ABSTRACT
Before we enter that debate then, it will be useful to find that bigger debate. Dick Hebdige, in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, does this pretty smartly, offering, economically, an historical dimension. Culture
Culture: cultivation, tending, in Christian authors, worship; the action or practice of cultivating the soil; tillage, husbandry; the cultivation or rearing of certain animals (e.g. fish); the artificial development of microscopic organisms, organisms so produced; the cultivating or development (of the mind, faculties, manners), improvement or refinement by education and training; the condition of being trained or refined; the intellectual side of civilization; the prosecution or special attention or study of any subject or pursuit. (Oxford English Dictionary)
Culture is a notoriously ambiguous concept as the above definition demonstrates. Refracted through centuries of usage, the word has acquired a number of quite different, often contradictory, meanings. Even as a scientific term, it refers both to a process (artificial development of microscopic organisms) and a product (organisms so produced). More specifically, since the end of the eighteenth century, it has been used by English intellectuals and literary figures to focus critical attention on a whole range of controversial issues. The ‘quality of life’, the effects in human terms of mechanization, the division of labour and the creation of a mass society have all been discussed within the larger confines of what Raymond Williams has called the ‘Culture and Society’ debate (Williams, 1961). It was through this tradition of dissent and criticism that the dream of the ‘organic society’ – of society as an integrated, meaningful whole – was largely kept alive. The dream had two basic trajectories. One led back to the past and to the feudal ideal of a hierarchically ordered community. Here, culture assumed an almost sacred function. Its ‘harmonious perfection’ (Arnold, 1868) was posited against the Wasteland of contemporary life.
The other trajectory, less heavily supported, led towards the future, to a socialist Utopia where the distinction between labour and leisure was to be annulled. Two basic definitions of culture emerged from this tradition, though these were by no means necessarily congruent with the two trajectories outlined above. The first – the one which is probably most familiar to the reader – was essentially classical and conservative. It represented culture as a standard of aesthetic excellence: ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’ (Arnold, 1868), and it derived from an appreciation of ‘classic’ aesthetic form (opera, ballet, drama, literature, art). The second, traced back by Williams to Herder and the eighteenth century (Williams, 1976), was rooted in anthropology. Here the term ‘culture’ referred to a
… particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning, but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour. The analysis of culture, from such a definition, is the clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture. (Williams, 1965)
This definition obviously had a much broader range. It encompassed, in T. S. Eliot’s words,
… all the characteristic activities and interests of a people. Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dartboard, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th Century Gothic churches, the music of Elgar … (Eliot, 1948)
As Williams noted, such a definition could only be supported if a new theoretical initiative was taken. The theory of culture now involved the ‘study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life’ (Williams, 1965). The emphasis shifted from immutable to historical criteria, from fixity to transformation:
… an emphasis (which) from studying particular meanings and values seeks not so much to compare these, as a way of establishing a scale, but by studying their modes of change to discover certain general causes or ‘trends’ by which social and cultural developments as a whole can be better understood. (Williams, 1965)
Williams was, then, proposing an altogether broader formulation of the relationships between culture and society, one which through the analysis of ‘particular meanings and values’ sought to uncover the concealed fundamentals of history; the ‘general causes’ and broad social ‘trends’ which lie behind the manifest appearances of an ‘everyday life’.
In the early years, when it was being established in the Universities, Cultural Studies sat rather uncomfortably on the fence between these two conflicting definitions – culture as a standard of excellence, culture as a ‘whole way of life’ – unable to determine which represented the most fruitful line of enquiry. Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams portrayed working-class culture sympathetically in wistful accounts of pre-scholarship boyhoods (Leeds for Hoggart (1958), a Welsh mining village for Williams (1960)) but their work displayed a strong bias towards literature and literacy and an equally strong moral tone. Hoggart deplored the way in which the traditional working-class community – a community of tried and tested values despite the dour landscape in which it had been set – was being undermined and replaced by a ‘Candy Floss World’ of thrills and cheap fiction which was somehow bland and sleazy. Williams tentatively endorsed the new mass communications but was concerned to establish aesthetic and moral criteria for distinguishing the worthwhile products from the ‘trash’; the jazz – ‘a real musical form’ – and the football – ‘a wonderful game’ – from the ‘rape novel, the Sunday strip paper and the latest Tin Pan drool’ (Williams, 1965). In 1966 Hoggart laid down the basic premises upon which Cultural Studies were based:
First, without appreciating good literature, no one will really understand the nature of society, second, literary critical analysis can be applied to certain social phenomena other than ‘academically respectable’ literature (for example; the popular arts, mass communications) so as to illuminate their meanings for individuals and their societies. (Hoggart, 1966)
The implicit assumption that it still required a literary sensibility to ‘read’ society with the requisite subtlety, and that the two ideas of culture could be ultimately reconciled was also, paradoxically, to inform the early work of the French writer, Roland Barthes, though here it found validation in a method – semiotics – a way of reading signs (Hawkes, 1977 [1992]).
(Hebdige 1979: 5–8) What's Next?TS Eliot offers a list of English cultural items which he presented in the late 1940s. Make a current list. What are the differences?
Arnold wrote of ‘the best that has been thought and said’. What would your list include?
