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Social Scientist

Culture and Society: An Introduction to Raymond WilliamsAuthor(s): R. ShashidharSource: Social Scientist, Vol. 25, No. 5/6 (May - Jun., 1997), pp. 33-53Published by: Social ScientistStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3517827 .

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R. SHASHIDHAR*

Culture nd Society:An Introductionto RaymondWilliams

Raymond Williams' Culture and Society appeared in the ideologicalclimate of the cold war and bears all the makes of it. Given theremoteness of that ideological climate-accentuated ironicallyby thefall of Soviet Russia-and giventhepresentpost-Saussurean limate ofpoststructuralism,t might appear that this text of Williams is ratherdated and can have only an academic interest o the studentsof theleftistwritings f Raymond Williams. There are, however, two reasonswhy I am going back to this text. First,Williams is a thinkerwhosesignificance s not sufficientlyppreciated in this country. t is rathersad that his seminal contributions were relegated by Althusserianarguments n the Seventies and then by the spate of poststructuralistand Derridean deconstruction. t is oftennot sufficientlyppreciatedthat Williams addresses these intellectual formations in his laterwritings, lbeit obliquely. My second reason is that where Williams isheard, it is more oftenas the author of Culture and Society,as if hislater writingswere just an old-styleMarxist justification f all that hesaid in this book. These remarks should not lead one to expect thatthis article is an overall introductionto the ouvre of Williams. It,rather, a critical presentationof Williams, book mentioned above,which I hope introducesthe newcomer to the problemsthat hauntedWilliams all his writing life. I have deliberately kept clear ofpoststructuralistnd postcolonial arguments, lthoughthe analysis inthis essay, I hope, shows where such openings are possible. In thebeginning of the essay there are references to certain intellectualformation ery specific o the literary-criticalorld-referencesto F.R.Leavis and T.S. Eliot. But I have not taken the trouble of explainingthem as I thought that might distract the reader fromthe generalargument. n any case such references re marginal.Because Williams learnt his bitter lesson from the defeat of thereductive Marxism of the Thirties in the battle for culturalinterpretation, is political thinking ook a longer time in traversingfrom its initial ethical preoccupation to itssubsequent redefinition

*Reader, Department of Postgraduate Studies and Research in English, MangaloreUniversityMangalagangothri,KarnatakaState.

Social Scientist,Vol. 25, Nos. 5-6, May-June 1997

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34 SOCIALSCIENTISTtlhrough-i arxism which is characteristic of an intellectual'sradicalisation. But politics,as we remember,was one of the twinpolesof his Romanticainti-capitalistreoccupation. n the journal he startedsooIn aftertheWW I-Politics and Letters-the otherwas 'literature'.As a Cambridge School product, iteraturewas important o Williamsin two senses: as thereceivedhistoricaltradition' t was the significantrecord of a kind and qualityof lived culturewhich,in its felt ack inthe moderntimes,demanded to be studied,taughtand passed on as aguide for any valid social thinking. In the present its value wasaltogether different.n its encounter with the lived details of life,literaturesignified in the present a creative exploration by and ofconsciousness. In this its mode of cognition was held to bequalitatively different nd higherthan the epistemologyof systemicsocial sciences. By extension iterature hen stood for subjectivity' nall its malleability s i.tcontinuouslydiscovered tself, urprised tself,founditself, hrough; iving n the objectiveworld. the objectiveworlditselfwas not the-givenmaterial ntity f theDescartean schism: twas,oIn the other hand, very much an active social world. From PoliticsanidLettersup to the discoveryof Gramsci and Goldmann, Williams'problem was how to socially explain this creative consciousness sothat it would not be positivistically educedas the epiphenomenonofsome other,usually economic, element of society.Eliot's conservativeway out of this problem was through the schism between theanithropologicalculture as 'a whole way of life' and the redefinedArnoldian culture as the quality of an accomplished anddiscriminatingonsciousness.ReductiveMarxistsin the thirtios aw nioproblem here at all in that the great explanatoryformula of base-superstructurehad already explained everything nd it was only aquestion of its next 'application'.1 Most of Williams' holisticwritingwith reference o literatureand other discursivewritingsup to hisconfrontationwithcontinentalMarxism is taken up with the problemof finding n alternative pproach to Eliot and the reductiveMarxists.For a long time he tried systemic rganicism' s a solution-a positionby which he came to view society as organicallyrelated to familial,communicational,economic, and political systems.2 t mustbe addedhere at once that Williams was not subscribing to the fallacy of'expressivetotality' n thisexercise. n the dual attempt o counterthepositivistic and mechanistic crudities of English Marxism aboutcreative consciousness and the conservativeconsecration of elitism,Williams' 'systemicorganicism'took on the colours of ethicalism.Thepolitics and cultural criticism of this period following from theseconcernsand positions require a separate analysiswhich falls outside


