F R Leavis and Raymond Williams - Two Very Different Positions on 'Culture'
As I grew up, my idea of culture was what socialists disparagingly called 'posh culture', being positively championed and articulated by the famed literary critic F R Leavis ...
... in, among a range of contexts, 'The Great Tradition' (1948). Such high culture was seen to be embodied in a small number of seminal and critically important literary and artistic works, productions that revealed universal truths and wisdom, and the highest spiritual and moral goals to be strived for in a society. This notion of culture has developed and been controlled by elites for the past two hundred years.
Leavis was only ever recorded once and by the BBC - in a open lecture at Cambridge University, where he was a don. In this talk, he articulated his elitist position that the democratisation of culture was a great declining, as exemplified in the following extraordinary extract ...
One articulation of an alternative emerging and contemporary view of culture was given by Raymond Williams ...
... novelist, critic and Cambridge University don, in 'Culture and Society 1750-1950' (1958). Coming from a Welsh working class background, Williams widened the idea of what 'culture' could involve to mean 'the whole way of life' of all of the classes in a society, though there was a corrective and politically motivated focus on the culture of the working classes.
With my middle class plus background, I still have a sneaking affinity with elite culture - so wads of opera, ballet and classical music do me very well indeed. But through university sexual politics, theoretically based in an amalgam of Marx, Freud and Michel Foucault, I've added pop music, Manga comics and a range of other dangerously dissident interests to the mix.
Being gay, I guess we live across borders, using Williams' term, and have a natural affinity with taking a range of different often contradictory angles on the way we view the world and culture. I've never felt the needed to resolve the inherent contradictions in such a stance.
And I was wondering where you guys stood in this?
I stand squarely with Leavis, who was arguing in favor of the best that has been said and thought in the language. Where Williams (and others) go wrong is in the erroneous foundational argument that high culture is only for the elites. Pfui – this is nonsense and puffery. High culture is everywhere and easily accessible. There is no bank account check at the door of a great museum or library; and I have known many people from working class families (and lower) who have had their lives deeply enriched by high culture. Pop culture has its place: it’s non-challenging and easily digestible. However, by giving such works the heft of canonicity, we are doing our culture and ourselves a disservice. (Just my two cents, and worth every penny.)
ReplyDeleteI stand squarely with Leavis, who was arguing in favor of the best that has been said and thought in the language. Where Williams (and others) go wrong is in the erroneous foundational argument that high culture is only for the elites. Pfui – this is nonsense and puffery. High culture is everywhere and easily accessible. There is no bank account check at the door of a great museum or library; and I have known many people from working class families (and lower) who have had their lives deeply enriched by high culture. Pop culture has its place: it’s non-challenging and easily digestible. However, by giving such works the heft of canonicity, we are doing our culture and ourselves a disservice. (Just my two cents, and worth every penny.)
ReplyDeletehey bob
ReplyDeleteit's true that 'high culture' is now available to all - in this context, i was living in london as a kid when the gov caused the major galleries to introduce not insubstantial entrance fees - and the following uproar was along the lines of restricting access of art to certain sections of the community - the charges were short-lived and the abandoned toll booths were a pleasant sight for the victors in this skirmish.
i think that the raymond williams's are broadening the notion of culture beyond the arts i constructed it as - and is perhaps suggesting different cultures for different stratum in a society.
there seems to be a kind of anthropological imperative going on in all this - an expanded range of activities/objects to consider allows a better reading of the phenomenon in question - all strata in a society - a different view of 'culture' than that in which i was schooled. and you too i guess
good to hear from you as always
cheers
I'm with Bob on this. And it disturbs me when a classical music critic in the NY TIMES says Rap Music is equally good music as anything Mozart wrote. That's bullshit. Rap music has its place in the great scheme of things, but it's nowhere as complex or profound or as "good" as Mozart.
