Cultural Studies and Modern Society

From the opening pages

Ask a reasonably educated person what “culture” means and there is a fair chance that, after a thoughtful pause, they will mention museums, novels, classical music, perhaps theatre, and possibly something involving subtitles. Culture, in this sense, is what people consume when they are being serious. It comes with catalogues, respectable bindings, and a faint suggestion that one ought to have dressed better. The National Gallery is culture. An argument over whether pineapple belongs on pizza is apparently not. Beethoven is culture. The tune that plays when a washing machine finishes its cycle is merely an irritation. This distinction is tidy, flattering, and almost completely useless for cultural studies.

Cultural studies starts from a broader and more inconvenient premise: culture is woven through ordinary life. Television, clothes, accents, hairstyles, school uniforms, family meals, football chants, wedding customs, slang, emojis, queueing, swearing, religious festivals, office manners, takeaway menus, national flags and the rules governing who is expected to say “thank you” to whom are all cultural material. So are paintings, symphonies and novels. High culture does not have to be expelled merely because the rest of human existence has been admitted.

This sounds suspiciously greedy. If everything is culture, an objector may ask, does the word still mean anything? A fair objection. Cultural studies is not a scheme for proving that every teaspoon is secretly a masterpiece. A brick remains a brick. Yet human beings rarely encounter bricks, clothes, foods, gestures, buildings or voices without also encountering expectations about them. A brick wall may suggest privacy, wealth, exclusion, security, imprisonment or suburban respectability. Its chemistry need not change for its social significance to change.