The Big Names in Cultural Studies
As you'd expect, all the dudes associated with the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools were considered the cream of the cultural studies crop. At Frankfurt, it was Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas who focused their attention on the study of culture (particularly in relation to mass culture).
More specifically, it was Max who laid out cultural studies as a discipline—based on being interdisciplinary, as you recall—and also wrote about how the Enlightenment's focus on reason set the stage for fascism to develop.
That idea was the thesis of a book called The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Max co-wrote with his buddy Theodor Adorno. Theo-dorable was a philosopher and also a music scholar, and in addition to his collaborations with Max, he wrote about the role of aesthetic development in historical evolution, and argued that civilization is moving toward self-destruction. Pretty upbeat guy.
Their pal Jürgen Habermas was a bit higher on the positude spectrum—he looked at modern society from within, without, below, upside-down, and backwards and wrote about the possibility of freedom within it. Take that, A-downer-o.
So these were the popular kids of the Frankfurt school—which, don't forget, was never an official association: these guys were way too cool to buy a building and stick a sign on it. Instead, because of their shared interests and because academics love to form cliques, they set themselves apart from the other kids by labeling themselves the Frankfurt school.
It was a different story at the CCCS (remember? The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies). Though still kind of the oddball of the academia world, the CCCS was an official institution from the get-go, with a multi-word fancy name and everything, and was set up with particular goals in mind.
One difference between the two, despite their similar stick-it-to-the-man attitudes, is that the Frankfurt school (especially Theodor Adorno) contrasted mass-produced culture with avant-garde "high" culture texts (which some people think makes the Frankfurt school look like the snooty guys of the punk world). The Birmingham school, meanwhile, wasn't concerned with avant-garde material; instead, its members examined media texts in-depth and looked to subcultures, particularly among the youth, as possible means of resisting capitalist control.
These goals were promoted by the leaders of the CCCS, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, who were interested in the ways in which dominant forms of culture (such as capitalism) managed to achieve such prominence and acceptance. Richie focused on the working class and the role of mass media for individuals, who usually accept whatever ideas are fed to them, and Stu first made a splash by focusing on the dangerous disease of "Thatcherism" (based on the conservative influence of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher), and later moved on to focus on nice things like multiculturalism and civil rights.
These individuals are the bigwigs in the development of cultural studies, but the groups they stand for are extra important for the field in general because of their emphasis on political motives and concerns about class inequality. Talk focused more and more on the role of consumers and possibilities for subversion and resistance within mass culture. The move toward analyzing pop culture texts signaled a major change in the sort of work being carried out in this area.
By the 1980s, concerns with Marxism and capitalism were starting to seem limiting and dated. Academics started gravitating toward a postmodern approach that was less critical of popular texts and consumer culture. Some more recent theorists include:
- Raymond Williams, who developed a big list of "Keywords" like culture, society, and other big concepts, for which he traced the histories of the words and talked about what people take them to mean today.
- Fredric Jameson, who wrote a famous essay (and then a whole book) called Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism about how people are obsessed with buying stuff and that has destroyed most ideas of identity and community.
- Judith Butler, who got famous for saying that gender is something people perform, rather than something natural. She's also famous for her brilliant, but almost incomprehensible writing.
Whether we're talking about the early Frankfurters and CCCS-ers or the more recent theorists, cultural studies hotshots love to be the punk rockers of the theory world. BUT, cultural studies isn't just about having fun or being rebellious for the sake of it. These folks wear their political views on their safety-pinned, leather-jacket sleeve and set out to examine the production of meaning and the operation of power in everyday life. The best accessory to a blue mohawk is talking about the ways texts shape, and are shaped by, culture. Rock on!