Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams (1921-1988) was an author, academic,
cultural theorist, literary critic, public intellectual, socialist, and a
leading figure of the New Left. He was the son of working-class parents from a
Welsh border village, an adult education tutor, a Cambridge professor, and,
according to Terry Eagleton, was and wasn’t a Marxist. From such unique
positions, he established a new mode of critical analysis, cultural
materialism, grounded in a concept of culture which identifies cultural
practice as part of an active, dynamic, historical process. His work
consistently draws attention to two strands within cultural forms: the
contingent and the subjunctive. Raymond Williams The former figures history as driven by human
action while the latter looks for moments which ask what alternatives are possible
and how. From here, Williams developed a number of enduring theoretical
concepts: he identified a ‘structure of feeling’, what he described as ‘the
area of interaction between the official consciousness of an epoch […] and the
whole process of actually living its consequences’; he insisted upon viewing
culture as ‘ordinary’, as everyday and (potentially at least) democratic, being
constantly made and re-made; and he formulated three forces or tensions within
the development of cultural form: the residual (pre-existing and traditional),
the dominant (central and defining), and the emergent (new and challenging).
All of these give a glimpse into his relevance and influence as well as
providing a way of analysing and critiquing cultural transformation, placing a
primary focus on culture as, what Williams notably called, ‘a whole way of
life’, something made and lived.
In works such as Culture and Society (1958)
and The Long Revolution (1961) he embarked on what would be a
prolonged analysis of cultural development viewed through, and ingrained
within, the transformations of industrial capitalism and capitalist society. He
was influenced by Antonio Gramsci and the concept of hegemony, writing in
opposition to the methods of vulgar or mechanical Marxism which fail to place
due emphasis on the dynamic nature of cultural production. As Stuart Hall has
noted, Williams played an integral role in the development of (a politically
engaged) cultural studies. And he theorised the distinctive and decisive
experiences of class, region, and community during an extended engagement with
questions of form; these were all themes which he drew upon and expertly
marshalled in his impressive debut novel, Border Country (1960).
In Towards 2000 (1983), published five years before his death,
Williams offered a prescient analysis of ‘nomad capitalism’ and labelled as
‘Plan X’ the political and economic project of social management now commonly
understood as neoliberalism; for Williams, this was a new form of capitalism
which aimed to ‘grasp’ and ‘control’ the future. He envisioned a powerful
alternative: a radically new kind of politics coalescing around the
disarmament, environment, and feminist movements. Cultural practice would, of
course, play a defining role and Williams’s methodological approach offers a
radical kind of critical analysis, one foregrounding the material processes and
relations of culture itself.
Raymond Williams (1921-1988), Welsh cultural critic,
who was a major forerunner of contemporary Cultural Studies. Books such
as Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961)
served to map out much that is now taken as the basic subject area of cultural
studies, as well as doing much to shape the understanding of culture that
informs those studies. While Williams’s work is therefore important to
understanding the history of cultural studies, his work is in other respects
somewhat marginal to the mainstream of the discipline. This is because his
methods and techniques of analysis tended only gradually and partially to
incorporate the insights of structuralism and semiotics that were fundamental
to cultural studies in the 1970s and 1980s.
Culture and Society is an exercise in literary history,
but explores literature by relating books and authors to the broader historical
and social development of ideas, and to culture as a ‘whole way of life’, ‘a
mode of interpreting all our common experiences’ (p. 18). Culture is therefore
not the culture of an elite, but a culture that is embedded in everyday
experience and activity. The culture that Williams is interested in is the
culture that emerges as a complex criticism of industrial capitalism. Like his
contemporary Richard Hoggart, Williams may however still be seen to be working
in tension with the dominant Leavisite approach to literature and culture, and
thus the tension between an understanding of everyday culture as it is, and an
attempt to evaluate parts of that culture more highly (or as more civilised)
than others. The Long Revolution takes further the analysis of culture as a way
of life. The revolution is that brought about by ‘the progress and interaction
of democracy and industry, and by the extension of communications’ (p. 12), and
the analysis concerns the way in which this affects all aspects of everyday
life. A key (if not precisely defined) term introduced by Williams is that
of’structures of feeling’: the lived experience of a particular moment in
society and in history.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Williams demonstrated a
greater interest in the mass media. While in his early books he tends to
present the mass media as a threat to the revolution of democracy and to the
rise of a ‘common culture’, Williams gradually moves away from this position in
Communications (1962) and in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974).
While Williams therefore comes to examine a topic that is fundamental to
cultural studies, his early approach is heavily marked by the influence of
American media research, as to the more theoretical approaches that would come
to the fore, for example, in the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies. Williams’s description of his first encounter with American
television (and thus the entwining of a film, advertisements and, crucially,
trailers for films to be shown in the future), and thus the breakdown of a
series of discrete programmes into a ‘flow’, has been widely cited (1974, p.
92).
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