"The Politics of Culture" Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan

The word culture has been defined in numerous ways and seems to be a somewhat elusive concept to grasp. The authors of this piece go into detail following and exploring the various definitions applied to the word culture throughout the history of "Cultural Studies". Prior the '60's and 70's the word culture had a narrow definition attributed to it. It's probably the definition that comes to many peoples mind when they hear that "someone has culture". The image of someone in an art museum leisurely reading Shakespeare while Beethoven's sonata plays daintily in the background, or something along those lines. During this time period culture was something highly exclusive and reserved for a specific class. During the '60's and 70's the word "culture" took on a different meaning completely and was seen as being closely tied to class. Culture became a means through which one class could dominate another. As the authors put it "the culture of television, radio, film and cheap paperbacks " (Rivkin, Ryan 1998) was a means for an elite minority to dominate and control the way that people perceived reality. By inculcating the working masses with thier perceptions of reality those in the minority assured themselves that they would remain at the top and all others happily working for them below. However during the 1960's theorists like Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P Thompson revamped this definition that culture was a means of domination. In their mind culture was a means of resistance and rebellion against the perceptions imposed upon the working class by the elite of the capitalist hierarchy. These theorists saw culture as a mean for the working class to revolt against the domination imposed upon them. They believed that the only way to accomplish this was by being intellectually stimulated and refusing to sit by and be entertained into submission. In this definition culture was seen as something that enlightened and empowered the common people. Culture was the means for the masses or the "culture from below" to voice their perceptions of reality while rejecting those imposed upon them by the "culture from above" or the elite minority. Essentially this article poses the idea that "culture" can be seen in two ways. In one way culture can be seen as a means for the elite minority from above to dominate the culture from below. On the other hand culture can be seen as a means for the culture from below to reject the social order imposed by capitalism.