, with its extension into basic life-skills and such fields as computer skills, and its origins in the liberal philosophies of citizenship and individual rights. I am able to offer little in the way of final resolutions to the contradictions I see. What I hope this paper can do is to lay out the possibilities of transformation and resistance that existed in the Leicestershire Adult Literacy Service at one particular time. There were real gains, although they have constantly to be resecured. I have tried to show what powerful
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issues of class and gender were at stake, what gains seemed possible and for whom, and the limitations that were in operation. In 1972 when the Adult Literacy Campaign began to gather momentum it was not selfevidently a good time to launch a new educational initiative. Governmental spending cuts were already threatening. Hostility to schools and ‘trendy’ teachers was already being articulated in the popular press. The first half of this paper is therefore an attempt to understand the ways of mobilising public opinion that were available to the Campaign. It takes a close look at exactly which formulations were used, and at how they worked in bringing effective political pressure to bear on the government. On the surface, the case put forward for an Adult Literacy Service seemed drawn from an already existing repertoire of arguments: the inadequacies of schools which produced adult illiterates, the needs of industry for a literate work-force, the rescue of individuals from Sir Keith Joseph’s ‘cycle of deprivation’, the use of voluntary labour to fill in gaps in social provieion. The support of the BBC added further to the pressure on the government, giving the whole campaign high visibility and offering pedagogical, administrative and financial backing which it was inexpedient for any government to be seen to disregard. The scene seemed in many ways to be set for ‘the revival of soup-kitchen policies’. (Rogers and Groombridge, 1976, p. 28). However, when I began to work professionally for the Adult Literacy Service in Leicestershire in 1976, I did not find myself in a conservatively minded organisation which regarded its students as personally deficient. The second half of the paper, therefore, analyses the other determining factors which contributed to the radicalisation of this particular group of literacy workers – partial and temporary though it was. This section also examines the local workers’ relationship to the National Campaign and the ways in which the philosophy expressed there proved subject to re-inflection towards more radical meanings. It was the potential contradictions both at the ideological level and at the level of the professional workers’ ambiguous social relationships, with students, voluntary tutors and other professionals, that created the space for educational practices which went beyond the orthodox notion of literacy as the transmission of a neutral skill.
Part I: The national campaign The educational consensus The Adult Literacy Campaign emerged in the first half of the 1970s, an unlikely time for any new educational venture to meet with success. What follows is a rather rough account of the campaign’s historical location, which is included to indicate how it was able to re-work pre-existing concepts and attitudes. The 1970s saw the rupture of the post-war consensus. The dominant assumptions of the 1950s and 1960s were that, through affluence, the UK was becoming a classless society; that the interests of labour and capital were identical, and this was often constructed in terms of the ‘national interest’; that the few remaining social problems could be taken care of through an expanding economy; that the most fundamental political issue at stake was who could best manage the ‘mixed economy’. It was also for many a time of real improvement in private standards of living. This helped to make the given axioms of public discussion even more plausible and further hindered any recognition of fundamental conflicts. The educational world had its own version of these constructs1 the interests of the individual in developing his (rarely her) potential were the same as those of industry, which, because of
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technological ‘progress’ needed a more highly skilled workforce; the glaringly different educational outcomes between working- and middle-class children, to say nothing (as was the custom) of gender differences, were construed as a waste of the nation’s talent; equality of opportunity was the watch-word. The problem of the off-spring of working-class families who resolutely failed to appreciate the rewards, in all senses, of formal education, was solved through notions of ‘relevance’ in the curriculum (the Newsom Report). There were also the problems of the inner city schools. These contradictions, however, were held at bay by the messianic belief that education could in itself actually eradicate social injustice. Liberal, progressive and egalitarian ideas won some ground for themselves in educational publications, and together with comprehensive schools, were to be the route by which all these conflicting ideals were to be realised. The politicisation of the debate Quite apart from these inherent contradictions, what must also be recognised is the gap which existed between the rhetoric of the educational media (e.g. the TES, the Schools Council, professional journals and debates) and actual practices within schools. The progressive forms of practice as advocated, and sometimes opposed, in the professional literature were perhaps never as dominant as the writers of the Black Papers were later to claim. The expectations of social transformation were either not aroused in pupils, parents and employers (the Newson Report in particular continued to assign the education of young women to the areas of domestic and personal interests) or, where awakened, not necessarily fulfilled, for example, the new technologies failed to deliver their promise of wider job opportunities and more human satisfaction. Both as a means of facilitating social mobility and, more radically, as a means of eradicating inequality, education was proving less than satisfactory. Thus, when the social domocratic consensus began to falter, these faults were already there to be opened up by the critics of the Right and Left alike. The Black Paper writers were to launch their attack on indiscipline as the cause of the nation’s economic and social ills, through a re-working of notions of old-fashioned standards. ‘De-schoolers’, such as Illich and Holt and radical critics such as Bowles and Gintis, and more ambiguously, Bernstein, attacked education on the more realistic ground that it served to reproduce the relations of the capitalist mode of production. The rediscovery of poverty Into this particular set of circumstances, one other significant factor entered in the late 1960s: the rediscovery of poverty, not least through a series of government commissions of enquiry (Milner and Holland, Ingleby, Plowden, Seebohm, Skeffington). Associated with these were the theories of ‘deprivation’ and ‘disadvantage’2 which percolated through to the field of adult education. Of particular influence was Peter Clyne’s book, The Disadvantaged Adult, 1972, written under the supervision of Professor H.A. Jones of the NIAE (National Institute of Adult Education). The thrust of his argument was to identify adult education with social and community work in the cause of social justice; he writes of that section of the adult population which, through no fault of its own, has failed to understand, maintain contact with, or become involved in, the rapidly changing technological society which for many spells affluence and success. The gradual evolution of Western society more often than not drives the weak and strong in opposite directions.
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Thus, one realises the urgency of providing educational and social amenities in poor areas inhabited by disadvantaged people, whose disadvantages and degradation will increase if left unattended. The trend towards a social environment in which the rich become richer and the poor become poorer, however we wish to define rich and poor, is almost inevitable without the active intervention of adult education, welfare and community work agencies. p. 106 This quotation contains key assumptions about the nature of a ‘rapidly changing technological society’ and the role education could or should play within it. Since the 1940s educational debate has drawn on the linked concepts of science and democracy.3 It was assumed that the developments of science, and the changing technologies which were derived from them, would automatically result both in more wealth and in the need for a more highly skilled work-force. Education was thus needed to supply industry with the appropriately trained work-force, and the new wealth created through the new technologies would repay the capital investment in more education. Technology was represented as a neutral form of knowledge, free from any determining conditions of existence within a profit-orientated industrial system. The earlier common-sense assumption that ‘higher’ technology also meant a more highly skilled labour force has now been critically challenged, for although, as research such as Braverman’s Labour and Monoploy Capital (1974) has shown, certain new technical and design skills were needed, the majority of workers experienced a down-grading of necessary work skills and even redundancy. That the process is by now highly visible is suggested by this quotation from a staff member of a comprehensive school for 14–18 year olds, written after a week’s industrial experience: We saw computers controlling lathes to do jobs not just faster than skilled craftsmen, but to do jobs which human beings could not do at all (on a single machine) . . . . The New Technology seems to be carving a big hollow into the centre of industry! Bosworth Staff Bulletin: No. 551, 21/6/82 What the common-sense assumption also crucially concealed is the actual nature of the relations of production within which the expansion of the new technologies has taken place. There is no possibility of recognising, in this account, the difference in interests between the owners and developers of the new technological processes, who need to counteract the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the working population whose skills have traditionally provided them with a terrain on which to resist and to protect themselves. Clyne shares with this earlier version both he uncritical view of technology and ignorance of the social relations within which it operates. Despite the fact that he is explicitly focussing on the experience of adults, he reworks these arguments, developed in connection with school education, quite uncritically. Although he recognises the existence of adults who live on the margins of society he wholly fails to identify any economic or political causes for this marginality, other than the inevitable ‘gradual evolution of Western society’ (my emphasis), The use of the quasiscientific term again aids in effacing the human agents of change. Indeed, the ‘we’, who might be able to agree on a definition of ‘rich and ‘poor’, are implicitly placed outside the determining structures of this Western society, mysteriously impartial observers having no material interests, archetypal social democrats. Furthermore,
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such inequities in the distribution of wealth as are acknowledged can be solved with ‘adult education, welfare and community work’. Despite his emphasis on the disadvantaged adult, Clyne assumes there is no fundamental conflict between ‘the individual’s needs’ and ‘the good of society’. He does not seriously challenge the assumption found in previous educational politics that there is a comfortable convergence between human needs and the demands of the economy. The problems he identifies are susceptible of solution through the application of yet more education, adult this time, which will, ‘enable individuals to live their lives in a more informed and contented way, as members of a community.’ (p. 105) The emphasis on ‘individuals’ within the ‘community’ also draws attention away from the constitution of those individuals by their location within society. There is no suggestion that age, class, gender or race have any systematic effect on individual experience. This book supported by the influence of the NIAE was highly influential in the production of the Russell Report (1973, Adult Education – A Plan for Development, HMSO). Clyne’s book also managed to synthesise the growing shock/horror of the popular conservative press over allegedly falling standards in schools, with the new equation of adult education and community work. Professor H.A. Jones, of Leicester University and chairman of the council of the NIAE, with Dr. A.H. Charnley, research officer of the NIAE, are joint authors of the two standard works on the Adult Literacy Service. They themselves make the same point, in a somewhat unreflecting way, about the BAS Campaign Document. This coincided with a growing public disenchantment with the escalating cost of public education and the apparently inadequate pay-off in standards of attainment. Jones and Charnley, 1978, p. 2 The two themes, of falling standards and of the reforming potential of adult education, can be nicely rolled up together in the ‘disadvantages’ theme: However unsatisfactory it might appear to be, the notion of disadvantage has many strengths when it comes to educational and governmental intervention . . . so far as policy-makers are concerned it has the capacity to appeal to a wide range of people with varied and conflicting ideologies. To social and political liberals it indicates the need for initiatives based on optimistic progressivism and couched in terms of ‘compensatory education’ and ‘positive discrimination’ in favour of ‘deprived groups’. Even to political and social conservatives, educational provision for the disadvantaged has the attraction of being cheap and conciliatory and intended to transform the feckless and potentially disruptive into more responsible citizens. Thompson, 1980, pp. 89–90 It was this potential for different inflections within a variety of discourses that helped the Adult Literacy Campaign successfully to mobilise such a wide range of support. Thompson also sharply observes that In many respects the definitions of disadvantage used by adult educators reflect the worst aspects of individualistic and pathological explanations of inequality and are quite uncritical of the fact that they are principally cultural definitions. p. 91
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It is also true, however, that the Russell Report and the Clyne book forced adult educators to acknowledge, as a minimum, that what they offered as adult education is demonstrably unpopular with the majority of the population: adult education typically draws the reasonably affluent, reasonably well-educated, young middle-aged. ‘Men are outnumbered five to two, partly because they are hived off, physically and administratively, into various kinds of vocational training. The elderly, the poor, the rich and powerful, the young adult and the ordinary worker are all under-represented. Rogers and Groombridge, 1976, p. 40 These facts undoubtedly caused professional concern over the image of adult education and the terms on which it was offered. The self-assessment stopped short, however, of any analysis of the function of education as part of the means of reproduction of the social relations of society. The causes of the widespread hostility or suspicion which adult education arouses remained unexamined. Despite the fact that writers like Lawson and Patterson have begun discussions about the nature of knowledge from a philosophical perspective, the status of knowledge itself, the way in which it is selected and made available to students, the reasoning which underpins a differentiated curriculum and the assumptions which constitute the ‘hidden curriculum of the great tradition are all aspects of the ‘content’ of adult education which are rarely treated as a problem. Thompson, 1980, p. 280 Nevertheless even these unpromising debates did create a space into which more radical voices could intervene. The national beginnings The Russell Report was itself one of the means through which the different interest groups who generated the literacy campaign began to identify and define themselves. The NIAE which, as has already been indicated, was highly influential in the production of the Report and The Disadvantaged Adult, continued to play a significant role in the creation of the Adult Literacy Campaign, finally becoming the agent for central government when ALRA was set up in 1975. Notable also was the BAS. This is an association of voluntary agencies, established mainly as philanthropic ventures in inner city areas in the late nineteenth century. With the growth of State social services their original aims of the relief of poverty and the ‘improvement’ of the working classes became increasingly irrelevant. Often they turned to the provision of Welfare Rights information, discovering in the course of this that many of their clients had difficulties with literacy. A pioneering literacy project in the 1960s, the Cambridge House Literacy Scheme, suggested that voluntary labour could be used to help adults needing to improve their reading and writing skills. From the mid-60s there developed ‘a handful of modest schemes’ (Charnley and Jones, 1979, p. 1), run by both voluntary organisations and a few LEAs. It was this experience which formed the basis for the effective BAS initiative in organising the Campaign. As a small organisation it had apparently taken the decision that its most efficient way to operate would be as a pressure group.4
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Also crucial to the success of the Campaign was the involvement of the BBC’s education department, which at this time was ‘identifying submerged needs’ (Rogers and Groombridge, 1976, p. 175). Eventually it was to put its considerable influence behind the literacy campaign. It was the alliance of these diverse professional and voluntary interests which generated the public campaign. The first step in the organisation of such a campaign, designed to extract financial resources from a not-enthusiastic government, was the National Conference in November 1973: Status Illiterate: Prospects Zero. At this Conference a National Right to Read committee was formed, chaired by Lady Plowden. The membership was drawn from a number of organisations including the BBC, BAS, NIAE and, at a later date, representatives from LEAs and the DES, the Welsh and Scottish offices. From this committee came the campaigning document that was the initial focus for publicity and for leverage upon the government. A Right to Read: The BAS Campaign Document. The BAS had selected the area of adult literacy as one in which there was an identifiable need with no provision to meet it. It therefore put its energy, commitment and finances into orchestrating a national campaign. In order to do this it was not only necessary to persuade the government of the day to provide the resources but in one sense to create the problem itself, or at least to represent it in such a way that it became highly and embarrassingly visible. The specific adults who experienced difficulty with literacy, for whatever reasons and to whatever degree, needed to be constituted as a discrete group, given a name, identified as a problem,; and then a solution to this new social ill needed to be proposed. The document through which these new meanings were created was the BAS publication A Right to Read (May, 1974). The title itself is a clue to the movement of the campaign: a new right is claimed. Rights normally accrue to the recognised citizen, and now, in addition to democratic rights, BAS formulated a new demand: not the right of access to education but the right actually to acquire a particular skill. Hidden within the claim to a right is often the unspoken implication that the right is in fact being denied by a power group and the veiled suggestion here is that school and teachers have failed (denied) their pupils this right to read. It is a possible inflection of meaning that was not lost on the right-wing press in its attack on the dominant educational sentiments of the 1960s which it characterised as ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’. Reading, in and of itself, is constructed as part of the nature of citizenship, a necessity for any individual to take up his/her place as a member of society. It is, furthermore, discussed only as an abstract ability, without reference to its potential use, in Freire’s famous couplet, as liberation or as pacification.5 There was no discussion of how the transmission of reading and writing skills is located within hierarchical structures, nor of how socio-linguistic analyses points to the way in which power is encoded in language use itself. The role of the BAS itself is defined in terms of its ‘long standing tradition of voluntary social work’ which it claims is aimed at ‘helping people to overcome various forms of powerlessness’. Although the Foreword (p. 2), by Geoffrey Clarkson Development Officer of the BAS, does thus refer to relative differences of power in society, there is nothing in the pamphlet to indicate how or why these differences might have such dramatic educational outcomes that 2 million adults can endure ten years compulsory schooling without acquiring effective reading skills. There is Clarkson’s further statement, In order to participate, to exercise certain rights, to choose between alternatives and to solve problems, people need certain basic skills; listening, talking, reading and writing.
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What these rights, alternatives and problems may be is not defined, and although it is reasonable not to preach subversion in a document addressed to the government there is no sense in what follows of inequalities of power dividing along the lines of class, race or gender, nor of structures within society that might themselves require change. This campaign document is nominally addressed to the Secretary of State for Education and Science; but also in its change of tone and use of direct address, it explicitly creates a position for its readers to occupy. If you believe in a Right to Read and you represent an organisation, or simply want to help as an individual, please write to us at . . . p. 25 The wider audience has become an as yet unawakened ‘public opinion’. The immediacy of the moral appeal of ‘if you believe in a Right to Read . . .’ (and who would dare identify themselves as opposing it?) is not, however, the mode of address of the greater part of the publication. Using the neutral tone of the judicious expert, Part One (pp. 3–20) examines the evidence for the numbers of adult illiterates, and gives its own definition of ‘functional literacy’. It is certainly clear that the adult literacy campaign was not a campaign created by a mobilisation of grass-roots opinion, of the oppressed themselves, or even because of the perception of threatening social unrest. Rather, however genuine the needs identified, it was the creation of ‘experts’. The BAS document lists the members of its advisory group: • • • • • • • • • •
the assistant secretary of the ATTI the director of education and training of the CBI the assistant director of the Council for Educational Technology the professor of educational studies at the OU a ‘reading specialist’ and representative of UKRA the national development officer of the WEA the chairman of the AAK the secretary of the NIAE the chairman of the illiteracy sub-committee of the NARE the secretary of the education department of the TUC
It is an exemplary group of ‘experts’. They are drawn not only from institutions of education such as the OU, but also from industry (CBI, TUC), from professional bodies (UKRA, NARE) and from voluntary organisations (WEA). Such self-constituted experts are a part of civil society, rather than directly of the apparatuses of the State, yet they have great power in the creation and definition of knowledge and control over its dissemination. In this way the professional expert plays an important role in supporting or challenging ideologies. The relationship between these diverse bodies, whatever their difference of interest or emphasis, is one of mutual validation. As entry into the hierarchies of schools, colleges and universities is guarded by the ritual exclusions of examinations, so acceptance into the culturally accredited world of experts is signified by the presence of an organisation on such committees. The actual writing group was drawn from officials of the BAS itself, including three out of five who were already ‘adult literacy practioners’. From this small group of ‘experts’, mobilisation of opinion spread out to ‘concerned opinion’. Through professional journals,
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down the hierarchies, new ideas spread to those who might have a potential professional or voluntary interest in the area. Finally, through the mass media the experts’ opinions reached and created that mysterious creature, ‘public opinion’. Politicians particularly may have been likely to interpret the visibility of voluntary tutors in the BAS version of an adult literacy service, as a manifestation of public opinion. Once again the role of the BBC in giving publicity to the need for voluntary tutors was crucial. An ALRA newsletter said: By October 25th – the Saturday after the second BBC TV programme, nearly 6,000 students and 8,000 volunteers were being referred local referral points . . . one puzzled journalist ’phoned the Agency to ask how it was that, with no immediately identifiable charismatic leader, and with so many other causes worthy of support, the campaign to eradicate adult illiteracy has had such an impact. Patient endeavour on the part of many people is all we could think of to say . . . November 1975, p. 1 It seems unlikely that the reference to ‘patient endeavour’ included the recognition that the production of ideology and the representations of the literacy campaign in the different media, did, indeed, constitute ‘work’. As a document produced by self-styled literacy specialists, A Right to Read takes up surprisingly few of the debates that were being conducted at an international level about the nature and purposes of literacy. A Turning Point for Literacy (ed. L. Bataille) although not published until 1976, contains an account of arguments which were certainly available to a researcher in 1973 when the BAS document was written. The key issues were summed up in UNESCO’s Declaration of Persepolis in September 1975: *It is true that all social structures give rise to the type of education which can maintain and reproduce them, and that the purposes of education are subordinated to the purposes of the dominant group; but it would be incorrect to conclude that there is nothing to be done within the existing system. *Literacy . . . is not the driving force of historical change. It is not the only means of liberation but it is an essential instrument for all social change. *Literacy, like education in general, is a political act. It is not neutral, for the act of revealing social reality in order to transform it, or of concealing it in order to preserve it, is political. Bataille, 1976, p. 274 Such analyses were undoubtedly available in 1973, not only through the radical critics of the earlier educational consensus, already cited, but also from such third world theorists as Nyere and Freire. They represent a principled break from the 1965 UNESCO stance which attempted to justify literacy solely through an economic vindication of its role in so-called ‘development programmes’. A concise account of this 1960s version of functional literacy is to be found in the Literacy Process, 1975, by Carol and Lars Berggren. The writers of the BAS document, however, chose to represent literacy in terms of passive reading ability, and made no mention at all of the need for writing skills which can serve in many ways to subvert and intervene in social relationships. They also implicity represented potential students as inadequate consumers, unable to function effectively due to their inability to read the BAS’s essential texts: a bleach bottle label, newspaper reports about the CBI, the back of a packet of pastry mix, and Leaflet FIS 1, issued by the DHSS. The
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assumption made about reading was that it is an essentially private activity undertaken by individuals in isolation. This privatisation of the issue of illiteracy was continued in the characterisations of ‘illiterate adults’ as, ‘a wide variety of men and women doing all sorts of different jobs, suffering from the inability to read in different ways.’ (p. 11) The focus on the capable, employed student in their six profiles suggested two misleading beliefs: first, that society basically provides equally for all its members’ needs, apart from a few inevitable failings; second, that this group of individuals, identified as illiterate, is equally distributed throughout society. In other words, illiteracy was presented as having no structural determinations but as occurring only through unforeseeable and random circumstances. This approach was partly generated by the desire to redress the stigma attached to illiteracy. It is also, however, part of the social democratic discourse of the 1960s which constructed a notion of the ‘national interest’ as the harmonisation of the goals of all citizens. In so doing, it denied any basic economic or cultural conflict between classes or races or between women and men. Once reading had been constructed as part of the inalienable rights of a citizen, it was easy to represent students in this privatised way, without other material location in a stratified society. Stigma The dependency of the BAS document on existing educational ideologies, of citizenship, of deprivation and of the need for further forms of provision, has already been indicated. The one significant disjuncture which it sought to make was centred on the issues of the stigma associated with illiteracy. In order to make it possible for students to come forward to learn, it was strongly felt that such stigma was a barrier that needed removal. The document sought to do this through a sympathetic account of how it feels to be illiterate and how students can experience shame and a profound lack of self-esteem. This account failed to provide any indication at all of the inadequate or discriminatory practices within education which result in failure for students. Still less did it show awareness of any inequality in the distribution of power, wealth or cultural capital throughout society. By giving six separate accounts of six different students the document managed to establish a sameness of motivation and basic social assumptions that held true for all six. The accounts rehearsed an unproblematic view of employment opportunities, and social and cultural participation as undifferentiated across age, gender and class. It was this undiscrinating sympathy, this expectation that literacy students are the same as you and me, that enrolled so many well-meaning tutors in the scheme. The publicity and the sympathy did, to a degree, remove the stigma, but at the cost of concealing the systematic economic and cultural pressures that produced the illiteracy in the first place. Without any recognition that, in the words of the UNESCO document already quoted, ‘the purposes of education are subordinated to the purposes of the dominant groups’, A Right to Read had no theoretical framework to explain the existence of illiteracy except as a kind of dysfunction. While it scrupulously avoided blaming the victims, it was unable or unwilling to identify the oppressive functions which the education system serves. At no point did it give attention to the enormous issues raised by the attempt to understand how schools conform individuals to the demands of an advanced capitalist society, in its needs for a flexible, docile workforce and for consumers of its products. Nor did this attempt, to remove the stigma attached to illiteracy, extend to examining the power relations implicit in the holding of knowledge and skills. The document gave no account of how the whole process
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of schooling is situated within the broader social and cultural context. It certainly left unexamined the further possibility that failure to learn to read might even be a resistance to the terms on which such skills are made available within schools. Recommendations Part Two of the document put forward a ‘Policy for Two Million Illiterate Men and Women’ (p. 21) comprising, as its measured mode of address phrased it, ‘a moderate and realistic set of proposals’. The seventeen points varied from the exhortative: (‘the Government should enter into a firm commitment to eradicate adult illiteracy’) to the administrative and prosaic: (‘this fund would be best administered by a National Resource Council for Adult Literacy’, staff should be paid above the lowest Burnham rates, etc.). The last few points made reference to the roles of the CBI, the TUC, the MSC and to publishers and the media, especially television. It was in fact an impressive bid for State finance, which mobilised a wide section of civil society to put pressure on the Government: from the quasi-governmental BBC to the right-thinking citizen there was a moral crusade mounted ‘to establish the ability to read as a right offered free of charge to every man and woman in the country’. Behind this orchestration of concerned opinion stood the experts, who, validated by their specialised knowledge and experience, had the power to name problems and to propose means to their solution. Behind both these groups lay the mighty weight of public opinion, ready to be articulated through the media in favour of their deprived fellow citizens. The favourable factors The location of the Campaign at the intersection of the interests of the State and of a section of civil society, self-defined as speaking for those without power, is particularly interesting. The discursive strategy of appealing to ‘rights’, together with presenting the judgment of experts, is a powerful one. Yet the economic situation at the time was highly unfavourable to any expansion of government spending in a new field, particularly as the 1974 IMF cuts were about to fall, not long in following the earlier round imposed by Barber, and education was indeed being represented as highly unpopular. It was two further factors that were the key to unlocking the government’s purse. One was the tradition of ‘voluntary social work’, which, through the recruitment of 50,000 voluntary tutors (and voters) was to become an established aspect of the literacy scene. The ambiguous meanings of voluntary work and some of its practical consequences will be looked at later. The second crucial factor was the prominent involvement of the BBC, which produced and disseminated the key ideas as well as acting as a material agent of recruitment. This gave the whole project such enormous publicity that it could not be ignored. Both national and local government were forced to make some sort of visible response. The role of the BBC From 1972 onwards the BBC had been studying the possibility of offering some sort of service to adults with literacy needs. The BBC is not well-known for revealing its internal debates or its system of decision making. It is therefore hard for an external observer to discern without further research what were the particular factors that governed its decision to support the literacy campaign by spending £750,000 over three years on its TV series On the Move. It is in any case a mistake to see the BBC as a unified agent without its own
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internal contradictions. The decision may well have been a congruence between the liberal intentions of members of its education section, and the more calculating opinions of the hierarchy that such an operation would pay good dividends in terms of public relations. TV is certainly a better place to recruit literacy students than is a printed poster put up in a library. If educationalists had sometimes pointed the finger at TV as a case of illiteracy, through its role in the Literacy Campaign TV redeemed itself by becoming part of the cure. This contradiction is also remarked upon by Jennifer Rogers in Adults Learning (2nd Edition). She is herself now a producer in the Further Education division of the BBC but her account of the BBC’s contribution to the literacy campaign is resolutely bland: The campaign against adult illiteracy depends for its success on a most elaborate publicity network which includes TV, a telephone referral service, local classes . . . This brilliantly executed campaign has uncovered a vast new clientele for a particular type of adult student whose needs were desperate but largely hidden. Rogers, 1977, p. 32 Later in the same book she maintains the same non-commital level about the other half of the conundrum: One of the common charges against broadcasters is that they encourage ‘passivity’ in their audiences. The best efforts of research have so far failed to prove whether or not this is true. p. 178 All other published pronouncements by BBC staff which are easily available are equally unrevealing and seem to go no further than the assertion that as literacy is a transparently ‘good thing’, it was the BBC’s duty to assist its promulgation all it could. What benefits accrue to the BBC in being seen as a public service in this particularly well-defined way, are not hard to discern. They would presumably strengthen its case in a struggle with the government for increased funding, as well as perform the more ideological function of its self-representation as a trust-worthy and caring organisation. Clearly it was impossible to offer any realistic form of actual literacy teaching to an unknown and disparate audience. The BBC’s favoured form of literacy provision was, therefore, to offer a ‘taste’ of literacy teaching, together with the reassuring input of illiterate adults discussing their difficulties. The centrepiece of the BBC service, however, was their offer to set up a national referral service to put both students and voluntary tutors in touch with a local scheme where they could work. Clearly, the voluntary agencies could in no way provide such comprehensive coverage throughout the country. The only way such a service could be set up was through the LEAs, and even then, if only 5% of the estimated two million potential students came forward, there would be severe demand on very limited resources. It was not until the National Literacy Conference of November 1973 that the BBC made this proposal known, the availability of its resources being contingent on the co-operation of the Adult Education section of all LEAs. It was difficult for the LEAs to be seen to refuse such a demonstrable need and such an opportunity to render service to the community, and so they concurred. The effectivity of this combination of voluntary ‘experts’ and the massive publicity and support given by the BBC was acknowledged in Adult Literacy Progress in 1975/6, HMSO:
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Overall the general publicity resulting from the BBC’s project, in addition to the specific recruitment of volunteers and students, has been of inestimable value in making a national impact, and we cannot speak too highly of the contribution to this field made by the BBC. p. 2 The invitation for men and women to teach a fellow adult to read and write caught the imagination of many. The publicity given to the need for volunteers via the BBC referral service and other BBC programmes was taken up enthusiastically by the provincial press in particular . . . Thousands of men and women offered their services. p. 7 It was not merely the publicity, however, or the promised referral services, that the BBC provided, but a substantial input in terms of structuring the pedagogy of the service. The BBC adult literacy handbook This handbook was a particularly powerful amplifier of contradictory educational discourses that contended, and continue to contend, for dominance within Adult Literacy practice. Published in 1975, to accompany the radio series, Teaching Adults to Read, first broadcast on Radio 3 on Tuesdays at 7.00 p.m. from 28th October 1975 to 16th December 1975, it had immense influence as it was one of the very few sources of professional guidance actually to exist. It can also serve to exemplify the range of conflicting debates as to the purpose and practice of literacy work that emerged from the beginning of the campaign. The Handbook contained a substantial amount of rather routine methods for teaching reading, but also more importantly addressed itself to such topics as ‘The Nature and Extent of the Problem’, ‘Characteristics and Causes of Illiteracy’ and ‘Organisation’. The terms in which the different BBC authors set up these debates were largely to govern their discussion at the plethora of conferences and training sessions that were soon to be held nationwide. Many of the educational discourses re-articulated through this handbook were those which were at that time being challenged by the emergent Black Papers of the right: It becomes a specific work of the new educational right to try to fix it (progressive/ comprehensive education) as part cause of a problem, even of the multifarious ‘crisis’ itself. Education Group CCCS, 1981, p. 169 The campaigners for an adult literacy service entered this terrain in a curiously circuitous way. Partly they drew on the liberal consensus of educational theory of the 1960s already discussed, yet they reinflected these categories so that some fitted into the newer disillusionment with that set of principles, and yet some others could be extended into radical assertions about the nature and causes of illiteracy. The clearest statements of the radicalism latent in the ‘student-centred’ approach to Adult Literacy work are to be found in the section, ‘Organisation’ by Margaret Bentovim and Susan Ghrapnel. They say,
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. . . illiteracy is an acute result of the general working-class experience of education, and [that] this experience cannot be changed in the educational field alone. p. 75 Literacy is still a fundamental power in this society, and its unequal sharing is as basic to life chances as the distribution of other kinds of power. p. 78 The limits of fulfilling the promise of what the authors characterise as their ‘bursts of rhetoric’ were succinctly indicated by their final paragraph in heavy type, which reads: Imagine you are planning a literacy programme from scratch: Write down your objectives, Would you show them to your boss? p. 92 These questions are undoubtedly addressed to imagined ‘chalk-face practioners’, who, the authors assume (correctly, I will argue later) are low in the hierarchy of educational management. Because of their more marginal position such literacy workers are assumed to be more likely to be in sympathy with their students, and therefore to recognise the need to conceal their actual practices from the judgement of more institutional figures. A ‘boss’, it is implied, is likely to be more firmly wedded to the dominant repertoire of adult educational practices: fee-paying, formal enrolment, etc. This radical stance was certainly not sustained throughout the official BBC publications, especially in those sections written by professional broadcasters. It has nevertheless surfaced regularly in professional Adult Literacy debates, and has helped to determine the form of practice in particular and protected places. In most other sections the ideologies of ‘the cycle of deprivation’ and the pathology of the non-middle-class family still dominate, although usually with an interpretation sympathetic towards the individual sufferer, illiteracy as a randomly occurring illness, rather than as a symptom of the maldistribution of power. For example, these quotations are all drawn from pages 13–14. From all the research on reading difficulties in schools, it is not difficult to argue a most forcible case for the importance of certain factors of family background to literacy. The term Cycle of Deprivation is commonly used to describe the legacy of deprivation which passes down from parent to child . . . Researchers have plotted the crucial importance of parental interest, so much is a confirmation of commonsense observation. and Associated with literacy problems, there seems to be a high incidence of large family size. and Illiteracy walks hand-in-hand as cause and effect of other deprivations such as poverty, homelessness, malnutrition, etc. Ann Risman, author of this section and also ‘Head of Adult Education and Organiser of
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the Literacy Scheme in Reading’, seems unconcerned with the inconsistencies in her account. On page 14 she states that The apparent disregard (by parents) for the consequences of reading failure is one aspect . . . which gives most cause for concern to teachers, yet concludes another section on page 15 with this observation: It is always difficult to know what credance to give to the many stories students tell of the horrors of their school life. Trenamen’s research conclusion that 45% of the adult population were resistant to the thought of beginning their education again must be a sobering reminder to all in this field that education has failed the student once already . . . She at least makes very clear that while the judgements of teachers and academic researchers need no questioning, the accounts offered by mere students should be subject to a certain amount of suspicion. Similarly the actual profiles of ‘typical’ students by Jennie Stevens, ‘ex-Deputy Director of the Cambridge House Literacy Scheme and now a BBC Further Education Officer’, reveal ambiguities and a reluctance to listen to the evidence: None of the five boys [the student’s brothers] is literate and Sean [the student] attributes this to the family’s general lack of interest in education as well as to the fact that all the boys missed quite a lot of schooling, doing seasonal work on neighbouring farms to supplement the family’s meagre income. p. 4 Presumably this ‘general lack of interest in education’ also explains the reported fact that the sisters went to a local convent school where they all did well. And again, Jackie [the student] maintains that she does not want to blame her parents for their lack of interest [in her reading difficulty]. p. 6 The value of ‘maintains’ carries not only a faint suggestion of disbelief but wholly excludes the possibility that Jackie understands precisely why reading seemed so unimportant to her parents: their realistic perception of their social position suggested to them that it would make very little difference to her life’s trajectory. Along with the inability to recognise the rationality of working-class attitudes to education, goes a readiness to offer explanations based on the individualised failings of women: ‘Murray’s mother was highly intelligent but rather neurotic’ (p. 9). And that explains Murray! The dominant frame of reference, however, as has been sketched in the account of A Right to Read is that of the 1960s, summarised in these quotations from the section, ‘The BBC Adult Literacy Project’ by David Hargreaves: ‘Our basic aim is to encourage people to seek individualised help’ and [the BBC] has a responsibility to educate society about illiteracy, and to encourage those of us, who are literate, to help those of us who are not. p. 73
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The construction of the social democratic citizenry ‘us’, to include those of ‘us’ who just ‘happen’ to be unable to read and write is peculiarly plain here. The problem is presented as being located entirely in personal learning difficulties. The emphasis on the individuality of and differences between students, articulated against the notion that we are all members of the same community, serves once again to conceal relations of unequal power. This pretence of equality where it does not exist makes the task of achieving it not only more difficult but often simply unrecognised. For the most part the arguments mobilised in the BBC Handbook are reformist, a blend of the humanistic appeal to everyone’s right to personal fulfilment with the needs of the ‘national economy’ for a literate workforce, especially in the light of technological change. What made these formulations acceptable at a time of generalised media hostility to schools was the way in which they could be rearticulated in an anti-school form. The revelation that two million adults were illiterate was, for example, a reinforcement of the Daily Mail’s concerted attack on the alleged general decline in standards in education, which it ascribed to progressive teaching methods and comprehensivisation. Among the many opposing pieces of evidence, which the Daily Mail also chose to dismiss, such as the Bullock Report of February 1975 (‘WHITEWASH spells Whitewash’, DM 19/2/75, quoted Education Group, CCCS, 1981, p. 213) were the facts that the majority of adult illiterates had been at school before comprehensives were established, and that the rigourous implementation of progressive educational practices was at that time scarcely universal. The focus on the ‘individual’ also reinforced that more generalised form of the right-wing argument that ‘we know how much our children vary . . . no one system is going to be perfect for all of them.’ (Daily Mail, 21/4/75), which leads into the theme of ‘freedom’ and the ‘right to choose’. The representation of voluntary tutors who, with a dash of common-sense, succeeded where ten years of compulsory schooling had failed, completed the circuit by validating everyday notions about the ‘3Rs’, and getting back to basics. The whole pattern of discourse drew its credibility from the disparity between the views of professional teachers and the perceptions of the taught, and their parents. This particular conjunction of themes round adult illiteracy created a popular appeal which it was hard for the government to evade. Coupled with the imminent start of the BBC’s referral service, which of itself had pressurised LEAs into offering some form of provision, and the ‘experts recommendations in the Russell Report, the BAS document, and the later Bullock Report, it was impossible for the government to be seen to withdraw the £1,000,000 allocation promised in 1974. Shirley Williams’ Foreword to the 75/6 ALRA Report incorporates most of the issues: ‘Literacy is indispensable for personal development’, ‘the willingness of local authorities and voluntary organisations to take up the demand for increased literacy tuition in financially difficult times’, ‘a debt to the Russell, Alexander and Bullock Committees for drawing public attention to the task; to the BAS . . . and to the BBC’. These civil interests had by the end of 75/6, proved powerful enough to have forced state provision, of an admittedly minimal kind, for a previously stigmatised group. The form of this provision actually was to vary greatly between different LSAs. Among the determinants on the nature of local provision were the respective strengths of adult education institutions and established voluntary organisations. In their turn these affected the type of professional posts created, and thus the recruitment of staff tended to be drawn from identifiable groups. This point will be elaborated on in Part II. As literacy was a newly constituted field of professional expertise these staff members had an impact on the dominant pedagogies and organisational methods that came to be adopted. These themes, with a
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more detailed consideration of voluntarism, will be explored in Part II which looks at the financing, organisation and professional ideologies of the Adult Literacy Service in Leicestershire.
