Page 48 - Decoding Culture

THE WAY WE WERE 41

merit close attention. Quite what was thus identified proved vari­
able. Hoggart, for example, was particularly positive about the
working-class cultures within which he had spent his youth, but
much less tolerant of those adopted by his post-war successors. His
chapter headings capture that bilious tone, contrasting, for
instance, The "Real" W o rld of People' and The Full Rich Life' with
his characterization of 'newer mass art' in terms like 'Invitations to
a Candy-Floss World' and 'Sex in Shiny Packets'.
Y e t in the context of the 'culture and civilization' tradition The
U s es o f Literacy does indeed make some progress toward a less
restrictive conception of culture. However, it is in Raymond
Williams' contributions to rethinking the tradition that the real
potential for change can best be seen. Williams was a complex and
striking thinker, the more so if one seeks to follow him right
through the long voyage of his engagement with the idea of cul­
ture. I shall be unjust to him here, considering only those elements
in his work of the late 1950s and early 1960s that crystallized some
of the terms through which the 'culture and civilization' tradition
could be transcended. For Williams it was a matter of fundamental
conviction that, in the title of a famous 1958 essay, 'Culture is ordi­
nary' (Williams, 1989) . In the light of this commitment, and
perhaps somewhat disingenuously, he professed himself puzzled
by the desire of so many to mark off culture as separate from the
experiences of ordinary people in their daily lives. The 'mass', con­
demned by both the mass society and the 'culture and civilization'
traditions to a life bereft of culture, were, to Williams, real people
actually living their cultures. There are in fact no masses;' he
writes, 'there are only ways of seeing people as masses' (Williams,
1961: 289). This did not mean that he had a uniformly positive view
of modern culture. Like Hoggart, he certainly did not, always
maintaining the importance of adopting a critical attitude to unde­
sirable features of any culture. But he saw that the differentiation

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