Page 31 - Decoding Culture

24 DECODING�CULTURE
rough distinction among three levels of culture, which are levels of
quality measured by aesthetic, intellectual, and moral standards.
These are "superior" or "refined" culture, "mediocre" culture, and
"brutal" culture' (Shils, 1961: 4).
Superior, mediocre, and brutal. Quite extraordinary terms for
any analyst, let alone for a sociologist who might in other contexts
aspire to some degree of descriptive neutrality. Yet, at the time, this
usage attracted relatively little attention in as much as such bluntly
evaluative distinctions were common currency in almost any dis­
cussion of culture. Hierarchical assessments were constitutive of
thinking about culture, and inevitably such judgements carried
with them a broadly elitist attitude to those whose taste was thus
evaluated. 'Proper' culture, wherein our accumulated aesthetic and
moral achievements were gathered, was seen to be at risk from the
culturally impoverished mass and from those who pandered to
their tastes in the media industries. Accordingly, for thinkers who
accepted these terms, there was a duty to discriminate so as to pro­
tect the storehouse of human achievements and values. In some
versions of the argument (well exemplified in the Leavisite work
that I shall consider later) discrimination was to be cultivated with
the aim of sustaining an elite capable of defending the great cul­
tural traditions. And even those marxist theorists who saw mass
culture as a tool of mass repression - as did members of the
Frankfurt School who had fled to the USA from Hitler's Germany ­
found themselves caught in essentially elitist attitudes by virtue of
the concepts that they and others routinely used to theorize
culture.
So far, so familiar. But behind this well-known topography of
the mass culture analysis lies a distinctive, if inconsistent, social
ontology. It is distinctive in its emphasis on the determination of
action by culture. As in the quotation from Mills above, social
actors are largely presumed to be passive victims of the mass

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