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The cultural field 221

of the world: ‘the ways in which the received natural and social world is made human
to them and made, to however small a degree (even if finally symbolic), controllable
by them’ (22).

[Grounded aesthetics] is the creative element in a process whereby meanings are
attributed to symbols and practices and where symbols and practices are selected,
reselected, highlighted and recomposed to resonate further appropriate and par-
ticularised meanings. Such dynamics are emotional as well as cognitive. There are
as many aesthetics as there are grounds for them to operate in. Grounded aesth-
etics are the yeast of common culture (21).

Grounded aesthetic value is never intrinsic to a text or practice, a universal quality
of its form; it is always inscribed in the ‘sensuous/emotive/cognitive’ (24) act of con-
sumption (how a commodity is appropriated, ‘used’ and made into culture). This is an
argument against those who locate creativity only in the act of production, consump-
tion being merely the recognition or misrecognition of the aesthetic intention. Against
such claims, Willis insists that consumption is a symbolic act of creativity. His ‘funda-
mental point . . . is that “messages” are not now so much “sent” and “received” as made
in reception. . . .“Sent message” communication is being replaced by “made message”
communication’ (135). Cultural communication is ceasing to be a process of listening
to the voices of others. Grounded aesthetics is the insistence that commodities are con-
sumed (and made into culture) on the basis of use, rather than in terms of supposed
inherent and ahistorical qualities (textual or authorial). In grounded aesthetics, mean-
ings or pleasures are undecidable in advance of the practices of ‘production in use’. This
of course means that a commodity or a commodified practice which is judged to be
banal and uninteresting (on the basis of textual analysis or an analysis of its mode of
production), may be made to bear or to do, in its ‘production in use’, all sorts of inter-
esting things within the lived conditions of a specific context of consumption. In this
way, Willis’s argument is a rebuke to both textualism, which makes judgements on the
basis of formal qualities, and the political economy of culture approach, which makes
judgements on the basis of the relations of production. The ‘symbolic work’ of con-
sumption, he maintains, is never a simple repetition of the relations of production, nor
is it a direct confirmation of the semiotic certainties of the lecture theatre.

People bring living identities to commerce and the consumption of cultural com-
modities as well as being formed there. They bring experiences, feelings, social
position and social memberships to their encounter with commerce. Hence they
bring a necessary creative symbolic pressure, not only to make sense of cultural
commodities, but partly through them also to make sense of contradiction and
structure as they experience them in school, college, production, neighbourhood,
and as members of certain genders, races, classes and ages. The results of this
necessary symbolic work may be quite different from anything initially coded into
cultural commodities (21).