Part II: Adult literacy at the grassroots In Part I, I tried to show where the Literacy Campaign was located within the institutions of the state and of civil society. I also offered an analysis of how it drew on existing educational ideologies in defining its problems and their solutions. In Part II, I rely heavily on my own experience as a professional employee of the Adult Literacy Service in Leicestershire. Jane Mace has offered a somewhat idealistic definition of the potential within literacy work; nevertheless it catches the sense of empowerment that can be experienced through the acquisition of these essential skills: Writing is a political act; and in the process of writing, we think, define, describe and communicate. By naming the problem, the feeling, or the issue (in whatever form we choose to express it) we take on some degree of control over it. Mace, no date, p. 7 The origin of the arguments used in the National Campaign appeared to leave little space for such a radical approach. The specific practices at a local level, however, cannot be simply read off from the campaign rhetoric. The location of the adult literacy practioners also needs to be analysed in terms of their economic and gender relations, and of the particular history of the institutions with which they became involved. As an account of historical changes over seven years, what follows is somewhat limited. There is no attempt to chart the precise fluctuations in funding and staffing which were constant preoccupations for participants at the time; nor is the crucial issue of the selection and training of tutors considered in any depth; the changing nature of what students actually came to read and write is only indicated by implication. The institutional location One of the many ways in which ‘education’ functions to reproduce the existing forms of power in society is through exercise of its own institutional power: in adult education this overtly takes the shape of bureaucratic impositions that place the student firmly on the lowest rung of the hierarchy – form-filling, fee-paving, registration of attendance, use of schoolbuildings, etc. Implicitly it conforms to established notions about the nature of education: Adult education is oriented towards the same dominant or middle-class values that are reflected by the education system as a whole and are evidenced by its clientele . . . In locating the dominant ideology of adult education within a consensus model of society, I would argue that adult education is like rather than unlike the rest of the education system in its form of cultural reproduction. Keddie, 1980, p. 47 The National Literacy Campaign had begun to suggest that these overt manifestations were stumbling blocks, although more because of the students’ assumed personal inadequacies than through any critique of their function:
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LEAs must ensure that their remedial classes for illiterate adults are free from the normal adult education practices relating to minimum class size, normal student hours and term times and formal enrolment procedures. These all obstruct the sensitive and intensive process that illiterate adults need to be involved in. BAS, 1974, p. 3 Just how tightly literacy work in Leicester was locked into ‘the bureaucratic structures that surround it’, or whether in any sense it escaped from ‘the status quo of hierarchical management that the bureaucratic structure demands’ ( Jeffrey and Magin, 1979), is the first area I shall investigate. In order to do this, a background description is needed to explain the concrete institutional location of the early Adult Literacy Scheme in Leicester. County and city Before Local Government Reorganisation in 1974 the County of Leicestershire and the City of Leicester were still separate LEAs. The County, although usually under Conservative control, had introduced one of the earliest schemes for comprehensive secondary education, and considered itself to be liberal and progressive. One of its main philosophies was the development of Community Education. This was based on the Leicestershire Community Colleges, usually 14–18 year old Upper Schools, but with extra facilities and staff exclusively for work with adults. Part of their function is to open up school courses to adults from the community and to provide for community needs such as playgroups, creches, youth clubs, sports facilities, evening classes, etc. There are several moderate-sized market towns in the county, but the area on the whole is rural, with extremes of both isolated, poor settlements and wealthy enclaves of suburbia near the city boundaries. The City, on the other hand, is dominantly Labour controlled, but has only in the last few years completed its transition to a comprehensive system. It has clung to its grammar schools (and a new, independent one opened in 1981) and claimed exclusive understanding of the grave problems of inner city, multi-racial secondary moderns. Its Adult Education took place, on the whole, in school buildings which were used during the day for other purposes and whose staff had no commitment to any form of community education. Some of its professionals, however, saw themselves as defenders of the ‘disadvantaged’ of the city, in comparison with their colleagues who enjoyed the greener, wealthier pastures of the County. When the two systems were compulsorily merged in 1974 under the aegis of the County and its Director, there was not only confusion but hostility. As a direct consequence, the two wholly separate initiatives towards an Adult Literacy Service, which had been independently embarked upon by City and County, were also merged. The City had one full-time organiser. The status she, and prospective students, enjoyed is indicated by the fact that the office space allocated to her was situated in a hospital for the mentally sub-normal, despite her nominal attachment to the education department. Later she was given, as the BAS document recommended, the title of County Advisor, although she was accorded neither the status nor the salary of other advisory posts. The six pilot-project, quarter-time posts, scattered round the County were maintained in their isolation. The pressure from the national literacy campaign caused the LEA to review its staffing, and in 1975 five further quarter-time appointments were made, three to city areas. It was these eleven, and later twelve, quarter-time ‘area organisers’ who provided the core to the Adult Literacy Scheme. In 1978 they became half-time Burnham F.E. Lecturer Grade 1 permanent posts, but until then they were renewable contracts on a totally ad hoc salary basis.
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Over the years a variety of paid group tutors and assistant organisers came and went according to financial fortune. The ambivalence of their position was compounded when these area organisers were made responsible not to the County Co-ordinator (as she rapidly became), but to their Area Further Education Officers. A place to meet Originally the Adult Literacy Scheme was envisaged as home-based provision on a one to one basis. The function of the area organiser was supposedly to take referrals, contact and interview students and voluntary tutors, prepare the tutors, match them up with a student, provide support and keep track of what happened. It soon became clear that within the city the influx of students was not going to be equalled by an influx of prospective tutors. In September 1976 the four organisers in the urban areas had a total of 270 students on record, with a waiting list of 30, and a total of 21% trained tutors, with about 100 waiting to attend an induction course. The drop-out rate for tutors enrolling on a course was usually around 50%. The eight rural and suburban areas had a total of 471 students, no waiting list and a total of 473 tutors already trained with a further 142 waiting to train. In other words, there was a comfortable surplus of tutors over students in the county area and a shortfall in the City. The above information has been compiled from the minutes of the Leicestershire Adult Litracy Advisory Group of 23 September 1976. It has not been easy to provide statistical information in this section of the paper. Much of the information is simply not clearly recorded anywhere. Also, the categories in which recorded statistics do appear are not standardised across the period, and, in fact, seem to vary from month to month. Furthermore, as one of those who was responsible for actually producing the statistics from my own area’s records, I have some reservations about their accuracy. There can be numerous reasons for what might, in a benevolent light, be seen as the creative production of statistics. The demand for these figures was experienced as a drain on time, a purely bureaucratic requirement from the hierarchy. Such pressures or threats from a central administration often produces a reaction that may remain at a relatively subjective level: a refusal to co-operate, a private withdrawal of enthusiasm or good-will, a reluctance to conform to what is felt to be unreasonable demands. It can also develop into more conscious forms of resistance that challenge the bases on which the information is being gathered, with, for example, a critique of economism. Organisers in this case, also had material advantages at stake, since resources were allocated according to numbers, plus a ‘weighting’ formula. There were plenty of objective factors as well as subjective motivations which meant that those who actually performed the labour process, who designed and operated the filing systems that generated the figures, also had some control over the end product. Since they were also the workers who had some material interests in the use to which the information they produced was put, and they were quite prepared to use what powers of control they had for their own purposes. The use of these apparently ‘hard’ and official statistics should not therefore conceal the conditions under which they were produced, and the available scope for manoeuvre. This disparity in the tutor: student ratio incidentally confirmed the view of the city adult educators that the county was predominantly a middle-class, ‘easy’ area. Thus it was the city organisers who through certain circumstances were forced to seek places for students to meet in groups. It was a simple expedient for coping with the numbers. By February 1977 the same city areas reported a total of 100 students in 14 groups, out of a total student popula-
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tion of 402, while the county had 4 students in 5 groups out of a total student population of 712 (Adult Literacy Advisory Group minutes, 3 March 1977). In the County the well-established Community College principals in most areas took a controlling, if sympathetic interest in literacy. In this way literacy became part of a more mainstream site of education, although no explicit directive from the authority had imposed this formation. Although it escaped from the formal requirements of registration, etc., it was firmly and physically located in the actual buildings belonging officially to Community Education.6 In the City, where there were, at this time, no purpose-built Community Colleges and physical space was at a premium, the place of literacy work was literally insecure. In addition, Literacy Organisers felt that the City’s AFEOs’ attitude was largely one of benign neglect, so that the area organisers were forced to look outside educational premises for places to meet. Bodily removing literacy from such locations carried ambivalent implications: Was it a chance to enact new forms of learning, or did it simply tell students that what they were doing was so remote from ‘real education’ that they were not even to be allowed through the door? Marginality and ideology The specific responsibilities of area organisers officially required them to interview, assess and place students; recruit, train and match volunteer tutors with students; provide classes and groups to meet a variety of needs – shift-workers, mothers of pre-school children – and give support to one-to-one students and tutors meeting in the home. In order to do this there clearly needed to be a place to keep records and resources, both for student-use and also for the purposes of tutor-training. My personal experience in 1978 was to be confronted with a locked metal cupboard in a hallway of a boys’ secondary modern, due to become a community college in another three years’ time, which represented the total domain of adult literacy in the North West area of Leicester. To go with this was the information that, due to the educational spending cuts, the secretarial help given to the former area organiser was no longer available. The budget allocation of class-teaching hours had also been reduced and was no longer sufficient to pay the existing group leaders for the full financial year. This situation was extreme but by no means untypical. As one city organiser was later to observe: In spite of the national campaign and the BBC’s On the Move, many people had still never heard of the Adult Literacy Scheme. Even sections of the Education Services doubted that these home-based organisers were part of the Education Department, the usual assumption being that it was a voluntary organisation. Never had a section of LEA Adult Education been so marginal. Mitchell, 1980, p. 18 In retrospect these professional conditions seem extraordinary. The area organisers were being asked to perform an administrative and educational function for the LEA but were not provided with the minimum requisites for the job: a desk, a phone, even a typewriter. At the time it all seemed part of a pioneering enthusiasm, which was partly to do with a need to prove the necessity for the existence of an adult literacy service, and partly a crusading spirit which was reinforced by the participation of voluntary tutors. The constraints were professional insecurity, lack of funds and total lack of recognition; the positive openings were a freedom from hierarchies, an ability to experiment, an hostility to established institutions (if
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only because of the latter’s indifference and lack of co-operation) and a kind of subcultural solidarity between literacy field-workers. Jane Mace in Working with Words (1979) epitomises, with the anecdotal verve of her account, this aspect of literacy work. The Leicester organisers would also have shared her belief that illiteracy is as much a state of mind as a deficiency in skills (p. 51), and her ideal of literacy as a way to enable students to be ‘masters (sic), not victims, of print’ (p. 88). This extreme marginality of literacy workers in the City for the next few years is interesting to examine. Nell Keddie makes a connection between the marginality of adult educators in general and their explicit philosophy. She says this marginality ensures that their primary concern will be with meeting the students’ needs and interests; and equally important, it operates to combat the marginality of adult education to the education system, and helps confirm practitioners’ professional identities. Keddie, 1980, p. 46 She also characterises the peripheral nature of adult education thus: . . . the low status of both adult and primary education is determined by the distance of both from the major process of certification and as far as adult education is concerned . . . that no value is set upon it in the academic market-place. p. 49 Keddie’s explanation of the power of the philosophy of ‘individual needs’ rests on the distance of its adherents from mainstream education. This definition of education takes as its paradigm the institutionalised, validating function of the examination system with its sanctioning of specialisation, competition and selectivity. Since primary school teachers and adult educators are excluded from these heights of ‘excellence’, the assertion of their professional competence in addressing the individual is seen, by Keddie, as compensatory; not the prestige of the academic hierarchy but, the service of the humanitarian educator. However, unlike Keddie, who suggests that the different emphases of teachers who are differently located within the hierarchies of education do not ‘differentiate practice in significant ways’ (p. 50), I wish to argue that for these literacy organisers they in fact did. There are multiple connections between the marginal position of the Leicester adult literacy organisers and the educational philosophy which they evolved from what was already available. Part of the conceptual framework available from the National Campaign did subjectively address them, it called to them by ‘explaining’ their situation and assigning to them a professional identity. The non-judgmental approach to students and the emphasis on reducing stigma meant that the literacy worker could not take up an instrumental approach to students. It is not only the tutors in literacy work who are voluntary; so are the students. Unlike school students, trainees on MSC schemes, or clients to the probation services, there is no formal or legal requirement on literacy students to keep on coming back. Literacy is therefore an area where the much vaunted notion of an agreed contract between student and teacher can more plausibly be implemented. This is not to suggest that it is totally impossible in other circumstances, nor that tutors and students meet on terms of instant equality, nor that students necessarily find it easy to articulate their own ambitions. It does mean, at best, that there is a chance of a sustained process of negotiation over what is learnt, and why and how, that is not also further constrained by the imposition of an examination syllabus or school curriculum, or the reluctance of the student. In terms of tutor-training it also means
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that, at least in Leicester, great emphasis is placed on tutors becoming self-critical of their own educational experiences, of their own role as tutor, and of the grosser elements of class and race ignorance in the schooling process. This does not, of course, directly challenge the practices of the educational establishments, particularly during the years of compulsory attendance; but it does offer an alternative model, in which the transmission of knowledge and skills takes place in a different way, and in which the goal at least is to undermine the prevailing power relationships around knowledge. This is not purely voluntaristic on the part of literacy workers, but is underpinned by the ability of students to vote with their feet and go – so, unlike the concern, produced partly by financial necessity, of many adult educators to fill classes, the essence of the literacy theory was to privilege the student’s needs, and to structure situations which fulfilled them. When, for example, a group of literacy students was permitted to meet in the comfortable surroundings of a Community Centre during the holidays, when general bookings were light, but was forced back into an uncongenial school classroom when the adult education term began and demand on space was heavy, two things were confirmed: the marginality of the students who were obviously accorded low priority compared with the needs of other groups, and also the marginality of the area organiser who had no power with which to challenge such decisions. The former reinforced the belief that literacy students did indeed need protection against being stigmatised and regarded as of low status, and the latter, by demonstrating the indifference of establishments towards literacy’s priorities, reinforced the organiser’s commitment to her differential identity as a literacy worker. The primacy of the students’ needs became therefore a key focus, an essential component of a professional literacy identity. Gender There was a further factor in the marginality of Leicester literacy organisers at this time: since the posts created were part-time (in theory), on short-term contracts and paid, until 1978, according to no known salary scale (unions were unenthusiastic about admitting such mongrel creatures to membership, and the DES still refuses to count the work as superannuable), they were inevitably filled by women. As Irene Bruegel notes: ‘. . . a job is women’s work partly because it doesn’t offer stable and continuous employment’ (Bruegel, 1977, pp. 14–15). This is determined partly by economic factors and partly by the pattern of segregation between women’s work and men’s work. In this particular instance the women concerned were all married and mothers of pre-school and school-age children. Whether women’s dependency on the male family wage is created through their exclusion from well-paid ‘masculine’ jobs, or whether it is this dependency which enables employers to keep female wages low,7 the situation of women in the labour market is profoundly structured by the ideologies of motherhood. The obligation laid on women to be available to their children and the necessity, both financial and psychological, to maintain the family unit, severely limits their opportunities to enter waged, full-time employment. The part-time nature of the literacy posts therefore fulfilled these women’s needs to spend some of their time with their children. This is a common solution to the contradictions experienced by women and also one which serves the needs of industry: In 1976, 40% of employed women in Britain worked part-time as opposed to 5% of employed men; . . . Part-time work is now a vital feature of the British economy, as it is generally in industrial-capitalist countries, though the UK leads the field in this respect.
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Part-time work is intimately linked as both cause and effect to the exploitation of women. Oakley, 1982, p. 159 The suitability of this work to women’s structural needs was reinforced by the already noted absence of ‘official’ working space. This meant that much of the administrative work, contacting students and tutors by ‘phone and letter could be done from home’. Additionally, since the majority of both tutors and students are employed during the day, a proportion of the work necessarily had to be done in the evenings. The ‘flexibility’ of these working conditions also, therefore, functioned to enable the women literacy organisers to continue to work their double shift of unpaid domestic labour and paid employment. There was a further aspect to the gender-specificity of literacy work, which was to do with the construction of the nature of women’s work around notions of nurture and service. Not only in their primary definition as wives and mothers, but in their over-representation in the ‘caring professions’ and service industries women perform the tasks that ensure the smooth reproduction of society: More than half of employed women in Britain work in three service industries: the distributive trades . . . 17%; professional and scientific . . . 23%; miscellaneous services . . . 12% . . . This kind of concentration is not found in male employment. Oakley, 1982, p. 151 Women are expected to be peculiarly apt at understanding and supporting others: ‘work that promotes the welfare of others, rather than the welfare or development of the worker herself ’ (Oakley, 1982, p. 155). As the report Adult Literacy: Progress in 1975/6 put it: There is evidence to indicate that some [students] are now responding to facilities which are offered sensitively and confidentially and that, throughout the initial tuition, the prime task is to give encouragement and confidence. p. 17, my emphasis Women are not, of course, wholly unaware of these forms of exploitation. The literacy organisers saw their pay before 1978 and their conditions of employment as exploitative. What made it tolerable was that it could be re-inflected, understood in more idealistic terms. The organisers’ own experience of exploitation served to cement their identification with the needs of the students, whose interests the organisers believed were served by their own economic exploitation. What sustained them was the belief that their own control over the processes of literacy and the professional identity created by the philosophy of meeting individual needs, actually could change the students’ position. In other words, their gender meant that these women found themselves in a vulnerable location in the labour market. Unlike the qualified teacher’s protected position within an institution, the marginality of literacy activated for them the educational philosophy of student needs. Acceptance of their exploited position was also reinforced by what I believe is a common type of negotiation with their disadvantageous position by ‘married women returners’. This is a willingness to accept very insecure conditions in the expectation that this will lead to acceptance back into the professional job market. It is believed that recent experience is necessary to validate their marketable skills and qualifications. This tempered acceptance
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therefore also reinforced the literacy organisers’ recognition of their professionally marginal position. It had the ambiguous result of providing yet another determining ‘explanation’ for their exploitation, while simultaneously opening up the space for the creation of more radical practices. The gender division of labour had further effects in the different positioning of organisers in the urban and rural areas. As the relatively few full-time administrative posts in Adult Education in the City were filled mainly by older males, the respect accorded to literacy was not increased by the part-time nature of its appointments nor by the fact of its being an all female sector. In the County the larger number of Community Education posts, with a different balance between the sexes and with younger people still climbing a career ladder, made the organisers in county areas more easily acceptable within the mainstream. The construction of literacy as a profession Although distinctions are being made for the purposes of this paper between County and City, it must be remembered that all this was taking place within one administrative unit. In June 1976 a county-wide Adult Literacy Advisory Group was established. Once again the consequences for organisers in City and County were curiously different. Some of the County AFEOs and College Community Education Tutors were for historical reasons8 better disposed towards Adult Literacy, especially as campaigned for at a national level. It was this generally liberal approach, with all its limitations, that led to support for individual literacy organisers in their areas. The protection this afforded obviously bound literacy closer to particular institutions, especially when it was accompanied by substantial financial help. It must also be said that the area organisers’ eventual permanent contracts on a recognised scale also resulted from the endeavours of one such AFEO in particular. No such help was forthcoming from most city establishments. However, the existence of such a body, together with a number of conferences organised on a county and regional basis9 provided the city literacy organisers with invaluable ideological support. It enabled them in fact to see their isolation and marginality as a positive opening, that gave scope for innovation. Philosophy into practice Despite her disavowal of any necessary causality between the theories intellectually held by educators and their actual pedagogic practices, Keddie also identifies a further and crucial function of ideology. It is one which militates against this separation. Insistence on the distinctive nature of adult education may be seen as a counterclaim which provides adult educators with a collective sense of their unique identity. Keddie, 1980, p. 46. Emphasis mine The ‘unique identity’ of these urban literacy organisers was created by the way in which accentuations of existing understandings of both gender and professional identity were available to ‘explain’ their experiences in this particular conjuncture. Unlike the primary and adult educators in Keddie’s analysis they had no protective institutional shell: no exclusive classrooms, no regimen of practices – enrolment evenings, registers, assemblies, timetables, etc. – to establish their identity as educators. The source of their professional identity was the
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literal taking up of the rhetoric of the Literacy Campaign in meeting students’ needs. This subjective investment produced real differences in material practices. The other feature of this take up of theories about literacy teaching was that it was not fully self-reflecting: it offered a way of thinking about and living through exploitation and contradiction without ever making them fully explicit. This is one reason why the change to educational practices which were objectively quite far removed from those of mainstream institutions and which implicitly challenged or refused much of the hierarchical power embodied in them, was not consciously radical. It was experienced as oppositional but was not the result of theoretically informed consciousness. The organisers’ own marginality (their part-time status, their gender, their novelty, their association with the ‘trendy’ county) already caused conflict with the educational institutions, if not with individual members of staff. Literacy, reinforced by a re-accentuation of the national ideologies and pedagogies, began to define itself: it was against fees, against enrolment procedures, against teacher-in-charge classes, against short academic terms and long holidays inappropriate to the continuous needs of a literacy service, against the relegation of literacy students to the poorest accommodation and certainly against County Hall’s request for reports on ‘average’ progress. How could that be measured when every student began at a different place and, ideally, set his own goals? It was in favour of (expensive) home-visits, flexibility, and increasingly, collective group activity, extra-institutional sites for groups to meet, and student involvement in running the scheme. Through various means, such as funding through the Inner City Programme and from the WEA, some of these goals were realised. Generous, and often illicit, help was given by professionals in the Library Service, the City Council Cultural and Recreational Department and the WEA. Literacy groups began in all sorts of non-LEA premises, including a short-life house (also occupied by an Afro-Caribbean organisation), youth clubs, Neighbourhood Centres, a Welfare Rights Agency and even Church Halls. A strange and temporary autonomy developed, not least because no-one in the hierarchy cared to interest himself in what was happening further than to turn a benevolent blind eve. Voluntarism Literacy organisers were also set apart from many of the assumptions of conventional school and much adult education by their involvement with voluntary tutors. The function of education in reproducing a society finely divided by class, gender and race, with different access to knowledge, financial rewards and power, is clear enough. A key element is its power to certify only a few people as qualified to occupy certain positions within its system. This is reinforced by the educational workers’ own resistance against exploitation by the State that employs them. Together with the mystification of the profession of teaching, all these factors combined to make literacy organisers themselves appear somewhat deviant. To mainstream educators it was near treason to suggest that voluntary tutors could actually teach a student to write and read. In order to resolve this professional contradiction literacy organisers were obliged, if at a fairly untheorised level, to revise their own educational theories. They had already begun to recognise that what the students experienced as their own failure was the result of the whole structure of education. An approach emerged which consequently privileged the non-professionalism of volunteers. Teachers were held to occupy, or to be perceived to occupy, a position which inevitably alienated students. This cartoon makes the point succinctly:
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(ALRA Newsletter, February 1976)
That it could be presented in this form suggests how widespread this critique was. The Newsletter was at this time printing 25,000 copies per issue. The same edition also refers to an article in the TES, of 2 January 1976 which had the headline: Challenging the Myth of Expertise. An unsigned front-page article also took up the egalitarian theme: . . . it is of paramount importance that this equality is recognised . . . Yet some tutors still see themselves as the director of learning, the arbiter of information, the identifier of needs. Tutors still exist who prefer to talk about the student than to the student, who feel that a student’s wishes have little relevance and, more importantly, see the
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learning process as a passive, one-way process, designed to fill the student with some pre-ordained knowledge called literacy. ALRA Newsletter, May 1977, p. 1 In an article by Alison Chapman and Jane Mace about a conference on literacy in which half the participants were themselves students, the following comment from a voluntary tutor is approvingly recorded: . . . it seems to me fairly preposterous, not to say absurd, the number of times tutors get together without students, in training courses, tutor evenings, even materials-making sessions. I feel we must rethink the limitations of a structure where students are still marginal, their appearance on committees largely token. ALRA Newsletter, May 1977, p. 7 Great emphasis was therefore laid on the voluntary tutors’ role in listening to and working with students and on their not representing themselves as the repository of all knowledge. Initially the value of one-to-one tuition in the home, which ‘protected’ the vulnerable student, was also considered essential. Later the ease with which this construction of roles produced dependency (judged by tutors answering remarks addressed to students, keeping records of work to which the student made no contribution, etc.) was recognised, and the paradigm situation presented to tutors was of an equable, working partnership, either as a pair within a group or simply as individual members of a group. This approach was reinforced by publications from the national Adult Literacy Resource Agency. In one of these a section entitled ‘Evaluation and Record Keeping’ contains the following recommendations. It is essential that both tutor and student are involved in evaluation . . . the student must stay in the driving seat. and . . . ask yourselves such questions as: – – – –
Is what we are doing relevant? Who chooses the materials? Who talks the most? Who decides what is to be learnt? ALRA, 1980, pp. 46, 48
The account given here is favourably inflected towards the possibility of evading the dominant/subordinant relationships of schooling; how far such relations were in practice subverted is harder to judge. Some tutors were attracted to the scheme by reason of the dominant role it seemed to offer them. Others could not escape their class position enough even to begin to see learning and its social meanings through their students’ eyes. It is likewise incalculable how many students were short-changed yet again because knowing that their tutors were volunteers made voicing their dissatisfactions even more impossible. I do not propose here, for reasons of space, even to attempt a political evaluation of the use of voluntary labour in this context, especially with respect to its association with the
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conservative ideologies of self-help and personal responsibility. I merely wish to register an argument that it is a practice capable of carrying a contradictory range of meanings. On the practical credit side the enthusiasm and commitment of volunteers was often appreciated by students who frequently would comment on the contrast between school, where they felt nobody had bothered about them, and their experience with the literacy scheme. Students themselves, however, do not stand outside the dominant ideas of society and for some there remained the suspicion that voluntary tutors were definitely second-best. This was expressed in an eagerness to ‘move on’ to a ‘proper teacher’. The subversion of the dominant/ subordinate relationship in education, which was necessitated by the involvement of voluntary, unqualified tutors, could itself be read by students in a diversity of ways which produced a range of meanings: from crippling gratitude to rejection of ‘charity’, from long-term friendship to a discovery of their own effectivity. What is reading? Another result of working with voluntary tutors, at least among City organisers, was an outright rejection of the massive orthodoxies of the teaching of reading. If reading really were a collection of discrete sub-skills which needed to be understood separately by the educator and sequentially taught to the waiting student, than no mere volunteer could hope to succeed. Instead, reading was seen as a process of scarching for meaning (‘cracking the code’ is the literacy phrase) through the use of a wide variety of cultural and linguistic clues, many of which the student already knows. This whole area was also strongly contested at a national level, where the debate was often structured around arguments about the use of standardised reading tests. The Manchester Curriculum Development Leader for Adult Literacy, Tom MacFarlane put the case against tests on the grounds of the nature of reading itself; that reading depends on . . . your background knowledge of the subject matter (in terms of vocabulary and ideas) and also your innate knowledge and expectation regarding word order (or grammar); secondly, this kind of fluent reading may well be prevented from ever emerging by the . . . strategies which many tests encourage. ALRA Newsletter, June 1976, p. 3 The next Newsletter contained an article by the Peripatetic Reading Advisor in Warwickshire, Aubrey Nicholls, which presented a view of testing based on some wholly unexamined assumptions not only about the social relations of education, but also about the skill of reading. Its use of language to mystify and intimidate is also worthy of attention: Any assessment procedure must, of necessity identify two main items. The first one is the level of priority (sic) attained by the student and the second, an indication of the direction in which it will be most advantageous for the tuition programme to proceed. The latter is the diagnostic aspect of the assessment. To do this requires considerable expertise both in the practice and use of test procedures and also considerable knowledge of materials which can facilitate the preparation of an individual programme. ALRA Newsletter, September 1976, p. 2 The clear implications that voluntary tutors are incapable of such an intimidating task, let