ReplyDeleteAnother example of this critic's absurdity was Alex Ross in THE NEW YORKER complaining that he was to meet a friend at Lincoln Center, but the young man couldn't FIND Lincoln Center, and so Lincoln Center--and everything it stood for--was somehow no longer relevant to society as a whole, because young people who lived in the East Village couldn't even GET to it. (Apparently the young man was incapable of hailing a taxi and saying, "Lincoln Center" or of asking a token clerk in a subway booth how to get to Lincoln Center...but that was Lincoln Center's fault, according to Ross.)
The fault is not with High Culture. As Bob accurately points out it's easily available and accessible to anyone who bothers to make an effort. But the people who are responsible for presenting it--heads of opera houses, symphony orchestras, etc.--have become apologetic about their art forms and no longer trust it. I suspect many of them don't even understand the uniqueness of their art, so they can't present it truthfully to the public. And so the public--especially those who are coming to, say, opera for the first time--has no idea of how it can change their lives and enrich their existence, because the head of the Opera Company is only concerned about making opera something Celebrities want to attend, or making opera "non-threatening" or "cool."
I'm all for making High Culture accessible to anyone...and there are lots of innovative ways to do that. But you don't do that by compromising the art itself. DON GIOVANNI *is* better than rap.
I've always loved so-called "elite culture" and was raised to respect it. I still do. But at the same time, I realize that everything humans do is culture. Culture is the humanly-created part of the environment we live in. The danger for a culture in this age is that when a culture (or important aspects of a culture) becomes corporately controlled, the culture can change from nurturing (which is what "culture" ultimately means) to toxic. I loved pop culture in the '60s, for example; I tend to love it a lot less now, because so much of it is sheer toxicity (messages pushing consumerism, selfishness, waste, greed) spewed out by the six global corporations that now control so much of pop culture. I find myself gravitating more and more towards so-called "elite culture" these days because it's more difficult (though not impossible) for corporations to gain control of it and spoil it.
ReplyDeletehi keith
ReplyDeleteyep, while valuing and being drawn to 'high culture', particularly as a kid in class-conscious london (and living just down from the Victoria and Albert Museum), i see the value of williams' expanded idea of culture - it lets more things be considered and it's rather nice to be able to step beyond the narrow 'canon' of approved things and ponder new things and what they say about an expanded idea of what constitutes a society.
noan chomsky in 'manufacturing consent' puts the pretty inarguable case that culture and it's expressions are (unfortunately) quite controlled by a society's elites - important works of art are now indisolutably tied to corporations in the sense that they are the only entitiies that can afford them - as galleries increasingly cannot - such works are now commodities to be traded like shares and other stock market items - for fine art (paintings and sculpture and so on) such corporations are the sole determiners their value, at a auction and so on. and high monetary value is hard not to associate with aesthetic value :<
but i'll still be going to my sotheby's and christies auctions and hoping to yet again to be the highest bidder!
cheers
hi paul
ReplyDeletei feel as though i should pop into a confessional about this - i'm a guilty elitist where certain forms of culture are concerned - i guess with the codicile that i understand there are other new emerging art forms that are going to be of even long-term interesting to some (other) people. though i'm making a judgement about relative value!
i agree 'high culture' (classical music and opera for example) is accessible to all through the internet, DVD and so on, though not, now, in the same sense of everyone now being able to have the live experience - as a kid in london anyone, really everyone, could afford to go to covent garden - in The Gods 50 pence seats, there were hoards of strange and eccentric and not-at-all well off opera- and balleto-manics with a deep understanding of their chosed form - these inexpensive seats are now not readily financially accessible to those who used to attend. i remember flyng into london a few years back only being able to get an upper circle seat at the Garden to see Caballe in the Rossini rarity 'Il viaggio a Reims' and being squeeze between men in dinner suits and women in long evening dresses - where grubby raincoats had used to prevail
i too am very apprehense about tricksy ways of luring in new publics - this of course is a financial issue in that with arts funding being cut in this country there's a need to correspondingly increase attendance
yes, the challenge is finding those ways of making such delicious necessities as Don G more accessible
good to hear - apologies for the delay in responding - we bought a dog and confession of the breed should probably be held back for an email - be in touch!
best