How It All Got Started
There are two key schools of theorists that stand out as pioneers in what we now know as cultural studies. The first was known as the Frankfurt School, which wasn't actually an official school, but an umbrella term referring to a group of academics associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. When the Marxist theorist Max Horkheimer became director of the Institute for Social Research in 1930, the School became a hub of interdisciplinary (there's that word again) cultural research.
While cultural studies has focused more and more on engaging with texts from pop culture, when we go back to the beginning we find that early cultural theorists had a whole different outlook. The Frankfurt guys were pretty irked by the rise in capitalism and mass culture that had resulted from nineteenth-century industrialization. The study of culture was therefore a political matter for them, with their research often taking a critical view of capitalist consumerism.
Translation: new technology means more money and more stuff people can buy for fun, not just for practical reasons. People become more dependent on their stuff and political leaders take advantage of that dependence. The Frankfurters saw this and were totally critical of mass culture: basically, they said, mass-produced art was there to keep people too busy to question—or even notice—social inequality.
Marxism played a key role in the beginning of cultural studies, but not because it offered all the answers. Au contraire! The Frankfurters were down with Marx's focus on economics, which made him argue that everything in society follows from a base structure where financial relations determine all other ones. BUT, Marx had predicted that capitalism would ultimately reach a breaking point and bring about a working-class revolution, and the Frankfurt fellows saw that instead, capitalism was reigning supreme and revolution was nowhere in sight.
So do you need to become an expert in Marxist theory to get a handle on cultural studies? Nah. Just make a note that it was dissatisfaction with traditional Marxism that helped catalyze the Frankfurt school, and that's why these guys branched out to think about culture in wider terms and see what other theories could be useful. That was the joyous birth of the interdisciplinary approach that allowed theorists to mix it up for a change.
As much as we love a good Frankfurter, by the mid-twentieth century there were several British academics whose plans for cultural studies added some tea and scones to the theoretical fire. Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams were two of these fish-n-chips-loving pioneers, and both were champions of working-class politics. These guys were also conscious that Marx's predicted revolution had failed to materialize. They said that capitalist consumerism was trampling on working-class values and communities, and they set about studying the reasons for this and scheming up possibilities for resisting capitalist control.
So there we were, theories running wild on these ideas, but cultural studies still hadn't been named as a subject. But come 1964, a bunch of British academics got together and opened the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham. They wanted their school to draw on a host of theories (Marxism, sociology, feminism, you name it) and to analyze all sorts of cultural texts. Like their predecessors, the CCCS founders were also into working-class politics, including how individuals became absorbed into dominant regimes and how they could resist those regimes.
So that's nice: some elements of Marxism, caring about the underdog, interested in a wide assortment of theories and texts, kind of like all the cookie-cutter shapes you get during the holidays. However, there are also important differences between these first branches of cultural studies. Plus, the branch of study itself has changed a lot since the early days of Frankfurters and figgy pudding.