Page 40 - Decoding Culture

THE WAY WE WERE 33

culture. For this reason there is little or no recognition here that
mass cultural artefacts might well be semiotically complex or that
the 'audience' may play a constitutive role in meaning construction.
In both descriptive and analytic versions, the concepts of the mass
society Imedia effects tradition do not provide for the possibility
that popular culture might be much richer than the typical evalua­
tions of the tradition suggest. Nor do they allow for an agent who
can be understood as an active, reflective user of culture, a knowl­
edgeable party to the construction and reconstruction of meaning.
And, in the end, it was these general limitations, along with a grow­
ing mistrust of claims to 'scientific' legitimacy for media research,
that were at the root of the 1960s break with this tradition and the
consequent flowering of cultural studies. But before we can pursue
that event it is first necessary to consider the more 'literary'
account of mass culture developed in the parallel 'culture and civi­
lization' tradition.

Culture, discrimination and value

As with the mass society thesis, the roots of the 'culture and civi­
lization' tradition can be traced well back into the nineteenth
century. Indeed, the key twentieth-century exponent of this per­
spective, F. R. Leavis, begins his most famous and rhetorical of
pamphlets, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, with a quotation
from Matthew Arnold's 1869 volume Culture and Anarchy. It was
Arnold ( [ 1869] 1960: 6) who crystallized that view of culture as 'the
best that has been thought and said in the world', and who laid the
foundations for an analysis that saw industrialization and the con­
comitant rise of the 'mass' as a profound threat to culture and
civilization. It was also Arnold who saw a key role for education -
'the road to culture', as he described it (1960: 209) - in combating

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