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Culture Is Ordinary RELATED ARTICLES
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Raymond Williams Developing a Liberatory Consciousness
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The bus-stop was outside the cathedral. I had been looking at the Mappa Mundi, with
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its rivers out of Paradise, and at the chained library, where a party of clergymen had
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gotten in easily, but where I had waited an hour and cajoled a verger before I even In Case You Missed It: "National
saw the chains. Now, across the street, a cinema advertised the Six-Five Special and a Endowment for the Arts Announces
National Folklife Network" READ
Published in: GIA Reader, cartoon version of Gulliver's Travels. The bus arrived, with a driver and conductress MORE...
Vol 12, No 1 (Winter deeply absorbed in each other. We went out of the city, over the old bridge, and on
2001) through the orchards and the green meadows and the !elds red under the plough. The Role of the Arts in Criminal Justice
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Ahead were the Black Mountains, and we climbed among them, watching the steep
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!elds end at the grey walls, beyond which the bracken and heather and whin had not
yet been driven back. To the east, along the ridge, stood the line of grey Norman LA County's New Cultural Policy To
castles; to the west, the fortress wall of the mountains. Then, as we still climbed, the Ensure Every Resident Has Access to
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rock changed under us. Here, now, was limestone, and the line of the early iron
workings along the scarp. The farming valleys, with their scattered white houses, fell The Community ACTS Fund in Colorado
away behind. Ahead of us were the narrower valleys: the steel rolling-mill, the READ MORE...

gasworks, the grey terraces, the pitheads. The bus stopped, and the driver and Foundation Grants to Arts and Culture
conductress got out, still absorbed. They had done this journey so often, and seen all in 2017 READ MORE...
its stages. It is a journey, in fact, that in one form or another we have all made. Further reading
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I was born and grew up halfway along that bus journey. Where I lived is still a farming
Published: valley, though the road through it is being widened and straightened, to carry the
Winter 2001
heavy lorries to the north. Not far away, my grandfather, and so back through the
Cultural Policy
generations, worked as a farm labourer until he was turned out of his cottage and, in
Rural Arts
his !fties, became a roadman. His sons went at thirteen or fourteen onto the farms;
his daughters into service. My father, his third son, left the farm at !fteen to be a boy
porter on the railway, and later became a signalman, working in a box in this valley
until he died. I went up the road to the village school, where a curtain divided the two 2020 GIA …
classes — Second to eight or nine, First to fourteen. At eleven I went to the local
grammar school, and later to Cambridge.

Culture is ordinary; that is the !rst fact. 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 !nding of
common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and
amendment, under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing Video from the GIA 2020 Virtual
themselves into the land. The growing society is there, yet it is also made and Convening are now available for
remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is, !rst, the slow learning of streaming.

shapes, purposes, and meanings, so that work, observation, and communication are
possible. Then, second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, Developing a
the making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings. A culture has two
aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the
Liberatory
new observations and meanings, which are o"ered and tested. These are the Consciousness in
ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them
the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both
Funding
the most ordinary common meanings and the !nest individual meanings. We use the In this podcast we’re glad to have
word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life — the common Dr. Barbara J. Love, consultant,
author, lecturer, and the founder of
meanings; to mean the arts and learning — the special processes of discovery and
the framework Liberatory
creative e"ort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I Conscious joining us. She will
insist on both, and on the signi!cance of their conjunction. The questions I ask about discuss how to develop a Liberatory
our culture are questions about our general and common purposes, yet also Consciousness mindset that can
questions about deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society and in lead us to more drastic change both
within our institutions and outside
every mind.
of them.
Now there are two senses of culture — two colours attached to it — that I know
about but refuse to learn. The !rst I discovered at Cambridge, in a teashop. I was not,
Podcast #31: Deve…
by the way, oppressed by Cambridge. I was not cast down by old buildings, for I had
come from a country with twenty centuries of history written visibly into the earth: I
liked walking through a Tudor court, but it did not make me feel raw. I was not
amazed by the experience of a place of learning; I had always known the cathedral,
and the bookcases I now sit to work at in Oxford are of the same design as those in Política de Cookies
the chained library. Nor was learning, in my family, some strange eccentricity; I was
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not, on a scholarship in Cambridge, a new kind of animal up a brand-new ladder.
Learning was ordinary; we learned where we could. Always, from those scattered
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white houses, it had made sense to go out and become a scholar or a poet or a
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teacher. Yet few of us could be spared from the immediate work; a price had been
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set on this kind of learning, and it was more, much more, than we could individually
pay. Now, when we could pay in common, it was a good, ordinary life. Discover the Bene!ts of

I was not oppressed by the university, but the teashop, acting as if it were one of the BECOMING A GIA
older and more respectable departments, was a di"erent matter. Here was culture,
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not in any sense I knew, but in a special sense: the outward and emphatically visible
sign of a special kind of people, cultivated people. They were not, the great majority
of them, particularly learned; they practised few arts; but they had it, and they
showed you they had it. They are still there, I suppose, still showing it, though even
they must be hearing the rude noises from outside, from a few scholars and writers
they call — how comforting a label is! — angry young men. As a matter of fact there
is no need to be rude. It is simply that if that is culture, we don't want it; we have
seen other people living.

