Within the broader international perspective, Stuart always located 1956 as a key historical date for him—when the various crises of the old imperial structures were dramatized, as the Russian tanks rolled into Budapest to quell the rebellion and a Franco-British force invaded Egypt to resist President Nasser’s claims on the Suez Canal (the “windpipe of the British Empire,” as a contemporary phrase had it). The significance of that internationalist moment for Stuart has been widely remarked—and rightly so, as we shall see, for much of his later concerns with questions of postcolonialism and diaspora can be traced back to the early 1950s. However, in this chapter Stuart is more concerned to recognize, on the domestic front, the significance of the particular transformations in Britain’s national culture. 2

Thus “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms” begins by making an inventory of the qualities of the Cultural Studies’ perspective initially developed by Hoggart and Williams. Stuart offers a careful detailing of the innovations offered in their work (and in parallel, that of the historian E. P. Thompson) in opening up a more serious appreciation of the importance of cultural processes. As he observes, from a methodological point of view this also involves an important innovation in the use of a documentary, descriptive, and anthropological (or ethnographic) perspective on popular cultures and the “structures of feeling” (in Williams’s phrase) by which they can be characterized. In an important move, to which we shall return in later sections, he also details the specific contribution made by these early Cultural Studies authors in dislodging the fundamentalist Marxist model of base and superstructure and in developing more complex notions of determination, which allow for ideological superstructures to play more than a residual or reflective role.

In tracing these moments in the CCCS ’s history, his key point is to insist on a particular methodology for the pursuit of collective intellectual work. For him, the politics of necessarily continuous argument, in which conflicting principles and perspectives need to be debated acutely, can only work if proper attention is paid to the manners of “dialogic critical engagement” so that the participants can work through their differences without, as he graphically puts it, “eating each other.” This is no small matter, nor is it a merely superficial reflection of Stuart’s own impeccably courteous manners whenever engaging in critical debate. 10 In the previous chapter, he talked of the importance of holding on to the productive tension generated by the critical engagement in between culturalism and structuralism. Here, in a parallel form, his argument is for the necessity of holding on to Cultural Studies’ commitments to both theoretical and political questions. When he confesses his astonishment at the “theoretical fluency” of the form of Cultural Studies that he then saw taking off in the North American academy, his principal complaint is that this abstracted (and heavily “textualized”) form of cultural theory failed to demonstrate the “necessary modesty” of Cultural Studies as a contested, localized, and conjunctural form of knowledge. 11