Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 30

activities. Further, culture should not float above politics but should be embedded
within political activity. In these ways, Williams' approach not only embraces the
garden as a valid site for cultural politics, it also extends the notion that the garden is
an everyday space which is potentially saturated by cultural politics.
To this end, Williams proposed a moral basis for a socialist approach to the
analysis of culture through his conception of what he termed a 'common culture':
'collectively made, continuously remade and redefined by the collective practice
of its members' (Williams 1993, 334). This marked a difference from figures like
Eliot who used the term common culture to denote a passive form of cultural life.
For Williams, 'the distinction of a culture in common is that…selection is freely and
commonly made and remade. The tending is a common process based on common
decision' (Williams 1993, 337). For him the idea of a common culture is progressive,
it holds 'the idea of solidarity' which is 'the real basis of society' (Williams 1993,
332). Common culture comes about through the process of long revolution where
all cultural groups have equal access to and actively engage in the rich and varied
cultural life of a society. Williams also refused the cultural pessimism, harboured
by Leavis and Eliot, of an emergent mass culture. Williams shunned the word
'mass' on the grounds that it was no different to 'mob', a term used by conservative
critics to denounce collective activism. He recognised the term 'masses' as an
ideological category as opposed to a social descriptor. Such an approach justifies the
privileged place for elite culture and a cultural elite. Yet Williams was also critical of
conventional Marxist positions on culture which he felt also served to denigrate mass
culture. By envisaging the working-class as cultural dopes who passively consume
popular culture produced by the capitalist media, Marxist critics reduce the working-
class to an inert docile mass. For Williams, Marxist theory suffered from economic
determinism, thus he argued for a position where culture could be perceived as
relatively autonomous to the economy. As both culturalist and humanist Williams
could never accept deterministic versions of culture - hence his need to rework
Marxism. For him culture is always about lived experience: 'culture is ordinary, in
every society and every mind' (Williams 1989, 4). These tenets became influential
as cultural studies emerged as an academic field.
However, early cultural studies had come under attack by the late 1970s. Savage
(2000a) argues that despite the enormous influence of left-culturalism, it had never
had a 'real' or empirically evidenced working-class culture on which to make its
case. The intellectual influence of Hoggart and Williams came from the 'formulation
of class cultures as historical residues, as nostalgic figures whose lingering presence
could help explain current concerns' (Savage 2000a, 33). And while this explanatory
mould summarised here by Savage - 'the break up of the nostalgic 'working-class
community' led to attempts to symbolically reclaim the integrity of these old imagined
spaces, but in displaced, even 'debased' forms' (Savage 2000a, 33) - was used to
investigate a diverse range of cultural forms at CCCS, its demise came alongside
its critical re-evaluation. The import of feminism, new critical work on race and
ethnicity, the turn to structuralist theory and the new focus on individualised cultures
by writers such as Giddens (1990) and Beck (1992) meant that early cultural studies
work, with its defined emphasis on the collective nature of class culture, waned in
influence. According to Savage (2000a), it was not until Bourdieu's work, with its