Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

44
Chapter 3 Culturalism
Leavisism is most evident in the content of his own ‘good past/bad present’ binary
opposition: instead of the organic community of the seventeenth century, his ‘good
past’ is the working-class culture of the 1930s. What Hoggart celebrates from the 1930s,
is, significantly, the very culture that the Leavisites were armed to resist. This alone
makes his approach an implicit critique of, and an academic advance on, Leavisism.
But, as Hall (1980b) points out, although Hoggart ‘refused many of [F.R.] Leavis’s
embedded cultural judgements’, he, nevertheless, in his use of Leavisite literary
methodology, ‘continued “a tradition” while seeking, in practice, to transform it’ (18).
Raymond Williams: ‘The analysis of culture’
Raymond Williams’s influence on cultural studies has been enormous. The range of his
work alone is formidable. He has made significant contributions to our understanding
of cultural theory, cultural history, television, the press, radio and advertising. Alan
O’Connor’s (1989) bibliography of Williams’s published work runs to thirty-nine
pages. His contribution is all the more remarkable when one considers his origins in
the Welsh working class (his father was a railway signalman), and that as an academic
he was Professor of Drama at Cambridge University. In this section, I will comment
only on his contribution to the founding of culturalism and its contribution to the
study of popular culture.
In ‘The analysis of culture’, Williams (2009) outlines the ‘three general categories in
the definition of culture’ (32). First, there is ‘the “ideal”, in which culture is a state or
process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute or universal values’ (ibid.).
The role of cultural analysis, using this definition, ‘is essentially the discovery and
description, in lives and works, of those values which can be seen to compose a timeless
order, or to have permanent reference to the universal human condition’ (ibid.).
This is the definition inherited from Arnold and used by Leavisism: what he calls, in
Culture and Society, culture as an ultimate ‘court of human appeal, to be set over the
processes of practical social judgement and yet to offer itself as a mitigating and rallying
alternative’ (Williams, 1963: 17).
Second, there is the ‘documentary’ record: the surviving texts and practices of a
culture. In this definition, ‘culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative work, in
which, in a detailed way, human thought and experience are variously recorded’
(Williams, 2009: ibid.). The purpose of cultural analysis, using this definition, is one of
critical assessment. This can take a form of analysis similar to that adopted with regard
to the ‘ideal’; an act of critical sifting until the discovery of what Arnold calls ‘the best
that has been thought and said’ (see Chapter 2). It can also involve a less exalted practice:
the cultural as the critical object of interpretative description and evaluation (literary
studies is the obvious example of this practice). Finally, it can also involve a more historical,
less literary evaluative function: an act of critical reading to measure its significance
as a ‘historical document’ (historical studies is the obvious example of this practice).