AULIA MAGHFIRAH RAMADHANI

200512502039

ENGLISH LITERATURE C

CULTURALISM

In this chapter John Storey will discuss the work produced in the late 1950s and early

1960s by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, EP Thompson, and Stuart Hall and Paddy

Whannel. Although there are certain differences among the authors, this work is the basic text

of culturalism.

OPINION OF EXPERTS

1. Richard Hoggart - The uses of Literacy

         Use of Literacy is divided into two parts, namely the 'old order' section, which

describes the culture of the working class, marginalized social groups, which were

part of Hoggart's childhood (1930s); and the section 'towards a new direction', which

describes how traditional working-class culture was threatened by new forms of mass

entertainment in the 1950s.

According to Hoggart, traditionally, or at least for generations, regard art as an

escape, something that is enjoyed but has little to do with the problems of everyday life. Art

is a marginal, (joy) thing, the 'real' life that goes on everywhere. And art is for use. For this

reason, the aesthetics of the working class, or people, pay great attention to details that are

familiar in everyday life. 

The weakness in this book is Hoggart's inability to pass his brilliant ideas on 1930s

popular culture into his treatment of so-called 1950s mass culture. Maybe it was covered up
because of the pessimistic feeling that was very dominant at that time. When, in the second

part of his study, Hoggart turns to considering 'some features of contemporary life' (169), the

self-made aspect of working-class culture is largely invisible. The popular culture of the

1950s, as Hoggart describes it, no longer offers the full possibilities of a rich life; everything

is now too thin and bland.

2. Raymond Williams – The Analysis of Culture

         Raymond Williams had an enormous influence on cultural studies. He has produced

outstanding works and has made significant contributions to our understanding of cultural

theory, cultural history, television, the press, radio and advertising.

In 'Analysis of culture', Williams (2009) outlines 'three general categories in the

definition of culture:

  The “ideal”, where culture is a state or process of human perfection, in terms of

certain absolute or universal values.

  "Documentary'" recordings: extant cultural texts and practices. In this definition,

'culture is a body of intellectual and imaginative work, in which, in detail, human

thoughts and experiences are variously recorded'.

 Definition of "social" culture, where culture is a description of a certain way of life.

Williams' definition introduces three new ways of thinking about culture:

a.  The 'anthropological' position, which sees culture as a description of a particular way

of life.

b.  The proposition that culture 'expresses certain meanings and values' The

c. claim that cultural analysis works should be 'a clarification of the implied and explicit

meanings and values in a particular way of life, a particular culture.

Lived culture is the culture experienced by people in their daily life in a certain place and at a

certain time; the only people who have full access to this culture are those who really live the

structure of its feelings.

 The making of the British working class details the political and cultural formation of

the British working class by approaching the subject from three different but related

perspectives.

  It reconstructs the political and cultural traditions of British radicalism in the late

eighteenth century: religious dissent, popular discontent, and the influence of the

French Revolution.

  It focuses on the social and cultural experiences of the Industrial Revolution as

experienced by different working groups: weavers, field workers, cotton spinners,

craftsmen, etc.

  Analyzing the growth of working class consciousness as evidenced in the growth in

various political, social and culturally based and self-aware working class institutions.

Williams draws two conclusions from his research.

1. When every caution has been made, the remarkable act of the period between 1790-1830

was the formation of the "working class".

2. He claims that 'this is, perhaps, the most famous popular culture Britain has ever known.

3. E.P Thompson - The Making Of English Working Class

         For Thompson the working class is a 'historical phenomenon' but not a 'structure' or a

'category', but the union of 'a number of disparate events. And that is 'something that

actually happens in human relationships. Moreover, classes are not 'things'; it is a historical

relation of unity and difference: uniting one class against another. As he explains: 'class

occurs when some people, as a result of shared experiences (inherited or shared), perceive
and articulate their identity of interests as among themselves, and against others whose

interests differ from (and usually conflict with theirs). Classes' general experience is largely

determined by the productive relationships into which human beings are born – or enter

unintentionally. However, class consciousness, the translation of experience into culture, 'is

defined by humans as they go through their own history, and, in the end, this is only the

definition. Class is for Thompson, 'a social and cultural formation, which emerges from a

process which can be learned when they worked alone over a considerable period of history'

Thompson's aim was to place the 'experience' of the British working class at the

center of an understanding of the formation of industrial capitalist society over the decades.

by the 1830s. This is history from below in the double sense suggested by Gregor McLellan

(1982): a history from below which seeks to reintroduce working-class experience into the

historical process; and history from below which asserts that the working class are conscious

agents of their own making. Thompson works with Marx's (1977) famous claim about the

way men and women make history: 'Men make their own history, but they don't make it as

they please; they do not create it in circumstances of their own choosing, but in circumstances

directly encountered, given and handed down from the past.

What Thompson does is to emphasize the first part of Marx's claim (human agency)

against what he considers Marxist historians to have overemphasized the second part

(structural determinants). Paradoxically, or perhaps not, he himself has been criticized for

overemphasizing the role of human agency – human experience, human values – at the

expense of structural factors.

 4. Stuart Hall & Paddy Whannel – The Popular Arts

 The main thesis of Popular Art is that 'in terms of actual quality the struggle between what is

good and valuable and what is ugly and demeaning is not a struggle against modern forms of

communication, but a conflict within these media' (Hall and Whannel, 1964: 15).

This book was written against the background of concerns about the influence of popular

culture in the school classroom.

Part of the goal of Popular Art, is to replace the 'misleading generalizations' of previous

attacks on popular culture by helping to facilitate popular discrimination within and across

popular culture itself. Their approach led them to reject two common teaching strategies that

are often encountered when popular culture is introduced into the classroom. 

1. Defensive strategies that introduce popular culture to condemn it as second-class culture.

2. An 'opportunist' strategy that embraces the popular tastes of students.

The second part of their thesis: the need to recognize in popular culture a distinct

category they call 'popular art'. Popular art is not art that tries and fails to become 'real' art,

but art that operates within popular boundaries.

Popular art is basically conventional art that restates, in an intense form, already

known values and attitudes; which measures and reaffirms, but brings the shock of art as

well as the shock of recognition. Such art has something in common with folk art, namely,

true contact between the viewer and performer: but it differs from folk art in that it is

individual art, the known art of the performer. The audience as a community has depended

on the skill of the performer, and on the strength of personal style, to articulate shared

values and interpret the experience.

 The main focus of The Popular Arts'  is on the textual quality of popular culture.

However, when Hall and Whannel turned to the question of youth culture, they felt the

need to discuss the interaction between the text and the audience.

The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

In the introduction to The Long Revolution, Williams (1965) regrets the fact that “there is no
academic subject within which the questions I am interested in can be followed through; I
hope one day there might be” (10). Three years after the publication of these comments,
Hoggart established the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of
Birmingham. Culturalists study cultural texts and practices in order to reconstitute or
reconstruct the experiences, values, etc. – the ‘structure of feeling’ of particular groups or
classes or whole societies, in order to better understand the lives of those who lived the
culture.