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AN INTRODUCTION TO RAYMOND WILLIAMS 35the scope of this article. n this article want to analyse how Williamsconstructedcreativeconsciousness in his pre-semioticperiod-that is,before his encounterwith the continentalMarxism and the linguisticsof Vygotsky.We can begin with the importanttext Culture and Society. Thegestation of eight years between the publications of 'The Idea ofCulture' in 1950 and 'T.S. Eliot on Culture' in 1953, and Culture andSociety in 1958 confirms Williams' recollection in Politics andLetters-Interviews with the New Left that the 'whole process ofwriting Culture and Societywas one of almost constant redefinitionand reformulation'.3 Although Williams had welcomed Eliot'semphasison 'a whole way of life' in the latter's book Notes Towardsthe Definition of Culture, he had felt that his neo-conservative tancein it as a whole was 'almost calculated to infuriate.'4 He rightlyidentified liot's work as theparagon of cold-war ideology.In writingCulture and Societythe question, thus,was whetherhe 'should writeacritiqueof that ideology in a wholly negativeway, which at one time[he] considered or whether heright ourse was not to recover the truecomplexity of the tradition it had confiscated-so that theappropriationcould be seen for what it was.'5 The 'initial impetus'ofthe origin'of Culture and Societythusgoes back to thepublicationofEliot's Notes towards the Definition of Culture in 1948, whichconfirmedfor Williams that there was a 'concentration of a kind ofsocial thought around this term which hadn't before appearedparticularly important.'6 He settled for the second option as 'itallowed [him]to refute he increasing ontemporary se of theconceptof cultureagainst democracy, ocialism, the workingclass or populareducation, in the tradition tself.'7Hence the 'primarymotivation' ofCulture and Society was not 'to found a new position;' as 'anoppositional work' it intended to counter the appropriationof a longline of thinking about culture to what were by now decisivelyreactionarypositions.'8As a socialist attemptforthe counter appropriation of 'a long line'of thinkersCulture and Societyhas occasioned fertile ontroversy. hehistorical nature of the book, its polemical conclusion forced by thecircumstancesof the cold war, and the socialist colour of the wholeenterprisehave generallyblinded the reviewers nd criticsalike to thesemantic fulcrum of Culture and Society. In the Interviews, forexample, which is the most comprehensivediscussion of the book todate, no question is asked about Williams, generalpreoccupationwithhistorical emanticsduringthis time.9 The Interviewsdo not correctlycorrelate Culture and SocietywithKeywords,exceptfornotingthat incomparisoni onie absolutely central point comneshome nmuchmnoreforcibly n the later book, because of the wider r.anige f the term-lsdiscussed. ...' 0 ThouLghsubstanitial ork was done 'later', Keywordis


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36 SOCIALSCIENTISTwas essentially partof Cultureand Society.Williamsconfirms hisinhis 1983 introduction n which the original literary-criticalmphasison language as the expression of meaning is now redefinedwithreference o 'conflict':

The kind of semanticsto which thesenotes and essays belong isone of the tendencies . . [which] recognizes,as any studyoflanguage must,that there s indeed community etweenpast andpresent,but also thatcommunity-thatdifficult ord-is not theonly possible descriptionof these relations betweenpast and thepresent; that there are also radical change, discontinuityandconflict.... 11Because of thisgeneral nattention he Leavisiteshave generallyhurriedto point at the socialist 'propaganda' behind the book, while theMarxist criticshave, rightly, usied themselveswith its idealism. Butnow a closer look at this idealism is necessitatedby Williams' claim,followinghis reentrynto the linguistic ealm,that all previoususe oftheconceptof 'sign' has been essentially bjectivist dealism.Beforesettlingdown to analyse its semanticfoundations,we shouldfirst amiliarise urselves withthe groundplanof Cultureand Society.Thematically, t consists of threedistinct evels. The firstpart of thebook consists of a historical urveyof significanttatement n culture.Williams' guidingprinciplehere is thatthesestatementswere made asactive responses to the pressures of the day. Aftertaking culture asmeanings distinguished in response to involving social situations,Williams traces it through the nineteenth entury n terms of majorissues like Industry,Democracy and Art. This yields threephases-1790-1870, 1870-1914, and 1914-1945.12 Williams makes thisdemarcation as preparatoryto saying that although 'certain d-ecisivestatement tand' prominently rom all these periods and phases, 'theworld we see throughsuch eyes is not, although it resembles, ourworld.'13 Hence whatever holds 'significance' from the 'set ofmeanings'receivedfrom the tradition'has to be valued in termsof thepresent experience.14 For this we have to 'return hem to immediateexperience.'15 This returning of meanings to the 'immediateexperience' for testing their significanceformsthe second level ofCulture and Society. The termsof reference orthis testingreturn rethe 'new problems arising from the developmentof mass media ofcommunication nd the generalgrowth of large-scaleorganizations'-whichwe have studied n the last chapter.16


