Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel: The Popular Arts 51
as a description of his work. This and other related points was the subject of a heated
‘History Workshop’ debate between Richard Johnson, Stuart Hall and Thompson himself
(see Samuel, 1981). One of the difficulties when reading the contributions to the
debate is the way that culturalism is made to carry two quite different meanings. On
the one hand, it is employed as a description of a particular methodology (this is how
I am using it here). On the other, it is used as a term of critique (usually from a more
‘traditional’ Marxist position or from the perspective of Marxist structuralism). This is
a complex issue, but as a coda to this discussion of Hoggart, Williams and Thompson,
here is a very simplified clarification: positively, culturalism is a methodology which
stresses culture (human agency, human values, human experience) as being of crucial
importance for a full sociological and historical understanding of a given social formation;
negatively, culturalism is used to suggest the employment of such assumptions
without full recognition and acknowledgement that culture is the effect of structures
beyond itself, and that these have the effect of ultimately determining, constraining
and, finally, producing, culture (human agency, human values and human experience).
Thompson disagrees strongly with the second proposition, and refutes totally any suggestion
that culturalism, regardless of the definition, can be applied to his own work.
Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel: The Popular Arts
The ‘main thesis’ of The Popular Arts is that ‘in terms of actual quality . . . the struggle
between what is good and worthwhile and what is shoddy and debased is not a struggle
against the modern forms of communication, but a conflict within these media’ (Hall
and Whannel, 1964: 15). Hall and Whannel’s concern is with the difficulty of making
these distinctions. They set themselves the task to develop ‘a critical method for
handling . . . problems of value and evaluation’ (ibid.) in the study of popular culture.
In this task they pay specific thanks to the work of Hoggart and Williams, and passing
thanks to the key figures of Leavisism.
The book was written against a background of concern about the influence of popular
culture in the school classroom. In 1960 the National Union of Teachers (NUT)
Annual Conference passed a resolution that read in part:
Conference believes that a determined effort must be made to counteract the
debasement of standards which result from the misuse of press, radio, cinema and
television. . . . It calls especially upon those who use and control the media of mass
communication, and upon parents, to support the efforts of teachers in an attempt
to prevent the conflict which too often arises between the values inculcated in the
classroom and those encountered by young people in the world outside (quoted
in Hall and Whannel, 1964: 23).
The resolution led to the NUT Special Conference, ‘Popular culture and personal
responsibility’. One speaker at the conference, the composer Malcolm Arnold, said: