This, needless to say, is a false antithesis for all sorts of reasons. Whether these cultures are within the citadel of Culture or outside it then hardly matters. Note that Culture, in this view, is cultureless. Think of this, if you like, in terms of the Romantic imagination. It surely isn't hard to spot the affinities between this aesthetic doctrine and the politics of imperialism.
Culture is the power of knowing other cultures, whereas what cultures know is themselves.
It would be far too simplistic simply to back one of these forms of culture against the other. Culture may be exclusivist and elitist, but in its time it had also harboured utopian, even revolutionary desires. Indeed, a lot of so-called high culture is a lot less reactionary than much of its mass counterpart. And if cultures include some enlightened forms of identity politics like gay and feminist ones, or the more progressive brands of revolutionary nationalism, they also encompass some fairly sinister forms of racism, neo-Nazism, communitarianism, religious fundamentalism and the like. These are the cultural forms of those who, feeling shut out from Culture as so-called universal civility, exhibit a pathological reaction to a pathological universality.