Page 280 - Cultural Theory

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••• Cultural Citizenship •••

not only need to familiarise working-class students with high forms of culture, but
to allow them to develop their own arguments and perspectives that might stop well
short of traditional forms of reverence. In these terms then Williams (1989: 37)
argues that perhaps a ‘culture in common’ is a better description than the mislead-
ingly titled common culture.
Despite the democratic bent of these ideas we might still object that the pursuit of a
culture in common remains an exclusive ideal. Here I want to briefly consider the argu-
ment that Williams poorly appreciates the symbolic creativity of popular culture,
remaining more of a cultural conservative than he might seem, and that the forms of
cultural difference that are likely to exist within a multi-cultural society have finished
attempts to construct common cultures. These are both serious objections which are
indeed worthy of more extended treatment than I have space to explore here.
It remains the case that despite Williams’s sensitivity to questions of class his own
cultural ethos was that of a literary critic rather than as a fan of popular culture. This
has led many, myself included, to argue that he has a tendency to be overly dismis-
sive of the complexity of consumer culture (Stevenson 2002). If we were looking for
a complex textual analysis of popular romances or soap operas we would probably
not call on Raymond Williams. Arguably, since Williams’s time, cultural studies has
done much to extend our appreciation of the complex negotiations that are involved
in the everyday consumption of consumer goods. Paul Willis (1990, 1998) has per-
haps gone the furthest in claiming that the creative meaning-making of the excluded
should be respected rather than reformed by cultural institutions. Here Willis criti-
cally contrasts a dominant high culture of traditional artistic practices with a ‘com-
mon culture’ creatively made from everyday consumer culture. Willis maintains that
despite arguments from people like Williams who sought to democratise high culture
it remains (and is likely to do so) fundamentally detached from the cultural experi-
ences of the vast majority of the population. Instead a democratic and egalitarian
cultural policy should seek to empower young people to produce their own cultural
forms. Whereas most cultural policy remains focused upon preserving the cultural
and aesthetic choices of the educated middle-classes, this needs to be radically refor-
mulated. Willis, as I argued above, wants to argue that working-class young people
formulate their cultural experiences through an explicitly commercial culture. Hence
cultural policies need to be enacted that enable ordinary forms of symbolic creativ-
ity evident within a night at the pub, reading a life-style magazine or listening to a
rap artist. That is, the problem is not as cultural elitists of the right and left would
argue that young people are consuming the ‘wrong culture’, but they are restricted
by a lack of access to consumer culture. Here Willis advocates the setting up of
Cultural Exchanges and Cultural Clubs where symbolic material such as videos and
CDs could be swapped and musical and recording material, photographic and video
equipment made available for common usage. The key idea being pressed by Willis
is not so much inter-cultural dialogue but a determination to provide people
excluded from ‘educated’ culture autonomy as cultural producers and consumers.
The problem with such proposals, according to Jim McGuigan (1997), is they
reproduce dominant ideas of consumer sovereignty; that the market is the best

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