Page 67 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CULTURE

production of a strain of men who are not ‘naturally’ (by divine right
of succession) fitted to rule but who are nevertheless powerful is made
sense of, by those men themselves and for the benefit of others, by the
systematic dissemination of the metaphor of culture.
However, the early hegemony of the aristocratic land-owning
capitalists was subjected by the nineteenth century to the altogether
more disruptive development of urban, industrial and commercial
capital. No sooner was culture established as a term that referred freely
to rulers without echoes of rhizomes than economic and political
changes began to challenge the naturalised right of the cultured to
rule. Entrepreneurial and imperial capitalism appeared to be no
respecter of culture. Instead, the term was denounced by Marx
(culture which means works of wonder for the rich also means rags
and corruption for the poor), and apparently ignored by the capitalist
and middle classes alike. It was left to the intelligentsia, especially its
liberal-conservative, moralist-humanist literary element, to take up the
concept. Here, during the mid-nineteenth century, it began to be
honed into a quite precise notion, one which is still influential today.
Culture was established, especially by Matthew Arnold and his
followers, as the pursuit not of material but of spiritual perfection via
the knowledge and practice of ‘great’ literature, ‘fine’ art and ‘serious’
music. Since the goal was perfection, not just understanding, and
spiritual, not material, culture was seen as the training of ‘discrimina-
tion’ and ‘appreciation’ based on ‘responsiveness’ to ‘the best that has
been thought and said in the world’. The cultural critics strove then to
prescribe and establish a canon of what exactly could be counted as the
‘best’. But such critics also tended to see themselves as an embattled
community struggling against the encroachments of material civilisa-
tion and scientific technology to preserve the ‘sweetness and light’ of
culture and disseminate it to the benighted denizens of mass society. In
such a climate it is not surprising to find that the ‘treasures’ of culture
are assumed to belong to a pre-industrial past and a non-industrial
consciousness. Modern proponents of this concept of culture-as-
embattled perfection have been influential in offering an ideology to
highly placed elites in government, administrative, intellectual and
even broadcasting circles within which their sectional interests can be
represented as general interests.
Culture has not yet recovered from this history. The concept itself
has undergone a period of decolonisation. It is argued by those who
object to the elitist notion of culture that it dispossesses most people,
leaving a ‘cultured’ fewand an ‘uncultured’ majority. Further, there
seems to be an uncanny degree of fit between this division of culture

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