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alone the implied subordination of the student to his proper place as grateful recipient of such attention, perhaps caused the addition of the Editorial Note, prominently positioned and outlined: It is fair to say that a substantial number of adult literacy practitioners doubt the wisdom of the experimental assessment referred to. ALRA Newsletter, September 1976, p. 3 Even in MacFarlane’s piece, however, there is no critique of the essential social relations implied in the testing procedure. Inescapable in the testing situation is the power of the tester’s ‘knowledge’ to define and judge the candidate, and the total inadmissability of any opinions the candidate might have about his abilities. The distortions which these relationships create are not discussed, nor the methodological assumptions which created the content and structure of the materials used. The limits of MacFarlane’s focus on the inherent character of reading and on the individual use of reading are also revealed in this quote: There is a temptation for the teacher to import instrumental objectives, as in the stages of a formal reading scheme. If we ask what it is that the adult will learn to read, for what purpose, with what depth of understanding, with what result, we see that there is no linear progress here, such as could be assessed by an advancing series of objective tests. Each piece of reading or writing is a domain of its own, defined by the student’s purpose and these purposes derive from his status as an autonomous adult, exercising will and judgement within the context of his own life . . . Charnley and Jones, 1979, p. 18 What is said is useful and can provide a basis for quite positive action; but what is yet again excluded is any notion of the social construction of what seem to be individual ‘purposes’. Charnley and Jones do not recognise that the adult’s ‘autonomy’ is not simply self-made from within; nor do they deal with the fact that what any individual wants is deeply shared by the practices and representations available to her/him. In their scheme of things ‘will and judgement’ exist unproblematically within the individual agent of choice and action. This framework, which privileges the unique individual, is of course, also implicit in the stance of the initial campaign, as well as in more general progressive educational thought. The positive limits to voluntarism The early tutors were fed on a fairly heavy diet of the value of personal empathy, the vulnerability of students and the centrality of personal attention. All these attitudes emerged out of the classically individualistic framework which also produced the personal deprivation theories. Actual experience of one-to-one tuition in the home demanded a revision of this approach however. Many tutors and students were introduced, circled each other warily, and, baffled by what they saw, both dropped out. It was plain that tutors as well as students needed something else if they were even to get started. The limitations of one-to-one tuition were also being discussed nationally, articles with such titles as ‘A Move Towards Group Tuition’ (ALRA Newsletter, July 1977) were beginning to appear. A survey of voluntary tutors carried out by the University of Nottingham Adult Education Department carried this conclusion:
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. . . a sizeable proportion of volunteer tutors [came] from the same social background as the students, with modest educational attainments to their names. They . . . were not contributing from a sense of social duty in a narrow sense. They were involved because they had skills to offer . . . [and] a heavy leaning towards wanting to help others, coupled with a desire to extend their own skills of communication through literacy work. Elsey and Gibbs, 1981, p. 46 Initially the literacy organisers failed to realise that indivualised teaching is just as demoralising, lonely and unrewarding as individualised, competitive learning. As most tutors freely admitted at a first meeting with an organiser, they also sought to feel useful and needed. The Nottingham survey also revealed tutors’ dissatisfaction with the level of support offered by the full-time workers in Nottinghamshire. Whether a similar level of dissatisfaction would have been found in Leicestershire is simply not known. However, the Nottinghamshire workers were located in institutions and certainly did not make a practice of being available at their home telephone number, as did the Leicester organisers. It did become apparent to these literacy workers that voluntary tutors needed more recognition than it was possible to provide for isolated individuals. One motive identified as a reason for women attending ordinary evening classes is that it can ‘. . . often be seen as an opportunity to restate their sense of themselves as individuals against the demand to service the needs of others that are made on them in the home’ (Keddie, 1980, p. 55). Ironically this seems to have been the motive of voluntary tutors, about two-thirds of whom are women. Professionals do not necessarily acknowledge their need or desire for self-affirming feed-back, although they frequently function to ensure that they get it, if not through job-satisfaction then through status and salary. Volunteers have no such influence. If voluntary work does not match their expectations they will simply disappear. The disappearance and/or disaffection of tutors was what faced the literacy organisers. Partly through expediency, but increasingly through conviction, they began to extend group work. Collectivity For all the reasons sketched above, including desperate over demand on non-existent resources of people and materials, more and more literacy groups were established. It would be far from the truth to portray them as instant solutions, but over the two or three years, about 1976–79, forms of collective working emerged. Organisers, voluntary tutors, students and paid group ‘leaders’, all slowly learnt ways of sharing and generating knowledge in a co-operative way. For example, a magazine of students’ work was produced, the writing, editorial work and layout being undertaken by different groups in turn. The solidarity engendered between paid staff, voluntary tutors and students was to be dramatically demonstrated in the crisis that overtook the Adult Literacy Service in February 1980. By that time about 50% of the students in the City were part of a group, and even in the County the proportion of students in groups was about 35%. Support for this move towards collectivity was also increasingly available from national sources. An ALRA document Working with Groups in Adult Literacy Schemes (Occasional Paper No.2) formulated the advantages like this: What this paper tries to do is to suggest ways in which the feelings of mutual support
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between students can be carried over into their work, so that they start actually to work as a group, to feel able to learn from each other as well as their tutor, to assume responsibility for their own learning and to grow more confident and more independent. ALRA, March 1978, p. 1 In itself this method of work is not consonant with the dominant ideology of education in the secondary and tertiary sectors. The actual content of two evenings’ work described in this paper significantly includes both active intervention by students in events outside the group (a letter from one student to the Public Health Inspector, written in a previous session had been seen to produce results) and also a political discussion (leading on from a Daily Mirror article) about cuts in the NHS. From 1977 onwards literacy field-workers were also able to draw on the pedagogies coming out of ALRA that insisted on the centrality of writing. Cathy Moorhouse’s Helping Adults to Spell (1977) was a vital influence, driving home the message that no-one needed to spell at all unless they first had something to say. The role of the tutor became that of scribe or secretary to the writer (or writers), writing and reading back until a final version was agreed upon. That text could be used as a basis for such spelling work as the student identified as what (s)he needed. This collaborative style of work horrified some tutors, who left, but others became skilled in such approaches. Jane Mace has described the process: the ‘illiterate’ . . . is taught to think . . . that their inability to write is the result of their personal deficiencies. Writers believe they write alone. Non-writers believe they don’t write because they can’t write in conditions of isolation – so they believe they can’t write at all. Adult literacy work in this country over the last few years has made no small dent in this vicious circle. It has insisted, slowly and in piecemeal ways, but with some determination, that literacy is a social activity. Red Letters, 12, p. 4 There is a marked divergence between this and the original BAS Campaign document with its emphasis on the passive reader and the individual pathology of the illiterate. Even among those originally responsible for mobilising the adult literacy campaign there appears to have been change. Ann Risman, whose section in the BBC Handbook displayed all the ideological assumptions about deprivation and a kind of contempt for students’ own accounts of their difficulties, could now be found criticising Jane Mace’s Working with Words for the absence in it of the major political themes of literacy . . . student self-management, group collectivism, volunteer participation, democratic decision-making on policy and finance (and) . . . a reasoned rethink of the ambivalent role of the professional in this climate. ALU Newsletter, February/March 1980, p. 7 This is not to claim that Risman represented the dominant view in what had become an Adult Literacy hierarchy. Nevertheless what was analysed in Part I as being an essentially tired and regressive ideology seems to have opened up radical spaces in more places than Leicester. In the later ALU and ALBSU10 Newsletters a radical voice can often be heard, especially in the reviews and correspondence:
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That ALBSU failed to offer any critique at all of the content of the form and of the reasons given for the census, is not just disappointing. It highlights the essentially limited interpretation apparently given to what constitutes adult literacy teaching and learning by the Unit. If literacy tutors were looking for confirmation in the ALBSU material that Literacy means more than the ability to fill in forms, they were destined to be disappointed. Letter from Stella Merryweather, ALBSU Newsletter, June/July 1981, p. 4 This particular correspondent was a former assistant organiser in Leicester, but the same issue also printed a review by Julian Clissold, Organiser for Adult Literacy and Numeracy from the Borough of Waltham Forest. This was about two of the Gatehouse Project books and began: Both these books, like some of their predecessors of the same genre, are important. That importance lies in their provision of a break in the hegemony of the large British publishing houses, and their ability to give a voice to groups who have been systematically excluded from most media avenues. ALBSU Newsletter, June/July 1981, p. 11 The sort of critique of the philosophy of the original literacy campaign which is presented in this paper, had seven years after the campaign began, been articulated in the official newsletter of ALBSU. It is not the dominant voice in literacy work, but its existence and visibility are evidence of the oppositional strategies now being developed within this field. The end of the story In February 1980 one of the members of the Leicestershire County Council Further Education Committee ‘leaked’ the confidential information that, among other spending cuts approved for implementation that April, was the total abolition of the Adult Literacy Service. The shift to collectivity now paid unpredicted political dividends, enabling students, tutors and organisers to mount a campaign that was, I believe, wholly unanticipated by county councillors and administrators alike, coming as it did from this marginal sector run by women. Groups, were particularly vigorous in their letter-writing and lobbying, and once again the element of voluntary labour and the generous airspace given by BBC local radio were also key factors. The local Leicester Mercury gave the scantiest of cover to the issue, which received some coverage in the national press. This is perhaps a measure of the popular appeal of provision seen to be based on the goodwill of volunteers and the political embarrassment involved in rejecting it. Eventually the County Council grudgingly restored £50,000 out of the £94,000 annual literacy budget. Despite their large majority the Conservatives could not afford to be seen to be dispensing with the free services of around 1,200 volunteers, performing the self-evidently useful task of rectifying school-teachers’ inadequate results. The consequences of this experience for the City literacy organisers were highly contradictory. It was in many ways an enlightening education in practical politics, as it was for the students and tutors involved. However, the practical situation confronting them in the summer of 1980 was extremely demoralising and posed many problems requiring essentially political solutions: half the staff, namely assistant organisers and all group-leaders paid by the LEA had
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gone; there was no money at all even for stationery let alone for resources; no-one at County Hall seemed to have the time/inclination/competence to attend to the essential restructuring of responsibilities. The key problems were how to maintain some sort of minimum service to safeguard current students and what to do with new referrals. Any solution needed to display the crippling effects of the cuts, pass on the impact to the administrative hierarchy in County Hall in the forlorn hope that this would have some effect on the next set of decisions, and, simultaneously, not damage the individual student. It was, of course, impossible. The results in terms of the organisers’ sense of professional identity as discussed in this paper, were also profound. Ironically, the literacy campaign against the cuts was seen as uniquely successful, and made the literacy service highly visible to the rest of the education service. The fact that it had still suffered a 50% cut seemed to get overlooked. Community Education, previously protected by the Director’s personal interest in it, was now under attack. Literacy representatives were co-opted onto various campaigning ad hoc committees such as the Association for Community Education. For the city organisers their professional isolation was over. Acceptance of their own exploitation, especially in terms of their willingness not to count their hours of work above their contractual limit, was also over. Determined not to subsidise the County Council by absorbing any of the costs of the 50% reduction in budget, the organisers also began to count the cost of their own hours of unpaid labour. Using the criterion of efficiency which had previously had no purchase but now seemed essential for survival, they reorganised their method of working. Students were invited to a central office, drop-outs were not followed up, home-telephone numbers were guarded, fewer choices were offered to referrals – indeed, fewer were available. After the May 1981 Council elections there was a ‘hung’ County Council, the balance being held by five Liberals and one (previously Conservative) Independent. Eventually, in September 1981 the 50% cut was restored. Since this represented a twelve month’s budget which had then to be spent in six months, the Literacy Service was temporarily away with funds. The metal cupboard in the school hallway had already been converted into a dingy but large room in a City Council Neighbourhood Centre. Now it acquired new paint, curtains, cupboards, easy chairs and a carpet. Literacy had begun to grow its institutional shell. The marginality and hence some of its autonomy were going. Three new Community Colleges have opened in the City. Both County Hall administrators and Community Education staff know of the existence and activities of the literacy service. The radical inflection of the Campaign ideology which ‘explained’ the extreme professional marginality of the organisers in the earlier years is no longer necessary. The potential of literacy to be ‘really useful knowledge’ must now be argued for in a fully conscious way on the more central terrain of Adult Basic Education, overshadowed as it is by the repressive structures of the MSC, the proliferation of Youth Training Schemes, and the coercive threat of unemployment.
Conclusion The Literacy Campaign drew on an already disparate set of ideas in its initial movement, and patched them together into a new constellation which, at that particular time, was very effective in achieving its aims. Despite the conservative origins and tendencies of some of these ideas – the pathology of individual failure, deprivation as the personal responsibility of the deprived etc. – they do not necessarily have reactionary consequences. Dominant ideas
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have in themselves no power to impose on individuals. They have to be taken up, given a material location and negotiated over before they become active. In this paper I have tried to show in detail how the precise circumstances in which ideas are received crucially changes the use to which they are put: ‘What exists at any given time is a variable combination of old and new, a momentary equilibrium of cultural relations corresponding to the equilibrium of social relations’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 398). As far as the Literacy Campaign’s effect on the Government was concerned, there appears to have been a negotiation between sections of the professional classes. The State itself was caught by its need to be seen in its ideological role of guaranteeing the rights of its equal and free citizens, in this case, the right of all adults to read. The institutions providing the leverage on the government were pre-eminently those of a fraction of the education system, strengthened by the ideological messages of the governmentally-commissioned Russell Report, and of the mass media, especially the BBC. Although the education system functions to ensure the reproduction of capitalist social relations, particularly in its production of a stratified labour force, it also fulfills the other ideological purpose of creating a consensus. In order to do the latter it needs to promulgate, and believe, a version of itself as guarantor of objectivity and guardian of knowledge. . . . what is taught in schools is regarded as valid and worthy of preserving. Cultural artefacts, knowledge, and ways of transmitting knowledge and the values that surround such skills as literacy become consecrated. Westwood, 1980, p. 39 The educational hierarchy and the government both benefitted ideologically from the process of the Literacy Campaign, which ‘demonstrated’ the apparent independence of the supporters of literacy from the State through the demands which they made upon it. Materially the government had very little at stake, the £1,000,000 for literacy which captured the headlines being of relatively little significance, whereas the educators also made a modest gain in the creation of a further field of expertise and of a few more paid jobs. At no point was the government subject to any sort of fundamental challenge, so although it made a material concession it was able to do this also as a means of maintaining its hegemony, its ideological consensus. A further agent in the Campaign was the voluntary sector, represented by the BAS. Once again the role of civil society in reproducing the hegemony of the dominant class can be seen at work: The school as a positive educative function, and the courts as a repressive and negative educative function, are the most important State activities in this sense; but, in reality, a multitude of other so-called private initiatives and activities tend to the same end – initiatives and activities which form the apparatus of political and cultural hegemony of the ruling classes. Gramsci, 1971, p. 258 Through its intervention, adult literacy provision could be represented as a vindication of the social democratic beliefs about the nature of society. Voluntarism in this context defined the terms in which the problem was viewed, by concealing the structures which really produce illiteracy, and also provided the ready-made solution: the individualised exercise of personal services. Thus it drew upon the available consensus of common-sense about society
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and personal responsibility, and simultaneously reconstructed a new variant of it on a new terrain, thus deepening its plausibility, its power to be seen as explanatory. The philosophy of the Campaign, however, including its elements of progressivism, did not only mediate the negotiations at the national level between the various ‘subaltern’ and ‘ruling class’ fractions, to use Gramsci’s terminology. It was also at work at the level at which the campaign rhetoric was being translated into practice. As this paper has indicated, what happened at this level was in no way simply determined by the available theory; rather the ideas were reworked and transformed by the demands of their new location. Similarly, the historical individuals involved also had previously formed subjectivities, already had their own investments in attitudes and ideas, notably those of gender and professional position already discussed. The intersection of these different sets of subject positions created highly visible contradictions for the individuals concerned. Through the marginalisation which they experienced, the ideology of the Literacy Campaign, which had originally served to cement the hegemonic relationship between the civil and educational institutions and the government, was reworked. It produced not only new meanings but new positions from which some aspects of the class hegemony might be challenged, including ‘. . . the relationship between teacher (or other paid worker in education) and student, which can contain within it either a challenge or a reinforcement of prevailing class relations’ ( Jackson, 1980, p. 17). The method of working developed within the Adult Literacy Service in Leicester certainly had, and has, within it elements that challenge the standard power/knowledge relationships in education. The students’ aims in learning and the means suggested by the tutors for attaining them are at least formally on the table for discussion. There is understanding too of the cultural signals of dominance and subordination through which power relationships are carried at an individual level, and of the grosser manifestations of race and class prejudice. Some of this derives from a fairly sophisticated grasp of how identity is formed in and through language, and the necessity therefore for the tutor to be wholly accepting of the student’s forms of language, as well as of his wishes and anxieties. These do seem real gains, transferable to practices in other areas, and to offer, together with group learning, a hopeful model of how student experiences of subordination can be recognised, named and transformed. Whatever its limitations, it seems the necessary place to start. Literacy in Leicester has also been relatively fortunate in that it has kept its own separate identity and has maintained clear distinctions between its own practices and those of the MSC. It is perhaps worth noting that this has been possible at least in part because of the thriving tradition of community education in the authority, outcome of a long commitment to progressive forms of education. There seems no doubt to me that it is far easier to open up issues of power, and definitions of really student-centred aims and forms of learning when there is no pressure to impart or acquire hierarchically imposed sets of skills and norms. Nor, in literacy, is there any limitation to the sort of political debate students can engage in. Yet many of these practices are only techniques, recuperable to ‘better’ forms of management, to the winning of consent to more conservative ends. Can there exist, even in theory, a set of professional practices that is free of such regressive possibilities? Equally ambiguous is the relationship of literacy workers to their employer, the local state. There is real tension between radical commitment to students and the trade(s)-union stance of literacy workers that defends them against exploitation, that makes them reckon their hours and, for many, the insecurity of temporary contracts, not to mention the inevitable emotional wear and tear of a demanding way of working, against what they are paid. The material conditions of work provided by the state therefore had a tendency to alienate literacy workers from their own labour, and to return them to more rigid and less demanding
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forms of practice. Is it possible for radical professionals in such fields to maintain the subjective commitment and openness needed to transform the terms on which they work, while also using their control over their own labour as means of defence against exploitation? The steady squeeze in the 1980s in local government to extract more labour for the same wages certainly tends to make workers a great deal more instrumental about what they do. Control over the labour process is one of the hall-marks of professionalism, but what is, on the one hand, a site of subordinated resistance against the interests of the employer, is, on the other, a site of power from which others may be excluded. Use of voluntary labour to carry out the ‘professional’ work of teaching has similarly ambiguous consequences. It undermines the mystique of teaching, claims back the skills involved into a form of unalienated labour, and demonstrates that it is not the nature of a task that commands power, prestige and payment, but the social relations within which it is performed. At the same time it potentially undercuts the paid literacy workers’ professional position both at this ideological level of who is fit and able to ‘do the job’, and also at the economic level, by appearing to do the job for no wages at all. This latter point may be more illusory than real, although in the abolition attempt of 1980 some local councillors did seem to think that literacy students and tutors could somehow magically identify themselves to each other without any mediation, not to mention find resources, meeting-places and develop their own methodologies. Volunteers may not in fact, be as cheap as they look. Literacy also differs somewhat from other forms of voluntarism in that many of its tutors are in employment. However, voluntary labour is being increasingly used by the Thatcher government both as a panacea for the effects of its own spending cuts, and as a way of concealing the true level of unemployment: The voluntary sector is being transformed. Many organisations have become subcontractors for the MSC and their traditional activities have been increasingly subordinated to their new role of the management of unemployed. In a context of expenditure cuts and rate-capping, the Community Programme is also starting to pose important questions for those working in local authorities and health services, whose activities and jobs are being eroded and redefined through MSC interventions. D. J. Finn, Letter to the Guardian, p. 14, 15.3.85 Against this undoubtedly realistic assessment of the situation, there must also be set the more tenuous evidence available from such sources as a document produced by a two-day seminar of paid workers from Voluntary Workers’ Bureaux in the Midlands shows decidedly hostile reactions to such a trend. It declares the Government must: – – –
stop short term funding schemes, now. put the money it spends on MSC, Opps for Vols. etc. . . . back into public service, health, social services etc. realise the Volunteer Bureaux need long-term funding Ford, 1984, p. 38
And among the list of ‘important things I (the participant) will do’ were: – –
keep speaking out about the MSC campaign against unemployment. Project VBX, 1984, p. 37
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In other words, although the MSC and other quasi-governmental schemes may have the power temporarily, to attempt to replace statutory services with volunteer labour, there are consequences that may not have been foreseen. For any government has to win consent as well as coerce. It would appear from the VBX document that as soon as organised groups begin to evaluate and discuss the situation, seeing the real effects of spending cuts and unemployment, they may well have a tendency to mobilise against such policies. The role of other groupings, outside traditional political associations, in organising, educating and campaigning should not be overlooked. It may be in such circumstances that Literacy workers, as well as many others, will have the scope to perform some necessary tasks.
Notes 1 A full analysis of this is given in Education Group CCCS (1981) Part Two, Chapter 5. ‘Adult Education and the Sociology of education: an exploration’ by Sallie Westwood in Thompson (1980) also investigates this area. 2 I have drawn heavily on ‘Adult Education and the Disadvantaged’ by Jane Thompson in Thompson (1980) in formulating this section. 3 See particularly Education Group CCCS (1981), pp. 66–69. 4 BAS gives this account of its own activities: Since 1920, Settlements had been linked together nationally in the BAS, although until 1969 BAS had not existed as a separately resourced unit. In the 1970s, with a Development Officer and an an Administrator, BAS had decided that national campaigning was the most appropriate way to reflect the work of its individual members and thus influence social change. Such campaigns were seen as short-term, limited life inputs nationally, with a gradual fade-out as other bodies, more appropriately placed, took over the initiative. BAS, 1977, pp. 6–7 and Small voluntary organisations with limited financial and human resources need to plan their involvement in any work carefully, particularly when involved in campaigning. From the earliest stages of its involvement in the campaign for adult literacy, BAS had recognised that any campaign progressed from an initial build-up to a peak and thence to a gradual fade-out. A responsible campaign, however, should ensure that other agencies or individuals could continue after the fade-out of an organisation. Perhaps also any new political campaign needed to be of a different kind and BAS was not well-fitted to take a lead in such a campaign. BAS, 1977, p. 9 5 Freire’s work originated in his native Brazil and has been largely focussed on the ex-colonial world, including South America and West Africa. He often writes therefore of the cultural disinheritance of the third world by the colonial powers and the need for revolutionary struggle. His writings are not directed in any straightforward way to the circumstances of advanced capitalist Western societies. Nevertheless his categorisation of the contradictory potential of education and particularly of literacy has been widely taken up – as, for example, in the sub-title of the Berggrens’ book (1975). The following quotations are samples of his characterisations of this dichotomy; first, pacification or domestication: The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant minority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to their own purposes), the more easily the minority can continue to prescribe. The theory and practice of banking education serve this and quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading requirements, the methods for evaluating ‘knowledge’, the distance between teacher and taught, the criteria for promotion. Freire, 1980, p. 50
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and, secondly, liberation: Education as the practice of freedom – as opposed to education as the practice of domination – denies that man (sic) is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from men. Freire, 1980, p. 54 6 Maureen Stubbs, a colleague in a rural area, points out to me that because of the scattered nature of the rural population, a total of forty-eight villages with poor public transport in the area for which she has responsibility, adult literacy in the county remained rather more wedded to the oneto-one privatised tutor-student relationship. Whatever its other implications, this factor meant that the literacy workers there saw themselves as fulfilling a different role from that of colleagues in community education. 7 This debate is carried too, in Floya Anthias (1980) and Veronica Beechey (1977). 8 See Fairbairn (1979). Andrew Fairbairn was the Director of Education of the Leicestershire LEA until 1984. His book gives an account of the origins of Community Education in Leicestershire in 1949 when Stewart Mason, who was Director at that time, produced his Scheme for Further Education and Plan for County Colleges. In its turn this was derived from the tradition of Henry Morris’s Village Colleges in Cambridgeshire in the 1930s. Fairbairn traces the development of new Community Colleges in urban areas after the Local Government Reorganisation of 1974 which, by combining the City and County, demanded the translation of this approach into a new setting. The ideology of the book is not, in itself, in any way radical, presenting education in terms of personal recreation and cultural development in a wholly uncritical way: The provision of courses leading to qualifications in typing, shorthand and commerce, in elementary engineering, building subjects and the like for which students enrolled in order to better themselves in their future careers has shifted to more appropriate quarters. Community Colleges set out to serve the cultural and social needs of their communities in a much wider sense, and the class [educational] component of their programmes is characteristically non-vocational and recreative, serving the aspirations of people who want to occupy their leisure in a worthwhile manner, to develop known or discover unknown personal skills. Fairbairn, 1979, p. 19 There is certainly recognition of the contradictions involved in offering education as a means of social regeneration, although no analysis of its causes is offered, and its tone of condescension is sometimes barely concealed. In these deprived urban situations, we are dealing. . . . with the needs of people who would not dream of going near an educational institution, and of those who, although stirred by new impulses to learn, recoil from their less happy memories of the school environment. That is why the mini-Community Centres, evolving on a college’s contributory primary school sites will be so important, especially in ‘catching’ the young mothers bringing their children to the nursery units and infants’ schools. They will be unsure of themselves and frequently greatly dis-advantaged, but their strong feelings for their children and desire to do their best for them will not yet have been dissipated – in the way it so often is by the time the children transfer to secondary schools. Fairbairn, 1979, p. 38 Nevertheless the long-term existence of such establishments in the rural areas, brought about by the implementation of the Mason plan, did have consequences with regard to literacy: It is perhaps interesting to note that, at a time of financial crisis, there has been much greater emphasis on disadvantaged members of the community. Long before the establishment of ALRA, several colleges had made great strides in searching out and providing for the adult illiterates of their areas, and since the Agency’s establishment this work has blossomed. Fairbairn, 1979, p. 18 There is also evidence in this book of the influence again of the NIAS, this time in the shape of
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research by another representative of that organisation, Edward Hutchinson, carried out in 1974, which is extensively quoted. 9 The Regional Advisory Council for Further Education, East Midlands funded the following courses for Adult Literacy practitioners in 1977/8: 17 September 77: 26 October 77: 5 December 77: 19 January 78: 28 January 78: 11 March 78: 31 March–2 April 78:
Alfreton, Derbyshire, Organisation and Management. Alfreton, Derbyshire, The Adult Slow Learner. Beaumanor Hall, Leicestershire, Organisation and Management. Beaumanor Hall, Leicestershire, Spelling. Alfreton, Derbyshire, An Approach to Functional Literacy. Beaumanor Hall, Leicestershire, Materials Workshop. Nene College, Northants, Exploring the Techniques of Adult Learning Situations.
In following years these were repeated at LEA level. 10 In March 1980 the Adult Literacy Unit (ALU) duly ceased to exist at the end of its two-year period of work. After some uncertainty caused by the Conservative election victory in May 1979, it was re-constituted as the Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit (ALBSU) in April 1980, having longer term prospects and a slightly wider remit.
Bibliography ALBSU Newsletters: April 1980–November 1981 (7 issues), London, ALBSU. ALRA Newsletters: September 1978–March 1980 (8 issues), London, ALRA. ALRA (1976), Adult Literacy: Progress in 1975/6, London, HMSO. —— (1978), Adult Literacy in 1977/78: A Remarkable Educational Advance, London, HMSO. —— (1980), Adult Literacy: 1978/79, London, HMSO. ALU Newsletters: April 1980–November 1981 (7 issues), London, ALU. Anciano, Gillian, et al (1977), An Approach to Functional Literacy, London, ALRA. Anthias, Floya (1980), ‘Women and the Reserve Army of Labour’, in Capital and Class, Spring 1980, pp. 50–63. BAS (1974), A Right to Read, London, BAS. BAS (1977), Ad. Lit: A Continuing-Need, British Association of Settlements and Social Action Centres, London. Bataille, Leon (ed), (1976), A Turning Point for Literacy, Pergamon Press, Oxford. Beechey, Veronica (1977), ‘Some Notes on Female Wage Labour in Capitalist Production’ in Capital and Class, Autumn 1977, pp. 45–66. Birggren, Carol and Lars (1975), The Literacy Process, A Practice in Domestication or Liberation, Writers and Readers Publishing Co-op, London. Braverman, H. (1974), Labour and Monopoly Capital, Monthly Review, New York Bruegel, Irene (1979), ‘Women as a Reserve Army of Labour’ in Feminist Review 1979, (3), pp. 12–23. Charnley, A.H. and Jones, H.A. (1978), Adult Literacy, A Study of Its Impact, NIAE, Leicester. —— (1979), The Concept of Success in Adult Literacy, Huntington Publishers Ltd. Cambridge. Clyne, Peter (1972), The Disadvantaged Adult, Longman, London. Eggar, R. et al (1977), An Approach to Functional Literacy, ALRA, London. Elsey, Barr and Gibbs, Margaret (1981), Voluntary Tutors in Adult Literacy, Nottingham Working Papers (No.3) in the Education of Adults, University of Nottingham. Education Group CCCS (1981), Unpopular Education, Hutchinson, London. Fairbairn, Andrew (1979), The Leicestershire Community Colleges and Centres, Nottingham Working Papers (No.1) in the Education of Adults. University of Nottingham in association with NIAE, Nottingham. Ford, Kevin (1984), Volunteering for Unemployed People? Project VBX, Coventry.
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Freire, Paulo (1976), Education: The Practice of Freedom, Writers and Readers Publishing Co-op, London. Ghalali, A. and Harris, J. (eds) (1976), Literacy and the Adult, Department of Adult Education, University of Manchester. Good, Martin and Holes, John (1978), How’s It Going: An Alternative to Testing Students in Adult Literacy, ALU, London. Gramsci, Antonio (1971), Selections from Prison Notebooks, Laurence and Wishart, London. Hoyles, Martin (ed) (1977), The Politics of Literacy, Writers and Readers Publishing Co-op, London. Jackson, Keith (1980), Foreword to Thompson, Jane L. (1980), pp. 9–18. Jeffrey and Magin (1979), Who Needs Literacy Provision Macmillan Education, Adult Literacy Guides, London. Longley, C. (ed) (1975), BBC Adult Literacy Handbook, BBC, London. Keddie, Nell (1980), ‘Adult Education: an ideology of individualism’ in Thompson, Jane L. (1980). Mace, Jane (1979), Working with Words, Writers and Readers Publishing Co-op, in association with Chemelon, London. —— (no date) ‘Watch Your Language, the Politics of Literacy Notes’ in Red Letters, No. 12. Mitchell, Anita (1980), The Development of Adult Literacy Provision in Leicestershire, unpublished study submitted for the Diploma in Adult Education, University of Nottingham. Moorhouse, Cathy (1977), Helping Adults to Spell, ALRA, London. Oakley, Ann (1982), Subject Women, Fontana Paperbacks, U.K. Rogers, Jennifer (1977), Adults Learning, Open University Press, Milton Keynes. Rogers, Jennifer and Groombridge, Brian (1976), Right to Learn, Arrow Books, London. Russell Report (1973), Adult Education – A Plan for Development, HMSO, London. Stubbs, Michael (1980), Language and Literacy, the Scoio-linguistics of Reading and Writing, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Thompson, Jane L. (ed), Adult Education for a Change, Hutchinson, London.
