Raymond Williams - Culture 1981, Fontana Press

P12. Culture: a developed state of mind; means  of processes like the arts; informing spirit of a way; whole social order.

P13. Cultural practices become constitutive as it forms a signifying system through which a social order is apparent.  Usually analysed and identified by all social, artistic and intellectual activities.

P26.  Ideology - the formal and conscious beliefs of a class or social group and the characteristic world view or perspective of a class or social group, and their broader beliefs, attitudes, habits and feelings.  Sociological analysis of culture operates via the senses to evaluate social class, politics, economics and occupation.  The wider unseen feelings, attitudes and assumptions can only be measured by observed behaviour, but clearly mark the culture of a specific class.  This is identified by lived experience of social practice and the cultural production of these groups demonstrates their beliefs via macro control systems (politics and faith), but also via drama, art, literature.

P27 Williams says there is a strong correlation between formal and conscious beliefs of class and group, the cultural production associated with it, via the perspectives and values that the group beliefs make normal and acceptable.  What the group focusses on (both by attention and omission) leads to identifiable links between belief systems and artistic forms, and position and positioning.

P80 He used the Bloomsbury Group as an example of early 20thC culture.
They came from aristocracy and landed gentry.  Their group featured:

- university educational achievement
- serve dominant social order and are a division of it
- values of higher education
- possession of general broad (not national or class) sculpture
- practice of intellectual and professional skills (plus dissidence via insistence on wholly open intellectual enquiry and opposed to stupidity and incompetence of political and economic leaders (!) )
NB Girls were largely excluded from education then.

P126  Social processes of art.  Williams says art in its most sustained and popular forms attempts to position itself above society; whereas an analysis shows a disguised social (class) process.  Historically the position of art practices with hierarchy has always taken place:  court/peasant; aristocratic/folk; high/popular.

P130 The arts as social forms - signals of art.  Consider Occasion and Place.  When do we look at art?  In a gallery - high art.  On a street wall - low art.  In a concert hall or theatre - high art.  A busker - low art.  A trip out or private view makes it an occasion.  So when is it not occasion?  In the domestic?
Does this mean Post Modernism has upset all this with the power of the individual?

P207 Culture as a signifying system.  Distinguishable as a language that shows the thoughts and ideals via a body of signifying work.   The artistic output moves from the individual to the institution via state of mind - individual practice - systems - the institutions and works exhibited.

P208 Culture is most easily shown and identified where it is most clearly displayed.  Art in the public domain has to fit with other signifying systems - political; economic; social; technological; legal.  Post modernism has made it much more individual.

Quite interesting but I am not sure where it takes me or what my conclusions are  … yet.