New Project Starting in 2023: Self-Reflexivity, Class Consciousness and Cultural Division in Britain

[Edit: since I wrote this post, I have received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in order to conduct this project on ‘Self-Reflexivity, Class Consciousness, Culture Wars and Social Change in Britain’. This runs for 12 months from September 2023. The project description is as outlined below.]

The landslide election victory of Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party in December 2019 is most frequently interpreted as due to their success in ‘getting Brexit done’ and thus appealing to a silent majority, including the northern working-class inhabitants of former ‘Red Wall’ areas, ‘who lean left on spending and public services but are culturally conservative’ (Shipman 2021). From this perspective, Britain’s departure from the EU potentially enables a return, at least symbolically, to the postwar heyday of a ‘Great Britain’ characterised by political consensus, social deference, a common culture, full male employment, and a rigid gender binary; a context that is often equated with so-called traditional working-class values. However, apart from any political criticisms of such a formulation, ‘traditional’ is a misleading term in this respect because the working class is a product of the uneven development of industrial modernity. Since the onset of modernity, according to the sociologist Margaret Archer (2007), self-reflexivity (the capacity of people to consider themselves in relation to their social contexts and vice versa) is the primary means by which people relate to the social world ‘which can no longer be approached through embodied knowledge, tacit routines, or traditional custom and practice alone’ (5). Archer’s central idea is that ‘there is a relationship between patterns of social mobility and different modes of reflexivity’ (86), which are determined by the individual’s choice to maintain or break with ‘contextual continuity’. The maintenance of ‘traditional’ working-class consciousness is therefore dependent on what Archer calls ‘communicative reflexivity’ tirelessly maintaining that contextual continuity in an environment in which accelerated social change requires everyone to exercise ever more and more reflexivity over increasingly greater tracts of their lives. By tracing self-reflexivity, through published and archival autobiographical (non-fiction and fiction) narratives since 1919, this project will reassess how we understand class consciousness and how this affects our understanding of Britain and Britishness. Centring self-reflexivity as the primary determinant of British social history allows consideration of its role (rather than external factors) in the generation of cultural division, understood as the default condition of modernity, rather than as a deviation from a supposedly organic common culture.

This project follows on from ‘Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narrative’ (2018-21), funded by a British Academy Small Research Grant, for which I researched autobiographical writing from the 1930s and 1980s from the Mass Observation (MO) Archive in Brighton, the Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiographies at Brunel, and selected published sources in order to investigate the role of self-reflexive writing  both autobiographical and fictional, in the aligned development of both women’s and working-class cultural agency during the 1930s, which has been seen (Hilliard 2006) as a key prerequisite for the cultural and social democratisation of postwar Britain. This phase of the project has led to preliminary publications (Hubble 2021, 2022) with some more in the pipeline. However, what hasn’t been researched in detail before is how these trajectories of self-reflexive working-class and women’s writing continue following the political shift in the 1980s away from the common culture of the immediate postwar decades. What I found from analysing my source material was that differences emerge in this period between the social values expressed in women’s autobiographical writing and that of (in particular) older-working-class men – who display views associated with ‘Brexit’ and the 2019 General Election (Ford et al, 2021) – despite both being equally self-reflexive (Hubble 2023; see also Hinton 2016). Self-reflexivity, which had enabled an aligned development of cultural agency after WW1, was now apparently generating a sharp cultural division.

I shall be critically investigating these processes over the coming months and reporting and reflecting on some of that here. The idea is that the self-reflexivity aspect of the project applies to me as much as anyone else. Indeed, part of ‘Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narrative’ involved me reflecting, through a diary and posts on this blog, on my own position, as a university professor in my late 50s from a (London suburban) working-class background working in a changing Britain. One of the things that struck me was that cultural division intensifies with the breakdown of the mid-20C link between literature and working-class experience (as exemplified by the work of Raymond Williams) which has both underpinned my own career and been central to my research interests. Therefore, a focus of this project will be on the changes in the relationship between literature and working-class experience since the First World War because I think this will cast a lot of light on the emergence and relative dominance of social and cultural values over the course of that century. This part of the project will, in effect, involve reconceptualising the history of what is currently called English literature. To this end I will draw on my experience as a series and volume editor of Bloomsbury’s ‘The Decades Series’, which is now 80 per cent of the way to charting a century over which the literary and cultural landscape was utterly transformed. Over the coming months, I will post descriptions of the books in that series as a first step towards a wider cultural mapping of the period, beginning with what in many ways was the pivotal decade: The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction.

Works Cited

Archer, Margaret (2007). Making our Way through the World: Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Ford, Robert et al, eds (2021). The British General Election of 2019. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hilliard, Christopher (2006). To Exercise Our Talents. MA: Harvard UP.

Hinton, James (2016). Seven Lives from Mass Observation. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Hubble, Nick (2021) ‘“You’re not in the market at Shielding, Joe”: Beyond the Myth of the “Thirties”’ in Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber and Elinor Taylor, eds, The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, London: Bloomsbury, 17-57.

Hubble, Nick (2022) ‘“Class Lives”: Spatial Awareness and Political Consciousness in British Mining Novels of the 1930s’ in Simon Lee, ed., Locating Classed Subjectivities: Intersections of Space & Working-Class Life in 19th, 20th, and 21st-century British Writing. New York: Routledge, 77-92.  

Hubble, Nick (2023) ‘Everyday Life, Class Consciousness and Social Change in Mass Observation Narratives’ in Lucy Curzon and Ben Jones, eds,Mass Observation:  Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses, London: Bloomsbury – forthcoming. Shipman, Tim (2021) ‘How the Tories Weaponised Woke’. Sunday Times, 13 June.