47 The strange fate of progressive education James Avis
This chapter considers the ‘strange fate of progressive education’ in the postwar period and explores the way in which its ideas and themes have been taken up and distorted by the new vocationalism of the 1970s and 1980s. The concerns of progressive education had to some extent been reflected in liberal and general studies in the 1960s and were echoed by the ‘humanism’ of the Crowther Report. The aim of liberal and general studies was to move students beyond narrow vocational concerns to examine broader issues related to society. The new vocationalism of the 1970s and 1980s represents a retraction from this position and its replacement by a vocational focus. The first part of the chapter discusses the nature of progressive education in the postwar period, followed by an examination of the curricular models of the new vocationalism. I have considered the Certificate of Pre-Vocational Education (CPVE), Core Skills in YTS, and various documents produced by the Further Education Unit (FEU). From its inception the theory and practice of progressive education has been profoundly contradictory and marked by disjunctures between its rhetorical justifications and the actions of its practitioners (Jones, 1983; Bernstein, 1977). It has often been claimed that focusing on student interest would enable progressive education to move the student on to a higher level of abstraction and so develop potential for critical thought. This aim has frequently been stalled when practitioners become stuck in the present by simply remaining on the terrain of student interest. The contradictions and disjunctures are unsurprising as there is no agreedupon set of principles on which progressivism is based. This enables its practice to be malleable and capable of being adjusted to meet the institutional requirements of different educational settings (Gordon, 1986; Jones, 1983). The word itself is ambiguous reflecting as it does the divergent directions progressivism can take (Williams, 1981, p. 245). On one level the notion of progressivism can be collapsed into a biological developmentalism – the idea of a step-by-step move from immaturity to maturity. On another level it can be counterposed to conservatism as its antithesis – thus having a resonance with radical sentiments (Walkerdine, 1984; Walkerdine, 1986). Despite the inconsistencies that surround the theoretical underpinnings of progressivism there are a number of underlying themes. In 1986 Tula Gordon constructed an ideal type of progressivism present in secondary schools: i.
mixed ability, vertical groupings work together and or individually in an open plan classroom under a team of teachers; ii. the day is ‘integrated’, the curriculum is problem- or concept-based; iii. a wide range of resources is drawn upon; iv. the teaching-learning is child centred, based on the pupils’ interests, needs and skills;
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v. the teacher is a guide and supporter in the child’s pursuit of learning; vi. academic learning is balanced by social and emotional learning, emphasizing creativity and self-expression; vii. decisions in the school are made by all those involved in it. 1986, p. 29 Gordon’s description has the merit of drawing our attention to a number of elements within progressivism and its potential ambiguities. In the postwar period the central underpinnings of progressivism are its child/student centredness, its focus on relevance, its concern to relate to the interests of the child thereby enhancing motivation and willingness to learn, and its concern with integration. The important thing for progressivism is not so much what is learned, but rather the process of learning, and this is why there is emphasis on activity-based learning. The offshoot is that learning is individualized, children are perceived to develop at different rates and the pedagogic milieu should accommodate this. The mentors of progressivism have been many, but both Dewey and Bruner figure prominently among these and their ideas have been selectively utilized in theory and practice. For Dewey, by drawing on learners’ practical interests, motivation and commitment to learning would be sustained. The educational exchange should go further and was intended to transcend the present and the localized. Learners’ immediate interests were to be developed and engaged in such a way as to enable the acquisition of conceptual, abstract and analytical modes of understanding. Aronowitz and Giroux in Education under Siege have, by stressing these themes, attempted to regain the radical potential of Dewey’s approach through the development of a critical education. The work of other progressive theorists is equally capable of being appropriated and used radically, in as much as these echo a desire to move from the immediate to higher levels of understanding. For example, Andy Green (1986) has discussed the work of Bruner whose notion of the ‘spiral curriculum’ attempts to move children from simple generalization to the more complex and thus to develop their conceptual understanding. Paradoxically, within practice the potentiality of progressivism has often not been developed. As a curriculum form it is in the curious and unenviable position of being both supported and criticized by the ‘left’, as well as being subject to attack from the right, and yet being a hegemonic element in the curricular forms of the ‘new vocationalism’. The right in both England and the USA has launched an attack on the work of schools and the practices of teaching and learning that take place in educational institutions. The concern with standards, both academic and attitudinal, is paramount. Schools, it is argued, have been lax, whilst child-centred curricula which work from children’s interests are considered antithetical to a disciplined and serious engagement with knowledge. Thus there is a call for a return to basics. The attack from the right has keyed in with popular sentiments and paradoxically is supported and reinforced from the ‘left’. Aronowitz and Giroux write: ‘Thus, the radical reformers were prey to the charge that they had betrayed the interests of the poor and minorities who desperately needed to learn how to read, write and calculate’ (1986, p. 8). For commentators such as Sharp and Green (1975), progressive education was merely a more sophisticated form of student control and a means of reproducing capitalist social relations. These ideas have a resonance with Bernstein’s discussion of the invisible pedagogy and Walkerdine’s strictures on the nature of progressivism as a system of social regulation and surveillance, whereby all aspects of the child come under the total gaze of the teacher (Bernstein, 1977; Walkerdine, 1986).
1052 James Avis The paradox of progressivism is that it faces both ways and can be appropriated by both left and right in attempts to use it for quite different political purposes. Smith and Knight, for example, suggest the right’s attack on progressivism is a result of its potential to evoke social criticism. It is in order to ask why the radical right in England, Australia, and the USA fear and attack progressive education. This is not only a reflection of their ideological opposition to liberal democracy but also an index of their apprehension of progressivism’s perceived intention and potential for social and cultural change. They fear it because of its perceived failure to train students to docility and obedience and its perceived potential for developing more autonomous and responsible individuals and for fostering a more democratic and aware community. 1982, p. 229 It is this sense of critique that Aronowitz and Giroux (1986) are trying to reinstate. There is an inherent difficulty in the practice of progressivism that has enabled it to point both ways. This has been its inability to develop a fully worked-out politics and politically engaged curriculum. Bernstein (1977) commenting on the theoretical underpinnings of progressivism suggests that it is constructed out of diverse elements.1 Atkinson, commenting on this aspect of Bernstein’s work, states: ‘it [progressive theory] is a very mixed bag. It is, as I have implied, the outcome of bricolage: that is, the cobbling together of whatever bits and pieces are to hand, rather than a custom-built design’ (1985, p. 159). Ironically, it was this theoretical and political lacuna that enabled radical teachers in the 1960s to incorporate progressivism into their practice. As a result of this vacuum, however, neither progressivism nor radical teachers were able to defend themselves from the onslaught of the right in the 1970s. This failure opened the way for a rightist take-over of progressivism and came in the guise of a realistic and vocationally orientated approach that masqueraded as being of the left. What then have been the radical failings of progressive education in practice? The central flaw has been its individualism. Each child and student is categorized atomistically and expected to pursue their own separate and autonomous development. The difficulty here is that there is no grasp of collective processes or indeed the formation of collective ways of appropriating and using educational forms and knowledge. Education is reduced to the pursuit of individual development. The social processes involved in the production of knowledge are ignored and knowledge is rid of its social uses. Whether or not knowledge is of use depends on the vantage point from which it is viewed and the social interests to which it can be put. Progressive education either neglects or trivializes social differences, the consequence being its failure to address forms of knowledge that could be used collectively by oppressed groups. This relates to a number of other difficulties. In progressive education the classroom becomes a small-scale model of society without the social relations and as such provides a distorted and astructural view of the social formation (Walkerdine 1984). This results from its empiricism, its focus on relevance and on what the student knows. Despite the strictures of the mentors of progressivism it has often become fixed on the immediate and has therefore failed to develop in its charges a wider understanding of social processes that can transcend the present and provide ‘really useful knowledge’. As Andy Green writes: ‘The danger of “instant relevance” is that in its earnest desire to “meet the kids where they’re at” it ends up leaving them exactly there’ (1986, p. 115; emphasis added).
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This tension within progressive practice results from its mode of deployment. Progressivism is taken up differentially in various educational sites. Thus it will be subject to subtle transformation between pedagogic locations. In addition, within particular sites its accenting will be dependent upon the type of student or pupil to whom it is addressed. In the case of the Raising of the School Leaving Age (ROSLA), the move towards progressivism was more an attempt to solve the problems schools encountered when faced with pupil hostility to the traditional curriculum, than a well thought-out curriculum intervention aimed at developing ‘really useful knowledge’. In these instances it was used as a form of surveillance and student control. Progressivism became reduced to technique. It became part of the armoury of educationists to be used judiciously when the need arose. Its apolitical nature enabled this shift and conspired in its transmogrification into conservative education.
The selective take-up of progressivism The central themes of progressivism were ready-made for an appropriation into a new conservative educational/training paradigm. Its focus on the student, its orientation towards relevance and its perceived ability, through the combination of these elements, to motivate the learner, rendered it the paradigmatic form for the new vocationalism. A number of related educational currents also fed into the new paradigm in both positive and negative ways. The often reported resistance to traditional pedagogies and their stultifying effect on many pupils provided a negative push away from this type of curriculum towards the more vocational. This shift was located at a moment when traditional education was in crisis, bearing much of the blame for the growth in youth unemployment. The bifurcation between traditional educational relations and those embodied in progressivism was also reflected in the polarity between competency-based education and traditionalism. The deep-seated behaviourism of competency-based education was able to align itself with the truncated progressivism of the new paradigm. Consider, for example, the distinctions made between competency-based education and traditional education in the following passage from Competency in Teaching:2
Competency Based Education 1. The main indicator of student achievement is ability to do the job effectively. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Traditional Education
The main indicators of student achievement are knowledge of the subject and the ability to do the job effectively and efficiently. Once a student has demonstrated ability to Students operate within specified time do the job, his/her preparation is complete. limits. Criterion of success is demonstration of The criteria of success are better ability to do the job. grades. Entrance requirements are not of Entrance requirements are important. paramount concern. Flexible scheduling of learning activities is Students are scheduled for instruction essential to provide for individual into fairly rigid blocks of time. difference.
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6. No fixed rules as to how, when or where learning is to be accomplished. 7. Opportunities are provided to acquire competences in practical field or on the job experience. 8. Learnings are presented in small learning units. 9. Provision is made for differences among students with various alternative paths for acquiring competence.
Classroom teaching. Practical field experiences are limited.
Learnings are organized into courses. Lecture-discussion is the most common mode of presentation. Little attention is given to student style of learning.
This passage is of interest as it is indicative of another route to the new vocationalism that draws upon behaviourist psychology and the objectives school of curriculum design (Mager, 1962). It shows the way in which progressivism can become distorted and yet allied to an amazingly restricted educational form. It should be remembered that, whilst progressive educators in the 1960s were often opposed to the psychology of measurement, the two were intimately linked, as Walkerdine (1984) has shown in her discussion of Piaget. In the same vein a similar link is present between the looser forms of progressivism in the new vocationalism and behaviourism. The social and life skills element in the early Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP) reflects this tendency. Davies notes: It [social and life skills training] has been used for many years in work with the mentally handicapped, with prisoners and even those seeking help with personal and behavioural difficulties. However, in these fields of practice it has usually been possible to regard those undergoing the ‘training’ as victims of some personal incapacity . . . It has, therefore, also been possible to act as if their ‘problems’ could be defined ‘objectively’ and as if their ‘treatment’ were entirely a ‘technical’ matter calling for no implicit ethical choices. 1979, p. 4 Integration was another element of progressivism that was taken up in the new vocationalism. It allowed a distancing from the perceived irrelevance of academic studies, the sterility of much that passed for technical education, and was able to key into anticipated student responses to the newer curricular forms.3 These changes were responses to the new relations in which further education (FE) was placed in the 1970s. The advent of the youth training schemes and the growth of unemployment meant that youth who had previously been denied access to FE entered in ever-growing numbers. Progressive pedagogic styles were seen as meeting the needs of these students/trainees, as well as avoiding control problems arising from the use of traditional pedagogic models (Stafford, 1981). Teachers involved in this type of work were accorded low status. It was also at this time that the Further Education Curriculum Review and Development Unit was established (FEU).4 The significance of this unit has been profound and has been crucial in the generation and dissemination of new curricular models that have represented the vocational appropriation of a truncated progressivism. In part its activities have conjoined with those of some practitioners of the new vocationalism who have sought a greater legitimacy for their curricular practices. It is something of a paradox that the linchpin of integration in the new forms has been contrasted to the restrictive and hidebound theoretical orientations of traditional academic
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and technical education. Yet the ideologues of the new forms have sought to provide themselves with a theoretical justification for an atheoretical and concretely based practice. This can be contrasted against the heavily theoretical and pedagogically unsupported practice of traditional education. There has been and continues to be a struggle within further education between the new trainers, attached to the newer curricular forms, and those attached to the older. In this struggle careers have been made and a variety of resources have been manipulated. One such resource has been the quite correct denigration of traditional academic education for its elitism and another has been the new trainers’ pretence to left-wing commitments (Boffy and Cave, 1982).
The new educational paradigm and curriculum interventions In this section I consider a number of curricular interventions that reflect the development of the ‘new educational paradigm’ and its preferred pedagogy. A close-in analysis will be made of a number of documents, The Certificate of Pre-Vocational Education (CPVE blue books), Core Skills in YTS, and a selection of the publications of the FEU.5 These documents have been selected as they reflect different institutional responses to the curriculum. The CPVE, for example, developed by City and Guilds London Institute (CGLI) and the Business and Technical Education Council (BTEC), arose out of a response to youth unemployment by the Department of Education and Science (DES) (DoE/DES 1986); Core Skills in YTS, was a publication produced by the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) for managing agents and was funded through the EEC social fund; FEU was established, amongst other things, to review and evaluate the FE curriculum. Each of the documents represents a different vantage point from which FE can be viewed. By exploring these documents various contradictions and tensions may be uncovered that open the way for an appropriate political intervention. It should be recognized that there are links and overlaps between these institutions which will be reflected in their documents. In the discussion I do not focus on the entirety of the documents, rather I explore three interrelated themes: models of society, of the student, and of education. These themes are implicitly or explicitly reflected in the documents. The analysis should not be viewed as restricted to the specific documents and I would contend that a similar reading could be made of current publications emanating from these bodies. In addition, these documents should be viewed as part of an ongoing struggle to define what counts as educational knowledge in our schools and colleges and what are suitable knowledge and curricula for certain types of students/trainees. These documents not only reflect a particular form of appropriation of progressivism but are also attempting to further a specific form of education. As Apple would suggest, they are involved in a process of cultural production. Commenting on the American experience he states: It is important that we focus on reports of this type since they act to alter the very discipline of education. The terrain of debate shifts from a concern with inequality and democratisation (no matter how weak) to the language of efficiency, standards and productivity. Alterations in the terrain of debate affect our collective memories in major ways. We lose sight of the years of effort it took to establish the progressive tendencies that do exist within state institutions such as schools, and these changes provide an ideological horizon against which we locate policies and practices of curriculum and teaching. Thus, these documents are not only useful indicators of ideological shifts. They
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are themselves part of the cultural production of such altered public discourse and as such need to be seen as constitutive elements of a particular hegemonic project. 1986, p. 174
The Certificate of Pre-Vocational Education (CPVE) The CPVE is a full-time pre-vocational course designed for those who have completed their compulsory schooling. It caters for students with varying vocational commitments and levels of ability. It aims to assist in the transition from school to adulthood; to provide an ‘individually relevant educational experience which encourages learning and achievement’; to provide a qualification which embodies national standards and provides scope for progression. There are three elements to the CPVE course framework: the core, vocational studies and additional studies. It is intended that the core and vocational studies be integrated. There are ten core areas and these should cover A range of experiences and competences (which include skills, knowledge and attitudes) which are essential to the students’ chances of making a success in adult life including work. CPVE Pt A, p. 4 The CORE Personal and career development Industrial, social and environmental studies Communication Social skills Numeracy
Science and technology Information technology Creative development Practical skills Problem solving based on CPVE Pt A, p. 4
Vocational studies aim to encourage motivation by building on student interests. They thus enable students to explore and develop their talents and interests as well as providing a focus for the development of core competences. In addition they provide a route for progression as well as generally developing ‘broad Vocational Skills applicable to a variety of adult roles found both inside and outside of employment’ (CPVE Pt A, p. 5). Vocational studies are grouped into five main categories, each being divided into a number of clusters based on groupings of occupational and non-occupational roles found in the category. a. b. c. d. e.
Category 1 – Business and administrative services. Category 2 – Technical services. Category 3 – Production. Category 4 – Distribution. Category 5 – Services to people. CPVE Pt A, p. 5
Within each category and cluster there are three stages. a. b. c.
Introductory – providing a general introduction to activities within each category Exploratory – providing a more detailed exploration of roles in a cluster Preparatory – encouraging the development of a range of skills and knowledge within a cluster as a preparation for progression within occupational routes in this or related clusters. CPVE Pt A, p. 5
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The third element of the CPVE framework is additional studies. The core and vocational studies comprise 75 per cent of the course; integration is encouraged, with a minimum of 20 per cent of the core and vocational studies being integrated. The remaining 25 per cent comprises additional studies and this is to provide time for ‘community activities, leisure, recreation and for reflection’, as well as providing for ‘particular educational needs’.
Model of society in CPVE Within the CPVE, society is conceived of in pluralist terms and comprises different interest groups and cultures. There is, however, an underlying consensual base to society in which fundamental conflicts of interest are absent. In the third aim, ‘personal and social development’, which is concerned with morals and ethics, the student is to ‘recognise the relationship between rights and responsibilities of citizens in a democratic society’ (CPVE Pt B, p. 5). And in the fourth aim, ‘industrial, social and environmental studies’, objectives include: understanding the legal rights, duties, and responsibilities of the individual. identifying the role of the police and courts in the enforcement of law and the protection of the rights of individuals and groups. CPVE Pt B, p. 7 Implicit within these quotes is a view of society as ultimately democratic and fair, for if it were not, how could one justify an emphasis that stresses the duties and responsibilities of the individual? Where conflicts do arise these are perceived in frictional terms. Individual bias or prejudice may lead to conflict. These are resolvable on the level of the individual and represent a dysfunctioning of an otherwise democratic and therefore just society. Thus students should be able to ‘formulate personal values by . . . recognising bias and its effect on human relationships – race, sex, age, class, and religious discrimination’ (CPVE Pt B, p. 5) and to recognise and analyse the signs used to allocate individuals to categories, and to be aware of the prevalence and abuses of such categorisations by . . . assessing the usefulness of such categorisation [gender, class, race, dress, speech, age] in developing effective working and social relationships [and by] recognising misuses of categorisation of individuals and groups – working, social, cultural and religious. CPVE Pt B, p. 11 There is a recognition of the social structure, for example, as a cause of unemployment, though curricular stress on the individual limits its centrality (CPVE Pt B, p. 7). The core, to be fair, is potentially contradictory and could be used to raise important questions, but its critical edge is subsumed to a truncated vocationalism that limits this possibility. This is the result of its integration with vocational elements of the curriculum. The design of courses and the balance of the various components are the responsibility of the schools and colleges. Courses can vary from a totally integrated programme in which the Core competences are achieved entirely through the Vocational studies, to a structure in which only partial integration is achieved. Courses in which Core and Vocational studies are wholly separated will not be approved. CPVE Pt A, p. 7; emphases added
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The nature of the CPVE framework recognises that the achievement of core aims and objectives will be met in a variety of ways but specifically identifies the role of the Vocational studies as a way in which the core will be developed and applied. CPVE Pt B, p. 3; emphases added If the vocational aims of the CPVE are to be met, the critical potential of the core has to be neutralized and this is done by placing ‘vocation’ in a hegemonic position. Anything that undermines this aim is thus rendered illegitimate. The vocationalism of the CPVE is constructed as a form of anticipatory socialization through the focus on role exploration. The student is to explore the roles available in a particular occupational category or cluster. The experiences provided by the CPVE seek to develop the personal autonomy of the student: To develop ability to make effective personal and working relationships and to promote self-reliance. CPVE Pt B, p. 10 The student should be encouraged and guided to adopt active rather than passive learning methods, with the aim of generating autonomy and a pro-active approach to learning. CPVE Pt B, p. 32 However, this concern with autonomy and self-reliance emerges in a restricted form which is stripped of a sense of empowerment. The student is simply to acquire the characteristics of the responsible worker which are reflected in the nature of the CPVE with its stress on occupational socialization (see Friedman, 1977) and its concern that ‘The CPVE will allow students to demonstrate readiness to . . . respond and perform effectively at work’ (CPVE Pt A, p. 3). Whilst the student is to develop a degree of personal autonomy, this stops short of a concern with control and with an understanding of industry and society. The autonomous individual may reject the ideology of vocationalism and may perceive the exploitative relationships that arise in paid labour, but the whole weight of the curriculum is designed to negate such an outcome. The curriculum core does recognize the existence of a range of social inequalities; for example, those based on race and gender. However, these are not considered as patterns of social relations but rather as the effect of individual bias, are treated as dysfunctional and are resolvable within the existing structure of society. Unfortunately the official version of the CPVE provides no space for the recognition of contradictions whose resolution would require structural change.
Education in CPVE Within the CPVE there lies an implicit critique of academic and ‘traditional’ vocational education, both being construed as inappropriate. Traditional vocational education is seen as being too specific and failing to develop transferable skills. On the other hand academic education is criticized for its sterility, its lack of relevance and its ‘construction’ of the student as passive. An adequate education is seen as being activity-based and involving negotiation between student and teacher. The learning strategies adopted must support the aims of the course as a whole. The
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following [activity-based learning, work experience, guidance and student support] are particularly important and will be an integral part of all CPVE courses. Activity-based learning Achievement of a large number of Core and Vocational objectives requires the use of practical activities to develop the students’ experience and to provide opportunities for applying and re-applying knowledge and skills. Activity-based Learning also provides the basis for encouraging student selfdevelopment and increasing autonomy. To achieve this it must be based on the needs, interests and resources of the students themselves. CPVE Pt A, p. 8 The teacher becomes a facilitator. The whole educational experience is organized around the perceived needs of the learner and here student guidance is stressed. A system of Student Counselling and Guidance is an integral part of all courses and must be closely related to Formative Assessment and the Profiling system. It will include regular meetings between the student and a personal tutor at which problems and progress can be reviewed and future patterns of learning agreed. This involvement of the students in the planning of their own programmes and learning contributes to course integration by helping them to perceive the course as a coherent whole. CPVE Pt A, p. 8 Many of the themes raised in the CPVE are an appropriation of progressive education. This is reflected in the concern with a student-centred, activity-based education that relates to the interests and needs of the learner. This progressivism, which presents itself as radical, is in fact deeply conservative. The focus on relevance, needs and interests is the bulwark of progressivism, and in radical versions these are used to transcend the present, to consider possibilities and to develop critical insights into the nature of society. Yet the curriculum framework of the CPVE limits this possibility. The teaching exchange is seen as benign, discrepancies of power are ignored, and education is perceived solely as developing the individual rather than empowering collectivities too. The knowledges that students bring with them are treated differentially. Those that accord with realism and appropriate forms of subjectivity are valued, whilst those that do not are counselled against. Thus the importance placed on profiling and negotiated learning becomes a way of monitoring student subjectivity. Whilst prominence is given to the notion of vocation there has been a narrowing of the term. Vocationalism could mean not only an exploration of occupational roles, functions and activities, but also an active engagement with the nature of work. This would not solely be at an individual level, focusing on occupational suitability, but involve a more rigorous critique, implicitly raising issues of value. The form of vocational education envisaged by the CPVE subsumes skill to competence and attitudinal dispositions. There is a devaluation of the notion of control that is implicit in the conception of skill. Within the CPVE the split between mental and manual labour is reproduced, as is the separation between academic and vocational education. There is no consideration of their interrelation, or that an adequate and critical education could combine both, drawing on their strengths and in this way transforming them.
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Students in CPVE Whilst the CPVE is purportedly for the vocationally uncommitted with a wide range of abilities, this emphasis should be viewed within the educational relations in which it is placed historically and contemporaneously. Historically it developed from low-level, pre-vocational courses; as a route to high-status occupations it is clearly limited in comparison with traditional academic courses. In order to motivate the learner, it is argued that an activity-based, experiential, vocationally related course is required. There is a stress on learning by doing and the student is perceived as oriented towards the practical. Vocational studies in their different modes illustrate this. Where there is time for reflection, this is shaped in such a way as to encourage consideration of difficulties experienced by students that inhibit adequate role performance. This approach stresses the practical, is focused on the individual, and to the extent that reflection is encouraged this is in terms of individual inadequacies. Reflection on work experiences, sessions on personal development, counselling and formative assessment all lead to the construction of the student as an atomistic individual. There is a concern with the surveillance and policing of student subjectivity. Even when the term autonomy is used this is in a restricted sense which reduces it to one of compliance and self-discipline within the worker. There is no sense of collective empowerment, and even when the individual is placed in a group context it is to encourage the acceptance of group evaluation of their performance. Contributing to the self evaluation of others by sharing perceptions of them through constructive one-to-one and group evaluations. Summarising and reviewing opinions and judgement of self in groups and in one-to-one discussions. CPVE Pt B, p. 10 Here we see a concern with monitoring the student in order to encourage the formation of a conformist subjectivity. This is all the more insidious in that students are to be party to this process. The vocational nature of the CPVE advances a subjectivity that is fitted to employer requirements, that is, the construction of a flexible, reliable, responsible, self-disciplining worker. I am aware that many of the core objectives and aims of the CPVE could point to alternative outcomes, and that radical teachers, with their students, will draw on its fissures and tensions to struggle for these. However, the curricular framework of CPVE is such that its core objectives are subsumed under a vocationalism that limits the effectiveness of such struggles.
‘Core skills in YTS’ This document was produced by the MSC for the guidance of management agents in the provision of work experience and off-the-job education and training.6 The document avoids an engagement with educational theorizing and the acceptance and legitimacy of its educational underpinnings are taken for granted. Core skills aim to encourage managing agents to adopt its definition of good practice. The document secures its legitimacy through its form which is that of the glossy, authoritative report akin to annual reports produced by business firms, and its written style which uses easy platitudes of common sense to authorize its claims. In the discussion I do not consider the implicit model of society found in the
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document as this is similar to that of the CPVE’s. Instead I focus on models of education and the trainee present in the document. The foreword to Core Skills (Pt 1 foreword) summarizes the aims of the Youth Training Scheme (YTS) as providing the trainee with initial competence in a job; a broad range of occupational and transferable skills; and personal effectiveness. Core skills themselves are defined as follows: Core skills underpin the concept of skill transfer, and the development of personal and occupational competence in the work place. They are of major importance in a school to work transition programme, since they are concerned with the application of skills and knowledge to tasks at work and in the world outside work. For this reason they cannot be learned or assessed as single subjects in the classroom. Core Skills Pt 1, foreword; emphases added What then are these core skills that are to be developed in YTS trainees? There are 4 core areas which contain 14 core skills groups which together involve 103 core skills. Core Area
Core Skills group
Number
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Operating with numbers Interpreting numerical and related information Estimating Measuring and marking out Recognizing cost and value
Communication
6. Finding out information and interpreting instructions 7. Providing information 8. Working with people
Problem Solving
9. Planning: Determining and revising courses of action 10. Decision making: Choosing between alternatives 11. Monitoring: Keeping track of progress and checking
Practical
12. Preparing for a practical activity 13. Carrying out a practical activity 14. Finishing off a practical activity. Core Skills Pt 1, p. 37
Training for core skills is intended to develop both competence in an occupational area and in transfer skills; and to encourage the acquisition of knowledge and skills that will enable the young person to progress ‘to further education and training in the same or different occupations and to cope with the world outside employment’ (Core Skills Pt 1, p. 4), even if this is unemployment. The acquisition of core skills is far more than the mere learning of technical know-how, as it involves not only transfer skills but also the formation of an appropriate subjectivity. It is, in effect, an attempt to construct the generic worker. What, however, is meant by skills of transfer? There are two ways in which the question is handled. First, itemizing core skills makes visible what was previously taken for granted: for example, the communication skills involved in talking to people at work.7 By naming these, core skills are
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uncovered that can be universalized and can transcend any particular occupational site. The acquisition of these skills, it is suggested, will lead to a more adequate performance at work. Secondly, the notion of transfer involves being able to apply knowledge and skills appropriately in new contexts. This element of transfer involves not only the application of knowledge and skills but also the subjective wish to do so.
Education and the trainee The document implicitly assumes schooling has failed to equip young people with the appropriate core skills because of the dominance of traditional educational techniques. These techniques can be summarized as subjects, abstraction, lack of application to the real world, teacher-centred learning. All of these are counterposed to the good practice that is recommended in Core Skills. If trainees are to receive an adequate education/training this must be of a type that is activity-based and student-centred and links what is learned to the real world. Whilst the document is focused on YTS trainees and is primarily concerned with their training and off-the-job education, it does have a wider application to educational debates. This is because its arguments are constructed in such a way as to point to what is considered to be good educational practice. The emphasis throughout is on learning by doing and the process of learning. Training for core skills often has as much to do with how trainees are learning as it has to do with what specific knowledge they are acquiring; situations in which trainees learn through active experience promote a greater range and depth of skills. Core Skills Pt 1, p. 2; emphases added This is contrasted to traditional subject teaching which is seen as unnecessarily restrictive and separated from the real world of practice. The document is critical of methods of assessment that ‘measure theoretical abilities in isolation from their application’ (Core Skills Pt 1, p. 8). An adequate assessment of students’ core skills must consider their ‘performance in real situations’. It is suggested that core skills cannot be ‘taught’ as subjects but must be related to an integrated programme. This position is grossly anti-educative. For whilst these strictures echo the tenets of progressivism, on another level they are profoundly conservative. This is because the assessment of core skills goes beyond the evaluation of capability and involves an implicit appraisal of moral worth. There is a paradox in the way in which the document deals with attitudes: Some skills are more important in a task than others, and some are so insignificant as to be not worth recording . . . for example the collection of mail calls for no real exercise of skill. (This is not to say that is it not important in the task. If the trainee did not bother to collect the mail, all the other skills would be irrelevant. But this would be a shortcoming in attitude not skill.) Core Skills Pt 1, p. 10, note iii Here, there is an attempt to separate attitude from skill and yet in the performance of the task it will be paramount. If assessment is concerned with performance it cannot help but be involved in the appraisal of attitudes. When discussing communication the document states: Within both of these groups [customers/clients] trainees should be given contact with a
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variety of people in order to learn appropriate ways of communicating with people in a variety of departments or sections and with people at a variety of levels in a company, for instance. Often communication skills can only be effective if the trainee has first decided when it is best to use them and planned the best ordering for information on enquiries. Core Skills Pt 1, p. 23 Clearly in these relationships, there is a concern not just with some abstract capacity to communicate, but rather with relations of power and authority and the trainee’s response to this. The ability to communicate, in this instance, is not separable from the trainee’s attitude as it will be through the perceptions of others that this ability is measured. Thus if a supervisor feels a trainee is insufficiently deferential this will be perceived as the trainee’s inadequacy to communicate effectively. It is within this sphere that core skills become problematic. Because they are tied to a particular set of relations, namely employment relations, their accomplishment is limited by them. This means that if occasions arise when the trainees reflect on their position, a contradiction emerges. Reflection is encouraged in core skills; the trainees are to reflect on their training, on their own skills, on the generality of the skills that they possess. However, if reflection transcends the employment nexus, if trainees start to question the authority relations in which they are placed, and if they start to contemplate the exploitativeness and meaninglessness of much that passes for work, they will be seen as having failed to develop the appropriate core skills. The suggestion that core skills training is educational is a misrepresentation, for it is in fact an anti-educative device, though some trainees and teachers may struggle to turn it into something of value.
