Page 53 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

community and the idea that ‘culture is ordinary’, as described by Raymond
Williams. Indeed, the whole notion of common culture within cultural studies is
associated with ‘culturalism’ and the stress on a common community element to
30 culture in the face of the selective tradition of elite class culture. In so far as culture
is a common whole way of life, its boundaries are largely locked, at least in the work
of Williams, into those of nationality and ethnicity.
The work of Paul Willis has maintained the idea of ‘common culture’ in the
tradition of Williams. However, whereas the initial stress in the notion of a common
culture for Williams was on the generation of meaning at the moment of
production, for Willis a common culture is forged through the practice of creative
consumption. For example, Willis argues that young people have an active, creative
and symbolically productive relation to the commodities that are constitutive of
youth culture. Meaning, he suggests, is not inherent in the commodity but is
produced through actual usage in a process called ‘grounded aesthetics’. For Willis,
contemporary culture involves the active creation of meaning by all people as
cultural producers through acts of symbolic creativity.
Under the influence of poststructuralism cultural studies has begun to emphasize
not so much commonality as difference. As cultural studies has engaged with
structuralism and poststructuralism so it has been widely accepted that meaning is
generated through the play of difference down a chain of signifiers. Further, subjects
are formed through difference so that we are constituted in part by what we are not.
In this context, there has been a growing emphasis on difference rather than
commonality in cultural life. This is a culture that is not ‘One’ but rather is divided
by class, gender, race, age and other forms of ‘difference’. Indeed, though once
grasped as a ‘whole way of life’, culture is now understood to be fractured into a
kaleidoscope of distinctions.
Links Consumption, cultural studies, culturalism, culture, difference, poststructuralism

Common sense The category of ‘common sense’ has been a significant one in the
context of Gramscian-influenced cultural studies and its concern with questions of
ideology and hegemony. Here the notion of common sense refers to the embedded,
incoherent beliefs and assumptions that characterize a given social order. That is,
common sense involves the deeply held terrain of the ‘taken-for-granted’ aspects of
cultural life.
For Gramsci, all people reflect upon the world and it is through the ‘common
sense’ of popular culture that they organize their lives and experience. Thus,
common sense becomes a crucial site of ideological conflict. In particular, common
sense is the site of struggle on which Gramsci hoped to see the forging of a ‘good
sense’ that would involve the recognition of the class character of capitalism.
Common sense is the most significant site of ideological struggle because it is the
domain of that practical consciousness which guides the actions of the everyday
world. More coherent sets of philosophical ideas are contested and transformed in
the domain of common sense so that every philosophical current leaves behind it
a sediment of common sense. Of course, common sense is not rigid and immobile