Page 63 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

CULT_C03.qxd 10/24/08 17:12 Page 47

Raymond Williams: ‘The analysis of culture’ 47

(inevitably) produces a cultural record, a cultural tradition, marked by ‘a rejection of
considerable areas of what was once a living culture’ (38). Furthermore, as he explains
in Culture and Society, ‘there will always be a tendency for this process of selection to be
related to and even governed by the interests of the class that is dominant’ (1963: 313).

Within a given society, selection will be governed by many kinds of special inter-
ests, including class interests. Just as the actual social situation will largely govern
contemporary selection, so the development of the society, the process of histor-
ical change, will largely determine the selective tradition. The traditional culture of
a society will always tend to correspond to its contemporary system of interests and
values, for it is not an absolute body of work but a continual selection and inter-
pretation (2009: 38–9).

This has quite profound ramifications for the student of popular culture. Given that
selection is invariably made on the basis of ‘contemporary interests’, and given the incid-
ence of many ‘reversals and rediscoveries’, it follows that ‘the relevance of past work,
in any future situation, is unforeseeable’ (39). If this is the case, it also follows that
absolute judgements about what is good and what is bad, about what is high and what
is low, in contemporary culture, should be made with a great deal less certainty, open
as they are to historical realignment in a potential whirlpool of historical contingency.
Williams advocates, as already noted, a form of cultural analysis which is conscious
that ‘the cultural tradition is not only a selection but also an interpretation’ (ibid.).
Although cultural analysis cannot reverse this, it can, by returning a text or practice to
its historical moment, show other ‘historical alternatives’ to contemporary interpreta-
tion and ‘the particular contemporary values on which it rests’ (ibid.). In this way, we
are able to make clear distinctions between ‘the whole historical organization within
which it was expressed’ and ‘the contemporary organization within which it is used’
(ibid.). By working in this way, ‘real cultural processes will emerge’ (ibid.).
Williams’s analysis breaks with Leavisism in a number of ways. First, there is no
special place for art – it is a human activity alongside other human activities: ‘art is there,
as an activity, with the production, the trading, the politics, the raising of families’ (34).
Williams presses the case for a democratic account of culture: culture as a particular
way of life. In Culture and Society,he distinguishes between middle-class culture as ‘the
basic individualist idea and the institutions, manners, habits of thought, and inten-
tions which proceed from that’ and working-class culture as ‘the basic collective idea, and
the institutions, manners, habits of thought, and intentions which proceed from this’
(1963: 313). He then gives this account of the achievements of working-class culture:

The working class, because of its position, has not, since the Industrial Revolution,
produced a culture in the narrower sense. The culture which it has produced, and
which it is important to recognise, is the collective democratic institution, whether
in the trade unions, the cooperative movement, or a political party. Working-class
culture, in the stage through which it has been passing, is primarily social (in that
it has created institutions) rather than individual (in particular intellectual or