Page 28 - Decoding Culture

THE WAY WE WERE 21

differentiation. What different forms of culture were to be found
in industrial societies? What had been the impact of twentieth-cen­
tury media of mass communication on those forms? How were
different forms of culture related to each other? Were they strati­
fied? Was culture in decline? Was the pervasive distinction
between high and low culture meaningful and appropriate? In
responding to these and related questions in the late 1950s and
early 1960s, scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds
found themselves addressing similar issues but armed with dif­
ferent concepts and methods. They were the inheritors of a
tradition that presupposed the value of 'high' culture and was var­
iously concerned about its fate in twentieth-century society, but
they were critical inheritors. The break with tradition that they
made, the break that constituted the grounds from which cultural
studies developed, crucially centred on rethinking the categories
in which culture had hitherto been understood.
This process took place in a number of different intellectual
contexts, two of which are the particular concern of this chapter. I
shall begin with the mass society and media effects orthodoxy
since that body of, on the one hand, speculative theorizing and, on
the other, detailed empirical research, was crucial in much post­
war criticism of twentieth-century culture. It was also the central
locus for sociological thinking on this topic (other than in the then
rather restricted sociologies of literature and art) and dissatisfac­
tion with its conceptual and methodological limitations played a
significant part in the early development of cultural studies. Then
I shall attend to aspects of the more literary 'culture and civiliza­
tion' tradition, first as it was mediated by Leavisite thinking in the
1930s and 1940s and then in relation to its influence upon Williams,
Hoggart and others in their emerging concern with 'ordinary' cul­
ture. Finally, I shall try to suggest how these 'seed-bed' traditions
provided fertile ground for the growth of cultural studies.

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