Working Papers in Cultural Studies, or, the Virtues of Grey Literature

Abstract

Abstract One of the more striking, if under-appreciated, aspects of publishing in cultural studies ' early days was its provisionality. It is worth remembering that the chief publishing organ of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was not called Cultural Studies, or something similarly definitive, but rather Working Papers in Cultural Studies. By today's standards it would likely be considered 'grey literature', because the work appearing there announced itself as, on some level, in process. This essay offers a detailed history of cultural studies' early publication practices, particularly those associated with the Centre. Its purpose is to provide insight into the modes of scholarly communication through which the nascent field established itself in the 1960s and '70s. Equally, its purpose is to use this history as a means for taking stock of the field's apparatus of scholarly communication today. Cultural studies, the authors argue, might do well to open a space once again for less finished scholarly products - work that is as much constitutive (i.e., about community building) as it is instrumental (i.e., about conveying new research).Keywords cultural studies, working papers, grey literature, scholarly communication, Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural StudiesThis essay focuses on the writing and publication practices that developed in and around the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from the time of its founding in 1964 until the cessation of the journal Working Papers in Cultural Studies, arguably its chief publication, in the late 1970s. Through our engagement with these practices, we want to develop an approach to the question 'what is cultural studies?' that is historical, speculative, and above all, materialist. It is historical insofar as it revisits the 'moment' of Birmingham, albeit from the perspective of its serial publications. It is speculative to the extent that we hope to build upon these historical traces and make some arguments for the ways in which textual production in cultural studies might be reformulated to allow for more productive engagements with the contemporary conjuncture. Finally, our approach is materialist because we want to de-emphasise the conceptual and biographical aspects of the work that took place at the Centre - the content, as it were - and to draw attention instead to the varied functions of that work vis-a-vis its form.1What this amounts to, essentially, is 'a trip below decks into the boiler room which was to become Cultural Studies', as Stuart Hall has described it.2 Beyond all the rows, beyond all the major works and their intellectual history lies a more mundane but no less important story to be told about Birmingham, and about cultural studies more generally.3This is a story about the instruments with which, and the infrastructure through which, cultural studies developed at the Centre and seeped out into the world. At its heart is the category 'grey literature', a term we borrow from library and information science to refer to pamphlets, conference proceedings, reports, white papers, newsletters, self-published journals, and other types of fugitive publications that lack high production values, the endorsement of blind peer review, or both. Grey literature may be academic, but its authority is typically in doubt. Also central to our story is process, or rather a range of methods for writing, duplicating, and publishing that came to be condensed under the heading of'working'. Our argument is that the success of the Birmingham Centre is attributable not only to the intellectual content of the work produced there in the 1960s and '70s but also, and in no small part, to the grey literature in and through which those ideas circulated.Given how the present moment is marked by debates and struggles at the intersection of knowledge production, intellectual property and labour, reconstructing this earlier moment might help to remind those of us currently working in cultural studies that the modes of research, writing and publication that are dominant today (namely, those that favour the single author and the discrete, properly credentialed text) were not always the only, or even primary, ones that mattered. …