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ANINTRODUCTION TO RAYMOND WILLIAMS 37The third evel of Culture and Society is thatpart of the book inwhich Williams offersholistic propositions as the ethical imperative

issuing from the significance of past meanings tested under thepressures of the present experience. These propositions emerge as'variationsand new definitions' f the idea of culture.They are the by-product of the 'return' made in order to ascertain the presentrelevanceof the receivedmeanings.Two of the questions and objections' raised about the book can beisolated from the Interviews for a closer examinationof its semanticfoundation.17 I am isolatingtwo of these 'questions and objections'because theybear on the historical-semantic ndertaking n Cultureand Societywhich correspondsto his political preoccupationwith theorganicistic 'naive community' of the period. The first of these'questions and objections' of the interviewers is regarding thedistinctionWilliams maintainsbetween politics' and 'social thinking'.The interviewers point to a series of interconnected limitationsfollowing from this literary-critical istinction. They relate to thegeneral strategyof Culture and Society and its effecton the finaloutcomeat three evels: (a) Despite their veryexplicitand definite ndoften entralview on thepoliticsof theday,' thethemeof Culture andSociety 'appears to be a directcounterpositionof the social core ofsuccessive thinkers against a mere political surface which can besomehow detached and dismissed.'18 The distinction osits a contrast'between truth which is necessarily social, and politics which is abrittle nd ephemeral adjunct separable from t;'19 (b) The settingupof suc-h contrast comes to have a directbearing on Williams' ownpolitics in that- the 'general depreciation of politics' betrays an'inadvertent', 'conservative' bias in the balance of 'judgment ofparticularpersonsas the centralstructure f thework,the overallwayit is organized,'20 (c) the separation of social thoughtfrompolitics ofthe day excludes 'the middle term of politics,' thereby failing toappreciatethat the politicsof the period cannot be treated as a seriesof transientudgments f particular pisodes thatare separable fromdeeper social thought.'21The second question relates to the specificepistemologywhich 'in'forms Williams' distinctionbetween politics and social thinking nwhich the latter s value-loaded againstthe former.While the questionon epistemology s strategic n so far as it concernsthe verystructureof the book, the one on the separation of politics and social thinkingcan be seen as the outcome. The question regarding the'epistemology', prefigured n the distinction between social thinkingand politics, s what I am goingto concentrate n below.However, I shall not be dealing with 'epistemology' proper. Byobservingthe three evels in the construction f Culture and Societywe can conclude that in drawing the historical lineage of culture-


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38 SOCIALSCIENTISTsociety thinkersWilliams employs a kind of 'epistemology' of thehuman-social reality which is to be properly called 'historicalhermeneutics'.That is, instead of an 'epistemology'which he wouldhave seen as an a prioriprivilegingf thecategoricalover thereality fthe human-social 'experience' as it emerges from the pores andpressuresof 'immediate' livingas the ground for his distinctions. nother words he employs the notion of the literary-critical rganiccommunity nd its categoryof 'experience'as thedistinguishing uide.This thenwas 'discovered'byWilliams in the texts' of thenineteenth-centuryculturalistson the literary-critical asis of language as thesolution of the idealist community.Williams tries to convince us allthrough the book that such a reality is not available to rational'abstraction' and that any hope of understandingt lies in 'returning'the significantstatementsreceived from the past instances of that'lived' reality to the 'immediate' living of our own times. Such aconcept of reality as the hermeneuticdialectic between the past andthepresentexplainsWilliams' statement,Somewhere, n theworld ofh-umanthinking coming down to us from our predecessors, thenecessary nsights, he fruitful earings,exist. But to keep them wherethey belong, in direct touch with our experience, is a constantstruggle.'22Though its connectionswithliterary riticism re obvious,the familiarityof some of the phrases should not blind us to thedevelopment Culture anzd Society achieves in this argument. Thesubstitution of the literary-criticaltext by history itself as ananthropological text is a continuation of latenciespresent n some ofhis earlier dramatic criticism,where the preoccupation with theproductionalconventionswas dragging him more and more out intohistorical and ideological criticism. What happens in such asubstitution s obvious. If the lack of theconcept of civil societyforcesWXJilliamso conceptualise t as systemic rganicism, he resultant ackof the concept of class struggle n the fieldof cultureforceshim toconceptualise writing s the hermeneutic ecord of 'immediate' living.We will now see how Williams does this.The first nd themajor part of Culture and Society is the studyofactual individual statements an contributions' which records andanalyses the major statementsabout culture.23 Although Williamsexpresses his commitment n broad terms 'to the study of actuallanguage: that is to say, to the words and sequences of words whichparticular men and women have used in tryingto give meaning totheir experience,' the literary-critical ackground leads to him to aparticular 'tradition' of thinkers.24 More than the criterionthatinforms he selectionof thinkers,what is noticeable is the distinction


