The idea of culture and the politics of cultural value

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The idea of culture and the politics of cultural
value

• Lecture 2
• An Introduction to British Cultural Studies
• 14/03/06

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When I hear the word culture I reach for
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False oppositions?

• (Choice between Neighbours Middlemarch)as
  though the same set of critical standards could
  be brought to bear and agreed on
• From Buckingham Sefton-Greene, Cultural
  Studies Goes to School

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Culture as opposed to

• Popular culture
• Mass culture
• Subculture
• Folk culture
• culture

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Culture and cultivation

• The civilised man was a figure who could
  exercise judgement but strictly within the
  acknowledged modes of authoritarian knowledge
  production, with the capacity to make a judgement
  as to what is beautiful, good and true
• Mark J. Smith, Culture Reinventing the Social
  Sciences (2000)

• The capacity to judge is a product of active
  participation in the moral, aesthetic and
  epistemological communities through which we
  identify the demarcation criteria for what is
  good, beautiful and true (and of course, bad,
  ugly, and false)

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Interlocking meanings of culture

• A general process of intellectual, spiritual and
  aesthetic development
• The works and practices of intellectual and
  especially artistic activityculture is music,
  literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and
  film
• From Keywords, Raymond Williams (1974)

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Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869)

• Culture is
• The best that has been thought and said
• It embodies
• Sweetness and light
• It is sought by
• Trying to perfect oneself, and ones mind as part
  of oneself
• And attained through
• Disinterested and active use of reading,
  reflection and observation

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Culture as an appeal to the best self

• Culture as a corrective to class feeling, as a
  way of mitigating the abuses of nationalism and
  provincialism, culture as a way of thinking that
  would give the growth of the moral life a fair
  chance
• Lionel Trilling on Matthew Arnold

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The culture of the masses

• This book (The Making of the English Working
  Class) has a clumsy title, but it is on which
  meets its purpose. Making, because it is a study
  in active process, which owes as much to agency
  as to conditioning. The working class did not
  rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was
  present at its own making

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Class as culture

• And class happens when some men, as a result of
  common experiences (inherited or shared) feel and
  articulate the identity of their interests as
  between themselves, and as against other men
  whose interests are different from (and usually
  opposed to) theirs. The class experience is
  largely determined by the productive relations
  into which men are bornclass consciousness is
  the way in which these experiences are handled in
  cultural terms embodied in traditions,
  value-systems, ideas and institutional forms
• From E.P. Thompson, Preface of The Making of
  the English Working Class

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(No Transcript)
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Just in case Charlie wasnt clear enough

• An early twentieth-century model of the social
  organisation of industrial/capitalist societies
  which characterised them as comprising a vast
  work-force of atomised, isolated individuals
  without traditional bonds of locality or kinship,
  who were alienated from their labour by its
  repetitive, unskilled tendencies and by their
  subjection to the vagaries of the wage
  relationship and fluctuations of the market. Such
  individuals were entirely at the mercy of (i)
  totalitarian ideologies and propaganda (ii)
  influence by the mass media

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Criticism from left to right

• Habermas the rise and fall of the public
  sphere
• Adorno Horkheimer alienation and the Culture
  Industry
• FR Leavis and others the rise of mass
  civilisation

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FR Leavis and the Cambridge circle

• Upon this minority depends our power of
  profiting by the finest human experience of the
  past they keep alive the subtlest and most
  perishable parts of tradition. Upon them depends
  the implicit standards that order the finer
  living of an age, the sense that this is worth
  more than that, this rather than that is the
  direction in which to go, that the centre is here
  rather than there

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The cruel paradox of mass society

• One danger I have long forseen from the spread of
  the democratic sentiment, is that of the
  traditions of literary taste..being reversed with
  success by a popular vote. The revolution against
  taste, once begun, will land us in irreparable
  chaos
• Edmund Gosse quoted in Q.D. Leavis REF!!!!!!!!

• But the modern is exposed to a concourse of
  signals so bewildering in their variety and
  number that, unless he is especially gifted or
  especially favoured, he can hardly begin to
  discriminate. Here we have the plight of culture
  in general
• From FR Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority
  Culture (1930)

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Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957)

• There is peasant blood in my veins, and you
  cannot astonish me with peasant virtues
• Chekhov, quoted by Hoggart

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Shush..

• Different listening situations give different
  norms of quality, both for the piece of music and
  for the activity of the listener. As long as I
  listened with dispersed interest, I was charmed
  by the sound..I adopted an adequate mode of
  listening..when I began to listen more
  concentratedly, however, I applied an inadequate
  mode of listeningbecause I measured it according
  to norms appropriate to other listening
  situations and other music
• Quoted in Kassabian, Anahid

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Mass entertainment democracy as consumer
society?

• Involves corrupt brightness and moral evasion
• Progress is seen as seeking material
  possessions
• Equality is dressed up as moral levelling
• Freedom as irresponsible pleasure

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Hoggart and the social value of entertainment

• The strongest objection to the more trivial
  popular entertainments is not that they prevent
  their readers from becoming highbrow, but that
  they make it harder for people without an
  intellectual bent to become wise in their own way