Page 33 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

CULT_C02.qxd 10/24/08 17:10 Page 17

2 The ‘culture and

civilization’ tradition

The popular culture of the majority has always been a concern of powerful minorities.
Those with political power have always thought it necessary to police the culture of
those without political power, reading it ‘symptomatically’ (see Chapter 6) for signs of
political unrest; reshaping it continually through patronage and direct intervention. In
the nineteenth century, however, there is a fundamental change in this relationship.
Those with power lose, for a crucial period, the means to control the culture of the sub-
ordinate classes. When they begin to recover control, it is culture itself, and not culture
as a symptom or sign of something else, that becomes, really for the first time, the
actual focus of concern. As we noted at the end of Chapter 1, two factors are crucial to
an understanding of these changes: industrialization and urbanization. Together they
produce other changes that contribute to the making of a popular culture that marks a
decisive break with the cultural relationships of the past.
If we take early nineteenth-century Manchester as our example of the new industrial
urban civilization, certain points become clear. First of all, the town evolved clear lines
of class segregation; second, residential separation was compounded by the new work
relations of industrial capitalism. Third, on the basis of changes in living and working
relations, there developed cultural changes. Put very simply, the Manchester working
class was given space to develop an independent culture at some remove from the
direct intervention of the dominant classes. Industrialization and urbanization had
redrawn the cultural map. No longer was there a shared common culture, with an addi-
tional culture of the powerful. Now, for the first time in history, there was a separate
culture of the subordinate classes of the urban and industrial centres. It was a culture
of two main sources: (i) a culture offered for profit by the new cultural entrepreneurs,
and (ii) a culture made by and for the political agitation of radical artisans, the
new urban working class and middle-class reformers, all described so well by E.P.
Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class (see Chapter 3). Each of these
developments in different ways threatened traditional notions of cultural cohesion and
social stability. One threatened to weaken authority through the commercial disman-
tling of cultural cohesion; the other offered a direct challenge to all forms of political
and cultural authority.
These were not developments guaranteed to hearten those who feared for the con-
tinuation of a social order based on power and privilege. Such developments, it was
argued, could only mean a weakening of social stability, a destabilizing of the social