But of course it is not culture, and those of my colleagues who, hating the teashop,
make culture, on its account, a dirty word, are mistaken. If the people in the teashop
go on insisting that culture is their trivial di"erences of behaviour, their trivial
variations of speech habit, we cannot stop them, but we can ignore them. They are
not that important, to take culture from where it belongs.

Yet, probably also disliking the teashop, there were writers I read then, who went
into the same category in my mind. When I now read a book such as Clive Bell's
Civilisation, I experience not so much disagreement as stupor. What kind of life can it
be, I wonder, to produce this extraordinary fussiness, this extraordinary decision to
call certain things culture and then separate them, as with a park wall, from ordinary
people and ordinary work ? At home we met and made music, listened to it, recited
and listened to poems, valued !ne language. I have heard better music and better
poems since; there is the world to draw on. But I know, from the most ordinary
experience, that the interest is there, the capacity is there. Of course, farther along
that bus journey, the old social organization in which these things had their place has
been broken. People have been driven and concentrated into new kinds of work,
new kinds of relationships; work, by the way, which built the park walls, and the
houses inside them, and which is now at last bringing, to the unanimous disgust of
the teashop, clean and decent and furnished living to the people themselves. Culture
is ordinary; through every change let us hold fast to that.

The other sense, or colour, that I refuse to learn, is very di"erent. Only two English
words rhyme with culture, and these, as it happens, are sepulture and vulture. We
don't yet call museums or galleries or even universities culture-sepultures, but I hear
a lot, lately, about culture-vultures (man must rhyme), and I hear also, in the same
North Atlantic argot, of do-gooders and highbrows and superior prigs. Now I don't
like the teashop, but I don't like this drinking-hole either. I know there are people
who are humourless about the arts and learning, and I know there is a di"erence
between goodness and sanctimony. But the growing implications of this spreading
argot — the true cant of a new kind of rogue — I regret absolutely. For, honestly, how
can anyone use a word like “do-gooder” with this new, o"beat complacency? How
can anyone wither himself to a state where he must use these new #ip words for any
attachment to learning or the arts? It is plain that what may have started as a feeling
about hypocrisy, or about pretentiousness (in itself a two-edged word), is becoming a
guilt-ridden tic at the mention of any serious standards whatever. And the word
“culture” has been heavily compromised by this conditioning: Goering reached for his
gun; many reach for their checkbooks; a growing number, now, reach for the latest
bit of argot.

“Good” has been drained of much of its meaning, in these circles, by the exclusion of
its ethical content and emphasis on a purely technical standard; to do a good job is
better than to be a do-gooder. But do we need reminding that any crook can, in his
own terms, do a good job? The smooth reassurance of technical e$ciency is no
substitute for the whole positive human reference. Yet men who once made this
reference, men who were or wanted to be writers or scholars, are now, with every
appearance of satisfaction, advertising men, publicity boys, names in the strip
newspapers. These men were given skills, given attachments, which are now in the
service of the most brazen money-grabbing exploitation of the inexperience of
ordinary people. And it is these men — this new, dangerous class — who have
invented and disseminated the argot, in an attempt to in#uence ordinary people —
who because they do real work have real standards in the !elds they know — against
real standards in the !elds these men knew and have abandoned. The old cheapjack
is still there in the market, with the country boys' half-crowns on his reputed packets
of gold rings or watches. He thinks of his victims as a slow, ignorant crowd, but they
live, and farm, while he coughs behind his portable stall. The new cheapjack is in
o$ces with contemporary décor, using scraps of linguistics psychology and
sociology to in#uence what he thinks of as the mass-mind. He too, however, will have
to pick up and move on, and meanwhile we are not to be in#uenced by his argot; we
can simply refuse to learn it. Culture is ordinary. An interest in learning or the arts is
simple, pleasant, and natural. A desire to know what is best, and to do what is good,
is the whole positive nature of man. We are not to be scared from these things by
noises.

Raymond Williams (1921-1988) was author of Culture and Society, The Long
Revolution, Marxism and Literature, Keywords, and many other works in cultural
studies.

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