Communication,media, film and cultural studies

What is culture?
In this context, the concept of culture is associated with a coherent system of identifying attitudes, values, and frames of activities linked to a given pattern of behaviour (Sapir 1921 and 1967). What defines a culture is not the presence or absence of a certain cultural trait, but rather the way in which it pursues its objectives in a given direction. One way of doing this is to provide a system of accepted rules and standards of behaviour, in other words a ‘code of ethical values’.

PIONEERS
Deeply concerned about these developments, three working-class intellectuals, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E.P. Thompson, focused on the question of "culture" in their class-based society and wrote the texts which formed the basis of this intellectual movement.

Richard Hoggart (b. 1918), taught literature in the adult education programme at the University of Hull, 1946-59; and later (after 1957) taught English at the University of Birmingham, where he founded the CCCS, serving as director from 1964-68. In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Hoggart "reads" working class culture for the values and the meanings that were embodied in its patterns and arrangements (Hall, 1996, p. 31); he describes the conditions and the culture of his youth--he grew up in Leeds during the 1920s and the 1930s, conveying (with great poignancy) working-class attitudes toward religion, politics, poverty, sex, and so on via the speech-patterns of the area: in the second half, he engages contemporary "mass" culture of the 1950s. Like Leavis, he perpetuates a dichotomy between the "good" culture of working-class (organic) communities of the past and the "bad" mass culture of the present, i.e., an alarming amount has been imported from the United States.

Raymond Williams (1921-88) taught in adult education programs at Oxford, 1946-60, and from 1961 taught literary studies at Cambridge (he was Professor of Drama from 1974-83). In Culture and Society (1958), he conceptualizes history as a process whereby cultural forms--the press, advertising, and the novel for example--shape and are shaped by the context of the time. In large part, he examines "key words," such as "democracy," "class," and "culture," noticing how the terms were used and how the terms changed, during three historical phases: (a) the nineteenth century, including J.S. Mill, Jeremy Bentham, S.T. Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold; (b) the brief interregnum between the two centuries, including George Bernard Shaw; and (c) the modern period, including such figures as T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, and George Orwell.

Williams offers us a broad definition of "culture," one that includes "high" culture as well as "mass" culture, and suggests that we have to take a holistic approach to the study of culture. From this perspective, recovering the "structure of feeling" of a period means going beyond the "major" literary texts and considering a range of forgotten texts, including letters, pamphlets, voting polls, and so on. By linking these texts with the political and the social history of the period, one can sketch the "social character" of the period. As well, he argues that we need a "common culture," one which values "diversity in community," enabling one to take pride in one's position but also to respect the different abilities of others. In The Long Revolution (1961), the follow-up book, he extends his thesis, providing more concrete proposals for a way out of the "stagnation" he sees ahead.

E.P. Thompson (1924-93), the radical historian, wrote The Making of the English Working Class (1963), a monumental work (it runs to about 900 pages), demonstrates the emergence of the British working-class--a topic ignored by historians of conventional history. He outlines the political and the cultural formation of the English working-class, approaching his topic from the perspectives of (a) the traditions of English radicalism in the late 18th century, e.g., religious dissent, popular dissent, and the influence of the French Revolution; (b) the social and the cultural experience of the Industrial Revolution as it was lived by different working groups, including weavers, field workers, cotton spinners, and so on; and (c) the growth of working class consciousness as evidenced in the corresponding growth in a range of social, political, and cultural institutions.

In short, Thompson argues that class is an historical phenomenon, i.e., we cannot understand it as a structure. To understand "class" (he writes) we must see it as a social and cultural formation arising from processes which can be studied only as they work themselves out over a long period of time. Culture must be understood in terms of the experiences of the winners and the losers in the struggles to fix meanings in society.

by Robert M. Seiler