The FEU: ‘conservative radicals?’ In this section, rather than a close-in discussion of a particular document, a more eclectic, and pragmatic approach is adopted. The FEU, a semi-autonomous body, was established in 1977. It was set up to realign and coordinate curriculum developments in FE and has managed to survive ten years of Conservative government. It is far from being a homogeneous or monolithic institution. The nature of its work, involving the commissioning of research and the dissemination of results, makes for variety in what is produced and recommended. The FEU has persistently seen itself as an agent of change: it was to transform the outmoded practices of FE and to introduce a more modern, streamlined and realistic form. This project connects the FEU to the previous developments discussed, and it has been portrayed as radical and progressive. But is it? What would be the effect if the educational developments suggested by the FEU were taken on board by FE? Would this result in a more ‘radical’ and therefore useful educational experience for students? What are the limits and possibilities of FEU practices? Is it trapped within the rhetoric of the ‘social-democratic’ view of education so that its radicalism shields a deep-seated conservatism? In the following discussion there are two sections. The first considers questions of access and waste, and the second the nature of the educational experience.
Access and waste A recurrent theme in the FEU documents is a concern with access to education and the subsequent waste of human resources that arises when this does not occur (FEU, 1985a). There is an emphasis that educational experiences should provide access for older people, women and members of ethnic minorities. For example, the ‘culture’ of FE is thought to
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inhibit the performance of women and girls: ‘These female students who find themselves in an FE college are likely to be part of an establishment organised by men for men often with a monocultural ethos’ (FEU, 1985a, p. 7; emphases added). The intervention of the FEU is designed to overcome these inhibitions. They suggest the way to do this is to transform the curriculum, the institutional framework and indeed the monoculturalism of FE. This stance is applied to all those groups who experience ‘disadvantage’ in FE: the older students, women, ethnic minorities and the disabled. Thus for the older students traditional further education fails to recognize the significance of their experience. It is proposed that Present provision of adult education/training is often the target of widespread criticism. Many schemes of traditional academic and vocational training seem to create barriers and disincentives and to inhibit adaptability as a result of their reluctance to recognize learning derived from work experience. FEU, 1984b, p. 2; emphases added A set of measures is proposed that will eradicate these blockages and without which we would all lose out; the nation would lose valuable human resources. In Changing the Focus the MSC is cited approvingly (FEU, 1985a, p. 8): ‘from a national point of view the waste of resources inherent in the failure to make full use of the ability of women needs to be corrected’. There is nothing new about these ideas. They were a recurrent theme throughout the 1960s and became embedded in the social-democratic view of education (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Education Group, 1981). This model of education held out the promise of meritocracy and equal educational opportunity. If these aims were met it was felt that all of society would benefit as its human resources would be stretched and developed to the full. This was the time when the notion of human capital was developed; it underlies much of the FEU’s work and can, for example, be seen in the idea of ‘skill ownership’. Like the earlier debates the current discussions treat ‘disadvantage’ in isolation. The issue of race is treated separately from that of age or gender, and nowhere is the issue of class discussed. A recognition of these relationships would challenge the FEU’s project which is to provide an effective, streamlined and adequately motivated labour force for a dynamic capitalism. The ‘disadvantages’ experienced by older people, women and ethnic minorities are seen to block moves towards economic recovery. To ensure a revived economy, educational processes need to be transformed. Here the FEU introduces something new. Rather than just providing access to traditional FE, its curriculum needs to be changed to facilitate effectiveness.
The educational experience The FEU is stringently critical of traditional education, both academic and vocational. Both are considered defunct as they fail to extend the student or develop skills needed by a modern, technologically advanced society. The linchpin of these criticisms is that not only does education lack relevance to the wider society and to the world of work, but that the student is cast in the role of a passive recipient of knowledge.8 In this way the educational experience of the student is rendered incomplete. The losers in this exchange are not only the students but society as a whole. Whilst the FEU’s work has been focused on vocational education in FE, its influence has also penetrated the school.9 For example, the joint
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publication of the FEU with the School Curriculum Development Committee, Supporting TVEI, argues that across the range of abilities there is a need to develop new teaching and learning styles (FEU/SCDC, 1985). There should be a shift away from teacher-led styles to those which are experientially based, curriculum-led, and, importantly, student centred. There is a move away from the classroom, towards a negotiated curriculum. In other words teachers and students negotiate an appropriate curriculum package that meets the needs of the individual student. There is a consistent critique of the dominance of subject teaching. It is argued that an integrated approach be adopted that overcomes the separateness of subject disciplines. Roy Boffy (1984) also calls for integration. He explains the dominance of subject disciplines as resulting from the power of educational elites in universities who have distorted the curriculum and led to the dominance of inappropriate curriculum forms. The hegemony of subjects renders education an abstract and unreal experience. Progressing to College: a 14–16 Core states: The core should be ‘compulsory’ for all 14–16 pupils, otherwise it is unlikely to be used and referred to by either educational institutions, examining boards or employers. The way it is provided, applied and made available to individual pupils should be a matter of negotiation and consultation between teachers, parents and pupils themselves. Although this appears radical, in practice many core subjects such as mathematics, English, etc, are already agreed in this way. The only differences, as will be described below, are that we are suggesting a core broader than a collection of single subjects. FEU, 1985b, p. 2 The core is restricted to fifteen aims and all pupils have an entitlement to have access to these. The aims are: Adaptability Physical Skills Values Problem solving Society Health Education Environment Coping
Role Transition Interpersonal Skills Communication/Numeracy Information Technology Learning Skills Creativity Science/Technology FEU, 1985b, pp. 3–5
The significance of the core with its emphasis on negotiation is that areas of study and student capacities that in the past were not assessed are opened up for scrutiny and social regulation. Personal qualities are, for many young people, their main strength. If these qualities matter, which they certainly do, and if they can be developed, which they certainly can, then we should plan to make them a real part of the curriculum. As well as affecting the approach we adopt to the learning process, this also means that we should work out the implications for assessment. Not to credit young people with (for example) their ability to work with
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others, whilst insisting on reporting their lack of ability (such as in essay writing) would seem to be perverse. Stanton, 1984, p. 18; emphases added These new emphases are indicated in the learning and teaching strategies that teachers are encouraged to adopt: negotiation, experiential learning, counselling and guidance, teaching for transfer, recording and profiling, continual assessment of need and progress, participative learning (FEU, 1984c; Boffy, 1984). Many of the ideas and arguments advanced by the FEU have a fine ring. They do connect with a real criticism of the nature of educational provision and yet their logic is fundamentally flawed. This becomes apparent when the measures used to assess the effectiveness of these interventions are considered. Examine the following aims that are part of the core entitlement: Adaptability to develop a flexibility of attitude and ability to learn sufficient to cope with future changes in technology, career and life style. Role transition to bring out an informed perspective as to the roles and status of a young person in an adult, multicultural society including the world of work in order to inform responsible and realistic decision-making as to future opportunities. Interpersonal Skill To bring about an ability to be sensitive to and tolerant of the needs of others, and to develop satisfactory personal relationships. Values To foster a reasoned set of social and moral values applicable to issues in contemporary society. FEU, 1985b, pp. 3–4 These aims are predicated on a number of disturbing themes. There is, for example, an implicit acceptance of the status quo, an attempt to encourage realism, an acceptance of one’s place and a move towards self-blame for failure. There is a deep concern with the formation and assessment of an appropriate subjectivity, one that accords with a particular view of the needs of a capitalist society. Many of the competences young people need . . . owe little to the content of traditional subjects. They rely on more generalised process skills of analysis and problem solving, personal qualities such as resilience and responsibility, and the ability to transfer knowledge and skills acquired in one context to other problems and situations. FEU, 1984c, p. 1 When one considers the FEU’s emphasis on competence, in more directly vocational education, the conservative nature of the concept and its attempted subjective effect becomes apparent. Competence can be defined as: the possession and development of sufficient skills, knowledge,
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appropriate attitudes and experience for successful performance in life roles. Such a definition includes employment and other forms of work; it implies maturity and responsibility in a variety of roles; and it includes experience as an essential element of competence. FEU, 1984e, p. 3 These issues are underpinned by the assumption that there is no difference between education and training. The two become merged, the hegemony of the vocational is secured and with it an acceptance of the social relations of work. Herein lies the essentially conservative nature of the FEU’s project and its ideological role. Its version of modernism and progressivism is one that is able to attract a type of ‘radical’ teacher whose radicalism is reduced to a posturing in the name of socialism and whose practice is conservative in its effect. This is not to deny the valuable work of radical teachers in countering the effects of the ‘new curriculum’, or of those radicals who work in the FEU and attempt to develop critical educational practices.
Conclusion This chapter has focused upon the contradictory nature of progressive education, an educational form pointing both to the right and left. It has also been amenable to various inflections at different locations in the educational system. The discussion of educational documents points towards one such appropriation, an appropriation that has been made in the name of progressivism but that disguises a fundamentally conservative education. This is not to deny the malleability of progressivism and the contradictory elements that surround the new vocationalism which may be worked on by students/trainees and teachers in order to generate ‘really useful knowledge’. One of the aims of this book is to transcend mere critique and argue for the development of more promising pedagogic forms. Concerns with relevance and students’ interests hold the possibility of moving towards more politically relevant understandings. None the less we have to recognize that the new educational paradigm, forged through the work of such bodies as the FEU and MSC, has had a profound effect on our educational system. The new ideas are fast becoming part of educational orthodoxy. This new paradigm has not only transformed the nature of pre-vocational and vocational education, but is also having an impact on academic education, in particular on the development of GCSE. On one level these moves could be applauded. It is eminently sensible that an individual’s educational experiences relate to their interests and to what they consider to be important. On another level, the current developments are deeply disturbing; relevance has become transposed to the immediate, theory to technique, and knowledge to the empirical. The epistemological basis of the new paradigm is fundamentally positivistic and empiricist: the world is directly observable and understandable. This view of knowledge legitimates an atheoretical approach that denies the social processes involved in the production of facts and theories. The knowledge and facts that are so generated are given a hardness and certainty that are unwarranted. This delivers a technicization of knowledge and theory that reduces these to technique that can be used in problem-solving. The effect of the new paradigm on academic education has been uneven. Knowledge can be generated through empirical methods and be applied in a technical manner to solve problems. But sometimes theory can become concretized in as much as it is reduced to simplified statements that are empirically testable. Bernstein in his discussion of academic subjects suggests:
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By the ultimate of the subject, I mean its potential for creating new realities. It is also the case, and this is important, that the ultimate mystery of the subject is not coherence, but incoherence, not order, but disorder, not the known but the unknown . . . Only the few experience in their bones the notion that knowledge is permeable, that its orderings are provisional, that the dialectic of knowledge is closure and openness. For the many, socialisation into knowledge is socialisation into order, the existing order, into the experience that the world’s educational knowledge is impermeable. 1977, pp. 97–8 Bernstein’s argument reflects the provisional and relative nature of educational knowledge. It is also important to take into account students’ relationship to knowledge. Students in the course of their studies will have developed particular stakes or investments in certain forms of knowledge. Vocational students and some sectors of the working class may have a stake in those ‘objective’ forms of knowledge that offer ‘practical’ mastery, whereas ‘A’-level students, oriented towards higher education, may have a stake in more esoteric forms that articulate with the cultural capital of the dominant class. These different relations to knowledge herald different social positions and interests. The working class, for example, has a stake in ‘craft’ knowledge that provides some control over the production process. The provisional and esoteric nature of academic knowledge, once admitted, can serve to exclude those with a stake in ‘objective’ and impermeable educational knowledge. It therefore secures the dominance and exclusivity of academic forms which play some small part in the reproduction of the cultural capital of the dominant class. Many students on vocational and GCSE courses encounter knowledge of a concretized form, by which I mean unproblematic, empirically-based knowledge. Should they wish to pursue the elite educational route of ‘A’ level and beyond, previous educational experiences may be less than beneficial. Students may seek to compensate for these shortcomings by drawing on cultural capital they have inherited or acquired elsewhere. The introduction of elements of progressivism to academic and vocational education, it is claimed, has led to their broadening. By providing a more relevant and interesting educational experience, access is opened up. However, my earlier discussion has shown how these aims have been transformed into their opposite, creating an even more deeply divisive educational system that is able to obscure its divisiveness in the language of openness. Broadfoot (1986) suggests that the new educational forms hold some ‘progressive’ possibilities; for example, in extending equal opportunities, particularly in Scotland. She is deeply pessimistic about their implementation in England because the traditional system of examinations remains in place, which means the new developments in assessment and examination, such as CPVE, the Technical and Vocational Educational Initiative (TVEI), etc., will be considered inferior. This will lead to differentiation between students who follow the traditional academic route and those who follow the perceived inferior route of new educational forms. However, this differentiation also arises within the academic route itself and is based on the cultural capital students bring with them and the type of educational experiences they have had. Thus even in terms of the provision of equal educational opportunities the new forms fail and as Broadfoot has put it: In all those countries where industrial growth is increasingly being identified as of prime importance, and social justice correspondingly devalued into an associated, rather than a prime goal, the effects of such policy initiatives are likely to be to reinforce social divisions. 1986, p. 122
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It seems likely the new educational forms will exacerbate social divisions and represent, despite the intentions of those who formed them, a conservative education that attempts to reproduce the kinds of subjective disposition and orientation thought to be required by industry. These tendencies have been exacerbated in recent years by the development of the National Curriculum, which represents a return to an older form of Conservative education (Coles, 1988). Ironically in much the same way as critical educators have ruminated and struggled over the possibilities and limitations of progressivism, so too has the New Right. It seems likely that the incorporation of the new vocationalism into academic education will be halted and will remain focused on the working class. The ‘strange fate’ of progressive education has been its transformation into a form of conservative education. Perhaps its fate has not been so strange after all, for those radicals who practised it failed to develop a really radical appropriation. Progressive education has come to be seen as a teaching technique, one part of a teacher’s armoury to be used to solve educational problems, rather than as part of a political project. This absence has left the space for the New Right to move in. Here lies the struggle for those committed to the development of a critical education: the need to reappropriate progressivism and move beyond it to provide a ‘really useful’ education.
Notes David Maund, originally to co-author this chapter, suggested the title. 1 Bernstein (1977, pp. 122–3) writes: ‘Such Pedagogies will adopt any theory of learning which has the following characteristics: 1. The theories in general will be seeking universals and thus are likely to be developmental and concerned with sequence . . . are likely to have a strong biological basis. 2. Learning is a tacit, invisible act. 3. The theories will tend to abstract the child’s personal biography and local context from his cultural biography and institutional context. 4. . . . the various theories in different ways point towards implicit rather than explicit hierarchical social relationships. Indeed, the imposing exemplar is transformed into a facilitator. 5. Thus the theories can be seen as interrupters of cultural reproduction.’ 2 FEU, 1984a, p. 7. The passage is an edited version of the quote on p. 7 of the document, the original source being C. E. Johnson (1974), ‘Competency based and traditional education practices compared’, Journal of Teacher Education, Winter, pp. 335–6. 3 See E. Venables, 1967 and D. Gleeson et al., 1980 for responses to the older forms of educational relations. 4 ‘The Further Education Curriculum Review and Development Unit (FEU) is an advisory, intelligence and development body for further education. It was established in 1977 by the Secretary of State for Education and Science to make possible a more co-ordinated and cohesive approach to curriculum development in FE by 1. reviewing the range of existing curricula and identifying overlap, duplication and deficiencies 2. determining priorities for action to improve the total provision and suggesting ways in which improvement can be effected 3. carrying out specific studies, helping with curricular experiments, and contributing to the evaluation of objectives, and 4. disseminating information about the process of curriculum development in FE’ (FEU, 1979; see also Grosch, 1987) 5 BTEC/CGLI, The Certificate of Pre-Vocational Education, Part A, B, C, (hereafter cited as CPVE A, B, C) Blue books, 1985; MSC, Core Skills in YTS Part 1 and 2 (hereafter cited as Core Skills Pt 1, Pt 2). 6 ‘The MSC YTS Core has been developed within the ESF YTS Core project, which is jointly funded
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for three years by the European Social Fund [ESF] and the MSC’; acknowledgement, Core Skills Pt 1. 7 ‘6.1 find out information by speaking to other people’ (Core Skills Pt 1, p. 37). 8 There are links here with the work of the de-schoolers and with the radical critiques of education that flourished in the early stages of progressivism: Illich, 1973; Freire, 1972, a and b. 9 See FEU (1979), A Basis for Choice; FEU/SCDC (1985), Supporting TVEI; BTEC/CGLI (1985), CPVE, Pt 1, Pt 2; FEU (1984c), Common Core Teaching and Learning.
48 How working class kids get working class jobs Paul Willis
Key ( ) ..... ... .. (. .) (. . .) (. . . .) – —— ————
Background information Long pause Pause Short pause Phrase edited out Sentence edited out Passage edited out Interruption Transcription from a different discourse follows Speaker not identified.
The aim of the research project entitled ‘The Transition from School to Work’, supported by the Social Science Research Council from April 1973 to June 1975, was to plot and uncover the subjective meanings and definitions of the situation of white working class kids without paper qualifications as they proceeded through their last eighteen months at school and into their first months at work. We were particularly concerned with how they chose their jobs and came to view their working future. In our case study work we identified two main groups in school – the conformists and the non-conformists. It was the latter group which interested us and on which we based our main case study. It was this group which was likely to include those lads of average to low ability (in terms of achievement at any rate), who were not going to get leaving paper qualifications, and who were destined for basic unskilled or semi-skilled working class jobs. In their terminology the two groups were the ‘lads’ and the ‘ear’oles’. These two groups formed the poles for the internal landscape of the year, if not of the school. The ‘lads’ largely either rejected the overt aims of schooling and the legitimacy of teachers to guide them or were deeply ambiguous about what they thought the school was trying to do – mainly it boiled down to ‘pushing us about’. The ‘ear’oles’ largely took the school in its own terms and accepted the legitimacy of the teachers. For the ‘lads’ they were ‘creeps’, ‘arse creepers’, ‘teacher’s pets’ and generally despicable for their conformism to school norms, for their lack of assertiveness, for their inability to show any autonomy, and most of all for their inability to create ‘fun’ for themselves to ‘have a laff ’:
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PW: (. . .) why not be like the ear’oles, why not try and get CSEs? DEREK: They don’t get any fun do they? DEREK: ’Cos they’m prats like, one kid he’s got on his report now, he’s got five As and one B ————: – Who’s that? DEREK: Birchall SPANKSEY: I mean what will they remember of their school life? What will they have to look
back on. Sitting in a classroom, sweating their bollocks off, you know, while we’ve been . . ., I mean look at the things we can look back on, fighting on the Pakis, fighting on the JAs. Some of the things we’ve done on teachers, it’ll be a laff when we look back on it. In terms of their structural location, the most crucial feature of the ‘lads’ and their culture was entrenched and personalised opposition to the school and its agents. (In a discussion on teachers and vandalism) JOEY:
(. . .) they’re able to punish us. They’re able to punish us, they’re bigger than us, they stand for a bigger establishment than we do, like, we’re just little and they stand for bigger things, and you try to get your own back. It’s er’m resenting authority I suppose. EDDIE: The teachers think they’re high and mighty ’cos they’re teachers, but they’re nobody really, they’re just ordinary people ain’t they? The ‘lads’ opposition to the school and its agents, and their scornful rejection of the ‘ear’oles’ – not least because of their acceptance of the legitimacy of the school – were very powerful determinants of what amounted to an anti-school, alternative, or counter culture within the school. Membership of this culture, or the manner of your relationship to it, was very much more important to the non-academic working class lads that was the achievement of any formal aims of education, or the satisfaction of any other independant or ‘free’ form of social connection. It was the spine around which their day and thoughts were organised: the dichotomy ‘Lads/earholes’ was the most basic organising structure of school life. One of the interesting things the research brought to light was that in terms of individual biographies at least, the split between the two groups and the development of the ‘lads’ culture could be easily traced. By and large it seemed that all children entered the first year as ‘ear’oles’, even if they had been in some form of non-conformist group in the Junior school (and there was evidence that these did exist). In the second or more commonly the third year, and sometimes the fourth year, a process occurred amongst some of the lads which might be termed differentiation. This was where mental and social support of the teacher, and the acceptance of the legitimacy of his proclaimed aims, were decisively withdrawn. The essence of this scepticism was a refusal to accept the teacher as automatically better than the children in all modes. The institutionally prescribed aims of gaining self esteem were – sometimes quite suddenly – seen as not only the only grounds for gaining self esteem – ‘that doesn’t rank them above us, just because they are slightly more intelligent’. For parallel with the disaffection from the teacher – sometimes seen as a cause of it – was an affiliation with a group of peers marked out precisely by the attempt to develop modes of activity and schemes of values which gave alternative grounds for self respect and a viable identity. Diligence, deference, respect – these became things which could be read in quite another way. PW:
Evans (the Careers Master) said you were all being very rude, (. .) you didn’t have the politeness to listen to the speaker (during a Career’s session). He said why didn’t you
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realise that you were just making the world very rude for when you grow up and god help you when you have kids, ‘cos they’re going to be worse. What did you think of that? JOEY: They wouldn’t. They’ll be outspoken. They wouldn’t be submissive fucking twits. They’ll be outspoken, upstanding sort of people. If any of my kids are like this, here, I’ll be pleased. It is during the stage of differentiation when the individual joining the ‘lads’ first develops an analysis of his social position viz à viz the school and the people in it. The teachers are trying to enforce patterns of behaviour and standards which are seen essentially as impositions. The other kids of his own age – the ‘ear’oles’ – accept these standards, collude in their maintenance, and judge their own worth and progress with these official measures. A value laden social map of the school year emerges on which virtually everyone can be placed. Many things which were confused and uncertain before – whether to speak to so and so, why somebody has always attracted you, why someone else has always been faintly boring – become clear in this stage of ‘coming out’. This social mapping was very much more a product of the self-elected ‘boys’ group than it was of the indicated ‘ear’ole group. Members of the conformist group had a less developed sense of what divided people, and reacted more on the individual basis: dislike of being called ‘dozy’; resentment when ‘troublemakers’ stopped the class working smoothly; jealousy of the social and sexual accomplishments of certain individuals. The very nature of the title, ‘ear’ole’ with its connotations of passivity, absurdity and inexpressivity – to the ‘lads’ it seemed that the ‘ear’oles’ were always listening never doing – indicates quite clearly which group was doing the signifying of the social landscape. The conformist group did not generate any counter terms to either identify, or evaluate differently, the major social groupings. Argot generally, and specific usages of conventional words were the product of the ‘lads’ and decisively not of the ‘ear’oles’. The research was focussed upon working class schools, so, at least in this context, there were no systematic differences in the class background of our two groups. There was certainly, however, a difference in the kind of aspirations the two groups had. The ‘ear’oles’ were likely to be academically motivated, interested in taking CSEs at the end of the fifth and very careful about their choice of subjects. The ‘boys’ were not academically motivated, were much less interested in taking CSEs, chose particular subjects on the basis of the ‘easy option’, and regarded their final year at school, if not all those years beyond the point at which they had learned to read and write, as a waste of time. There was some evidence that the parents of the conformist group were themselves more conformist and that they took more interest in the progress of their children, were less fatalistic, protected them more and were more likely to have plans for their son’s futures than the parents of the non-conformist group. What was the nature of this lively, creative culture for which we are claiming some autonomy – an autonomy which is usually denied or ascribed only pathological importance? Most essentially this counter culture was organised around the colonization of symbolic spaces within the school – spaces left unpatrolled by the school or polyvalent in themselves. The nature of this colonization: was an introduction of meanings and a social ambience which subverted the school and its objectives on the one hand, and established a living and practical ascendancy over the ‘ear’oles’ on the other. This involved the development of a system of practices, and a set of evaluative criteria, opposed to those sanctioned by the staff and aimed at the maximum distancing from, and ridiculing of, the ‘ear’oles’. There were many elements within this cultural programme.
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As the most visible, personalised and instantly understood element of opposition and ascendancy clothes had great importance to the ‘lads’. The first sign of a lad ‘coming out’ was a fairly rapid change in the appearance of his clothes and hair. The particular form of this alternative dress is determined by outside influences, and in particular by fashions current in the wider symbolic system of youth culture. At the moment, and for the schools we worked in, the ‘lads’ look would include longish well groomed hair, platform-type shoes, wide collared shirt turned over waisted coat or denim jerkin plus still obligatory flared trousers. Whatever the particular form of dress, it was most certainly not school uniform, rarely included a tie (the second best for many Heads if uniform can’t be enforced), and exploited colours calculated to give the maximum distinction from institutional drabness and conformity. We should also understand from this discussion of dress that it is no accident that much of the conflict between staff and students should take place on the grounds of school uniform/casual dress. To outsiders it might seem a fatuous argument about differences in taste. Concerned staff, and involved kids, however, know that it is a continuing tussle about authority, a fight between cultures, and ultimately a question about the legitimacy of school as an institution. If manner of dress is the main apparent cause of argument between staff and kids, smoking is the next most apparent cause of discontent. Again we find another absolutely distinguishing characteristic of the ‘lads’ against the ‘ear’oles’. The majority of them smoke, and perhaps more important are seen to smoke. There is great pride taking in having the courage to walk right up to the school gate smoking, stub the cigarette out and then walk in. A great deal of time is typically spent amongst the ‘lads’ planning their next smoke and ‘hopping off ’ lessons ‘for a quick drag’. And if the ‘lads’ delighted in smoking and flaunting their impertinence with a little white stick, it drove staff absolutely crazy. There were usually strict and frequently publicised rules about smoking. If, for this reason, the ‘lads’ were spurred, almost as a matter of honour, to continue public smoking, the staff were incensed by the brazen challenge to their authority. Of course in a very typical conjunction of school based and outside meanings, cigarette smoking for the ‘lads’ was, as well as being an act of insurrection before the school, also an attempt to associate themselves with adult values and practices. In the attempt to build an autonomous system of values and rewards within the school, the adult world, specifically the adult male working class world, was turned to as a source of materials. This was obviously the case with drinking. Manifest drinking was an even more decisive signal to staff, than public smoking, that the individual was separate from the school and had a presence in a completely alternative, even superior and more mature, mode of social being. If a lad was going to smoke and, in particular, drink this did anyway put certain adult type responsibilities on his shoulders because he had to pay for his indulgences. This led to part-time work as well as other practices we shall come to later and the whole experience of confronting the working world – which was itself maturing – from the need for money. Again a distinguishing feature of the ‘lads’ from the ‘ear’oles’ was their much greater likelihood to have a part-time job or to be seeking one, and to recognise that there was a logic in their cultural choices which extended to quite firm adultlike commitments to a high income flow. These were the physical items around which social practices and rituals accrued. Forms of interaction and social interchanges were developing all the time, however, to fill spaces left by the teachers or won from the teachers. This was a moving feast, in which staff could win temporary reverses, and in which the ‘lads’ were always on the look out for new chances.
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(In discussion on staff ) Oh, we was loyal in the first few days, but when we got in to all the things we knew we could do like, all the little cracks we could get up to, then we started playing up a bit, and they started getting, e’m. FUZZ: That’s it. We was used to an easy life. JOEY: The first day in science he got, he says, ‘if any of you want to come back till five o’clock lads, do some experiments . . . We all fucking pissed ourselves day’n we . . . He thought it was going to be, like the year before, we was all going to be, like, wanting to do it. JOEY:
The central problem for the ‘lads’ whether during activity that was enforced by teachers, or during periods of inactivity won from the teachers, was to defeat boredom and thread a vital human involvement through the dry institutional text. Even in the most controlled situations they would find some subversive, potentially amusing activity. The really central thing about the ‘lads’ culture, however, and the major way of overcoming boredom, was ‘to be with your mates’ unsupervised by staff. When the group was together there were always things to do. JOEY:
We’re getting to know it now, like we’re getting to know all the cracks, like, how to get out of lessons and things, and we know where to have a crafty smoke. You can come over here (The Youth Wing) and do summat, and er’m . . . all your friends are here, you know, it’s sort of what’s there, what’s always going to be there for the next year, like, and you know you have to come to school today, if you’re feeling bad, your mate’ll soon cheer you up like, ’cos you couldn’t go without ten minutes in this school without having a laff at something or other. PW: Are your mates a really big important thing at school now? – Yeah – Yeah – Yeah JOEY: They’re about the best thing actually. SPANKSEY: You like to come to school, just to skive, ’cos you get bored at home. You’d rather come here and sit in the Youth Wing or summat. JOEY: (. .) You’m always looking out on somebody (when skiving) and you’ve always got something to talk about, . . . something PW: So what stops you neing bored. JOEY: Talking, we could talk forever, when we get together, it’s talk, talk, talk. An important and striking element of their interaction centred on a particular form of joking, kidding language turning on rough practical or physical humour. It was quite common for one individual to be picked on, ribbed, have ‘the piss taken out of him’, ‘kidded’ or sometimes viciouly needled for long periods. Often it was the same individual who was picked on repeatedly for the same kinds of things: his supposed stupidity, or alleged sexual practices, or some eccentricity of clothing or appearance. Language generally was much ‘coarser’ than was common amongst the ‘ear’oles’ and seemed to make much more muscular use of local dialect and specifically generated argot. All these practices whether apparently cruel, or obviously supportive, went to make the group into a cohesive social whole with a frisson which made the ‘lads’ special. They had real cultural skills – conversation, repartee, quick wits, style, confidence – which were lacking from the ‘ear’oles’ and decisively marked them out as a force on the cultural landscape.
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The particular excitement and kudos of belonging to the ‘lads’ came from more antisocial practices, than these. It was these more extreme activities which marked them off most completely, both from the ‘ear’oles’ and from the school. There was a positive joy in fighting and in talking about fighting and about the tactics of the whole fight situation. It’s interesting that many of their important cultural values were expressed through fighting. The solidarity of the group becomes perfectly obvious in the fight situation, the importance of quick, clear and not over-moral thought comes out time and again. Most of all – and there was a kind of bravery in this – the fight puts you at risk and tests your conviction to betray conventional morality and uphold with a curious kind of honour, an alternative convention. It was in fighting with its own politics, dangers, scares, strange codes and illicit joys, that one was furthest from the reach of the school, most joyous in your celebration of truly independent and hard-won skills, and most sure of mastery over the ‘ear’oles’ and those of similar tendencies. PW: What do you feel when you’re fighting? (. .) JOEY: (. .) It’s exhilarating, it’s like being scared .
. . it’s the feeling you get afterwards. I know what I feel when I’m fighting . . . It’s that I’ve got to kill him, do your utmost best to kill him. PW: Do you actually feel frightened when you’re fighting though? JOEY: Yeah, I shake before I start fighting, I’m really scared, but once you’m actually in there, then you start to co-ordinate your thoughts like, it gets better and better and then, if you good enough you bear the geezer. You get him down on the floor and just jump all over his head. (. . .) PW: (. .) After you’ve had a fight . . . How do you feel then? SPANKSEY: Shaky. BILL: Funny feeling, don’t you, sort of shaking. JOEY: – It’s all according, if you bear him, forty feet tall – Yeah – You always do – They might get the police or summat, or a big mob. – No it ain’t that – Can’t explain it, you’re just shaking, naturally, you know The other main activity amongst the ‘lads’ which was quite beyond the conventional register, was stealing. Theft was exceptionally widespread both inside and outside school. Again what comes through most strongly is the ‘lads’ secret and delicious joy in defying authority, celebrating their own values, and most important confirming both, getting away with it. Theft is clearly aimed directly against authority – especially if the theft, or what is very closely allied in this sense, vandalism, is against the school – and also an action quite beyond what the ‘ear’ole’ would even believe possible. That theft also brought extra money was an added, real and concrete advantage – sometimes the apparent initiating cause – which fitted in especially with the peculiar needs of the ‘lads’ for extra cash for smoking and drinking. The ‘ear’ole’ neither had the need for extra cash, nor the imagination to overcome the conventional morality, nor the quickness and smartness to carry through the deed. Altogether, though in a risky fashion, theft summed up many of the ‘lads’ values, attitudes and most admired skills.
