Between the Medium and the Mass--On Television Culture

Author: Chen Long
Publisher:
Publishing Time: Not Available
Features: The emergence of cultural studies in the political field is closely related to the rise of the British New Left. In November 1956, Soviet tanks entered Hungary to suppress the Hungarian Revolution; soon after, Britain and France invaded the Suez Canal Zone. These two significant historical events clearly demonstrated that two entirely different social systems—capitalist imperialism and Stalinism—were equally violent and aggressive in their existence. Following the Hungarian event, British Communist historians such as E.P. Thompson and John Savile began to doubt Stalinism, recognizing that blindly adhering to Stalinist dogma was extremely dangerous. Another group of independent socialists outside the Communist Party line, represented by R. Samuel and S. Hall, remained critically aware of colonialism and Stalinism due to their backgrounds in the Third World. After the 1956 events, they expressed a desire to unite with left-wing scholars who had left the Communist Party. In 1961, the New Reasoner, co-founded by Thompson and others, merged with the Universities and Left Review, operated by Hall and others, to establish the New Left Review, which has been in circulation for over 40 years. The New Left was concerned with a wide range of issues, such as the important structural and historical problems gradually facing British society: the characteristics of late capitalism; economic and political colonialism: new forms of imperialism; the role of culture and ideology in various power relationships, and so on. The emergence of cultural studies was also a response to objective social conditions, representing a comprehensive reflection by intellectuals on post-World War II British society. Cultural studies was closely tied to the realities of British society from the outset, and can be seen as intellectuals' engagement with the cultural and political dimensions of society. Unlike previous cultural movements in history, the cultural studies movement of the 1950s did not rise as an independent discipline but quickly became an academic trend and rapidly moved toward institutionalization. In 1964, the "Center for Contemporary Culture Studies (CCCS)" was established at the University of Birmingham. Subsequently, the social cultural studies school gradually gained prominence. In its early stages, cultural studies emerged through debate. Scholars such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E.P. Thompson, with their socialist humanism, directly challenged the economistic reductionism of Marxism, emphasizing the importance of creative agents and the decisive power of cultural production. Although cultural studies appeared in an academic guise, it opposed the elitist and aristocratic attitudes of traditional academia in literary and historical studies, as well as the detached and exclusionary approach that marginalized working-class culture. Early cultural studies focused on the concrete lived experiences of ordinary people and cultural products as its primary research areas. A key feature of mass media is its wide audience reach and broad distribution, and watching television has become a part of daily life.