Williams and culture

I'd like to add to yesterday's post with a short remark on William's definition of culture. I was reminded, during some easter book-cleanup that RW worked with a threepart definition in his book The Long Revolution (1961). Briefly, the three general categories of culture are 1) the ideal, 2) the documentary and 3) the social.

Nuff said. Happy easter!


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Why Culture is Ordinary?

This blog is named after a 1958 essay by Raymond Williams. It’s a catchy phrase and a good name for a blog. It’s also something like a source of inspiration, or a mind opener, you could say. I’ll try and explain how and why.

Williams was a marxist-socialist academic, writer and critic, and one of the forces behind the formation of the Cultural Studies school of media research. Coming from someone who spent his lifetime studying aspects of culture, “ordinary” may seem an odd choice of words, but hang on – it all makes sense.

I do not subscribe to nearly all aspects of Williams’ opinions. His ideas were born out of different times (1921-1988) and a different place (primarily the UK). Although it is possible to draw a few comparisons between Williams and myself – a non-academic background, coming into media studies through literature – I would probably feel a stranger next to him.

But then, there’s this view of culture that I really find interesting. Williams wrote in Keywords (1976) that “culture” is one of the most complicated words in the English language. (We might add, so it is in Norwegian as well.) It’s complicated because it carries different meanings and those meanings change with different contexts, but not the least because it’s so widely used. It’s one of those complicated terms that we actually use in everyday language.

If we stick to the uses of culture employed in the humanities, I believe we are left with three definitions, or senses of the concept:

1. Culture as a set of shared practices and values (in the anthropological sense, the culture of the Aztecs, Norwegian culture, but also in more narrow contexts, cf. subculture).

2. Culture as in cultural phenomena, consumption goods and leisure activities: Books, paintings, movies, television drama – but also in the extended usage of culture in connection with sports, fashion etc.)

3. Culture as the utmost of human artistic achievement, cf. high culture, Culture as Civilization.

In addition, we should add the overall distinction between culture and nature as significant for an understanding of the concept.

Despite all the depth and richness and conflict and confusion surrounding the concept, Williams states: “Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact”.

And further:

“Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land”

This notion of culture writing itself into the land is significant. It is connected to the observations the author makes about seeing culture in the landscape itself. In “Culture is Ordinary”, Williams describes a journey, from the village and the contryside to the city and the factory, from the cathedral to the university, from the teashop to the pub. The landscapes he experiences all carry different meanings: Culture writing itself into the land. (This brings to mind Pierre Bourdieu’s and Marcel Mauss’ notion of habitus, as culture anchored in the body).

Williams sees two (rather than three) senses of culture, and he argues that we need to value the “significance of their conjunction”. Thus, in order to fully understand def. 1, we need to grasp def. 2 and 3 and vice versa. Culture is the sum of its definitions.

Raymond Williams is a great writer of prose, his style is concise, succinct, personal. Another brilliant academic also wrote on the subject of bringing together of the various notions of culture, but Pierre Bourdieu’s style is more Proust than Hemingway. I really enjoy the following passage from the opening pages of Distinction (1979):

“One cannot fully understand cultural practices unless ‘culture’ in the restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage, is brought back into ‘culture’ in the antroplogical sense, and the elaborated taste for the most refined objects is reconnected with the elementary taste for the flavours of food”.

Once more, then: Culture inscribed in the body, incorporated.

Let’s go back to Williams: “The questions I ask about our culture are questions about our general and common purposes, yet also questions about deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind.”

To me, this is a call to keep your eyes open to culture in all its forms and to remember that culture carries significance both on a societal and personal level. Culture is the air that we breathe, and we tend not to think about the existence of oxygen on a daily basis, but it’s nevertheless a good thing to be reminded of what keeps us going. There is a lot of crap out there, Williams reminds us, but are the people we meet vulgar?, he asks. Let’s at least examine the matter at hand. This is the force of media studies, the way I know it, it doesn’t discriminate. I believe it was Cicero who said that “I am human, I consider nothing human to be alien to me”. A great motto, not only for Montaigne, who supposedly carved it into a roof beam in his study, but also for media studies in general. Culture is ordinary, therefore, do not shy away from academic examinations of any cultural expression, high, low or middle brow.

It’s a tall order, I know. But remember: Culture can also be extraordinary.

The second coming of CiO

As you can see from the archive, I launched this blog five years ago (on my 29th birthday, for some reason I can't remember). Since then, it's been stone dead. Like so many other blogs. But now, from the ashes arises the Culture is Ordinary blog!

Why? And why now? I guess the answer must be that I feel I should give something back to the Norwegian taxpayers who fund the Ph.D I recently began at the Department of media and communication at the University of Oslo. (You wonder what my Ph.D is about? I'll save that for later.) Or perhaps it is that I now feel the need to communicate with the world outside my crammy office? Or perhaps it's a touch of mid-thirties vanity.

Anyway, expect somewhat more frequent postings on CiO in the coming period. As it says in the banner headline thingy, I will use this blog for several purposes, personal and academic, but the common denominator will be issues cultural. So what does it mean, that Culture is Ordinary? More on the origin of this blog's name tomorrow - or sometime soon, anyway.