Raymond Williams “Culture is Ordinary” (1958)

Raymond Williams “Culture is Ordinary” (1958) “ “The Analysis of Culture”, f from The Long Revolution ( (1961)

Williams on ‘culture’ in Keywords: “Cultureis one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought.”

“...three general categories in the definition of culture”: • the ‘ideal’ – culture as a state or process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute or universal values • the ‘documentary’ – culture as the body of intellectual and imaginative work, in which human experience / thought are variously recorded • the ‘social’ – culture as a description of a certain way of life, which expresses certain meanings/values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour (‘culture as ordinary’)

“The variations of meaning and reference, in the use of culture as a term, must be seen, I am arguing, not simply as a disadvantage, which prevents any kind of neat and exclusive definition, but as a genuine complexity, corresponding to real elements in experience. There is a significant reference in each of the three main kinds of definition, and, if this is so, it is the relations between them that should claim our attention.” (43) • “If the art is part of the society, there is no solid whole, outside it, to which, by the form of our question, we concede priority. [. . .] Thus art, while clearly related to the other activities, can be seen as expressing certain elements in the organization which, within that organization’s terms, could only have been expressed in this way” (45).

Raymond Williams Stuart Hall E. P. Thompson Richard Hoggart Founding figures in ‘British Cultural Studies’

British Cultural Studies institutionalized in the 1960s – in this period you had the appearance of key texts such as Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and the founding, by Hoggart, of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964 • Key early texts that “helped stake out this new terrain” were Hoggart’sThe Uses of Literacy (1957) and Williams’ Culture and Society (1958).

Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy on the new forms of mass culture: the appeals made by “the mass publicists” were made “more insistently, effectively and in a more comprehensive and centralised form today than they were earlier; that we are moving towards the creation of a mass culture, that the remnants of what was at least in part an urban culture “of the people” are being destroyed”. • idea of genuine popular culture vs. mass culture as something imposed on people from above • Williams on mass/commercial culture: “this crazy peddling, in which news and opinion are inextricably involved with the shouts of the market, bringing in their train the new slavery and prostitution of the selling of personalities” (“Culture is Ordinary”, 24).

Who believes in democracy: “the millions in England who still haven’t got it, where they work and feel. There, as always, is the transforming energy, and the business of the socialist intellectual is what it always was: to attack the clamps on that energy – in industrial relations, public administration, education, for start; and to work in his own field on ways in which that energy, as released, can be concentrated and fertile. The technical means are difficult enough, but the biggest difficulty is in accepting, deep in our minds, the values on which they depend: that the ordinary people should govern; that culture and education are ordinary; that there are no masses to save, to capture, or to direct, but rather this crowded people in the course of an extraordinary rapid and confusing expansion of their lives” (24).

Cultural Studies as an intellectual project emerges in large part precisely from the work that was being done in adult education, on the fringes of what was then a highly selective university system • dissatisfaction with the university English studies curriculum as it was then constituted • more specifically, a reaction against, but also a complex, ambivalent engagement with, the work of the literary critic F. R. Leavis and associates (Scrutiny journal)

[The discipline] became, with some notable advantages, as always happens, a professional discipline; it moved to higher standards of critical rigour and scholarship; but at the same time the people who understood the original project, like Leavis for example, were marginalized. The curious fact is that they then tried to move outside the university, to set going again this more general project. But because of the formation they were – largely, if one wants to be strict in the usual terms, a group of people from petty-bourgeois families, almost equally resentful of the established polite upper middle class which thought it possessed literature, and of the majority who they felt were not only indifferent to it but hostile and even threatening – they chose a very precise route. They went out, and sent their students out, to the grammar schools to find the exceptional individuals who could then come back to the university and forward this process”. (Williams, “The Future of Cultural Studies”)

“If you take the question of popular culture, or popular fiction, it has been clearly quite transformed in the 1980s from its situation in the 1950s, not only because people have been more prepared, because of general social and formational changes, to relate directly to popular culture, putting themselves at a very conscious distance from Richards and Leavis in the 1920’s and 1930’s who saw it only as a menace to literacy – an element which survives, perhaps, although always as uncertainly and ambiguously as ever, in Richard Hoggart’s book.” (175).

Williams on “selective tradition”: “the cultural tradition can be seen as a continual selection and re-selection of ancestors. Particular lines will be drawn, often for as long as a century, and then suddenly with some new stage in growth these will be cancelled or weakened, and new lines drawn. [. . .] [I]t is often true that some change in this tradition establishing new lines with the past, breaking or re-drawing existing lines - is a radical kind of contemporary change. We tend to underestimate the extent to which the cultural tradition is not only a selection but also an interpretation. We see most past work through our own experience, without even making the effort to see it in something like its original terms. What analysis can do is not so much to reverse this, returning a work to its period, as to make the interpretation conscious, by showing historical alternatives; to relate the interpretation to the particular contemporary values on which it rests; and, by exploring the real patterns of the work, confront us with the real nature of the choices we are making. (53)

“...everyone living in the period would have had something which [. . .] no later individual can wholly recover: that sense of the life within which the novels were written, and which we now approach through our selection.” (50) • “The most difficult thing to get hold of, in studying any past period, is the felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place and time: a sense of the ways in which the particular activities combined into a way of thinking and living” (47). • “We are usually most aware of this when we notice the contrasts between generations, who never talk quite ‘the same language’, or when we read an account of our lives by someone from outside the community, or watch the small differences in style, of speech or behaviour, in someone who has learned our ways yet was not bred in them. Almost any formal description would be too crude to express this nevertheless quite distinct sense of a particular and native style.”

Structure of feeling: • “The term I would suggest to describe it is structure of feeling: it is as firm and definite as ‘structure’ suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity. In one sense, this structure of feeling is the culture of a period: it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization. And it is in this respect that the arts of a period, taking these to include characteristic approaches and tones in argument, are of major importance. For here, if anywhere, this characteristic is likely to be expressed...” (48). • “I do not mean that the structure of feeling [. . .] is possessed in the same way by the many individuals in the community. But I think it is a very deep and very wide possession, in all actual communities [. . .]. One generation may train its successor, with reasonable success, in the social character or the general cultural pattern, but the new generation will have its own structure of feeling, which will not appear to have come ‘from’ anywhere.” (48-49).

Raymond Williams “Culture is Ordinary” (1958)