Page 42 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

genius to interpret the two traditions to each other. In the failure
of the two traditions to come to a point of junction, something
was lost. How much we cannot be sure, for we are among the
losers’ (Thompson, 1963, p. 832).
Less directly political in intent, Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy
marked the point at which post-Leavisite culturalism decisively
shifted emphasis from ‘literature’ to ‘culture’. Hoggart combined
an ethnographic account of Yorkshire working-class culture with
Leavisite practical criticism of mass media texts. His central theme
was that of the damage done to the older, inter-war working-class
culture by the new print media: ‘The old forms of class culture
are in danger of being replaced by a poorer kind of classless...
culture . . . and this is to be regretted’ (Hoggart, 1958, p. 343). Like
Leavis, Hoggart was arguing a theory of cultural decline. But for
Hoggart it was working-class culture, rather than that of the
‘sensitive minority’, that needed to be valorised, if only so as, in
turn, to be elegised. Hoggart’s achievement was thus to divest
Leavisism of much of its cultural elitism, if not perhaps of its
nostalgia; Thompson’s was to divest British socialism of its
Marxian economic determinism, and to make explicit what had
previously only ever been an implicit—and barely acknowl-
edged—Romanticism.

Raymond Williams
The full analytical range of this left culturalism only became
apparent, however, in Williams. His originality in relation to the
culturalist tradition, as he had encountered it in the work of Eliot
and Leavis, was to effect a dramatic reversal of socio-cultural
evaluation, such that a distinctly working-class cultural achieve-
ment came to be valorised positively rather than negatively. Quite
centrally, Williams insisted that ‘culture is ordinary’; and, more
famously, that ‘a culture is not only a body of intellectual and
imaginative work; it is also and essentially a whole way of life’
(Williams, 1989; Williams, 1963, p. 311). In principle this is little
different from Eliot. But in the practical application of that
principle, Williams so expanded its range as to include within
‘culture’ the ‘collective democratic institution’, by which he meant

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