Page 52 - Decoding Culture

THE WAY WE WERE 45

continue to be shaped' (Williams, 1965: 1 1 7) . It is this tension
between and interdependence of individual agency and the struc­
tures that people inherit and recreate that will continue to haunt
the emerging discipline of cultural studies.

Appropriating art

By the mid-1960s many of the views shared by the mass society
and culture and civilization traditions were increasingly subject to
scepticism among a younger generation of scholars working in a
variety of disciplinary contexts. They rejected the cultural elitism of
both traditions, in part because of a growing tendency to reject tra­
ditional forms of elitism per se, and in part because of the
recognition that, methodologically, elitist cultural commitments
had blinded analysts to the richness of so many popular cultural
forms. This had resulted in, on the one hand, media research rely­
ing upon mechanistic methods of content analysis that proved
entirely unable to capture the complexity of communication
processes, and, on the other hand, 'literary critical' discussions
that simply condemned popular culture, sight unseen. Like
Williams - though not always directly influenced by him - the new
generation felt that it was essential to understand culture as deeply
embedded in people's social lives, as part and parcel of everyday
experience rather than something to be aesthetically differenti­
ated in order to supply the pleasures of a cultured elite. But, as yet,
there was neither a theoretical nor a methodological focus for this
growing sense of dissatisfaction with received views on culture,
and for a period the main thrust of dissent took the unlikely but
understandable form of legitimating the study of popular culture by
demonstrating its significance within traditional evaluative terms.
So-called left-Leavisism is a good instance of this in action, at least

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