To The Popular Culture:Cultural Studies In Birmingham School

In the Mid-Victorian Britain, with the further advance of modernization, the working class was keenly asking for democracy, which was regarded as the symbol of "anarchy" by Matthew Arnold, resulting in riots of Hyde Park. He believed vulgar middle class culture and the "anarchy" tendency of the working class were the consequences of modern machinery and material civilization, which needed the best culture to set up the unity of the appropriate authority against them. He set up a humanistic idea of elite culture. Entering into the20th century, British quietly came into the era of commercialization and popularization. F.R. Leavis studied the mass culture represented by movies, advertising and so on. He thought the past "organic community" in the modern machine civilization had been lost. So he built the "great tradition" of English literature, and expected through the college English education training a few people who could appreciate the work of the highest value and maintaining British cultural tradition. In fact, they belonged to this group themselves.Although deeply influenced by the "close reading" method of F. R. Leavis, the "scholarship boy" Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart who were born of working-class, according to their own life experience and the practice of adult education, rejected the idea of elite culture. They thought that culture is common and a way of life. What’s more, in their opinion, elite culture is only one kind of culture. They moved into academia and made the voice of the working class hearted. With post-war Britain into the advanced stage of capitalism society and economy, its politics and culture underwent profound changes. As culture was increasingly commercialized and Americanizated,"cultural revolution" which marked by rebel culture broke out. Politically, Consensus Politics and frustration of International Communist Movement both brought about the lost of political space of the traditional Left-wing. The New Left which centered on New Left Review changed to discuss cultural issues and gradually declined, owing to the lack of a common platform and space. However, the Student Movement, Anti-Vietnam war movement, and later Women’s Liberation Movement, the Anti-Racial Movement and other new social movement opened up a new way of political identity and struggle.When a new generation of the New Left was looking for continental thought resources for theory construction, Stuart Hall who had involved in the new left movement joined Birmingham Centre for the Contemporary Cultural Study (CCCS) set up by Richard Hoggart, which was benefited from postwar expansion of higher education. It was committed to interdisciplinary research of postwar culture After Hoggart left Center, Hall leaded Center members and students, the "marginal people" to actively participate in the new society movement,to establish theory seminar group and to absorb predominantly western Marxist thought resources. Centre members continued to research cultural and political issues of the New Left period, study the pattern of modern mass consumer and media, youth subculture, and so on. Their academic achievements were published in Center’s stencil paper and Working Papers of Cultural Studies. In addition, academic exchanges between the Birmingham Centre and the journal Screen and other cultural research institutions of UK were rather active. In the late1980s, the Centre was formally institutionalized and changed into the Department of Cultural Studies, and was finally closed in2002. But cultural studies under the leadership of Birmingham Center spread and won a wide respect globally, especially in English countries.In the early stages, Center affected by culturalism of Williams, more emphasized on the initiative of the human experience; with the introduction of Althusser’s structuralism, Center was influenced by structural analysis, and afterwards, was mediated by Gramsci’s theory. Birmingham school whose analysis centered on the mode of ideological operation of internal culture, promoting the understanding of culture from what is culture to how is culture. For example, the study of youth subculture revealed the complex tension between dominant culture and subordinate culture, and suggested that subculture was not blindly manipulated, sometimes was a form of resistance. Of course, the leading group would implement the reproduction of the social order through education. In terms of research fields, women and the black members of the Center rebelled one after another, promoted the study of their group, scrambled for power of discourse, and revealed the oppressed "marginal people" Women Group’s research suggested that gender relation was constructed by ideology. This form of gender relationship implied that the subordinate of women to men. So, feminist ideology which was constructed by the patriarchal capitalism must be treated in its multiple relationships with’masculine’. Ethnic studies thought that it had always been ignored in historical writings, and suggested that racist ideology penetrated into state institutions and shifted under authoritarianism. Research field of the Center had constantly produced new breakthrough points, explored new academic and political issues, along with development of times. The study of postwar British culture from Birmingham School promoted the deep understanding of popular culture, making people more strongly to perceive the real meaning of popular era. To sum up, Birmingham school is one of big power which had promoted the transformation of post-war British academic.