Culture, for much of modern history, has been a velvet rope. A gatekeeping term used by critics, institutions, and academics to separate the refined from the raw, the worthy from the wasted. But Raymond Williams, Welsh Marxist thinker and unwitting patron saint of Cultural Studies, asked a deceptively simple question: what if culture isn’t just the opera, but also the pub? Not just Shakespeare, but Coronation Street? What if culture is not only the best that has been thought and said, but also everything else we live and breathe?
In his landmark 1958 essay "Culture is Ordinary," Williams detonated the elitist bomb at the heart of cultural criticism. Against the rigid hierarchies of F.R. Leavis or Matthew Arnold—who believed culture should uplift the masses toward elite refinement—Williams argued that culture was already everywhere. It wasn't something possessed by the few, but practiced by the many. It was, in his now-famous phrase, "a whole way of life."
Against Cultural Snobbery: Making the Ordinary Visible
To say that culture is ordinary was not to flatten or sentimentalize it. Williams wasn’t a cheerleader for mediocrity. Rather, he sought to recognize that value doesn’t only live in high forms or canonical texts, but in the rituals, dialects, and emotional textures of daily life. The meals people cook, the songs they hum, the stories they tell at the bus stop—all of these, for Williams, were cultural forms as worthy of attention as any sonnet or symphony.
This approach is deeply political. When culture is defined from above, it becomes a weapon of distinction—a way to delegitimize the tastes and identities of working-class people. By asserting that culture is embedded in everyday practices, Williams turned culture into a terrain of struggle, one shaped by social forces but also by collective creativity. Culture, in this view, is not just reflective but productive; not a mirror, but a loom.
Culture as Living Practice, Not Museum Piece
Williams’s framework anticipates—and arguably seeds—the entire field of cultural studies, which would later examine everything from soap operas to street fashion with theoretical rigor. But it also remains startlingly relevant in an era where debates about taste, authenticity, and representation rage across digital platforms. TikTok dances, reality TV, meme formats, fan fiction—these aren’t just frivolous content. They are, as Williams would insist, cultural practices thick with meaning.
The core of Williams's insight is that culture isn’t just what we make, but how we mean. It’s the shared codes and contested stories through which people locate themselves in the world. To treat culture as ordinary, then, is not to demote it, but to democratize it. To say: your life counts. Your language matters. Your experiences are not ephemera to be archived by elites, but living forms to be understood on their own terms.
So yes, culture is ordinary. And that is exactly what makes it extraordinary.
