Culture by Raymond Williams Essay Example

any definition which fails to include the other definitions: ‘However difficult it may be in practice, we have to try to see the process as a whole, and to relate our particular studies, if not explicitly at least by ultimate reference, to the actual and complex organization’.

In addressing the ‘complex organization’ of culture as a particular way of life, the purpose of cultural analysis is always to understand what a culture is expressing; ‘the actual experience through which a culture was lived’; the ‘important common element’; ‘a particular community experience’. In short, to reconstitute what Williams calls ‘the structure of feeling’. By structure of feeling, he means the shared values of a particular group, class or society. The term is used to describe a discursive structure that is a cross between a collective cultural unconscious and an ideology.

We need to distinguish three levels of culture, even in its most general definition. There is the lived culture of a particular time and place, only fully accessible to those living in that time and place. There is the recorded culture, of every kind, from art to the most everyday facts: the culture of a period. There is also, as the factor connecting lived culture and period cultures, the culture of the selective tradition.

Lived culture is culture as lived and experienced by people in their day-to-day existence in a particular place and at a particular moment in time; and the only people who have full access to this culture are those who actually lived its structure of feeling. Once the historical moment is gone the structure of feeling begins to fragment. Cultural

analysis has access only through the documentary record of the culture. But the documentary record itself fragments under the processes of ‘the selective tradition’… For Williams, it is crucial to understand the selectivity of cultural traditions. It always (inevitably) produces a cultural record, a cultural tradition, marked by ‘a rejection of considerable areas of what was once a living culture’. Furthermore… there will always be a tendency for this process of selection to be related to and even governed by the interests of the class that is dominant’.

Within a given society, selection will be governed by many kinds of special interests, including class interests. Just as the actual social institutions will largely govern contemporary selection, so the development of the society, the process of historical change, will largely determine the selective tradition. The traditional culture of a society will always tend to correspond to its contemporary system of interests and values, for it is not an absolute body of work but a continual selection and interpretation.

This has quite profound ramifications for the student of popular culture. Given that selection is invariably made on the basis of ‘contemporary interests’, and given the incidence of many ‘reversals and rediscoveries’, it follows that ‘the relevance of past work, in any future situation, is unforeseeable’. If this is the case, it also follows that absolute judgments about what is good and what is bad, about what is high and what is low, in contemporary culture, should be made with a great deal less certainty, open as they are to historical realignment in a potential whirlpool of historical contingency.