Carolyn Steedman’s
essay Culture, Cultural Studies and the Historians discusses the concept of
culture, cultural studies in Britain since the last war, and the connection
between these concepts to the practice and writing of history. Steedman follows
a historiographical tradition laid down by British cultural studies, which
usually organize themselves in a particular way, rendering up their own account
in terms of three key-texts: Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957),
Raymond Williams's Culture and Society (1958), and E. P. Thompson's The Making
of the English Working Class (1963).
Steedman argues that history is the most impermanent of written forms, as it is
only an account that will last a while. The practice of historical work, the
uncovering of new facts, and the endless reordering of the immense detail that
makes the historian's map of the past performs this act of narrative
destabilization daily. The written history is a story that can only be told by
the implicit understanding that things are not over, that the story isn't
finished, and can never be finished.
However, when text-based historical knowledge is removed from the narrative and
cognitive frame of historical practice and used within another field, it loses
its impermanence and potential irony. The historical item taken out of its
narrative setting to explain something else is stabilized, making it a building
block for a different structure of explanation. This has been observed in the
use of the written history within sociological explanation.
Steedman asserts that the first bourgeois individual was not an economic man
but a domestic woman, born of conduct books, educational manuals, and possibly
Samuel Richardson's pen.
She expresses concerns about the authenticity of Raymond Williams' account of
culture in Marxism and Literature and Keywords. They argue that Williams'
account may have been influenced by historical events, such as the sociology of
the gendered reader, family and childcare, and the influence of Locke's text.
They suggest that a program of reading and archive research could help identify
the historicized subjectivity in the feminine and explore Freud's theory of
human inwardness and interiority. The author believes that by 1995, the terms
'woman' and 'child' might be added to the schema, potentially leading to a more
profound change in the account. They also question whether there is a
connectedness to everything, suggesting that Williams may have never read Some
Thoughts Concerning Education, as the ideas expressed in the book would be
available from the historical air he breathed when writing about the late
seventeenth century.
Carolyn Porter discusses the underlying formalism of critical practice in
historical studies, focusing on the tendency of new historicists to use
"riveting anecdotes" to explore texts and contexts. This technique
reflects a principle of arbitrary connectedness, where any aspect of a society
is related to any other. Dominick LaCapra criticizes social historians for their
reliance on the concept of culture, where everything connects to everything
else and "culture" is the primordial reality in which all historical
actors have their being, do their thing, share discourses, worldviews, and
languages.
The social historian's reliance on the notion of "culture" as the
bottom line has its own history, as seen in the academy's elevation of
nineteenth-century historians like Burkhardt and de Tocqueville to canonical
status in the post-Second-World-War period. Cultural studies in Britain has intersected
with these questions, revealing a more general social and institutional shaping
of history and historical knowledge in Britain over the last thirty years.
Cultural studies in Britain is nervous about codifying methods of knowledge and
attempts at institutionalization, and is constantly repositioning subjects and
defining themselves through autobiography and oral history.
Cultural studies in the UK has evolved from native texts and was
institutionally established at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in
Birmingham. However, the arrival of "structuralisms" disrupted this
evolution. The teaching and learning forms in cultural studies degrees have
been influenced by the culture concept in schools, which has played a role in
organizing historical knowledge for young children and adolescents. The
organization of historical knowledge in British cultural studies has been about
questions of education, accommodation to learners, and the allure of certain
teacher-student relationships.
The practice of history in university-based cultural studies began in the late
1960s, with the MA program at Birmingham. The center's Popular Memory Group
struggled with history's empiricism and resistance to theory. The educational
form within which they did their wrestling is inimical to conventional
historical practice, particularly archive research. Archive research is
expensive, time-consuming, and not practical for a group of people.
The textual approach used in these studies was inadequate, making no distinction
between spoken and written language, not acknowledging language as a form of
cognition and a process of development, and lacking strategies for analyzing
literary form as a negotiated form. The most urgent need for history is an
adequate model of both spoken and written language, and whether developed
within historical studies or by students of cultural studies working on the
past does not matter as much as the fact that it might be done.
The curriculum change in national education systems has been influenced by the
establishment of English literature as the foundation of a national system of
education between 1880 and 1920. This led to the reorganization of education in
terms of cheapness and practicality, with accessible texts being the primary
focus. However, the amount of history taught in British society has steadily
diminished over the last thirty years. The cheapness and practicality of
text-based historical inquiry can also be seen as a theoretical propriety. The
last great flowering of English progressive education in schools in the 1970s
was seen in both the English departments of secondary schools and the practice
of integrated topic work in many primary schools. This flowering was seen in
the breaking down of barriers between teachers and taught, common involvement
in a common project, and the use of texts to make enquirers of them all. The
practice of history in primary and lower forms of secondary schools has also
been influenced by pedagogical forms.
The focus of cultural studies has shifted from Masters teaching to
undergraduate degrees, with the need for historians to teach history. This
shift is due to the institutional setting, alignment of humanities subjects
under departmental reorganization in polytechnics, and the need for students to
understand the interface of different knowledges brought together in
undergraduate teaching. As a result, British cultural studies needs to consider
its approach to history and the kind of historical thinking it will ask its
students to perform.
In a dehistoricized intellectual world, all children in society will be taught
exactly the same set of historical knowledges from the age of five to sixteen.
British cultural studies may be able to achieve what history cannot, as the
history of pedagogical practice and educational forms puts cultural studies in
a position to do its own historiography. However, after conference days,
cultural studies must ask questions about why they want history, what new acts
of transference will items from the past help cultural studies perform, how it
will be done and taught, whether there will be room for detailed historical
work or rely on schematic and secondary sweeps through time.
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