SEARCHING FOR A CENTRE

Abstract

This essay uses the first decade's Reports from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to describe the emergence and evolution of the project of cultural studies itself through the early work of the Centre.

Keywords:

• Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
• cultural studies
• interdisciplinarity

Notes

1. I am deeply grateful to Ted Striphas and Mark Hayward for their helpful criticisms, suggestions and support, and I have borrowed unashamedly from their comments on an earlier draft. I have also benefited from the work of a number of key figures in Australian and Asian-Pacific cultural studies, especially Meaghan Morris, which has attempted to similarly tell more complicated, contextually specific and institutionally located stories about the emergence of cultural studies.

2. This makes sense, since, in 1989, the Centre was merged with Sociology into a new department.

3. For a telling discussion of other aspects of the Centre's early publication history, see Ted Striphas and Mark Hayward, ‘Working Papers in Cultural Studies, or the Virtues of Gray Literature’, New Formations, forthcoming. Striphas and Hayward emphasize the importance of the variety of forms of other kinds of writing and non-traditional forms of publication – occasional papers, working papers, etc. – in the history of the Centre and the emergence of cultural studies in the English-speaking world. We should not underestimate the importance, for example, of these Reports as administrative writing, which speak in some ways, to a longer and very important history of institution-building, as a crucial dimension of the effort to forge new models of political–intellectual work. (Again, I am grateful to Mark and Ted!)

The Centre's work was originally organized around an open General Graduate Seminar, and a Monday Working Seminar, devoted to both exercises in close reading and individual research presentations. In 1966, these were supplemented with a Seminar in Selected Texts. In 1968, the Working Seminar was divided into a first semester devoted to the practices of literary-critical analysis, and a second semester devoted to a common research endeavour (for example, a collaborative study of ‘Cure for Marriage’, a short fictional piece from a popular women's magazine, and then, a study of the Western). In 1971, the Text Seminar was renamed the Theory Seminar, and expanded to include additional meetings of designated ‘sub-groups’ (for example, Literature and Society, Mass Media, Sub-cultures and Work and Leisure), originally all operating under the common topic of a consideration of Marxist theory. Over time, these sub-groups expanded, changed and gained autonomy from the Theory seminar. (See Hudson Vincent's essay in this issue.)

4. Other avenues into the Centre's history – such as the Occasional Papers or even the Working Papers in Cultural Studies – may offer even more problematic snapshots, because many of the pieces have complicated writing/publishing histories.

5. In later reports, this is transmogrified into the sociology of (mass) communications.

6. In contemporary terms, we might refer to this as ‘affect’.

7. Ted Striphas has suggested to me (personal communication, 18 June 2012) that it is possible that some of this might be interpreted as an increasing attention to output and products, partly as a result of the fact that the initial grants that paid for the Centre were about to run out in 1968.