CULTURALISM

Asmaa Hanifah J1A018009

Hanifa Risfia J1A018012
Nurul Safika J1A0180
Retyana J1A018021
Mahesa Bayu J1A0180
Yusi Maryuningsih J1A018036
CHAPTER 3 - CULTURALISM
• The works by
• - Richard Hoggart
• - Raymond Williams
• - E.P Thompson
• - Stuart Hall & Paddy Whannel
=> Constitutes founding texts of culturalism.
• Richard Jhonson (1979) uses the term to indicate the presence of a body
of theoretical concerns connecting the work of the three theorists.
• # Hoggart & Williams : Leavisism
• # Thompson : Mechanistic and Economic versions of Marxism
ÞAn approach what insist that by analysing the culture of society and The
perspective that stresses 'human agency' (the active production of
culture, rather than its passive consumption.
ÞTaken together (three theorists) as a body work -> emergence of what is
known as the cultural studies approach to popular culture.
Þ• A brief discussion of the institutionalization of culturalism at the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
Richard Hoggart: The Uses of Literacy
• Hoggart’s approach to popular culture has much in common with the
approach of Leavisism,
(Leavisism is most evident in the content of his own ‘good past/bad
present’ binary opposition: instead of the organic community of the
seventeenth century, his ‘good past’ is the working-class culture of the
1930s)
> both operate with a notion of cultural decline; both see education in
discrimination as a means to resist the manipulative appeal of mass
culture.
The Uses of Literacy is divided into two
parts:
• An “older” order, and ‘Yielding place to new’,
• ‘An “older” order is describing the working-class culture of Hoggart’s
childhood in the 1930s;
• ‘Yielding place to new’, describes a traditional working-class culture
under threat from the new forms of mass entertainment of the 1950s.
• The first half of The Uses of Literacy consists mostly of examples of communal
and self-made entertainment.
# For example, he defends working-class appreciation of popular song against the
dismissive hostility of Cecil Sharp’s (Leavisesque) longing for the ‘purity’ of folk
music (see Storey, 2003) in terms which were soon to become central to the
project of cultural studies.

• in the second part of his study, Hoggart turns to consider ‘some features of
contemporary life’
# the self-making aspect of working-class culture is mostly kept from view. The
popular aesthetic, so important for an understanding of the working-class
pleasure on show in the 1930s, is now forgotten in the rush to condemn the
popular culture of the 1950s.
Raymond Williams: ‘The analysis of culture’
• The ‘three general groups in the concept of culture' are defined by
Williams (2009).
• 1. The "ideal," in which culture is described as a state or process of
human perfection based on certain absolute or universal values (ibid.).
• 2. The ‘documentary' record: a culture's surviving texts and practices.
‘Culture is the body of intellectual and creative work in which human
thinking and experience are variously documented in a comprehensive
way,' according to this description (Williams, 2009: ibid.).
• 3. The “social” concept of culture, in which culture is described as a
representation of a way of life (ibid.).
The importance of the ‘social' concept of culture in the formation of
culturalism cannot be overstated. Therefore, Three new ways of thinking about
culture are added through this definition.

• a) the ‘anthropological' stance, which sees culture as a definition of a

specific way of life;
• b) the argument that culture ‘expresses certain meanings and values'
(ibid.);
• c) the claim that cultural analysis should be the ‘clarification of the
implicit and explicit meanings and values in a particular way of life, a
particular culture' (ibid.).
We need to distinguish three levels of culture, even in its most general
definition.

• 1) lived culture of a particular time and place, only fully accessible to

those living in that time and place.
• 2) recorded culture, of every kind, from art to the most everyday
facts: the culture of a period.
• 3) factor connecting lived culture and period cultures, the culture of
the selective tradition
E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working
Class
Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel: The Popular
Arts
• In this chapter, Hall and Whannel refute Leavism's arguments, as well
as the critique of mass culture (primarily by Americans), who claim
that all high culture is good and all popular culture is bad, on the one
hand. On the other hand, contrary to Leavism and criticism of mass
culture, most high culture is good, and some popular culture is also
good - this is ultimately a question of popular discrimination.
• -Popular art. . . it is basically conventional art that reaffirms, in an intense form,
familiar values and attitudes; that measures and reconfirms.-Popular art isn't art that
tries and fails to be'real' art, but rather art that exists within the realm of the popular.-
The Popular Arts is primarily concerned with the textual qualities of popular culture.
• Songs, magazines, concerts, festivals, comics, interviews with pop stars, movies, and
other forms of pop music culture help young people develop a sense of self: The
commercial entertainment market's culture... plays a significant role... It reflects pre-
existing feelings and attitudes while also providing an expressive field and a set of
symbols through which this attitude can be projected (276) It reflects existing attitudes
and sentiments while also providing an expressive field and a set of symbols through
which these attitudes can be projected (276). Furthermore, pop songs reflect
adolescent struggles with a tangle of emotional and sexual issues.
• In a nut shell, hall and whannel differ from Leavism in that they
advocate critical awareness training as a means of discriminating
between what is good and what is bad within popular culture, rather
than as a means of defending against it. When the ideas of Hall and
Whannel, as well as those of Hoggart, Williams, and Thompson, were
brought together under the banner of culturalism at the Birmingham
University Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, it was a move
that would lead to a decisive break with Leavism.
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies