Undoing cultural studies: cultural economy at the Open University (1979–1997)

This introduction article establishes the territory for the Symposium What Was Cultural Economy? After setting out the reasoning behind the collection and its eight contributions, the introduction describes the terms on which the ‘cultural economy’ concept was launched, within the Open University’s Faculty of Social Sciences, at the end of the 1990s. Noting the collective work involved, I highlight the role of Stuart Hall, and the brand of cultural studies he represents, as a key vector. Hall’s position as totemic public intellectual obscures his work as a teacher, curriculum designer and colleague, channelling the ‘cultural turn’ through this internal academic context. As such, I also stress the OU’s course team model of intellectual production, drawing from recent historiography on workshops as devices for the practice of collective intellectual and cultural work, coupling this to the figure of the ‘vanishing mediator’ as a driver of material and symbolic transformation. I then move to sketch out some of the key interpersonal relations, institutional contexts and intellectual trajectories through which cultural economy was first formulated. In conclusion, I ask what implications this little history might hold for a present-day journal engaged in the workshopping of ideas at increasingly international scale.