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ANINTRODUCTION TO RAYMOND WILLIAMS 39of 'abstracted problems' and 'statementsby individuals.'25 Williamsdistinguishesbetween abstraction and concreteness in his study ofindividualstatements n the basis of 'response'-that is, by takinganextracted semantic pattern of key words as the existential-seismicrecord of responses to involving social situations: 'Our meaning ofculture s a responseto the eventswhichour meaningsof industry nddemocracy most evidentlydefine.'26 I shall discuss below the methodused byWilliams to distinguish he [cultural]meanings'and 'to relatethem to their sources and effects.'27 have called thismethod,forthesake of covenience,the 'context-content'method.Historical hermeneutics ppears in Williams' attempt to constructrealityhistorically n the basis of language. It is signalled in the verybeginning f Culture and Societywhere he statesthe familiar iterary-critical necessity to distinguishbetween experiential and politicalstatements.Thus, if a representative assage is to be selected fromCulture and Society, it would certainly be the one used in theInterviews in which Williams defends Burke's anti-democraticsentiments:

The correctness f these ideas is not at first n question; and theirtruth s not, at first, o be assessed by theirusefulness n historicalunderstanding or in political insight. Burke's writing is anarticulated xperience, nd as such has a validitywhich can surviveeven the demolitionof its general conclusions.28The interviewers oint our that in the passage 'there seems to be anopposition betweenthe truthof ideas as usuallyunderstood-the sortthat help us to understandhistory r politics-and a deeper or moredurable experiencethat does not necessarilycorrespondto any kindof ordinarydiscursivetruth.'29 This opposition noted by the editorsbetween the experientialconsciousness as the guaranteeof the socialrealityand its subsequent rational and analytical abstraction is quitefamiliar to us by now from the analysis of Politics and Letters and'The Idea of Culture.' In fact the experiential mmunity o ideologythat Williams is claiming here for Burke is a formof the continuedexpression of the Romantic anti-capitalist ategorieswhich Williamswas yet to resolve into what he had then called a 'synthesis'. Thedichotomy between the so called experiential concreteness of thepersonal statement nd its analyticalor rational abstraction n socialsciences was what Williams had in mind when he wrote in Politicsand Letters that various facets of 'politics' and 'letters' need to beurgently esolved into a synthesisof 'human and material richness.'The distinctionbetween politics' in the historical contexts' and thesupposed 'deeper' contenits f social thinking, nd the semantic basistlhroughlhich a specificr ality is constructedto accommiiodate othcan be brotught nlder nialyticalfocus by reconstructing the mnethod


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40 SOCIALSCIENTISTemployed by Williams in the description nd analysis of the historicalformation f the concept culture'.

A polemical work which seeks to 'recover' or reappropriate thesocial reference f a categorybytaking t back to a criticalpoint in itstemporal journey may be expected to have a 'method', a workingprinciplewherebynot only the social' is understood n a specificway,but also 'related' as the reference f the category n question. But tospeak of a 'methodology'of Culture and Societywould be anomalousto theoriginalspirit n whichit was conceivedbyWilliams. Instead hespeaks of 'termsof reference':My termsof referencehen are not only to distinguish hemeaningsbut to relate themto their ources and effects. shall tryto do thisby examining,not a series of abstractedproblems, but a series ofstatementsby individuals. It is not only that, by temperament ndtraining, find more meaning in this kind of personally verifiedstatement han in a system f significantbstractions. t is also that,in a theme of this kind, I feel myselfcommitted to the study ofactual language: thatis to say, to thewords and sequencesofwordswlhich particular men and women have used in tryingto givemeaning to theirexperience.30

