Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Raymond Williams: ‘The analysis of culture’ 45
Third, ‘there is the “social” definition of culture, in which culture is a description of a
particular way of life’ (ibid.). The ‘social’ definition of culture is crucial to the founding
of culturalism. This definition introduces three new ways of thinking about culture. First,
the ‘anthropological’ position which sees culture as a description of a particular way of life;
second, the proposition that culture ‘expresses certain meanings and values’ (ibid.); third,
the claim that the work of cultural analysis should be the ‘clarification of the meanings
and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture’ (ibid.).
Williams is aware that the kind of analysis the ‘social’ definition of culture demands,
will often ‘involve analysis of elements in the way of life that to followers of the other
definitions are not “culture” at all’ (32). Moreover, whilst such analysis might still operate
modes of evaluation of the ‘ideal’ and the ‘documentary’ type, it will also extend
to 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 ‘laws’ or ‘trends’, by which social and
cultural development as a whole can be better understood (32–3).
Taken together, the three points embodied in the ‘social’ definition of culture – culture
as a particular way of life, culture as expression of a particular way of life, and cultural
analysis as a method of reconstituting a particular way of life – establish both the general
perspective and the basic procedures of culturalism.
Williams, however, is reluctant to remove from analysis any of the three ways of
understanding culture: ‘there is a significant reference in each . . . and, if this is so, it is
the relations between them that should claim our attention’ (33). He describes as
‘inadequate’ and ‘unacceptable’ any definition which fails to include the other
definitions: ‘However difficult it may be in practice, we have to try to see the process as
a whole, and to relate our particular studies, if not explicitly at least by ultimate reference,
to the actual and complex organization’ (34). As he explains,
I would then define the theory of culture as the study of relationships between elements
in a whole way of life. The analysis of culture is the attempt to discover the
nature of the organization which is the complex of these relationships. Analysis of
particular works or institutions is, in this context, analysis of their essential kind of
organization, the relationships which works or institutions embody as parts of the
organization as a whole (35).
In addressing the ‘complex organization’ of culture as a particular way of life, the
purpose of cultural analysis is always to understand what a culture is expressing; ‘the
actual experience through which a culture was lived’; the ‘important common element’;
‘a particular community of experience’ (36). In short, to reconstitute what Williams
calls ‘the structure of feeling’ (ibid.). By structure of feeling, he means the shared values
of a particular group, class or society. The term is used to describe a discursive structure
that is a cross between a collective cultural unconscious and an ideology. He uses, for
example, the term to explain the way in which many nineteenth-century novels