Page 21 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

12 Cultural change and ordinary life

Ordinary life

A key source for discussions of ordinary life is Raymond Williams’ (1989)
classic essay ‘Culture is ordinary’ (originally published in 1958). In this essay,
Williams in many ways initially codifies what were to become some key
emphases of cultural and media studies. He rejects two other ways of thinking
of culture and its development. First, he argues that cultural elitism should be
opposed. Williams’ idea of culture is not confined to the processes of ‘high’
culture and he rejects cultural snobbery. Second, he expresses his opposition
to the increased commercialization of culture and especially to the operations
of advertising and the way in which it is coming to dominate ever more
processes of culture. Williams, therefore, seeks to formulate a theory of and
research into processes of culture that are not simply those of the great works
of literature, art, and so on or the commercialization of culture. While he does
think that both of these areas can be studied and critiqued (and he spent much
of his work in so doing), they need to be rethought in different contexts.
Williams develops his critique and argument in the name of two main
ideas and emphases. First, he argues that culture should be seen as a way of life
(in an anthropological sense) with a strong historical background. As part of
this emphasis on the way of life, Williams also argues for the significance of
cultural creativity. It is strongly his view that culture changes over time and
that moreover, people have the power to effect its change through their
everyday actions. Second, culture as a way of life is social in that it is created,
learned and lived in common with other people. In this sense Williams
emphasizes the idea of a common culture. Moreover, in addition to being
social, culture is also individual in that it is concerned with experience,
personal effort and meaning.
These are arguments that have been influential and which can be fol-
lowed in their significant emphases. In is important to recognize the dynamism
of culture as inherited, learned, changing and changed through modes of
human action. Second, that culture is social in that it is produced through
human interaction, but also is woven into social conflict, social and cultural
divisions and the constitution and reconstitution of communities. In these
emphases, culture is political at a number of different levels. Third, culture is
personal in that it is to do with individual identities and biography. In a term
that Williams was very fond of, culture is lived. These three ideas that Williams
emphasizes as key aspects of culture as a way of life are ones that I also seek to
foreground as part of a theory and account of ordinary life: dynamism, social
and personal.
While Williams provides a significant underpinning for a theory of
ordinary life, his argument in this paper requires revision in two crucial ways.
First, his emphasis on a common culture as a way of life, or often in his work as
‘a whole way of life’, cannot grasp the diversity and fluidity of cultures of
ordinariness in a society such as that in the UK. It is essential that this trope of
Williams is reconstituted to recognize the significance of ways of life, diversity
and commonality and how ways of being in common and diversity are pro-
duced in the contexts of the flows of ordinary life. Something of this shift was
captured by Grossberg (1996: 105) when he addressed the importance of the