Culture according to F.R.Leavis and Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams describes culture as ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’. I have to admit it agree. I asked my mum and my boyfriend what they thought culture meant; to which my mum replied, ‘I suppose culture is described by what you believe in and the things/hobbies you do’ and my boyfriend replied, ‘I’d say it’s something people want to have. You associate culture with rich people; art, books, theatre’. This led to a great discussion about the classes and turned into a bit of a Marxism rant!

However, Richard Williams does give a good description of culture in Keywords by splitting it into three categories: ‘Ideal’ which is ‘the best that is thought or said’; ‘Documentary’ which responds to ‘how we live or have lived’ and ‘Social’ which is described as ‘the stuff that surrounds us’. Knowing this description helped me to better understand the F.R.Leavis reading, ‘Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture’.

One of the clear messages I got from this reading was similar to that of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Culture and Anarchy’: class is everything and class is minority keeping. Whether culture is trying to do away with classes to create an atmosphere of sweetness or light or whether by splitting the population into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace, culture is really highlighting the class differences: a person’s class is important to a person’s culture.

So to F.R.Leavis himself; who seems to look in detail at language and culture through literature. Firstly Leavis states that he believes culture to be in a crisis. I got the impression he blames Americanisation for this. Leavis looks at how Americanisation has impacted on films; taking a very negative look in my eyes; suggesting that Americanisation has led to the dumbing-down of films and literature and therefore the lowering on culture.

Leavis states how because the variety and number of types of literature has increased since Wordsworth’s time; meaning one has to be especially gifted or favoured, before he begins to discriminate. I understood this to mean that nowadays in order to discriminate against another’s culture; you yourself must be of a high class or of a high culture. This maybe harder to achieve nowadays if high culture is becoming harder to find or attain.

‘High-Brow’ is also touched upon by Leavis and I have to admit this term confuses me as I always though high culture and high-brow were more or less the same thing. In the reading high-brow is said to cut off the minority from the powers of the world as never before: once again the idea of class is being thrown back into the works.

The conclusion is simply, that culture is in trouble. Mass culture will not save the culture we are losing. Modern life and Americanisation seem to be the reasons for the loss of culture. Add the importance of class into this and the ever widening boundaries between classes and culture really is in trouble.