Raymond Williams
“Culture is Ordinary”
(1958)
“
f
(
“The Analysis of Culture”,
from The Long Revolution
(1961)
Williams on ‘culture’ in Keywords:
“Culture is 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’s The 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).