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PW: What interests me is why you do it (theft), what’s enjoyable about it? BILL: It’s just hopeless round here, there’s nothing to do. When you’ve got money, you know,
you can go to a pub and have a drink, but, you know, when you ain’t got money, you’ve either got to stop in or just walk round the streets and none of them are any good really. So you walk around and have a laff. JOEY: It ain’t only that it’s enjoyable, it’s that it’s there and you think you can get away with it . . ., you never think of the risks. You just do it. If there’s an opportunity, if the door’s open to the warehouse, you’m in there, seeing what you can thieve and, then when you come out like, if you don’t get caught immediately, when you come out you’m really happy like. BILL: ’Cos you’ve showed the others you can do it, that’s one reason. JOEY: ’Cos you’re defying the law again. The law’s a big tough authority like and we’re just little individuals, yet we’re getting away with it like. (. . . .) JOEY: You do anything you can here to, you know, go against them – Well, I mean, you vandalize books. SPIKE: Yeah, you smash chairs up, take the screws out of . . . JOEY: Really afterwards, you think ‘Well, stuff me, our old lady paid for that lot out of taxes’, but at the time you’re doing it, you don’t think and you don’t really care. PW: But do you think of it in the same way as smashing bottles or thieving? JOEY: It’s opportunity, getting your own back on the teachers when you’re caned or something. If you think, if you can get your own back on him you’ll do anything you can (. .), revenge, sort of thing, getting revenge. SPIKE: Paper, you nick a lot of paper. BILL: Exercise books. Yeah, we had about twelve packets of them. EDDIE: Pair of earphones, the other week. SPANKSEY: From school? EDDIE: Yeah (. . . .) Essentially we can see the ‘lads’ culture as a separate and informed domain set over against the school and its formalised, distant logic. This domain was specifically and immediately responsive to their feelings and attitudes. The rationality and importance of living out your meanings within this domain with its distinctive ways of evaluating and acting was just assumed by the ‘boys’. It needed no justification or explanation, though to many teachers and ‘ear’oles’ even its existence was not all that clear. For the ‘lads’ there was what amounted to a genuine confusion about how it was possible to survive school without its help. Having understood the central importance of the ‘lads’ culture, its relation to school and to other groups, for the working class non-academic boy, it becomes possible to make much more sense both of how official communications were received and how the non-academic individual made his actual job choice. All official communications about careers and work were importantly filtered through the group. by and large what might be termed as the denoted message from teachers and careers officers was most heavily filtered. This was the manifest content of particular communications concerning either the practical details of specific jobs, or general principles about the best form of approach to work. Unless an individual had already decided to do a certain specific job, information about it was simply not taken in. It was certainly not true that new information was fed in to rational grid system which matched job profile with ability profile, or life style/job/ambition profile.
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If things were remembered, they were picked up by some highly selective living principle of the counter cultural school group. What is remembered after careers films and careers talks is certainly not what the producers hope to imprint on, what they seem so often to assume are eager, young minds. (On Careers films) I wonder why there’s never kids like us in films, see what their attitude is to it? What they’m like and what we’m like. PW: Well, what sort of kids are they in the films? FUZZ: All ‘ear’oles’ PERC: All goody goodies WILL: No, you can tell they’ve been told what to say. They’m probably at some acting school or summat y’know and the opportunity to do this job – Film Careers for other kids, and you’ve gotta say this, wait for your cue, wait till he’s finished his lines. PW: I mean how can you tell that? WILL: Well, they’re just standing there, seem to be just waiting for ’im to say it, then . . . (. . . .) SPANKSEY: Another thing I think they try to con you into. They were saying to be a toolmaker they were saying ‘Now here’s a lucky one, he’s going into toolmaking without no qualifications’. The next minute ‘Now here’s another lucky ’un, he’s another who’s gone into toolmaking without no qualifications’. I think they’re all trying to get you in there. PERC:
Information that was given to the kids concerning what might be thought of as an ideology of getting a job, and of getting on in a job, was either blocked, interpreted into unrecognizable forms, or simply inverted. (in a discussion on Career’s sessions) After a bit you tek no notice of him, he sez the same thing over and over again, you know what I mean? JOEY: We’re always too busy fucking picking your nose, or flicking paper, we just don’t listen to him. (. . . .) SPANKSEY: He makes the same points all the time. FUZZ: He’s always on about if you go for a job, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that, I’ve done it. You don’t have to do none of that. Just go to a place, ask for the man in charge, nothing like what he says. JOEY: It’s ridiculous. PW: What do you mean, in terms of what qualifications you may need? FUZZ: Qualification and everything, you don’t you just ask for a job and they give you the job. (. . .) PW: (. .) They were on about how good it was to work hard and try to get on (. . .) WILL: ’Tis when you’re older, y’know, if you can’t cope with the job, but . . . like, too hard for yer, and wanna sit down and just tell other blokes . . . when you’re younger . . . ’cos the pay gus down once you go up with some jobs. SPANKSEY:
Some meaning concerning work did get through these cultural processes and these were what might be called the connoted messages, or latent information. Often it was not intended
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to transmit this information. It concerned such things as the general ambience of working life; a fascination with processes and machines; the apparent timelessness and inevitability of industrial organisation; the atomised competitive nature of the world of work. It was not meant to be part, and was not received as part, of the general model which was presented for a rational career’s choice. It came from the sheer exposure to a vast number of films where working class people were seen working, from the apparently bewildering variety of specific forms of jobs available, from film of machinery moving with a cameraman’s instinct for the compulsive, from the teacher’s impatience, from his implied or real flashes of departure from the impartial professional consultant line – ‘it’s a hard world that doesn’t owe you a living and you’ll soon be on your own in it, so wake up and find a job!’ Actual job choice for such individuals was only rarely based on the materials supplied by the agencies, although they did act, sometimes, as useful intermediaries. Indeed the most important finding of the research in relation to job choice is that it may well be confusing and mystifying to pose the entry of unqualified working class kids into industry as a question of particular job choices. Considered just in one quantum of time – the last months of school – individual job choice does indeed seem random and unenlightened by any rational techniques or means/ends schemes. This is the main finding of previous work on the school/work transition, a finding which we accept and have replicated ourselves. However, if one takes a longer time span, and looks not so much at individual job choice but more at basic ground shifts in the whole pattern of what is expected from a working life, and what sort of work fits in with a whole constellation of attitudes, practices, activities and values, which are developing in the much broader sweep of the social group and its culture, then one finds a more intelligible pattern. To start with, a simple but profoundly important point, the division between the ‘lads’/‘ear’ole’ cultures is also a division between different kinds of future, different kinds of gratification, and different kinds of job that are relevant to these things. These differences, moreover, are not random or unconnected. On the one hand they arise systematically from the intra school group oppositions, and on the other hand, they relate to quite distinct job groupings in the post school situation. The ‘ear’oles’/‘lads’ division becomes the skilled/unskilled and white collar/blue collar division. This continuity between specifically school based informal social groupings, and occupational groupings outside the school is of profound significance for us. The ‘lads’ themselves could transpose the divisions of the internal cultural landscape of the school on to the future, and on to the world of work outside, with considerable clarity. (in a discussion on ‘ear’oles’) (. . .) We wanna live for now, wanna live while we’re young, want money to go out with, wanna go with women now, wanna have cars now, and er’m think about five, ten, fifteen years time when it comes, but other people, say people like the ‘ear’oles’, they’m getting their exams, they’m working, having no social life, having no fun, and they’re waiting for fifteen years time when they’re people, when they’ve got married and things like that, I think that’s the difference. We are thinking about now, and having a laff now, and they’re thinking about the future and the time that’ll be best for ’em. (. . . .) JOEY: I think they’re (the ‘ear’oles’) the ones that have got the proper view of life, they’re the ones that abide by the rules. They’re the civil servant types, they’ll have ’ouses and everything before us (. . .) They’ll be the toffs, I’ll say they’ll be the civil servants, toffs, and we’ll be the brickies and things like that. JOEY:
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SPANKSEY:
I think that we . . ., more or less, we’re the ones that do the hard grafting but not them, they’ll be the office workers. (. . .) I ain’t got no ambitions, I doe wanna have . . . I just want to have a nice wage, that ’ud see me through. (. . . .) JOEY: I don’t say it’s wise, I say it’s better for us, people the likes of us, we’ve tasted, we’ve tasted, not the good life, we’ve tasted, you know, say, the social life what you’d have when you’re older. I think we just like it too much, I know I do anyway, I don’t think you can cut yourself off from it now and do an apprenticeship and all that . . . and not have much bread. Not only the opposition between these two main groups, but the internal development of the ‘lads’ culture provides located and deeply influential guides for the choice of final job. For the individual’s affiliation with the non-conformist group carries with it a whole range of changes in his attitudes and perspectives, and these changes also supply over time a more or less consistent view of what sort of people he wants to end up working with, and what sort of situation is going to allow the fullest expression for his developing cultural skills. The located ‘lads’ culture supplies a series of ‘unofficial’ criteria by which to judge, not individual jobs or the intrinsic joys of particular kinds of work – indeed it is already assumed that all work is more or less hard and unrewarding – but generally what kind of working situation is going to be most relevant to the individual. It will have to be work where he can be open about his desires, his sexual feelings, his liking for ‘booze’ and his aim to ‘skive off ’ as much as is reasonably possible. It will have to be a place where people can be trusted and will not ‘creep off ’ to tell the boss about ‘foreigners’ or ‘nicking stuff ’ – precisely where there were the fewest ‘ear’oles’. Indeed it would have to be work where there was a boss, a ‘them’ and ‘us’, which always carried with it the danger of treacherous intermediaries – the landscape would need to be familiar in this sense. It would need to be work where the self could be separated from the work task, and value given to people for things other than their work performance – the celebration of those independent qualities which precisely the ‘ear’oles’ did not have. It would have to be a work situation where people were not ‘cissies’ and could handle themselves, where ‘pen-pushing’ is looked down on in favour of really ‘doing things’. It would have to be a job where you could speak up for yourself, and where you would not be expected to be subserviant. It would have to be a job that could pay good money fairly quickly and offer the possibility of ‘fiddles’ to support already acquired smoking and drinking habits. It would have to be a job, most basically, where people were ‘alright’ and with whom a general cultural identity could be shared. It is this human face of work, much more than its intrinsic or technical nature, which confronts the lad as the crucial dimension of his future. In the end it was recognised that it was specifically the cultural diversion that made any job bearable. (on the imminent prospect of work) I’m just dreading the first day like. Y’know, who to pal up with, and er’m, who’s the ‘ear’oles’, who’ll tell the gaffer. (. . .) JOEY: (. .) you can always mek it enjoyable. It’s only you what makes a job unpleasant, . . . I mean if you’re cleaning sewers out, you can have your moments like. Not every job’s enjoyable, I should think. Nobody’s got a job they like unless they’re a comedian or something, but er’m . . ., no job’s enjoyable ’cos of the fact that you’ve got to get up of a morning and go out when you could stop in bed. I think every job’s got, has a degree of WILL:
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unpleasantness, but it’s up to you to mek, . . . to push that unpleasantness aside and mek it as good and as pleasant as possible In all these ways, then, the ‘lads’ culture provided criteria for the kind of work the lad is destined for – basically manual and semi-skilled work. Because these criteria arise from a culture, and because that school based culture also has profound similarities and continuities with the culture of the work place, there is also the further result that once the kids get on to the factory floor, they recognise a great deal: they feel at home. They’ve had experience of work anyway very often through part-time jobs, and they are immediately familiar with many of the shop floor practices – defeating boredom, time wasting, heavy and physical humour. What are the implications of all this for the so-called ‘transition from school to work’ of working class unqualified school leavers? Firstly, the most profound transition these lads make is not the period around leaving school and entry into work, it is his entry into the distinctive nonconformist group and its culture within the school, and this transition may occur anywhere between the second and fifth years. Secondly, with respect to their long term development of a sense identity viz a viz the work situation this kind of adaption has more relevance than the official rationality of individual job choice and means/ends schemes. Thirdly in relation to the basic cultural ground shift and the development of a wholesale and comprehensive view of what is expected from life which they are experiencing, particular job choice does not matter too much. Indeed we may see that with respect to the criteria this located culture throws up, most manual and semi-skilled jobs are the same and it would be a waste of time to use the provided, middle class grids across them to find material differences. As far as their actual work content is concerned all these jobs may all be expected to be monotonous and arduous, so what matters every time is money and the possibilities of a cultural involvement and diversion. Although the careers programme imbues the ‘lads’ with something of the sense of the range of jobs and the importance of choosing between the, it’s clear that beneath the surface the power of the cultural process I am pointing to, takes hold. Even if it’s not explicitly verbalised, from the way many of the kids actually get jobs, and their calm expectation that their jobs will change a lot, they do not basically make much differentiation between jobs – it’s all labour. (In a discussion on the jobs they had arranged for when they left) I was with my mate, John’s brother, I went with ’im to er, . . . he wanted a job. Well John’s sister’s boy friend got a job at this place, and he sez to Allan, he sez, ‘Go down there, and they might give a job there’, and he went down, and they sez, ‘You’re too old for training, ’cos he’s twenty now, he sez to Allan,’ he sez, ‘Who’s that out there’, and he sez ‘one of my mates’, he sez, ‘does he wanna job’ and he sez ‘I dunno’. He sez er’m ‘Ask him’. He comes out, I went back in and he told me about it and he sez, ‘Come back before you leave if you want it’. ——: What you doing? PERC: Carpentry, Joinering. And a month ago I went back and, well, not a month ago, a few weeks ago, and I seen him. PW: Well, that was a complete accident really. I mean had you been thinking of joinery? PERC: Well, you’ve only got to go and see me woodwork, I’ve had it, I ain’t done woodwork for years. PERC:
(in a discussion of their future) I don’t think any of us’ll have one job and then stick to it, none of us. We’ll swop around. SPIKE: It just shows in your part-time jobs don’t it, don’t stick to a part-time job. EDDIE:
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Fourthly it is clear that these lads voluntarily choose to enter the factory gate, at this age anyway, especially as they are aided by their dislike, and tumble out, of school. Just as the ‘lads’ school culture was not a reflex of defeat, so the entry into the lower grades of factory work is by no means perceived as defeat, failure or second best. This fact is of the fullest significance for us if we wish to study and understand forms of social stability, and strategies for changing society. Perhaps surprisingly, then, this suggest that there is no particular problem, at this age anyway, in the transition of the majority of working class kids without paper qualifications into work. That is providing the jobs are available which is much more questionable now. Where jobs are available, it is much more likely to be the conformist working class lads with some, though not particularly high, paper qualifications who experience grave doubts and problems. They may be asked to face the rigours of the factory floor and relatively unskilled work without the compensations of a cultural involvement. It is here that we may find the ‘problems’ of the ‘transition from school to work. Fifthly, and more speculatively, we may understand from all this something of the nature of the wider working class culture. The option of affiliation with a cultural group, and a processing of opportunities through the criteria thrown up by this culture, is a more sensible, richer and saner form of adaption to an unpleasant, unrewarding and finally oppressed working situation, than a more considered task-orientated form of adaption which would have exposed in the bleakest possible manner the real bankruptcy of the actual jobs available. For the working class as a whole still does face harsh conditions and the performance of work which by no stretch of the imagination could be thought of as rewarding. To face such work unrelieved by a cultural involvement or diversion, and armed only with middle class criteria which merely confirm the awfulness of the situation, would certainly not be a strategy for survival. In this sense it is possible to see the development of non-conformist groups, and counter cultures in the school, as a recognition – sometimes clearer than the teachers – that the real conditions of work faced by working people are still fairly grim and – for themselves – unrewarding. The beginnings of experimentation with accommodative and adaptive cultural practices in the school – themes which emerge much more fully and are the clearest characteristic markings of the wider working class culture – show us the inter-connectedness of working class themes and the way in which they are articulated, often invisibly in the particular case, around questions of rescuing self-respect in an oppressive situation, and generating alternative and oppositional modes of being from sparse materials. What can we draw out of these general conclusions for the specific work of careers teachers and officers? Well, in one sense we have to be pessimistic. The profound nature of the involvement of basic cultural processes with the structure of society, and its class formations, make any simple panacea impossible. These things will not be changed by small numbers of well meaning people. On the other hand, we can make some suggestions. We can recognise that there are real and identifiable processes at work, when working class kids make sense of their future and choose a job. At least it might be possible to see and recognise these processes without obscuring them by an inappropriate middle class grid of ends/means and functional rationality. It might also be possible to intervene and aid these real processes at certain points. Certainly from the personal counselling point of view, it is very useful to understand something of the real cultural processes you are seeing the results of. If direct action is frequently impossible, at least it is an advance to understand and sympathise. Furthermore, the cultural perspective might allow the counsellor to identify potential problem cases before they are
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actually suffering at work. The two obvious cases here are social isolates, and the more conformist lads, who might be heading, through lack of qualifications, or lack of choice, to the factory floor. These lads are most truly in the worst of all worlds. At the end of the day, however, you might feel that sympathy, and the cooling out of problem cases, is not enough. In the reflex moment of your awareness of the responsibility of being an intermediary, it may be that you recognize a duty to the kids, as well as to the employers, which goes beyond simple advice. The cultural adaption to work which we’ve been looking at is partly a response to the poverty of the kind of work which is awaiting these kids. Thus it may be that you think an acceptance of the status quo – one possible reading of this – research: ‘They’re doing alright by themselves’, – does not go far enough. What should perhaps concern us is an attempt to improve the objective conditions of many working jobs. As well as the question of guidance, we might also be concerned with questions about the quality of the jobs facing these kids: the degree of control they enjoy in the, and the possibilities of materially improving working conditions and prospects. And this is not simply a question of rewards. Many of the kids we have been considering will earn reasonably high wages – higher than teachers’ wages in many cases. It is also a question of control and power – what scope workers have to control their own destiny in any worthwhile sense. Ultimately, of course, this is a political question, and if all the courses seem arduous this is not a reason for shirking an answer. If that seems grand and beyond the scope of teachers, it is possible to locate some of the questions in the school. If, as we’ve argued, the counter school and shop floor culture lie parallel it is possible to argue that they must share some of the same determinants. The common impulse is to develop strategies for dealing with boredom, alienation and lack of control. Part of the argument of this paper has been that kids see – often better than the teachers – the poverty and inequality of the roles which await them. It may also be that – re reading from their culture and behaviour if not from their words – that they see aspects of the nature of the school more clearly than teachers. That, on apparently immovable issues of authority and syllabus, the school is more geared to its own hierarchies, and to its own professionalism, than it is to their own real condition as they experience it. Even the progressive rubric of equal development, child centred teaching, free expression, may be seen as a professional flirtation with utopia, rather than a real commitment to the kids which recognises both the inequality of their origin, and the inequality of their destination. It is utopian indeed to play with idealistic concepts between these two points. A real commitment to an improvement of the life chances of these kids might start by taking a cold, clear look at the school, its organisation and objectives. In what way might the kids be given more control here, so that they may expect more and fight for more later? Do they see an inequality of roles here between staff themselves and between staff and pupils, which teaches them only too well what to expect later? How might their real needs be responded to, rather than merely those which are left after the anodyne processing of institution and professionalism? What would serve these kids best in their future, and their struggle to fight for more control and meaning – good basic literacy, a clear understanding of their own history and of their class, a sense of the achievement and basic power of the working class, or often ill-fitting notions of individual development and expressivity? Is the permissive school regime – still concealing ancient authority structures – best fitted to approach the real needs of the kids? These questions are posed here only, and this is not to suggest that there are facile or acceptable-to-all solutions. But it is to suggest that if the problems of society and industry ‘out there’ seem too large to cope with, the school may be seen as a microcosm of that society, and a vital preparation ground for that society. The school is neither too large to
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understand, nor too reified to change – at least in small stages. Certainly it may be part of your responsibility to decide in which ways you would like to change it, and what avenues are open to you in order to bring this about.
Bibliography (i) Educational Albemarle Report, The Youth Service in England and Wales, H.M.S.O. 1960. Association of Assistant Mistress in Secondary Schools, Youth Employment and Careers Committee, London, Assoc. Ass. Mistresses in Sec. Sch., 1960. Avent, C. ‘The School Counsellor and the Y.E.S.’ in Lytton and Croft (eds) Guidance and Counselling in British Schools, Edward Arnold, 1969. Banks, O. ‘Social class and family life’, in M. Croft, ibid. Benn, C. and B. Simon, Halfway There, Penguin, 1972. Blackler, R. Fifteen plus: school leavers and the outside world. Allen and Unwin, 1970. Blau P. et al., ‘Occupational choice: a theoretical framework, Industrial & Labor Relations Review, 1956. Bunton, W.J. ‘Careers guidance in 12 comprehensive schools’, Soc.Ed., 2, No.3 Summer 1972, pp. 27–9. Carter, M.P. Home, School and Work, Oxford, 1962. Carter, M.P. Into Work, Penguin, 1969. Clemans, M. ‘School-work-school’, Trends in Ed., No.15, July 1969, pp. 40–4. Confederation of British Industry, and other, Schools Council, Working Paper No. 7 H.M.S.O., 1966. Daws, P.P. A good start in life, Cambridge Careers Res. and Advisory Centre, 1968. Douglas, J.B. Home and School, MacGibbon and Kee, 1964. Eggleston, S.J. Social context of the School, R.K.P., 1967. Ginzberg, E. et al., Occupational choice: an approach to a general theory, Columbia U.P., 1951. Ginzberg, E. Career Guidance: Who needs it, who provides it, who can improve, McGraw-Hill, 1971. Halsey, J.A. et al., Social Class and Educational Opportunity, Heinemann, 1956. Hayes, J. and B. Hopson, Careers Education and Guidance, Heinemann. Hopson, B. and J. Hayes, Theory and Practice of Vocational Guidance, Pergamon Press. Institute of Careers Officers, Work Experience in British Secondary Schools, Bromsgrove, Institute of Careers Officers, 1971. Jackson, B. and D. Marsden, Education and the Working Class, R.K.P., 1962. Jahoda, G. ‘Job attitudes and job choice among Secondary Modern School Leavers’, Occ. Psychol., 26, 1952. Jerrold, M.A. ‘Pre-jobs’ for the boys, Special Educ., 57, No.2, June ’68, pp. 15–17. Kaback, G.R. ‘A guidance service; educational and vocational information for economically disadvantaged children’, New Era, 49. May ’68, pp. 140–2. King, R.A. and G. Easthope, ‘The structure of careers’ guidance in secondary schools!’ Vocational Aspect, 23, Summer 71, pp. 65–7. Lester-Smith, W.O. Education, Penguin, 1966. London University Goldsmiths College, 14–18; The education of the young school leaver, ed. K. Rudge, U. London Goldsmith’s College, 1966. Maizels, J. Adolescent needs and the transition from school to work, Athlone Press, 1970. Mays, J.B. Education and the Urban Child, Liverpool U.P. 1962. Mays, J.B. Growing up in the City, Liverpool U.P., 1962. Musgrove, F. The Family, Education and Society, R.K.P. 1966. National Youth Employment Council, Working Party Report, Future Development of the Y.E.S.; 1965. Newsom Report, Half our Future, H.M.S.O. Nottinghamshire Education Committee, Head Teacher/Industrialist Study Group Report, Notts. Educ. Comm., 1960.
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Partridge, J. Life in a Secondary Modern School, Penguin 1963. Paul, L. The transition from school to work, Industrial Welfare Society. Pedley, R. The Comprehensive System, Penguin 1966. Pepperall, E.M. Pseud. (Elizabeth Maud Brewin) What do they expect from work? Industrial Welfare Society, 1962. Pucinski, R.C. and S.P. Hirsch, (eds) The courage of change: new directions for career education. Prentice-Hall, 1971. Rhodes, J.A. Vocational education and guidance: a System for the ’70s, Merrill, 1970. Roberts, K. ‘The organization of education and the ambitions of school leavers: a comparative review’, Comparative Educ., 4 March 68, pp. 87–96. Roberts, K. From School to Work: a study of the Y.E.S., David & Charles, 1970. Schools Council Report, Careers Education in the ’70s. Schools Council, The Working World; record of an intensive course for young school leavers. Prepared by H. Cunningham and A. Higgins, London. S.C. 1970. Schools Council, Young school leavers. H.M.S.O., 1968. Stovin, J.O. ‘Too little and too late’, in Youth Employment, XVI, 1964. Sugarman, B. ‘Social Class, values and behaviour in schools; in M. Croft (ed.) Family, Class and Education, Longman, 1970. Tapper, T. Young People and Society, Faber 1971. The Crowther Report, 15 to 18; H.M.S.O., 1963 (section on ‘the pool of ability’). The Youth Employment Service, the schools and the preparation of school leavers for employment. Voc. Aspect, 22, Summer 1970, pp. 81–9. Vaughan, T.D. Education and vocational guidance today, R.K.P., 1970. Veness, T. School leavers, Methuen, 1962. Walton, P. (ed.) Books about Careers, Institute of Careers Officers. Watts, A.G. ‘Counselling and the organisation of careers work in schools’. Aspects of Educ., No.5. March 67, pp. 44–53. Wilson, M.P. ‘Vocational preferences of Seondary Modern School Children’, Brit. J. Ed. Psychol., 23, 1957.
(ii) Sociology of education Alexander, C. and E.G. Campbell, ‘Peer influences on adolescent aspirations and attainments’, A.S.R., 34, 1969. Banks, O. The Sociology of Education, Batsford, 1968. Becker, H.S. and B. Goez, ‘Latent Culture’ in School and Society, op. cit. Berger, J. and J. Mohr, A Fortunate Man, Penguin, 1969. Bernstein, B.F. Class, Codes and Control (2 vols.), R. & K.P., 1971, 1973. Brittain, C.V. ‘Adolescent Choices and parental-peer cross pressures’ A.S.R. 28, 1963. Cicourel, A.V. and J.I. Kitsuse, The Educational Decision-makers, Bobbs-Merrill, 63. Cicourel, A.V. and J.I. Kitsuse, ‘The social organisation of the high school and deviant adolescent careers’, in School and Society, op. cit. Cohen, S. (ed.), Images of Deviance, Penguin, 1971. Cohen, S. Smashing up, breaking out, and the social context of aspiration, Unpub. paper, U. of Essex. Davis, J.A. ‘The Campus as a Frog-pond’, in A.J.S., 72, 1966. Goldthorpe, J.A. et al. The Affluent Worker, (3 vols)., Cambridge U.P., 1969. Haller, A.O. and C. Butterworth, ‘Peer influences on levels of occupational and educational aspirations’, Social Forces, 38, 1960. Hargreaves, D.H. Social relations in the secondary school, R. & K.P., 1967. Holly, D. Society, Schools and Humanity, Paladin, 1972. Hughes, E.C. et al., ‘Student culture and academic effort’ in School and Society (Open University), R. & K.P., 1971.
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Illich, I. Deschooling Society, Penguin, 1973. Kandel, D.B. and G.S. Lesser, ‘Parental and peer influences on educational plans of adolescents’, A.S.R., 34 1969. Labov, W. ‘The Study of Language in its social context’ in P.P. Gigliog (ed) Language and the Social Context, Penguin, 1972. Lacey, C. Hightown Grammar, Manchester U.P., 1970. Lawton, D. Social class, language and education, R. & K.P., 1968. Morrison, A. and D. McIntyre, Schools and Socialisation, Penguin, 1971. Musgrove, F. Youth and the Social Order, R. & K.P., 1964. Parker, S.R. Work and Leisure, Paladin, 1971. Parker, T. The Frying Pan, Panther, 1970. Parker, T. The Plough Boyse, Arrow Books, 1969. Parker, T. The Twisting Lane, Panther, 1969. Parker, T. The Unknown Citizen, Penguin, 1966. Parkin, F. Class inequality and Political Order, Paladin, 1972. Partridge, J. Life in a secondary modern school, Penguin, 1968. Rosen, H. Language and Class: a critical look at the theories of Basil Bernstein. Falling Wall Press, Bristol, 1972. Roth, J.A. ‘The study of career timetables’ in School and Society, op. cit. Silverman, D. The theory of organisations, Heinemann, 1970. Taylor, I. and L. Taylor, (eds), Politics and Deviance, Penguin, 1973. Turner, B. Exploring the industrial subculture, Macmillan, 1972. Wilson, A.B. ‘Residential segregation of social classes and aspirations of High School Boys’, A.S.S., 24, 1969.
(iii) Methodology Banks, O. and Finlayson, D. Success and Failure in the Secondary School, Methuen U.P. 1973. Beard, P. and Willener, A. Musique et vie quotidienne, Prepers-Mame 1973. Becker, H.S. et al., Boys in White, U. Chicago Press, 1961. Bruyn, S.T. The Human Perspective in Sociology, Prentice Hall, 1966. Cicourel, A.V. Method and measurement in Sociology, Free Press, 1964. Denzin, N.K. (ed.) Sociological Methods, Butterworths, 1970. Denzin, N.K. The Research Act in Sociology, Butterworth, 1970. D.E.S., Careers in Secondary Schools, H.M.S.O., 1973. Dreitzel, H.P. (ed.) ‘Childhood and Socialisation’, Recent Sociology Vol.5, Macmillan, 1973. Dreitzel, H.P. (ed.) Recent Sociology, Vol.2, Macmillan, 1969. Filstead, W.J. Qualitative Methodology, Markham, 1971. Ford, J. Social Class and the Comprehensive School, MR. & K.P., 1969. Glaser, B. and Strauss, A. The Discovery of Grounded Theory, Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1968. Gluckmann, M. Closed systems and open minds, Oliver and Boyd, 1964. Hammond, P. (ed.) Sociologists at Work, Doubleday, 1967. Keddie, N. (ed.), Tinker, Tailor . . . The Myth of Cultural Deprivation, Penguin, 1973. King, R. School Organisation and Pupil Involvement, R. & K.P., 1973. Marcus, S. and Rivlin, H. (eds) Conflicts in Urban Education, Basic Books, 1970. McCall and Simmons, Issues in Participant Observation, Addison-Wesley, 1969. Merton, R.K. and Kendall, P.L. ‘The Focussed Interview’, A.J.S., 1946. Musgrove, F. Patterns of Power and Authority in English Education, Methuen U.P. 1971. Polsky, N. Hustlers, Beats and Others, Penguin, 1971. Raynor, J. and Harden, J. (eds) Cities Communities and the Young, R. & K.P., 1973. Raynor, J. Equality and City Schools, R & K.P. 1973. Rubinstein & Stoneman (eds) Education for Democracy, Penguin, 1970.
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Webb, E.J. et al., Unobtrusive Methods, Rand-McNally, 1966. Whyte, W.F. Street Corner Society, U. Chicago Press, 1970.
(iv) Ideology Althusser, L. ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in B.R. Opsom (ed.) Education, Structure and Society, Penguin, 1972. Althusser, L. For Marx, Penguin, 1972. Althusser, L. and E. Balibar, Reading Capital, Pantheon Books, 1970. Bourdieu, P. La Reproduction. Gramsci, A. The Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and Wishart, 1973. Harris, N. Beliefs in Society, Penguin, 1971. Marx, K. and F. Engels, The German Ideology, Lawrence and Wishart, 1970. Marx, K. Grundrisse, Penguin, 1973. Plamenatz, J. Ideology, Macmillan, 1970.
