culture is a process...

One of the things that I appreciated about Kammen’s text was the way in which he tried to make sure that it could be useful to an academic and non-academic audience. I thought that the ways he incorporated theorists/theories was done in an accessible way, that if you new about Adorno, Williams, etc. you could take what you knew of their work to enrich what you were reading, but if you had never encountered them before you could also understand. His conversational tone—“By now the nonspecialist may very well feel overwhelmed by a surfeit of citations and contradictory points of view. If such browsers are still bearing with me, they surely must sense that the study of popular culture is clearly thriving in institutions of higher learning” (6)—made his text really easy to follow since he would have tons of evidence but then states his conclusions from that evidence in very plain and concrete language. I thought that the work was an interesting hybrid of theory, interpretation, and explication that epitomizes, for me, what a good cultural analysis should do.

I thought that his discussion of the origins of the division of brows coming with the proliferation of print materials, when he brought up Ohmann and Radway, was really interesting. The Lady’s Magazine, published in England from 1770-1837, was a unique publication in which the works of its readership were published alongside the work of authors such as Coleridge. But more interesting was the sentiment that was echoed in its editors’ notes continually through its nearly 70-year long run, that self-improvement must spring from “laudable curiosity”:

Criticism… is not that process of abstract reasoning, which disdains the aid of facts or observations…. It is exercised in its most simple when, after we have perused a literary production, or witnessed the representation of a dramatic piece, or surveyed a work of art, we call to mind what has pleased and what has displeased us in those performances; but when, from a laudable curiosity, or a desire of being enabled to explain the reasons of our admiration or our disappointment, we attentively examine those reasons, we rise into regions of philosophy, and are induced to conclude that only those principles which are founded on this solid basis can form the standard of true taste.

This term, echoed in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy—arguably the most elitist text ever published—emphasizes the idea that “culture” is not a static object to be achieved, but a process and a becoming. The fact that purchasing publications in order to facilitate that process is just a fact of social mobility. And maybe the date of social stratification could be bumped back a little bit further...