Carolyn Steedman's "Culture, Cultural Studies and the Historians" (Summary)

 

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.