‘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 consists of 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 hurt feelings, disappointments, and damaged egos.[4]

Yet, its success was hard won for far 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 described it.[5]  This amounts to broadening the scope of the historical investigation to encompass (putting it crudely) the instruments of production of cultural studies.  Beyond all the juicy bits of insider knowledge, beyond all the major works and their intellectual history lies a more mundane but no less important story to be told about Birmingham, and about cultural studies more generally.  This is a story about the network of pipes and ducting by which cultural studies diffused through the Centre and gradually seeped out into the world.  More straightforwardly, the history we want to develop focuses on the Centre’s publications, but not on their content per se; nor, for that matter, on the major works that posterity has come to see as exemplary of ‘the Centre’.  Instead we want to focus on the form, function, and frequency of its serials, and to linger on a few lesser known works whose significance warrants their inclusion within the standard accounts of cultural studies’ intellectual history.[6]

This history often begins with, or at least moves quickly to, what you might call ‘the big four’: Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1957); Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958) and Long Revolution (1961); and E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963).  These books immediately preceded the Centre’s founding and served as touchstones for its fledgling intellectual enterprise.[7]  There is fifth publication, however, one that, while hardly lost to history, nevertheless does not often figure in relationship to the big four: Rachel Powell’s twenty-two page essay ‘Possibilities for Local Radio’, published in December 1965 as the Centre’s first ‘Working Paper’.[8] According to the Centre’s third annual report to the University of Birmingham, dated December 1966, it was ‘widely circulated and commented on’.[9]

Powell was full-time staff Research Associate working on what, over several years of Centre reports, was called the ‘Gulbenkian project’.  This initiative, funded by a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, investigated ‘the relationship between the providers of television programmes and their audiences’ (and, obviously, that of radio as well).[10]  The release of ‘Possibilities for Local Radio’ was important if for no other reason than it first demonstrated the Centre’s ability to deliver on one of its more ambitious promises, namely, that it would not only pursue but also publish scholarly research.[11]  It thus marked an important threshold for cultural studies, at least in Britain, where publication had tended to be more the exception than the rule.  As Williams noted:  

[I]n the late forties, and with notable precedents in army education during the war, and with some precedents…even in the thirties, Cultural Studies was extremely active in adult education.  It only got into print and gained some kind of general intellectual recognition [later on].  I often feel sad about the many people who were active in that field at that time who didn't publish, but who did as much as any of us did to establish this work.[12]

What the release of Powell’s essay represented, in other words, was a first step in the direction of establishing an institutionalized publishing routine for cultural studies.

This was a tentative first step, however.  Powell’s essay was called a ‘Working Paper’ upon its release, as if to convey its provisional status.  But even this designation merits closer examination, because neither the terminology nor the meaning of ‘Working Paper’ seems to have been determinate at this point in the Centre’s history.[13]  The author of the 1964 annual report, for example, referred to what was to become this type of publication as an ‘occasional paper’.  Note the lack of capitalization, as if to suggest a strong degree of informality for the work that would eventually be appearing under this rubric.  The same type of publication would be referred to in the report dated October 1965 as an ‘Occasional Paper’, now capitalized, suggesting a higher degree of formalization and perhaps, then, a growing recognition of this body of work’s potential intellectual and practical import for the Centre.  In fact Powell’s essay, which was then in preparation, was referred to as such in the report.[14]  The second installment of the Centre’s series, Alan Shuttleworth’s ‘Two Working Papers in Cultural Studies’, appeared during the 1966-1967 academic year.  Here, though, ‘Working Paper’ functioned as a particular, not a categorical, description; in the annual report dated January 1968, the series was once again referred to as ‘Occasional Papers’.[15]  In other words, the Shuttleworth piece was a work-in-progress belonging to what was now understood to be, more or less definitively, a series of publications whose release would be intermittent.

Clearly, more was at stake in the decision to call the series ‘Occasional Papers’ than just a name.  Because the papers were a primary point of public contact for the Centre, they would be instrumental in helping to secure scholarly authority for its faculty and students.  They would also then help to establish credibility for the little-known field of cultural studies, beyond the Centre’s walls.  The decision to stress the periodicity (‘Occasional’) of these papers over their definitiveness (‘Working’) seems to have been an outcome of these types of considerations.  When the series was discontinued, in 1971, it totaled seven publications in all.  The Centre report dated October 1968 notes they were ‘distributed to our growing mailing list’ and ‘also available on general purchase’ by writing to the office secretary, Felicity Reeve.[16]  The same report contains an extensive list of contacts at the University of Birmingham and at host of other universities scattered throughout the United Kingdom, Europe, and North America, which, presumably, comprised the bulk of the mailing list.[17]  While this reveals little about the actual uptake of the material, it does provide a rough indication of the extent to which it may have traveled.

And yet, even before the publication of Powell’s “Possibilities for Local Radio,” it was apparent to Hoggart and his colleagues that the Occasional Papers would be a necessary but insufficient vehicle for promoting the Centre and its work; hence the claim, appearing in the second report (October 1965), that ‘there is an urgent need for a regular journal devoted to the study of contemporary cultural problems’.  The report says little beyond this, however, other than to note the indeterminacy of the audience and a prohibitive lack of finances.[18]  The subsequent report (November 1966) goes into greater detail about the proposed publication and the Centre’s plans for it:

We are now in need of a regular journal, devoted to cultural studies, in which research work can be published regularly, the critical books reviewed and new ideas put into the common pool.  We could carry such a publication ourselves, especially if we were able to draw on other people working in much the same field, who are anxious to be in closer discussion with us and for whom no publication outlet at present exists.  We have published one Working Paper [i.e., Occasional Paper], and two others are in preparation: but a journal would ease the pressure a good deal, and provide a stimulus to further research.  Without such a journal the field lacks definition, contributions tend to be haphazard and the flow of work spasmodic.[19]

This passage underscores just how important Hoggart and his colleagues imagined this publication would be and, indeed, how different they considered it from the Occasional Papers.  Whereas the latter were conceived of as ‘either short studies of some cultural problem, or a contribution to a current matter under discussion in the cultural field’,[20] the former would be endowed with loftier goals.  It would define cultural studies; create a bibliography for and raise awareness of new works in the field; regularize the appearance of new research; and, perhaps most importantly, involve scholars from outside of the Centre.

OP: Not, per se, an attempt to gather a broader scholarly community; the social backbone for the periodicals was the Centre and not something beyond.  The difference between ‘getting the word’ out and ‘brining the word in’, as it were.

Notice how history becomes a touchstone by which to make sense of, and gain perspective on, the present.  The point of this history is to gain perspective on our present, on what we’ve gained and lost as far as the boiler room goes.

‘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.

» 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; note, too, that in the time period they discuss the boundary between authoritative and gray literature was blurrier than it may be today, re: “let the author take responsibility for it.”

“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)

II.        Gray Literature

III.       WPCS, reloaded

IV.       Conclusion