Index
abstraction 777, 782, 786–7, 798–800, 807 academic history 895, 896, 903 acceptance, of second-class status, by black people 579, 580 Acland, Richard 829, 833 action research 967 activity-based learning 1059, 1060, 1062 Adams, P. 422 adolescence see young people Adorno, T. 46–7 adult education 895, 903, 1014–15; philosophy of 1030, 1033–4 adult literacy 918–19, 1010–11, 1015 Adult Literacy Campaign 1011, 1015, 1020; collective working 1039–41; effect on government 1043–4; in Leicestershire 1027–42; national beginnings 1015–19; philosophy of 1030, 1044; role of BBC 1020–26 adult literacy organisers 1030–1, 1034, 1042, 1044–5; marginality of 1030, 1031, 1032–3; women as 1031–3 advertisements, images of women in 454–9 affluence 201, 941, 944, 1011 Africa: 708–11; nationalism in 715 alienation 49, 75, 129, 863, 865 Althusser, L. 403, 503, 533, 801, 812; and base/superstructure 43–4, 133, 767, 769; and culturalism 792, 793, 809–10; feminism and 420, 425, 426, 427; and history 809–10, 813; and ideology 4, 500, 501, 530, 542, 544–5, 546, 547, 769, 854; and the problematic 35–6, 44; Reading Capital 809; transitions 778 American society, hippies and 147 American youth (see also hippies, American) 159–64 Anderson, P. 16, 40, 775, 791, 793, 900; Thompson’s critique 857 anti-school culture 919, 954–5, 968, 1072, 1073–7; and shop floor culture 1081, 1083; and transition to work 1080–2 appearance, and women’s employment 554, 555
arcadianism, American hippies and 151–2 Archer, F. 887 Aronowitz, S. 1051, 1052 arranged marriages 722, 740, 741, 745 art/s 40, 179; Adorno and 46, 47; Benjamin and 50–1; Brecht and 49; imagination and social determination in 71; and manipulation 51; production of 50, 51 Asad, T. 813 ASBOs (anti-social behaviour orders) 924 Ashley, B., The Trouble with Donovan Croft 658–60 Asian cultures 714, 720, 722 Asian girls 740; arranged marriages 722, 740; racist mythology of femininity of 739–40 Asian women 740; in labour force 743–4; as mothers 724; oppression of 752, 754; sexuality of 719–20 Asian youth 571, 725 aspirations of young working class 191–3 assimilation 579, 580, 727 attention-holding devices, on television 290–1 audience 327, 367, 387; cultural competencies of 400; genre and 72–4, 75; group affiliations 407; misunderstandings of 395, 396–8; reciprocity 368–9 audience research 265–6, 388–9, 393, 395, 399 authoritarianism: racism and 673–8, 689; subcultures and 919 autobiography 80–2; 1930s 81–2, 90; fiction and 82–3, 85–6, 89, 90; popular 903, 904, 906 Avis, J. 918 balance, in media 377–8 Balibar, E. 784–5, 809, 810, 811, 812 Barker, M. 726, 727–8, 731 Barker, R. 940 Barrett, M. 702, 737, 738–9, 742 Barry, K. 551, 557 Barthes, R. 51, 52–3, 394, 445
Index Barton, M. 610 base/superstructure 41, 42–3, 71, 180, 780–1, 802; Adorno and 46; Althusser and 43–4, 133, 767, 769; and social formation 132, 133–4, 780–1 Baudelot, 400, 402–3, 409 BBC 331, 383–4; Adult Literacy Campaign 1011, 1016, 1018, 1020–22; Adult Literacy Handbook 1022–6; politicians’ attacks on 329–30 Beat Generation 159, 160, 165 beauty, in women’s magazines 509 Beauvoir, S. de 452–3, 509 Becker, H.S. 150, 157 Beechey, V. 636 Benjamin, W. 43, 44, 50–1, 72, 75 Benton, T. 966 Ben-Tovim, G. 616, 633, 641 Bentovim, M. 1022–3 Benyon, H. 407 Berger, J. 444, 450, 499 Berger, P. 147, 392, 410 Bernstein, B. 400–1, 403–5, 406, 1012, 1052, 1067–8 Bevan, Aneurin 834 Beveridge Report 831–2 Bevin, Ernest 822 bias, in television journalism 228, 264, 288, 301, 331, 354, 362, 363 biographies 205 biology, sexual differences and 531, 532, 536, 537–8 bisexuality 531, 536 black Americans 150–1 black cultures, 241–2, 714, 727, 728; ‘fear’ of 729–30 black family: common-sense ideology of 721–5, 728; pathologisation of 740, 741; as site of resistance to racism 739 black feminism 737, 738–9, 754–5; critique of white feminist theory 744–5, 749–50 black people (see also West Indians) 683, 685, 699; class distribution 639–40; exclusion from class structure 625–6, 636; exploitation of 624, 627–8, 630–1, 633, 634, 636, 639; image of, in England 716–18; problematisation of 657, 685, 706–7; repatriation discourse 685, 686, 688–9, 729, 730; sexuality of 712–13, 718; in sport 720–1 Black Power 159, 160, 581; in Jamaica 600–1 black women 740; in labour force 743–4, 752; migration of 751; oppression of 738, 739, 741, 744, 752; struggles over access to land 752; support networks 753–4 black young people (see also West Indian youth) 721, 724–5 Blackburn (see also Haslingden Road Chapel)
1089
839, 849; expansion of Methodism in 845; Grimshaw Park 839, 840, 847 Blackburn, Tony 306–7 ‘blackness’ 709–10, 712 Blackwell, C. 599 Blackwell, T. 763–4 Blauner, R. 619–20 Blythe, R. 82 Boffy, R. 1065 Boone, B. 663, 664 boundary markers, in television debates 351 Bourdieu, P. 400, 402, 502, 924 bourgeois ideology 467–8 bourgeoisie 121, 702, 708 Boyd, J. 232 Boyle, Edward 944 Boyson, Rhodes 971, 974 Brake, M. 234, 244 Braverman, H. 966, 1013 Brecht, B. 43, 44, 49, 50, 72, 75 bricolage 143, 233, 237, 238, 245 Briggs, A. 384 British Association of Settlements 1015, 1043; A Right to Read 1016–18, 1019 Britishness 685–6, 707, 728, 901; superiority of British culture 714, 722 broadcast communications (see also radio; television) 365; audience 366–7; constraints on 365–6, 381; cultural power of 382–3; distorted 369, 371–2, 386, 395, 396–8; encoding/decoding 339, 341–4, 360, 366, 367, 371–2, 387–8, 389–90, 392, 395, 396–8; structured 373–84 broadcasters 367, 370; current affairs values 334–5, 339; as mediators 371, 376, 378; and politicians 328–32, 342, 359–61, 362, 364, 376; reading of news-events 371–2 Bronte, Emily 66; Wuthering Heights 61, 65–7, 104 Bruegel, I. 1031 Bruner, J. 1051 Brunsdon, C. 4, 5, 260, 262, 266, 418, 419, 422–3, 427 Bullock Report, 1975 975–6, 1025 Burgelin, O. 371 Burnett, J. 883 Burns, E. 39 Burns, T. 39 Burroughs, W. 194 Calder, A. 832, 833 Callaghan, Jim 350, 353–4, 356, 357, 358, 361; and education 928, 950, 970, 976, 978, 979 Cambridge House Literacy Scheme 1015 Cameron, James 271 capitalism 201, 643, 672, 709; and colonialism 751–2; crisis of 821, 823; development of
1090
Index
130, 672, 782–5, 791; Dobbs and 776–7, 779–80, 782–5, 787; domestic labour and 464–71, 472, 474, 476–7, 478–9; education and 939, 960, 978, 985–6, 994–5, 996–7, 1004; emancipation of women 741, 745; family and 480; racism and 670, 676, 708–9; and reproduction of labour 996–7, 998; resistance to 821–2; and social change 201–4 Carby, H. 6, 7, 10 careers information, for working-class boys 1077–9 Carr, E.H. 830 cartoons, images of women in 446–9 Castles, S. 627, 629, 630, 634–5, 637–8, 640, 641, 642 castration complex 482, 536 Caudwell, C. 97, 105 Caute, D. 20, 74 censorship 365–6, 381 Central Advisory Council 944, 960; Newsom Report 947–8, 960–1, 1012 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) 2, 8, 142–5, 262, 564, 567–8, 769; Cultural History Group 818–19; Education Group 8, 766, 911–12, 913, 915–16, 919, 921, 927, 1064; History Group 4, 761, 762, 765, 766, 767; Language and Ideology Group 424; Literature and Society Group 3, 15–17; Media Group 4, 9, 259–68; Race and Politics Group 566, 567; Women’s Studies Group 5–6, 261–2, 418, 420, 421, 427, 464 Certificate of Pre-Vocational Education (CPVE) 1055, 1056–7, 1058–9; model of society in 1057–8; students 1060 Chambers, Jessie 97, 98, 100–5, 106, 108 Chambers, Mary 109 charisma 177 Charlton, Michael 344, 349, 357 Charnley, A.H. 1014, 1038 Chesneaux, J. 896, 905 Chibnal, S. 679 child-centred education 656, 661, 947, 953, 1050, 1051, 1052, 1062, 1065 child labour 705–6 childcare 488, 526–7, 753–4 Chomsky, N. 68 Christianity 710; in Jamaica 589–90 Churchill, W.S. 824, 830–1 Cicourel, A. 367–8 cinema: Rastafarianism and gangster films 601–2; representations of women 445 Clare, M. 917–18 Clarke, G. 143–4 Clarke, J. 9 class (see also middle class; working class) 232, 808, 937, 967; as agency 855–6, 858; and culture 181, 405; and education 403–4, 915,
923, 944; egalitarianism and 963, 967–8; Fabians and 963; language and 401, 404–5, 406; Lawrence and 95, 97; political parties and 933–4; race and 603, 617–19, 621–2, 623, 633–40; relational character of 800–1, 802; social/political 618; subcultures and 209, 212–16, 220, 222–3, 226, 236, 242 class consciousness 135, 411, 618, 623–4, 853, 860–5, 868 class structure 623–4, 803–4; inclusion of black people in 624–6, 634–5, 638–40 classic genre 79 clitoridectomy 745, 746 Clutterbuck, R. 682 Clyde Workers’ Committee 870, 871 Clyne, P. 1012–13, 1014 Coard, B. 657 Coates, K. 576 cognitive poverty 946 Cohen, P. 211, 231, 234–5, 240, 678 Cohen, S. 211, 214, 216, 244 coherence 125–6, 131 Colley, L. 568 colonialism: and destruction of kinship patterns 747, 748–9; feminism and 745; impact of monetary system on women 750–2; resistance to 711 colour supplements, images of women in 458–9 common sense 121, 556, 640–1, 678, 681, 700–1, 1001; black family 721–5, 728; childhood 705–6; culture 237, 238; history 897; ideologies of race 685, 706–21, 730–2; images of family 699, 701–4; technology 1013; women 549, 558; youth 706 Common Wealth Party 833 communication (see also broadcast communications) 64–5, 395, 396–7, 404 communicative events 387 communism, black people and 717 Communist Party of Great Britain 114–15, 822–3, 828, 869, 872, 935; 1945 election 833; People’s Convention, 1941 828–9 community: destruction of 202; perceived threat to 215 community education 1027, 1029, 1042 community history 903, 904 compensatory education 976, 1014, 1030 competency-based education 1066–7; distinct from traditional education 1053–4 comprehensive schools 949, 958, 963, 982 conditions of existence 812, 813, 814 Connell, I. 262, 263, 265 connotative codes 392, 393, 394, 399 consciousness (see also class consciousness; revolutionary consciousness) 3, 4, 43, 119, 156, 807, 854; false 125, 243, 863, 866; Freud and 534; hippies and 155–8; negotiated
Index 206–7; structure of 74–5; West Indian 579–80, 610; women’s 486, 490, 496 consciousness-raising 493–4, 495, 496 consent, rule by (see also hegemony) 201, 232, 243, 382, 701 conservative ideology 179; family 703, 704–5; race 725, 726–32 Conservative Party: 1960s 941; and colonialism 714; and education 958, 970–5, 1003; racism 725, 726–30 Coombes, B.L., These Poor Hands 81 Core Skills in YTS 1055, 1060–3 Corrigan, P. 144, 188–9, 190, 246 Cosmopolitan, images of women in 452, 453, 454, 460–1 Councils of Action 866 courting rituals, in youth culture 246–8 Coward, R. 422 Cox, O.C. 616–19 CPVE see Certificate of Pre-Vocational Education Crawford, J. 723–4 Creole language 589, 661–2, 664 crime 314; black people and 724–5; definitions 313, 317–18; explanations of 320–1; public interest in 313–14, 316; reporting of 313, 314, 315–20, 334 crime control agencies; as definers of crime 318; as source of news 317 Cripps, Stafford 830 crisis 824; of British way of life 676, 679–80, 681–90; in education 926, 928, 969–81 critical theory 47 Crombies 209, 608–9 Crosland, A. 941, 948, 949, 963, 965, 967 CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education) 953, 977 cultural competencies 400–1 cultural Marxism 797–8 cultural power 366, 382–3; in historical research 906–7 cultural self-consciousness 60–1, 66–7 Cultural Studies 111–12, 122, 142–3, 902–3; evolution of 113; values of 113–14; Williams and 116–18 culturalism 778, 779, 790, 791, 799–80, 802, 807–8; Thompson and 792–3, 794–8, 803–6, 859 culture 118–19, 920, 1000; and non-culture 118; production of 180; and social control 180, 181; social theory of 96; and society 876; Williams and 40–1, 117 Curran, Charles 314, 330–1 current affairs television 361, 370; access to 291; appropriation of topic 342–4, 352–3; broadcasters versus politicians 328–32; conspiracy thesis 326; control of 343, 349,
1091
352, 355–6, 359; displacement thesis 326–7; election coverage 327, 328–9, 336–64; impartiality of 328–9, 330, 345, 360–1, 361–2, 363; and Industrial Relations Bill 376; interview roles 349–51, 352, 354–5, 355–6, 358; interview rules 351–2, 354–5; laissezfaire thesis 327; political debate 355–8, 360–1; values of 332–6 curriculum 939, 978, 984–5; control of 952–4, 955, 957, 977, 980; in FE 1054–5, 1064; Great Debate 979; multicultural 650–5, 656–7; negotiated 1065–6; of ‘new education paradigm’ 1055–63; spiral 1051 Curriculum Studies Group 97 cycle of deprivation 946, 959, 1023 Daily Express, racism in 723–4 Daily Mail 929, 1025; crime stories 316 Daily Mirror 825, 830; crime stories 315, 320 dalla Costa, M. 468 Dalton, Hugh 717 Davidoff, L. 487 Davis, F. 166 Davis Jnr, Sammy 173 Day, Robin 335 Deakin, N. 628, 629, 643 decolonization 714–16 delinquency 192, 193; identification of youth culture with 187, 189, 208 Delphy, C. 550, 1007 democratisation 381–2 denotative mistakes 393, 394, 395, 404 Department of Education and Science (DES) 977; Assessment of Performance Unit 979; Yellow Book 979 dependency 739, 740 deprivation: cultures of 706; education and 655–6, 1012, 1014 de-skilling 966 determination 802–3 deviancy 243, 245; hippie identification with 149–50; labelling theory and 231; as working-class response to subordination 207, 208 Dewey, J. 1051 Dhondy, F. 652, 657; Come to Mecca 663–4 dialectics 125; Goldmann and 131–5 dialects 661–2, 663, 664 difference (see also sexual difference) 708–9 Diggers 152 disadvantage: of black people 627–8; in education 1012, 1013, 1014, 1064 disc jockeys, relationship with audience 305–7 discourse 53, 60; Foucault and 991; television as 389–90 discrimination, against black school-leavers 609–10
1092
Index
distorted communication 395, 396–7, 404 Dix, C. 453 Dobb, M. 762, 768–9, 774, 855; and Marxist history 775–91 documentary broadcasting 273, 274, 370 domestic labour 472; isolation of 524–6; and labour power 464–70, 471, 477–8; and production of surplus value 464–70, 479; and wage labour 472–4, 477–8 domestic service, inter-war 883–4; discipline of employers 887–8, 890–2; and the oppression of women 478–9; pleasures of 888–90; women’s home background 884–6; work and wages 886–7 domesticity 310, 550; ideology of, reinforced by radio 307 dominant code 396, 397, 404 dominant meanings 121, 394–5, 396–7, 408, 409–10 domination (see also subordination) 180–1 Dostoevsky, F. 128 Downes, D. 190, 191, 192–3 Downing, J. 402 dreadlocksmen 591, 592, 593, 594, 595, 598, 610 Dreitzel, H. 366 Driberg, T. 830 drop-outs: American hippies 149, 162–3, 165; British youth 188, 190 drugs, hallucinogenic: hippies’ use of 156–8 Dutt, R.P. 828 Duvalier, Papa Doc 278, 279, 283, 284 Dyer, R. 143, 260, 504 earnings, inequality in 627–8 Eastmann, M. 447 Eastwood (Nottinghamshire) 93, 94–6, 98, 109; Congregational Chapel 104, 106; culture of 94–5, 103, 105–6; literary society 104 Eco, U. 392, 393, 395, 404 economic life, social life and 126, 129–30, 132–3, 133–4 economism 775, 790, 803, 809, 872; Dobbs and 779, 780–1; Marxism and 779–91 economy, education and 959, 965–6, 978, 980 education (see also curriculum; progressive education; sociology of education; teachers) 204, 713, 985, 990, 1004; 1960s 957–62, 982; access to 1063–4; Black Papers 971, 972, 974, 1012; changes in 203–4, 212; crisis in 926, 928, 969–81; examination boards 953, 959, 1030; Gramsci and 933–4; ‘Great Debate’ 972, 977–81; ideologies 927, 928–9, 984–5 (right-wing 971–2, 973, 974); as political question 926, 928, 960, 983; positive discrimination 655; sexual inequality in 968–9; Tawney and 936–40; traditional
versus competency-based 1053–4; ‘truths’ of 917–21 Education Act, 1944 832 Education Priority Areas 958, 967 education system 403–4; as determinant of cultural competencies of media audience 400–3; transmission of dominant ideology 403–4, 410 educational settlements 1005 Edwards, V. 661–2 egalitarianism, in education 963, 964 elections, coverage on television 327, 328–9, 336–64 elementary education 936–7, 953; free places to grammar schools 953 eleven-plus 944, 948, 949, 982 Eliot, George 93 Eliot, T.S., on Lawrence 92–3 Elliott, P. 387 Elsey, B. 1039 Elson, D. 743–4 emotional work 491 empiricism 786, 800, 809, 857, 860, 877; literary criticism and 36 encoding/decoding 366, 367, 371–2; in current affairs television 339, 341–4, 360, 387–8, 389–90, 392, 395, 396–8 ‘end of Empire’ 914–18 Engels, F. 465, 467, 478 English culture 685–6 English teaching 656, 658; multicultural texts 658–60 Enzensberger, H. 72, 75, 76, 78 epic genre 79 equality 940, 962, 965; and education 963; and exchange 475–6, 477 equality of opportunity 940, 949, 951, 962, 963–4, 965, 1064, 1068–9 Establet, R. 400, 402–3, 409 Ethiopia 590, 594, 595, 600 ethnography, Hoggart and 27–8 Eurocentricity, of feminist research 749–50 European theory of literature 17–19, 38 evolutionism 782–3 Ewe women 753 examination boards 959, 1030; control of curriculum 953 exchange 475–6, 477 existentialism 48 experience 795–6, 797, 802, 807, 856–60, 876 exploitation 804–6; of black workers 627–8, 630–1, 633, 634, 635–6; colonial 588; of housewives 466; of women 466 Fabianism 942, 946, 964; class and 963; and LSE 943 facts, models and 798, 800, 859–60
Index Fairbairn, A. 1047 family 233, 475, 478, 479, 486, 490, 728; Althusser and 544–5, 546; and capitalism 480–1, 483, 508, 540, 541, 546; commonsense ideologies 701–4, 707; fragmentation of 202; Marx and 476, 477; parental responsibilities 704–5; relationships with schools 998, 1000; as source of oppression of women 467, 738–9, 749; in women’s magazines 507–8 Fanon, F. 663, 715 Farr, R. 476 fashion: in women’s magazines 452–3, 509–10; youth subcultures and 225, 233–4 female sexuality 436, 463, 488, 489, 549; in advertisemernts 434, 435, 457–8; Asian women 719–20; black 724, 739, 742; black men and 712, 713, 718; femininity and 501; in images of women 444–6, 449, 458–9 ; problematisation of 557–8; psychoanalysis and 530, 538; in women’s magazines 452, 511–12 female support networks 753–4 femininity 423–5, 427, 495; adolescent 555–8; black 556; cultural construction of 487; employment and 553–5; feminism and 500; ideology of 501–3; and women’s interest in television 307–8, 310; in women’s magazines 458–9 feminism (see also black feminism) 5–6, 480, 481, 500; Eurocentricity of 749–50; Marxism and 479–83, 530, 543–4, 546, 993 feminist history 898, 904–5 Fenwick, I. 989, 990 feudalism 782–3, 784, 789; colonialism and 750, 751; and Third World women 741, 746, 748, 750, 751 fiction: multicultural 658–60, 663–4, 665–6; women in 460–1 Figes, E. 450, 499, 537, 538 fighting, working-class boys 1076 Firestone, S. 509, 537, 538 Fitzhugh, L., Nobody’s Family is Going to Change 666 Flaubert, G. 48 Floud, J. 943 flower power 155 Foley, W. 886, 889–90 Foner, N. 741 football: changes in 203; violence in 215 Foreman, A. 538 Foster, J. 854; class consciousness 860–5; on General Strike 865–7 Foucault, M. 905, 991 France, popular memory in 905 Fraser, R., Blood of Spain 904 freedom, and exchange 475–6, 477
1093
Freire, P. 1046 Freud, S. 154, 392, 424–5, 531–4; feminist assessments of 537–8, 540 Friedan, B. 423, 492 Frith, S. 243, 248, 250 Frye, N. 37, 39–40, 58 functionalism 942 further education 1054; Core Skills in YTS 1060–3; CPVE 1056–60 Further Education Review and Development Unit 1054, 1055, 1063–7 Gaitskell, Hugh 631 gangster subculture 586, 601, 605–6, 607 ganja 591, 592, 595 Gardiner, J. 471, 477 Garnham, N. 264, 265 Garvey, Marcus 587 Gavron, H. 423, 494 gender, class and 999 gender differences 487, 999 gender relations, in education 996–7 General Election, October 1974, coverage on Panorama 337, 338–9, 344–58 General Strike 866–7, 932 genetics, and educational inequality 974, 976 Genovese, E. 791, 793–4, 796, 800–1, 802, 803; and Marxism 797; The Political Economy of Slavery 794; Roll Jordan Roll 792, 794–5, 801 genre 20, 71–9 ghetto rebellions 159 Ghrapnel, S. 1022–3 Gibbs, M. 1039 Giglioli, P. P. 408 Gillott, J. 452 Gilroy, P. 7, 568 Girard, R.: Goldmann and 128–9; and the novel 128–9 girlfriends, images of women in advertisements 456–7 girls 219–20, 1000; alternative subcultures of 227–8; courtship rituals 246–7; in domestic service 884–92; resistance to men 247; in youth subcultures (invisibility of 221–4; roles of 224–6) Giroux, H. 1051, 1052 glam-rock 240–1 Glasgow, revolutionary movement 870–1 Glucksmann, M. 131 Goffman, E. 368, 890 Golding, P. 264 Goldmann, L. 3, 8, 17–18, 42, 43, 44, 70, 123; and dialectic 131–5; Girard and 128–9; The Hidden God 18, 45–6, 123–4, 125–6, 131; and the novel 126–7, 129–31, 134–5; and reflection 17–18; world–vision 18, 45, 46, 123–5, 126, 134, 135
1094
Index
Goodman, P. 190, 191 Gordon, T. 1050–1 Gorz, A. 637 gothic genre 78–9 Gough, I. 465 Gould, R. 950 Gramsci, A. 796, 802, 854; on common sense 238, 700, 1001; and hegemony 121, 201, 204, 232, 802, 824, 854, 857; and historical consciousness 899, 902; parties and class 932–4; The Prison Notebooks 762 Gray, R.Q. 867–8, 873 Gray, T.L. 943 Green, A. 1051, 1052 Green, J. 232 Greenwood, W. 81–2; Love on the Dole 82, 83–6, 89–90, 823 (characters in 85, 86, 87–9); There Was a Time 84, 85–6 Greer, G. 537, 538 Griffin, C. 425–6 Griffin, J. 719 Griffith, D.W. 445 Groombridge, B. 1015 Gurevitch, M. 259, 266, 267 Guy, R., The Friends 665–6 Habermas, J. 265, 367 Haile Selassie, as Ras Tafari 590, 591, 595 Hall, S. 4, 5, 11, 16, 424, 454, 716, 761, 766; ‘Encoding/Decoding’ 9, 121, 261, 263, 264, 265, 399, 409; and Media Group 260, 267, 268; on mugging 682; on permissiveness 679; on racism 644, 672–3, 689–90, 720, 726 Halloran, J.D. 386, 399 Halsey, A.H. 943, 948 Hard Times (Dickens) 88 The Harder they Come (film) 602–3 Hargreaves, D. 189, 190, 954, 1024 Haslingden Road Chapel, Blackburn 839–40, 845, 849; ‘Bright Hour’ 843, 845; development of 847–9; leadership 847, 850; members of 849, 850; social history 845–7; social life of 840–5, 846, 848 Heath, Edward 973 Hebdige, D. 233, 236–9, 244, 245; on punk and race 238–42, 247 hedonism, hippie 154–5 Hegel, G.W.F. 133 hegemonic ideology: media reproduction of 371, 372, 373, 382–3, 396; transmission of, in schools 410 hegemony 121, 232, 701, 802, 873, 1005; in adult literacy 1044; crisis of 677, 679, 682; democratisation and 382; and educability 403–5; Gramsci and 121, 201, 204, 232, 802, 824, 854, 857; history and 901; media and 360, 372, 373, 382, 383; post-war capitalism
and 201–4, 675; resistance of subcultures 243; and slavery 792; Thompson and 792, 857 Henry, Claudius 592 Henry, J. 190, 228 heritage, popular memory and 897 heterosexuality, compulsory 553, 556, 557–8 Hill, C. 775, 780, 790, 791, 855, 896 Hilton, R. 790, 855 Hindess, B. 775, 784–5, 786, 793, 810–15, 852 Hinton, J. 854, 866, 869–73 hippies 226, 244; female 223, 226 hippies, American 146–7, 161; counter-values 162–3; culture of 148, 149; and drugs 156–8; ‘happenings’ 154, 161; identification with American Indians 150, 151; identification with ‘East’ 151, 152; identification with poor 149–50; and love 153–4, 155; pastoralism 151–2; political contestation 161–4; as revolutionaries 163–4, 165–6, 167; slogans of 148–9; tribalism in 152–3 Hiro, D. 586–7, 589, 602, 610 Hirst, P.Q. 775, 784–5, 786, 793, 810–15, 852 historical constructions 896–8 historical process 785–7 historical representations 896–7, 899, 905 historical tourism 898 historicism 243–4, 781, 785, 802, 857, 865, 876 historiography 768, 895–6, 900, 901; Marxist 852–3; nationalist 901 history 811, 814; political uses of 900–2; and theory 768, 774–815, 995; Thompson and 856–60, 900, 992 History Workshop 761, 764, 897, 903 history-writing 898, 899, 902 Hobbes, T. 447 Hobsbawm, E. 793, 855 Hobson, D. 263, 423 Hoggart, R. 1, 3, 8, 116, 118, 911; at trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover 21; The Uses of Literacy 15, 22–3, 81, 82, 111–12, 113–14 (introduction to French edition 25–34) Holderness, G. 20–1 home 503; division of labour in 473, 483 homelessness 575 Honey, images of women in 450, 452, 454 hooks, b. 745 Hopkin, W. 99, 100, 195 Horney, K. 531 housewives 464; isolation of 517, 522–3, 524; oppression of 466, 467, 470, 472, 478, 527; as reserve army of unemployed 467; women portrayed as 435, 442, 449, 451–2, 455–6, 462 housework (see also domestic labour) 525–6, 527; sexuality and 527; undervaluing of 473 housing, inequality in 574–6
Index Howell, L.P. 591 human nature, common sense and 701, 727 humanism 57–8, 179, 805, 807, 809; and slavery 794; socialist- 792–4, 855–60 humour, women as objects of 446–50 Hussein, S.A. 751 identification, communication and 367, 369 identity (see also sexual identity) national 730 ideology (see also racist ideologies) 501, 873, 878–9, 929, 1001; Althusser and 4, 500, 501, 530, 542, 544–5, 547, 769, 854; cultural 769, 853, 867, 876–8; economistic 769, 853; functionalist 866; Marxism and 616; politics and 863–4, 866; structural 769, 854, 859 Igbo women 747–9 illiteracy 1019, 1023–4, 1025; stigma of 1019–20 images of women 434–6, 450–4; as news 436–44 imagination, and social determination 71 immigrants 635, 643, 653; in labour market 627–8, 634; as reserve army of labour 636, 637, 643; surplus labour of 629 immigration 576–7, 631, 683, 716; British legislation on 630, 631, 632–3; illegal 685; racist discourse 685 impartiality of media 373, 375, 379, 383 imperialism see colonialism impression management 282–3 income inequality 574 independence of women, portrayed in magazines 510–11 Independent Labour Party 935 India 715 individual needs, in education 1030 individualism: of hippie culture 158–9; of progressive education 1052, 1057, 1060 Industrial Relations Bill 373–4; media presentation 374–80 Industrial Revolution 780, 803, 804 inequality: in education 572–3; in employment 573–4, 609–10; in housing 574–6; in income 574; race and 576–7 institutional racism 649–50, 651, 653, 654 institutions, and production of history 896–7 integration: in progressive education 1050, 1054, 1065; racial 624 intelligence 947 internal colonialism 619–20 Irigaray, L. 542 Iriquois women 753 isolation of women 521, 522–3; and oppression 517, 523 ITV, current affairs programmes 273, 274 Jamaica 587–8, 662; Christian worship in
1095
589–90; music of 596–603; Rastafarianism 590–6; slavery 589 Jansenism 46, 126 Jeffcoate, R. 652–5, 656, 658, 660, 664 jobs: choices for working-class boys 1079–80, 1083; competition for 642–3 Johnson, R. 10, 488 Jones, B. 143 Jones, H.A. 1014, 1038 Jones, Jack 300–1 Jones, K. 628, 912–13 Jones, Tom 169; body and soul of 173; in performance 170–2, 175–6; as public personality 170, 171; sexiness of 171, 172; as superstar 172, 177; working-class background 174–5 Jordan, W.D. 709, 710–11 Joseph, Keith 574, 684 Joyce, James, Ulysses 87 Jude the Obscure (Hardy) 87 Kafka, Franz 130 Keddie, N. 405, 1030, 1033, 1039 Keynes, J.M. 823 kinship relations, in sex/gender systems 747–9 kinship structures 540–1, 589 Klein, J. 945–6 Knight, Jill 703–4 knowledge 769; educational 1052, 1067–8; production of 59–61; useful 916, 940; working-class 916 Kogan, M. 948 Kosack, G. 627, 629, 630, 634–5, 637–8, 640, 641, 642 Kray, Ronnie 585, 586, 605, 606 Kristeva, J. 425, 446, 480, 482, 483, 541–3 Kroll, U. 442 labelling, by media 323 labelling theory 231 labour aristocracy 115, 637–8; as means of social control 862, 864, 865, 866, 867 Labour Colleges 935 labour history 991–2 labour market: migrant workers 629–37, 671–2; women in 550–5, 1031–3 Labour Party 114, 337, 914, 940, 958, 982; 1920s–1940s 822, 829, 932, 941; 1945 election 820, 831, 833–4; and colonialism 714; and education 926, 927, 928, 932, 940, 941–2, 958–60, 962–4, 969, 985, 1003 ‘counter-education’ 934–5; Great Debate 977–81; and Industrial Relations Bill 374; relationship with working class 932–3, 934, 941, 985; Secondary Schools for All 936–40; sociology of education 942, 946, 948–9; and
1096
Index
