‘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’ social, institutional, and 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 prominently 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 conclusively, a series of intermittently released publications.

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; establish a more public bibliography for the field; raise awareness of new research and regularize its release; and involve scholars from outside of the Centre.

The final goal was arguably the most important.  It pointed to an impending shift in the sociality of cultural studies and its publications, or to what, in contemporary parlance, you might call a reimagining of the field’s ‘social graph’.  The Occasional Papers were primarily broadcast publications.  The emanated (appropriately enough) from the Centre and diffused into the world.   This is not to suggest the flow of communication was strictly one-way, although the nature of the series was such that its main purpose was to get the word out about the Centre, its people, and their research.  The proposed journal would have a significantly different orientation.  It would continue the job of getting the word out, to be sure, yet it would also be tasked with bringing the word in given its openness to the research of scholars unaffiliated with the Centre.  Thus it promised to transform Birmingham from a broadcast centre into a hub for cultural studies, at least where publication was concerned.  Moreover, the journal would in principle align better than the Occasional Papers with the traffic of people into and out of the Centre, which had already become a crossroads for visiting scholars including Daniel Boorstin, Dell Hymes, Fredric Jameson, Leo Lowenthal, David Riesman, Edward (E. P.) Thompson, and Raymond Williams, among numerous others.[21]

Despite the fact the journal was fairly well conceptualized by 1966, it would be another five years before it materialized in print.  Released in the summer of 1971, the first issue of Working Papers in Cultural Studies was a major achievement for the Centre.  It also posed something of a risk, according to the report dated December 1971: ‘The journal represents a considerable investment by the Centre both intellectually and financially so it is important this attempt to make more public the Centre’s work should succeed’.[22]  It marked a kind of homecoming, too – specifically, to the language of process Hoggart and his colleagues had embraced and then quickly abandoned with regard to the Occasional Papers.  Like the return of the repressed, ‘Working’ was back and more prevalent than ever, now as the leading term of the Centre’s flagship publication.

Writing in 2008, Hall observed that Working Papers in Cultural Studies ‘was launched in this period to raise the profile of the Centre’s work (the tentative character of whose title tells its own story)’.[23]  But to what extent is it fair to say the journal’s title ‘tells its own story’?  Indeed, just as the meaning of ‘Working’ was hardly straightforward within the context of the Occasional Papers, so it was (and is) within the context of the journal.  If nothing else, it seemed to connote more than just, ‘tentative’.  Consider what the report dated December 1971 had to say about the Centre’s scholarly endeavors: ‘We…regard our editorial and publicity work on finished products, and our production of a journal, as integral to our attempt to establish a radical and disciplined approach to the study of social and cultural communication’.  The report then went on to indicate that Working Papers ‘is intended as an academic publication’.[24]  As such it would address a scholarly audience, primarily, and conform to many if not most of the conventions of scholarly writing.  The subsequent report, dated January 1974, added that the journal would ‘print work of a high quality’.[25] 

‘Disciplined’.  ‘Academic’.  ‘High quality’.  These are probably not the first adjectives that come to mind for a journal whose express purpose was to present works-in-progress (at least, not today) – and yet, there they are. 

It is possible to make sense of this tension by stressing the bureaucratic function of the Centre reports.  Convincing the Birmingham administration of the integrity of the journal, and of the unit more broadly, must have been on the minds of Hoggart and his colleagues.  During its first five years the Centre had been self-sustaining, propped up financially by grants from Penguin Books, Chatto & Windus, the Observer Trust, and a small, one-time gift from an undisclosed ‘well-wisher’.[26]  When the Centre finally started receiving direct financial support from the University, in 1969, the change surely would have heightened its sense of accountability to the institution.

While there is probably merit to this story, it risks explaining away the tension at the heart of Working Papers more than actually explaining it.  It may also be that the journal managed to strike a unique balance between rigour and provisionality, one that proved highly productive for the Centre and its interlocutors.  Paul Buhle suggested as much in 1978, in a review of Working Papers published in the American journal Radical History Review: ‘Sometimes the essays in the journal appear to have been snatched out of that atmosphere too nimbly, without the gun-and-camera guide that readers (particularly non-Britishers) could use to understand the entire intellectual and political context of the study’.  Buhle quickly reversed course, however, observing that the journal’s contributors were working through ‘matters of great importance’ and achieving promising results. Theoretically, they had opened up the problem of base and superstructure so as to avoid romanticizing the working class on the one hand, and engaging in economic reductionism on the other.  Empirically, they had produced ‘hard-minded analys[e]s’ shot through with complex views of class composition and social antagonism.[27]  The material, wrote Buhle, ‘is head and shoulders above what American historians, sociologists and journalists have given us on similar subjects’.[28]

It seems, then, that in freeing contributors from some of the strictures of conclusiveness, Working Papers gave them latitude to explore questions, answers, and approaches that might not have emerged within a more conventional publishing situation.  Provisionality was not a liability, in other words.  If anything it was made to work for the journal and its readers – and it showed.  At its height Working Papers had an impressive initial print run of 2,500 copies per issue, with a frequency of two issues per year.  And according to the Centre report for the years 1975-1976, the eight issues of the journal thus far produced had all sold out ‘despite occasional reprintings’.[29]  Working Papers may have eschewed closure, but one thing was for sure: the journal had ‘undoubtedly made the Centre far better known than it previously was’.[30]

