‘The Boiler Room Which Was to Become Cultural Studies’

Biographers of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies have tended to adopt two main narrative approaches to chronicling the Centre’s history.  The first coalesces around its key figures—faculty like Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, as well as former students such as Charlotte Brunsdon and Lawrence Grossberg, who, since their time in Birmingham, have risen to prominence in the field.  Generally this body of work moves between their own personal reflections on their time in Birmingham and the reflections of travelers in cultural studies who have followed in their wake.[1]  The second approach focuses less on the figures per se and more on the enduring body of work they produced, both individually and collectively.  Here we have in mind Policing the Crisis (Macmillan, date); Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Methuen, date); Women Take Issue (Hutchinson, date); The Empire Strikes Back (Hutchinson, date); and a host of other landmark texts to which the label ‘Birmingham School’ is often retroactively – and indeed problematically – applied.[2]

There is, of course, ample crossover between these two approaches.  Taken together, they have yielded a useful composite of the cultural, political, and economic conditions both leading up to and following the Birmingham Centre’s founding in spring 1964.  And with this they have also provided fascinating glimpses into the Centre’s complex interpersonal and organizational dynamics, which is to say its everyday life throughout the 1960s and 1970s.  If there is any coherency to this historical picture, it is in the fraught process by which faculty and students at the Centre arrived at a sense of institutional identity, and at the broader intellectual commitments of cultural studies.  This is not necessarily to say, common purpose.  As Hall once put it, ‘My own memories of Birmingham are mainly of rows, debates, arguments, of people walking out of rooms’.[3]  Cultural studies’ success was hard won, in other words, and costly in terms of all hurt feelings, disappointments, and even perceptions of betrayal.[4]

Yet, its success was hard won for less dramatic reasons as well – reasons that become apparent once we take ‘a trip “below decks” into the “boiler room” which was to become Cultural Studies’, as Hall more recently put it.[5]  What this amounts to is broadening the scope of the historical investigation to encompass (putting it crudely) the instruments of production of cultural studies.

What might the history of the field begin to look like were we to focus less on key figures and the content of their intellectual work, and more on the form, function, and frequency of its publications?  And what perspective might that history give on

Notice how history becomes a touchstone by which to make sense of, and gain perspective on, the present.

In the Centre’s second report to the University of Birmingham, dated October 1965, the author (presumably Hoggart) concludes by emphasizing ‘an urgent need for a regular journal devoted to the study of contemporary cultural problems’.[6] 

‘urgent’ suggests that the credibility of the Centre, and, by extension, that of this vague new initiative called cultural studies, would depend in part on the development of some means for publishing and disseminating the work of its faculty, students, and affiliates. 

Had to invent its publishing apparatus, and this would not come easy.

Rarely, however, have has there been a studied investigation into

» Need to fn Williams (Future of CS) somewhere here, re: how the pedagogical aspects of cs are under-documented, how he says his renown has much to do with the fact that he published while many of his friends & colleagues did not.

» At some point you’re also going to need to note now the publications became a source of revenue – re: the eventual drying up of the Penguin funding covenant.

Need to talk a bit about the archive, i.e., the annual reports, which are more than just bureaucratic documents – or at least they quickly become more than that.

Note the preponderance of what Zuckerman & Merton call “fugitive” publications.

“Thus do purely marketing decisions homogenize research and university teaching in accordance with fashions coming from America, sometimes managing to fabricate outright ‘disciplines’ like cultural studies, this mongrel domain born in England in the Seventies, which owes its international dissemination – if not the whole of its existence – to a successful publishing strategy” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999: 74). » make this your ending!

An important and largely overlooked element of the “grassroots” of this story—the story of the formalization of cultural studies’ publications.  It was not, in the first instance, a top-down undertaking and indeed probably wasn’t until the 1980s, and even then never wholly.

Seemed to recognize from the beginning how important publications would be to the success of the Centre.

Want to spend some time reconstructing the publication history of the Birmingham Centre.

--Occasional Papers; special occasion pamphlets

(2^nd OP called “Two Working Papers in CS”)

-- WPCS (1971 – replacement for OP)

(Also producing pamphlets)

--Stenciled Occasional Papers Launched 1974-75

--Reboot(???) or formalization of CCCS Pamphlets (1976-77)