teachers 951–2; and wage restraint 288, 293–7, 301 labour power: domestic labour and 464–70, 471, 477–8; education and 939, 960, 978, 996; value of 466–7, 478 Lacan, J. 425, 479–80, 481–2; psychoanalytic theory 532, 534–7, 540 Laing, R.D. 158–9, 604 Laing, S. 8–9 land ownership, in colonies 751–2 language 52, 60, 63, 661; class and 404, 405, 406; dominant forms 662–3; Jamaican slaves 603; Lacan and 532, 534–5; and multiculturalism 661–5; race and 720; ‘stolen’ 603; and struggle of oppressed groups 664; of subcultures 148–9, 165, 389 Larrain, J. 1008 laughter 519 law and order 678–83, 858; young people and 703 Lawrence, D.H. 21, 87, 92; and Chapel 106–8; and class 95, 97; cultural background 92–3, 94–5, 102, 109; family background 97, 99–100; Pagans and 105–6; relationship with Jessie Chambers 100–5, 108; Sons and Lovers 95, 97, 100; The White Peacock 98, 99, 100, 108 Lawrence, E. 568 Leavis, F.R. 20–1; on Eastwood culture 105; on Lawrence 92, 94–6, 106 Lefebvre, H. 285, 494–5, 505, 790 Leghorn, L. 750, 752–3 Leicester 1027, 1029 Leicester Centre for Mass Communications Research 264 Leicestershire, Adult Literacy Scheme 1027–42, 1044 leisure 202–3; teenagers 192–3, 196–7, 222; women 551 Lenin, V.I. 776, 863, 867 lesbianism 558 Lester, J., The Basketball Game 66 Lévi-Strauss, C. 52, 480, 535, 536, 540–1 liberalisation 862, 864 linguistics 38, 52 listening 795–6 literacy (see also Adult Literacy Campaign) 918, 971, 978; UNESCO Declaration 1018 literacy groups 1039–41 literacy tutors 1035–7, 1038–9; dominant role of 1036; reading tests 1037–8 literary criticism 39–40, 56–9; traditional 36–8 literary text 36–7, 41; Adorno and 46; Brecht and 49; de-historicising of 38, 39; Goldmann and 45; Sartre and 48–9; structuralism and 53 literature 43, 44; sociology of 123–35; working class and 32
literature/society 92–3; Marxist tradition 42, 44–53; revival of interest in 38–42; in traditional literacy criticism 36–8 living standards, cuts in 6, 861–2 logic, and research 769, 777, 785–6, 788 London: poverty in 873–5, 877; Rastafarians in 608–9, 610 Long, E. 707, 718 Louvre, A. 20 love, in hippie philosophy 153–4, 155 Love on the Dole (Greenwood) 82, 83–6, 89–90, 823; characters in 85, 86, 97–9 Lovell, T. 426 Luckmann, T. 392, 410 Lukacs, G. 18, 42, 43, 44, 45, 50, 70; and Marxism 132; theory of the novel 127–8 McCrindle, J. 905 McCron, R. 144 Mace, J. 1030, 1040 MacFarlane, T. 1037, 1038 McGhee, F. 720–1 McGlashan, C. 596, 610 MacIntyre, A. 410, 411 McKenzie, Robert 354–5 McKibbin, R. 935 McLaren, Malcolm 245, 250 Maclean, John 870 McLennan, G. 768, 769, 795–6, 797–8 McLuhan, M. 152–3 Macmillan, Harold 714, 944 McNeil, M. 425 McRobbie, A. 5, 233, 262, 427, 550 Magas, B. 476 Mailer, N. 150, 163, 445 Malinowski, B. 28 Mann, M. 409 Manpower Services Commission (MSC) 968, 1045–6, 1055, 1064 Marchant, H. 556–7 Marcus, S. 157 Marcuse, H. 46, 47, 533 Marley, Bob 595, 602 marriage (see also arranged marriages) 248, 507, 550, 702 married women, as reserve army of labour 636 Marwick, A. 765 Marx, K. 42, 43, 44, 77, 483, 639, 806; bourgeois ideology 733; Capital 622–3, 777, 778, 782, 798–9, 807, 813, 994–5; class relationships 801; commodities 500, 502; dialectic 133; domestic labour 465, 466–7, 471–2; history writing 900; labour power 468, 517–18; relations of production 622–3; reserve army of labour 636; wage labour 474–7 Marxism 621, 823, 876, 933; 1930s 823;
Index CCCS and 4–5, 16, 17, 118, 261, 262, 264, 265; and class 622; and education 992–3; and feminism 479–83; Goldmann and 131; and literature/society 39, 40–54, 116, 118; political economy of race 626–33; and psychoanalysis 544–5, 546; and race and class 633–40; and racism 615, 616, 620–44; Williams and 41–2, 116 Marxist-feminism 530, 543–4, 546; and schooling 993 Marxist history 768–70, 811, 814, 852–3; Dobb and 775–91 Mary Barton (Gaskell) 88 masculinity: femininity and 501–2, 502–3, 509; skinheads and 215–16 Mass Observation 821, 829–30 material causality 810–11, 812, 813, 814, 857 Mattelaut, M. 490 Mau Mau 655, 715 meaning (see also dominant meanings) 604–5; Lacan and 534, 535; in television programmes 339, 340–1 means of production, artistic 50 means of subsistence 466–70 Means Test 84 media (see also broadcast communications; television): contacts with crime control agencies 317–18; on education 974; and historical constructions 898, 905; neutrality of 359, 360, 362, 363–4; new 76; politics and 358–64; portrayal of crime in 313, 315–16, 318–20; relations with power elites 372, 382–3; shaping public opinion on crime 319–20, 322–3, 324; and state 262, 328, 360, 362–3, 383 mediation/s 46, 48, 128–9; media and 290, 319, 327, 367, 370 men 473, 502, 503, 551; definition of women in relation to 487, 493, 502; leisure 551; sexual harassment of women 553; and work 999 merchant capital 783 meritocracy 1064 message-form 387 Meszaros, I. 77, 83 meta-language 52, 285 Methodism (see also Haslingden Road Chapel, Blackburn): decline in membership 848–9; working-class converts to 838 Methven, J. 978 middle class 203; culture of girls 226; images of working class 30, 31; philanthropy 874; responses to poverty in London 874–5; student culture 226 Middlemas, K. 684 migrant workers 620–30, 631–2, 635–6, 642, 671–2; benefits economy 629, 636–7; occupational concentration of 627, 634; and
1097
upward mobility of white working class 637 Miles, R. 643 Miliband, R. 819, 931 Millet, K. 537 Millum, T. 487 miscegenation 712, 718–19 Mitchell, J. 425, 483, 486, 501; Psychoanalysis and Feminism 481, 502, 531, 537, 539–41, 604; and Women’s Liberation Movement 491–2, 493 mobility: geographical 848, 849; social 637, 638 mode of production 778–80, 784–5, 810, 811–12, 813; pre-capitalist 775, 777, 778, 810–15 model of unequal exchange 471 models: facts and 798, 800, 859–60; images of women as, in advertisements 456–7 modernism, and literature 45 Mods 209, 211, 586, 608; female participation 223, 225–6, 235, 236; style of 212–14 Molyneux, M. 741 monarchy, and construction of history 896–7 money capital 783 Moorhouse, C. 1040 moral panics 7, 251, 316, 322–3, 960, 971 Morley, D. 4, 5, 9 Moshinsky, P. 943 motherhood 488, 526, 702, 1031; femininity and 501, 502, 506–7, 508; and images of women 442, 443, 444, 449, 462, 455–6 Motorbike culture, subordination of girls 224–5 mugging 316, 323–4, 571; West Indian youth and 581–3 multicultural fiction 658–60, 665–6 multiculturalism 649, 653–5; discourse of 661–5; in schools 655–7; state and 650–3 multiracialism 587 Murdock, G. 144, 264 Musgrove, F. 186–7 mysticism, hippies and 151 narcissism 502, 503 narcissistic images of women 450–1, 454, 457, 458 National Administrative Council 871 National Association of Labour Teachers 952 National Association of Schoolmasters 980–1 national consciousness, British 728–9, 730 National Government 83–4 National Health Service 834 National Health White Paper 832 national identity 730 National Institute for Adult Education 1014, 1015 National Right to Read Committee 1016 National Union of Teachers 950, 951, 953
1098
Index
nationalism 715–16, 729 Nationwide 262, 266, 291–2 naturalism, and literature 45 nature: oppression and 485–6; women and 486–9 negotiated code 396–7, 409 neighbourliness 849 neo-conservatism 676, 680, 684–5 Nettleford, R. 588, 594 New Criminology 231 new educational paradigm 1055–63, 1067 New Grub Street (Gissing) 87 new vocationalism 918, 1054–5, 1058–9, 1069 news-events 370–1, 375–6 news media (see also television news) 370–1; bias in 264, 288, 362; crime reporting 315–25; images of women in 436–44 news values, crime and 314–16 Newsom Report, 1963 947–8, 960–1, 1012 newspapers, crime reporting 315–25 Nicholls, A. 1037 Nigeria, ‘Women’s War’ 747–9 Nikolinakos, M. 626, 629 nostalgia 112, 244, 849 Nottinghamshire, literacy tutors 1039 Novak, B. 283 novel: 19th–20th centuries 86–7, 88; Goldmann and 126–7, 129–31, 134–5; Lukacs theory of 127–8; periodisation of 130–1, 133; social elements 83, 84, 86–7, 90; and society 129–30 Nowell-Smith, G. 504 nudity, in media 444, 445 Nuffield Foundation 944 Nuttall, J. 188 Oakley, A. 423, 522, 1032 objectification 180 Oedipus complex 531, 532, 535–6 Offe, C. 674–5 office work, young working-class women in 553, 554 Oldham 861–2 Omvedt, G. 752 oppositional code 397 oppression of women 470, 495–6, 514–15, 527; family as source of 467, 738–9, 749; isolation and 517, 523; nature and 486–9 oral history 895, 897, 903–4, 906 Orwell, George 717, 764, 824–5, 827, 884; The Road to Wigan Pier 81, 82, 823, 826; wartime diaries 831 Osgood, C.E. 604–5 Oxford,Kenneth 703, 704 ‘Pagans’ 99, 100, 105–6 Pala, A.O. 749–50
Panorama 333–4, 335, 336; on October 1974 General Election 338–9, 344–58 Papa Doc – the Black Sheep (TV documentary) 274, 278, 279, 283 Paper Voices (CCCS) 764, 765 parasocial interaction 279 parents 1000; blamed for excesses of youth 704; and education of working-class children 222, 969, 972, 974, 1073; responsibility of 703, 704–5; values of 222; West Indian 723–4, 725 Parker, K. 750, 752–3 Parkers 209 Parkin, F. 205, 396, 405, 408, 409, 410–11 parliamentarianism 931–2 Parmar, P. 6, 739 Parsons, T. 411 Passerini, L. 903–4 Passeron, J.-C. 22–3 Pateman, T. 290, 327 patriarchy 500, 540, 747, 999; black men and 741–2 patrilinear institutions 480–1 Peach, C. 626–7, 631 Pearson, G. 244 Pearson, R. 743–4 Peel, J. 188 Peirce, C.S. 393 Penguin Books 21 perceptual strategy 62 permissiveness 324, 679, 725 phallocentrism 481–2, 536–7, 542–3 philanthropy 874 Phillips, T. 568 Philpott, Trevor 271 Phizacklea, A.A. 643 Piaget, J. 63 Picture Post 824, 825, 826 Pinnacle community 591 Pirenne, H. 776, 777, 788, 790 Plebs League 935 Plowden Report, 1967 958 policing 6–7, 689; and West Indian community 577–8, 704, 725 political activism, of American youth 160–1 political authority 675, 691; crisis of 678–82 political deviance 411 political economy of race 626–33 Political Economy of Women Group 471 political elites 382; and broadcasting 372, 375, 376, 381, 383, 396; television’s relationship to 326–7 political interviews 376–7; rules of the game 350–2, 355, 357, 359, 361 political parties, and development of hegemony 933–4
Index political problems, use of history in analysis of 900–1 politicians, broadcasters and 328–32, 342, 359–61, 362, 364, 376 politics: of education 1011–12; and history 901; racism and 625, 679, 683, 685, 686–7; women and 490 Pollitt, H. 828 pop music 187–9, 223, 227; girls and 227–8; as language for dating 248–9 popular culture 31, 143, 179, 243; 1960s music 187–9; Hoggart and 32, 33 popular memory 244, 894, 899; as political practice 899–902; resources 902–5 pornography 444–5 ‘Positive Image’ 657; in multicultural texts 658, 660 Poulantzas, N. 622, 638, 675, 677–8, 812 poverty 1012; American hippies’ identify with 149–50; culture of 946, 959, 1012–14; in London 872, 873–4, 877 Powdermaker, H. 172 Powell, Enoch 587, 687, 688, 726–7, 728, 729, 730, 731 power, mass media and 382–3 practice, production of literature as 43–4 praxis 48 pre-capitalist production (see also feudalism) 775, 776, 778, 810–15 preferred meanings see dominant meanings prejudice 699 Presley, Elvis 171 Priestley, J.P. 823, 825, 826–7, 828 problematic 60–1, 71, 864–5, 873; Althusser and 35–6, 44 production (see also mode of production), relations of 621, 622–3, 635–6, 639, 805 (sex/gender systems and 750, 751–2) productive/unproductive labour 465–6, 468 professional code 396 professionalism 950; of teachers 950–2, 957, 983; in television 274 progressive education 955–7, 969, 1050–1, 1062, 1063–9, 1083; CPVE 1056–60; failings of 1052–3; as form of student control 1051, 1058, 1059; and multiculturalism 656; right and 971, 974, 1051–2, 1069; selective takeup 1053–5; teaching of English 656 prostitution 551–2 psychoanalysis: cinema theory 263; feminism and 530, 531, 533, 537–44; Marxism and 544–5, 546; political and theoretical perspectives 543–4; and sexuality 481–2 psycholinguistic competence 62–4 public opinion: shaped by media 290, 319–20, 322–3, 324 punks 238–41, 245, 247, 249–50
1099
‘queer bashing’ 209, 215 race 7, 10, 684–5; crisis management approach 683, 686–8; definition 652; political economy of 626–33; problematisation of 678, 683–4; and structural inequality 576–7; subcultures and 145, 241–2 race relations 683, 684; legislation 675, 688 race riots 687, 689–90, 704; in 1919 711–12 Racial Adjustments Action Society 587 racism 204–5, 625–6, 761, 766; authoritarianism and 673–8; black feminism and 738, 739; conspiracy theory 617–18; Hall and 672–3, 689–90, 720, 726; immigration and 716; institutional 649–50, 651, 653, 654; internal colonialism 619–20; politics and 625, 679, 683, 685, 686–7; popular memory and 901; violence of 681–2, 686; within white working class 215, 624, 625–6, 640, 642, 644 racist ideology 617, 620, 638, 641–4; commonsense 706–21, 730–2; Fascist 725; history of 707–15; Conservative 725–8; new 725–32 radicalism (see also war radicalism): popular 830, 833–4; working-class 861–2, 866–7 radio, housewives listening to 304–7 Ras Tafari 590, 591; as God 593–4, 595 Rastafarians 241, 581, 590–6, 605, 610–11; and film 601–3; music of 596–601, 605; in South London 608–9, 610 rationalism 795–6, 810, 811–15 readers 62–4 reading 37, 40, 56, 57–8; assessment of 1037–8; Lawrence and 103–4, 107; process of 61–7; scientism and 58–9 reading culture 65–7 reading history 768 realism, Lukacs and 45, 70 reciprocity, between communicators and audiences 368–9 reductions 800–2 reflection 17–18; in progressive education 1060, 1063 reggae 241–2, 596–7, 600, 601, 602; in South London 607–8, 609 Reich, W. 533 reification 134 Reith, Lord 383–4 religion: Lawrence and 106–7; Wesleyan Methodism 844, 848–9 repatriation 685, 686, 687, 688–9, 729, 730 representations 1001; of schools 1002, 1003 reproduction 496, 811, 994, 995; black women 742–3; of capital 476; generational 526–7; of labour 480, 996–7, 998; Marx on 799; relations of 479–83, 501; of working class 994
1100
Index
research: logic and 769, 777, 785–6, 788; social relations of 906 reserve army of labour 636, 637, 643, 742–3 resistance 857, 866; subcultural 236, 244 Resistance Through Rituals (CCCS) 230, 231–2, 234, 246, 766 revolutionary consciousness 862, 863, 864–5, 866, 869 revolutionary projects 147, 159, 163–4, expressive/activist poles 164–5, 166 Rex, J. 616, 617, 619, 620–2, 623–4, 624–6, 633, 642 Rexroth, K. 160 Rich, A. 556 Richards, I.A. 57 Riffaterre, M. 58, 63 A Right to Read 1016–18, 1019 Risman, A. 1023–4, 1040 Roberts, R. 81, 883, 890 Robinson, C. 708–9 Rogaly, J. 978 Rogers, J. 1015, 1021 romance genre 78 Rosen, H. 403, 405, 406 Rowbotham S. 447, 487, 489, 491, 493, 494, 495, 905 Rubin, G. 539, 556, 747 Rude Boys 581, 596, 599–601, 605, 606; in London 608 rules of the game, in current affairs interviews 350–2, 359, 361; breaking 354–5 ruling class 824: dominance of 853, 866; use of labour aristocracy 862, 864, 865, 866 Ruskin College, Oxford 10, 761 Russell Report, 1973 1014, 1015 Sacks, K. 749 St John-Stevas, N. 728 Samuel, R. 761 Sartre, J.-P. 43, 47–9, 68, 147–8, 791 Saussure, F. de 52 Saville, J. 862 Sayak, A. 924 Scannell, P. 259, 266, 267 schooling (see also education) 936, 985, 990, 999, 1004; Marxist accounts 993, 997; secondary 936, 937–9, 942, 951; selective 940, 944, 947, 953, 985; in society 990–1000 schools (see also anti-school culture): compulsory attendance 999; failure of black children 572–3, 651, 655–6; failure of working-class children 703, 723, 944, 946, 947, 954, 959, 968–9, 971, 975, 976; politics of 1001–4; scapegoating of 982; social relations in 998, 1004–5; working-class resistance to 189, 190, 204, 572 Schools Council 944, 954, 956, 959, 977
Schwarz, B. 768–9, 900 scientism, and reading 58–9 Seabrook, J. 849–50, 905 Seaga, E. 598–9 Seccombe, W. 468, 470–1, 473 Secondary Schools for All (Tawney) 934, 936–40 sectionalism 870–3 self-consciousness 60–1 self-sufficiency 152 semantic differential 604–5 semiology 38–9, 51, 52 sensationalism, in television documentaries 277–80 sense of the past, construction of 896–7 sex/gender systems 747, 750, 751–2; kinship relations as 747–9 sex-objects, women as 444–6, 449, 463 sexism 478 sexual difference 487, 543; biology and 531, 532, 536, 537–8; unconscious and 480 sexual identity 153–4, 540, 543, 546–7 sexual inequality, in education 968–9, 984 sexual marketplace 552–3 sexual slavery 551; virgin/whore dichotomy 555–6 sexuality (see also female sexuality) as form of social control 550–1; housework and 527; psychoanalysis and 481–2; theory of 533, 535–6, 538, 539, 546 Sharpe, S. 490, 491 Sheffield, revolutionary movement 870, 871 Sherman, A. 683, 685, 726, 729–30, 731 Shiach, M. 427 Shils, E.A. 177 shop stewards’ movement 870, 871–2 Short, E. 959, 970 Shrapnel, N. 442 Shyllon, F. 719 sign production 542 signification 49, 51–2, 52–3, 180, 393, 535; of current affairs television 339–42, 349, 369, 371, 391; of public events 376–7 Silburn, R. 576 Simmel, G. 149 Simon, B. 947 Sivanandan, A. 621, 627, 630–1, 634 ska 597–9, 608 skill 965, 966 skinheads 209, 211, 214–16, 235, 608–9, 610; female 222–3 slavery 588–9, 594, 709, 801, 802; humanism and 794; rape of female slaves 718, 719 Smith, A.D. 628 Smith, D. 627, 629 Smith, H. 556–7 social change 117, 201–4; working-class response to 208–9, 211
Index Social Contract, television news reports 288, 293, 297–9 social control 408, 674–5, 678, 682, 686, 689, 862, 945; culture and 180, 181; racial segregation and 673 social democracy 962, 972, 984; and education 940, 952, 964–6, 975, 981–5, 1064 social formation 205, 780–1, 801, 854; Althusser and 854; Marx and 132, 133–4; as mode of production 814; working-class response to 205–7 social history 762 social life, economic life and 126, 129–30, 132–3, 133–4 social movements 679–80 social norms, counter-definitions 147, 158, 162–3 social totality 28, 117, 856; Thompson and 857–8 socialisation 537; linguistic codes and 400–1, 406 socialism 853 socialist-humanism 792–4, 807, 855–60 society 117, 946; crime and 314; model of, in CPVE 1057–8; novel and 129–30; schooling in 998–100 sociolinguistic codes 400–1, 406, 408 sociology 914; of literature 123–35 sociology of education 703, 930, 942–6, 990; impact of 946–9; Labour Party and 942, 946, 948–9; ‘new’ 975, 977 soul music 241 sound-letter patterns 62–3 South Africa 621 Sparks, C. 22 spectacle 285 sport, black people in 720–1 Stanbrook, I. 727 standards in education 978, 979; alleged decline in 971, 974, 1014, 1025, 1051 stardom 177 stars, images of women as 443–4, 445 state 201, 382, 835: authoritarian 674, 675, 689; crisis management 674–5, 677; intervention in World War II 823–4; interventionist/technocratic 674, 676, 677; media and 262, 328, 360, 362–3, 383; multiculturalism and 650–3; neutrality of 360; and race 632, 633, 676, 689; and reproduction of ethnic differences 672; restructuring 674–7 Stedman Jones, G. 793, 854, 863, 864, 873–8 Steele, David 350–1, 352, 356, 357, 358 stereotyping, of women 447, 449 Stevens, J. 1024 Strachey, J. 715 streaming 953, 954, 963
1101
structural causality 811 structuralism 38–9, 51–4, 550, 792 structuralist Marxism 767, 858, 859 structure of feeling 65, 858 students 191 style 585; hippies 161; in women’s magazines 453; of youth cultures 212–16, 231–2, 233–4, 235, 237–8, 240, 245–6, 247–8, 249–50 subcultures (see also youth subcultures) 585; immigrant 586–7; language of 148; production of 920; style of 605–6, 608; theory of 603–4 subcultures/straight dichotomy 237–8, 249 subjective meaning 80–1, 181 subjectivity 545; Kristeva and 542; Lacan and 535–6, 543; of women 461–2, 500, 542 subordination 120–1, 180–1, 701, 730; responses to 205–7 subordination of women 490–1, 495, 999, 1007; dependence on personal experience 492, 496, 514; education and 1004; patriarchy and 501; psychoanalysis and 530, 538, 539–40, 546–7; sex/gender systems 747 subterranean values 193 Suez crisis 716 Sugarman, B. 945 Sun, racism in the 723, 724 Sunday School, at Methodist Chapel 840, 841–2, 845, 846 Sunday Times, crime reporting 321–2 superiority of British culture 714, 722 superstars 172 superstructure (see also base/superstructure) 156, 802 surplus value: domestic labour and 464–70, 479; wages and 470–4 Sweezy, P. 788–9, 790 Tabb, W. 619 Takahashi 788, 790 Tannenbaum, P.H. 604–5 taste 31, 33 Tawney, R.H. 936, 963, 964–5; Secondary Schools for All 934, 936–40 Taylor, I. 203 Taylor, P. 763–4 teachers 930, 961–2, 976, 1004; autonomy of 952–7, 959–60, 977, 983; blamed for crisis in education 971, 974, 976, 978, 980, 983; class location 949–50; professionalism of 950–2, 957, 983; progressivism of 953, 955–7; training 961 Teachers’ Labour League 952 technical-rationalist ideology, in cultural analysis 179–80 technology 1013 Teddy Boys, girls as 221–2
1102
Index
teenage culture 187–9, 208 teenagers see young people Teeny Bopper culture 227–8, 249 television 274, 277, 279; access to debates on 378–9, 381; chat shows 280–1, 282–3; demands on 365; as discourse 389–90; interviews on 280–2; production process 387–8; transparency-to-reality effect 293–7, 301; watched by housewives 307–12; women’s and men’s programmes 308, 310 television journalism 288–9, 292–3, 297; agenda-setting 290; attention-holding devices 290–1; bias in 228, 301, 331, 354, 362, 363; classifications 302–3; and political issues 290, 291, 292, 299–301; production of generalisations 290–1, 292; signification 301–2 television news (see also current affairs) 288, 291, 301–3, 328; coverage of TUC conferences 293–301; Social Contract coverage 288, 293, 297–9; women’s interest in 309–10, 311 Tennant, Colin 282 Thatcher, Margaret 6–7, 728, 973 Thatcherism 767 theft, working-class boys 1076–7 theory: Althusser 809–10, 854; culturalism and 796, 798, 807; history and 768, 774–815, 995 ‘Third World’ women 741, 744, 745 Thomas, M. 595, 596 Thompson, D. 21, 761–2 Thompson, E.P. 4, 21, 22, 761, 763, 770, 854, 888; culturalism 792–802, 803; and culture 118, 768; and experience 795–6, 797, 856–60; and exploitation 803–6; The Making of the English Working Class 634, 795, 796–7, 801, 803–6, 807, 856; and Marxism 797; Whigs and Hunters 858; and working-class struggles 992 Thompson, H. 225 Thompson, J.L. 1014, 1015 Thompson, P. 903 Thornham, S. 423, 424 The Times 830 Tolson, A. 19 Tomlinson, S. 623–4, 624–6 Tonight 272, 291 totality (see also social totality) 45, 60, 61, 132, 133, 135 Townsend, P. 574 Toynbee, P. 508 trade unionism 14–15, 120, 861, 932, 934, 935; 1930s 822; incorporation of leaders 865–6; Labour Party and 935; militancy and 680 Trade Union Conferences, television news coverage 293–301 transitions 762, 766, 767, 853, 994; to capitalism 778, 782–5, 787–91
transparency effect 359 triangular desire 128 Trouillot, M.-R. 566 turn-taking in political interviews 351, 355, 357 Turner, V. 392 Two-Tone movement 242, 249–50 unconscious 533, 546; Freud and 532–3, 534; Lacan and 534, 535; Mitchell and 540; and sexual difference 480 underclass 622, 623, 624, 625, 633, 634 unemployment 204; 1920s 884; 1930s 83; black people blamed for 642–3; vulnerability of minority groups 628; West Indian youth 573–4, 608–9, 636; young people 250–1 unemployment benefit 83–4 universality 83 USA (see also hippies, American): generational revolt 159, 164; political activism 160–1 Utopia 166–7, 594 values 194; hippies 162–3; working-class youth 193 Van Allen, J. 747–8 vandalism 184–6, 193; children and adolescents 193–7 (motivation for 195–6); subterranean values 193; types of 185 Vigne, T. 888, 903 violence 678, 679, 680, 681; media representations 679; political 682, 686; racist 681–2, 686; in television Westerns 389, 390–2 virgin/whore dichotomy 555–6 visual signs 393; connotations of 393–5; misreadings of 396–8 vocationalism 1053, 1054; CPVE 1056, 1058, 1059, 1060; new 918, 1054–5, 1058–9, 1069 Voloshinov, V.N. 661 voluntarism 1038–9, 1043–4, 1045–6 volunteers, in Adult Literacy Campaign 1018, 1021–2, 1025, 1034–7, 1038–9, 1045 vulgar Marxism 48, 180, 803 Vygotsky, L. 63 wage labour: domestic labour and 472–4, 477–8; working-class girls 519–22 wages: 1920s 884, 887; and surplus value 470–4 Wallerstein, I. 672, 750 Walters, N. 187 war radicalism 819–20, 824, 832–3, 835: Common Wealth Party and 833; Communist Party and 828–9; Cripps and 830; World War I 869–73 Ward, Barrington 830 WEA (Workers’ Education Association) 935 Webb, S. 963
Index Weber, M. 776, 786 Weberianism, class and 622, 623, 638 Weinstock, A. 977–8 welfare state 203 West Indian consciousness 579–80, 610 West Indian youth 571, 578, 723–4; cultural options 580–1; educational inequalities 572–3; and mugging 581–3; racism and 576–7, 578; relations with police 577–8; unemployment of 573–4, 608–9, 636 West Indians: cultural options 578–81; immigration 586–7, 626–7, 631, 716; and white working-class culture 609–10 Westerns on television, violence in 389, 390–2 Westwood, S. 1043 Whannel, P. 260, 261, 263, 264, 265 Whicker, Alan (see also World of Whicker) 270, 286; as celebrity 271; as ladies’ man 281–2; personality status of 279–80; professional career of 272–3; professionalism of 273–4 white working class: attitudes to ‘end of Empire’ 717; racism within 215, 624, 625–6, 640, 642, 644, 712, 713, 730; upward mobility of 637, 638 Whitelaw, William 350, 352, 356, 357, 358, 703, 705 Whiting, P. 489 Wilden, A. 436 Williams, J. 493, 494 Williams, K. 876–7, 878 Williams, R. 3, 4, 8, 16, 18, 22, 791, 857; and Cultural Studies 16, 111, 116–18; on Lawrence 96, 102; and literature 38, 40–2; and Marxism 18, 40–2, 116; structure of feeling 41, 858; on Wuthering Heights 66–7 Williams, Shirley 1025 Willis, P. 8, 10–11, 219, 233, 242–3, 664, 955, 968 Wilson, A. 754 Wilson, E. 742–3 Wilson, Harold 963, 970 Winship, J. 9, 262, 550 Wintringham, T. 824, 825, 833 Wolkowitz, C. 426 Wolpe, H. 620, 621, 813 Woman: ideology of motherhood 503, 504 (production of 504–15); readers’ letters 506; representations of femininity in 501; short stories 512–14 Woman’s Own, images of women in 450, 452, 461 women (see also black women; images of women; oppression of women; subordination of women): bodies of 487–9; choice of television programmes 307–12; colonialism and 750–2; definition of in relation to men 487, 493, 502; fragmentation of 435; good/bad
1103
555–8; isolation of 306, 307, 311–12; in labour market 550–5, 1031–3; listening to radio 304–7; personal lives of 507–8; personal world of 490–2; self-presentation 450–4; symbolic exchange 536, 540–1; as volunteers 1039 Women’s Liberation Movement 422, 424, 426, 485, 486, 488, 489–90, 492, 493–6 women’s magazines 423–4, 500; advertisements in 455–8; fantasy/reality schema 505, 509–10; and femininity 500, 501; images of women in 450–4; production of ideology 504–15; representations of women in 499–500 ‘Women’s War’ (Nigeria) 747–9 working class (see also white working class) 115, 409, 623, 680, 869, 890; 1930s 821–2; activism of 114–15, 870–1; anti–intellectualism of 730; class consciousness of 29, 205–7, 624; craft/class 870–3; education and 410, 921–2; employers’ control of 890–2; erosion of community 849; and family 30; Hoggart and 25, 26–7, 30–3, 114; incorporation of 243; internal differentiation 406, 617–18, 621, 867–8, 870, 871; labour aristocracy 637–8, 867–8; language and 405; social life 840–5, 846, 848 working-class boys (see also anti-school culture): anti-social activities 1076–7; attitude to teachers 190, 1072; conformists 1072, 1073; differentiation 1072–3, 1079–80; importance of appearance 1074; information about jobs 1077–9; job choices 1079–80, 1083; public smoking 1074; transition to work 968, 1080–2 working-class children 401–2, 403, 409: attitude to school 402, 409, 572, 954–5, 1071–5; educational attainment 943–4, 949, 961, 974; failure at school 703, 723, 944, 946, 947, 954, 959, 968–9, 971, 975, 976 working-class culture (see also subcultures) 32–3, 112, 115, 116–17, 119–20, 232, 1082; in 19th century England 181; cultural identity 875–6; young people 203, 207–8, 209, 212–16, 242–6 working-class politics 932–3, 933–5 working-class religious institutions 838, 849, 850; and social life 840–5, 846, 848 working-class struggles 120, 701, 870, 992 working-class youth (see also working-class boys) 231–2, 233, 235, 249; impact of black culture on 241 World of Whicker 270–1, 272, 273, 274–80, 283–5; commentary 275–7; interview 275, 280–3; sensationalism 277–8 world-vision 45, 46, 123–5, 126, 134 World War I: black people in 712; war radicalism 869–73
1104
Index
World War II 823–4; discontent with running of 824–31 Worpole, K. 895–6, 903 Wright, N. 974 writers 64 Wuthering Heights (Bronte) 61, 65–7; effect on Lawrence 104 Yippies 161 Yorkshire Television 272–3 Young, M.F.D. 956 young people (see also West Indian youth; working-class boys; working-class youth) 186–9, 197, 234, 249, 705, 706; aspirations of 191–2, 193; common-sense ideology 706;
drift into delinquency 192; geographical mobility 848, 849; leisure of 192–3, 196–7, 222; stereotyping of 187; as threat to law and order 703, 704–5; unemployment 250–1; and vandalism 193–7; violence of 183–4, 193–7 youth service 191–2 youth subcultures (see also anti-school culture) 143, 149, 186–9, 198, 232, 233, 249–50; invisibility of girls 221–4; punk 238–41; race and 241–2; as resistance 236, 242, 244, 250; social reaction to 216–17, 221; theory of 233–8; and working-class culture 203, 209, 212–16, 242–6 Youth Training Schemes (YTS) 1054, 1061