The concept of ‘Working’ was still more complicated than this, however, because it was operationalized within a context including publications other than just Working Papers in Cultural Studies.  The journal’s launch coincided with the cancellation of the existing series of Occasional Papers.  Its structured publication schedule meant that new research in cultural studies would henceforth be appearing more predictably.  It also meant that the Centre was less equipped than it had been to respond to current events, for its scholarly output was now subject to the dictates of an artificially imposed time-frame.  Out of this was born a new series of Stencilled Occasional Papers, launched in 1974.  The Centre report for 1975-1976 describes them as ‘a means of rapid communication of Centre work to interested people and groups’.  In contrast to the previous series of Occasional Papers, which had been professionally printed and bound in slick, glossy covers, the Stencilled Occasional Papers were ‘produced as cheaply as possible, stapled without binding or card covers’.[31]  They were copied in-house on a Gestetner mimeograph machine and sold for between fifteen and fifty-five pence, postpaid (except for overseas orders).[32]  They were also passed along informally among faculty, students and friends of the Centre.[33]

The look of the Stencilled Occasional Papers both embodied and conveyed the speed of their production.  And in this respect they shed additional light on how the concept of ‘Working’ was to be understood with respect to the journal.  The material form of these essays seemed to suggest they were even more provisional than the articles appearing in Working Papers in Cultural Studies, which, though rough around the edges itself, exuded relatively higher production values.  That is to say, the Stencilled Occasional Papers were evidently more ‘Working’ than even the Working Papers.  The Centre report for 1975-1976 underscores this.  The Stencilled Occasional Papers ‘commonly consist of worked-up versions of papers given by Centre members at conferences or to internal seminars.  Some are specially commissioned by the Centre; others are the product of theses, projects or collective work in sub-groups’.[34]  Or as John Clarke, who as a graduate student was attached to the Centre from 1972-1980, put it: ‘they were things we wrote about two-thirds of the way through thinking about things’.[35] 

The Centre managed to produce fifty-four Stenciled Occasional Papers by the end of 1978 and added to the list in subsequent years.  At least some appear to have enjoyed significant uptake beyond the Centre, particularly within the realm of tertiary education.[36]  Their circulation flowed from their timeliness and strength of intellectual contribution, no doubt, yet it also seems reasonable to surmise it had something to do with their matériel and hence the ease with which they could be shared.  In any case, it was around this time – the late-1970s – that the Centre’s whole publishing apparatus experienced another metamorphosis.

In 1976 the Centre launched what it called a ‘new’ series of pamphlets, whose look and feel resembled the first series of Occasional Papers.  In contrast to the Occasional Papers, however, the pamphlets would be ‘written in a less academic style with a wider audience in mind, and with a topic focus’.[37]  A strong element of professionalism complemented this ethos of public engagement.  Orders for the pamphlets would be fulfilled not by the Centre, as had been the custom for most of its other serials, but by the London-based Publications Distribution Cooperative, or PDC.  Yet, to call the pamphlet series ‘new’ was not entirely accurate.  The Centre had been producing pamphlets throughout the 1970s, albeit sporadically.  In fact Policing the Crisis had begun life as a pamphlet called Twenty Years, released in 1973.[38]  Thus the ‘new’ series seems to have represented an attempt to formalize what, up until that point, had been a more or less informal type of publication.  It was among the Centre’s least successful ventures.  Despite the tone of optimism surrounding the pamphlets in the Centre reports from the late-1970s, only two were ever produced: one, by Roger Grimshaw and Paul Lester, on The Meaning of the Loch Ness Monster (price: 60p); and the other, by the Women in Fascism Study Group, entitled Breeders for Race and Nation – Women and Fascism in Britain Today (price: 50p).[39]

Working Papers in Cultural Studies underwent a major transformation around this time as well.  The covenant from Penguin Press, which had underwritten the Centre financially since its inception, finally lapsed in 1976.  That translated into a loss of £2400 per year, or about £16,000 in today’s terms.  While that might not seem like a lot, the impact surely must have been felt given the complaint about ‘slender financial resources’ appearing in the report dated January 1978.[40]  Indeed it was becoming less tenable, economically, for the Centre to continue producing Working Papers without outside assistance.  The Centre struck a distribution deal with PDC, in 1977, which seems to have reduced the pressure somewhat.  The daily grind of managing, editing, typesetting and marketing a successful journal were also taking a toll, though, consuming precious time that faculty and students might otherwise devote to research.[41] 

Working Papers may have helped to raise the Centre’s profile, in other words, but it had also become something of an albatross.  Hall, Director since Hoggart’s resignation in 1973, along with his colleagues initially decided to reduce the frequency of the journal to just a single issue per year, starting in 1976.[42]  When that failed to make Working Papers more manageable, they decided to discontinue publication – sort of.  Issue ten (spring 1977) would be the final one appearing under the Centre’s imprimatur.  Hutchinson, which had produced the reprint of the acclaimed issue ‘Resistance Through Rituals’ (number seven/eight, autumn 1975), picked up the publication thereafter.  It would henceforth be published annually as series of Centre books, commencing with what would have been Working Papers issue eleven: ‘Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women’s Subordination.’  The latter, according to the report dated December 1978, represented a definitive shift ‘from artisan-journal to modern production methods’ and perhaps, then, a sense in which the series was even less ‘Working’ than it previously had been.[43]

{move on to pamphlets and Centre reports; note, too, how Centre reports were a marketing vehicle for the Centre’s various publications}

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.

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