Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 3 Culturalism
imaginative work). When it is considered in context, it can be seen as a very
remarkable creative achievement (314).
It is when Williams insists on culture as a definition of the ‘lived experience’ of
‘ordinary’ men and women, made in their daily interaction with the texts and practices
of everyday life, that he finally breaks decisively with Leavisism. Here is the basis for a
democratic definition of culture. He takes seriously Leavis’s call for a common culture.
But the difference between Leavisism and Williams on this point is that Williams does
want a common culture, whilst Leavisism wants only a hierarchical culture of difference
and deference. Williams’s review of The Uses of Literacy indicates some of the key
differences between his own position and the traditions of Leavisism (in which he
partly locates Hoggart):
The analysis of Sunday newspapers and crime stories and romances is . . . familiar,
but, when you have come yourself from their apparent public, when you recognise
in yourself the ties that still bind, you cannot be satisfied with the older formula:
enlightened minority, degraded mass. You know how bad most ‘popular culture’
is, but you know also that the irruption of the ‘swinish multitude’, which Burke
had prophesied would trample down light and learning, is the coming to relative
power and relative justice of your own people, whom you could not if you tried
desert (1957: 424–5).
Although he still claims to recognize ‘how bad most “popular culture” is’, this is no
longer a judgement made from within an enchanted circle of certainty, policed by ‘the
older formula: enlightened minority, degraded mass’. Moreover, Williams is insistent
that we distinguish between the commodities made available by the culture industries
and what people make of these commodities. He identifies what he calls
the extremely damaging and quite untrue identification of ‘popular culture’
(commercial newspapers, magazines, entertainments, etc.) with ‘working-class
culture’. In fact the main source of this ‘popular culture’ lies outside the working
class altogether, for it is instituted, financed and operated by the commercial
bourgeoisie, and remains typically capitalist in its methods of production and
distribution. That working-class people form perhaps a majority of the consumers
of this material . . . does not, as a fact, justify this facile identification (425).
In other words, people are not reducible to the commodities they consume. Hoggart’s
problem, according to Williams, is that he ‘has taken over too many of the formulas’,
from ‘Matthew Arnold’ to ‘contemporary conservative ideas of the decay of politics in
the working class’; the result is an argument in need of ‘radical revision’ (ibid.). The
publication of ‘The analysis of culture’, together with the other chapters in The Long
Revolution, has been described by Hall (1980b) as ‘a seminal event in English post-war
intellectual life’ (19), which did much to provide the radical revision necessary to lay
the basis for a non-Leavisite study of popular culture.