'Significantabstractions' was also the diagnostic phrase in literarycriticismfor the chronic 'logical rigidity' and 'abstract rationalism'from which the methodologies of the social-sciences were seen to besuffering. he 'terms of reference'forWilliams, then,are a series ofpersonal statements-the context n whichthey were offered nd theirsubsequent 'effects'-true to the 'private meaning' and 'public fact'concernof the editors of Politics and Letters. In practicethis meantrunning the conceptual diversityof a semantic unit along with thesocial context-seen as its 'source' of evolution-as interrelatedsequences. Given Williams' literary-criticaltemperamentnd training'at this time, any other conceptual or analytical mode of enquiryshould naturallyhave appeared 'metlhodological' n its worst sense.Hence the introductoryistancing:But, as a methodof inquiry, havenot chosen to list certain topics, and to assemble summaries ofparticularstatementson them.'31 This is entirely n keepingwith thespirit of the 'sociological' interestsof Scrutineerswho were one inhostility towards sociology as the 'quotation-lifting' background'study.Williams' 'terms of reference' nvolves a tactics of distinguishingmeaningsand relatingthemto their sources' and 'effects'. n generalterms the tactics can be seen as one of relating the 'content' of a


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AN INTRODUCTION TO RAYMOND WILLIAMS 41personal statement o its historical context'. The problemwas how toconstruct he facticity f history, f 'a whole way of life', as 'internal'to 'value'; to reconcile the analytical realm of facts with the activeworld of the subject. Here the idealism of organic 'experience'provided a solution by enablingan extensionof 'experience' to coverthe social facts themselves.Having done this,Williams then added thedialectics of process and relations to it, althoughthe word itselfwasanathema at that time as it suggested he natural-scientificvertonesofEngles' Dialectics of Nature.We can see how Williams works out his solution. An initialsequence of events, subsequently recognizable as a context in ahistoricaldistance, is shown to beget a sequence of responseswhichcan also be historically objectified as the responsive content, anargument or a position. The content,which was 'then' a process ofmeaning-in-the-makingut 'now' a recognizable body of arguments, sinherited in a subsequently changed context. Now, the effort tounderstand this received content in response to the changed initialcontext necessitates a further hange in the inheritedcontent. Theprocess can thus continue ad infinitum,such that the received-changed meaning always undergoesfurthermutations in response tothe changed and changing context in which it is received andcontinued as responsiveunderstanding. ut Williams,to be sure, doesnot offer hanges in contexts and contentsas separate and separabletemporal instances. The dynamic relation between them is not onlyprocessual, but also mutually nteractive nd involving.This can be illustratedby examples from Culture and Society.Burke's response was contextual. But the historicalcontextwas notstatic; it was a situation on the move-an industrialising anddemocratising ountrywhere these 'forces' were acceleratingeven asBurke was articulating his response: 'And even while Burke waswriting,the great tide of economic change was flowing strongly,carryingwith it many of the political changes against which he wasconcerned to argue.'32 The content of Burkewas not, similarly, ninstance but a continual accretion which only became a body ofwritingretrospectivelyn terms of the now historicallyobjectifiedcontext. Thus the contentof Burke'sexperienceof an initial context-'an experience of stability, containing imperfections, but notessentially threatened,' changes, not at some instance in time, butprocessually, n the course of response tself.As 'the current f changeswelled,' Burke's affirmation ecame a desperate defence.'33From the initial sequence of context and content certain major'terms' are seen to precipitateinto a 'pattern' or 'structure' of keywords in termsof which the subsequent social thinking, lbeit withlocal variations, largelyproceeds. In Culture and Society Williams''effects'referred o above largely onsist of locating the relay points inthe 'tr-adition'f the distinguished'meanings.Southeyand Owen, the


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42 SOCIAL SCIENTISTRomantic artists, Bentham, Coleridge, Carlyle . . . . each inheritscertainmeaningsand perspectives hrough set of 'key words' fromwhich theytryto build up a discourse in response;and responsivetothe changed and changingsituations- f his own times.The workingprinciple of Culture anid Society may thus be seen to contain anhistorical element the context,the 'source'), a linguistic lement thecontent,the receivedpersonal statementsfrom which the subsequentthinkers, ncluding Williams, distinguishmeanings by practising it'relevantly' in the present) and, as the middle term,an existentialelement, the element of consciousness; which 'responds' to theimmediate context of experience through inheritedkeywords (theelementof 'experience'). If thisworkingprinciple s accepted as valid,onie can then see Cultture and Society as a series of essays; onindividual thinkers n which this priniciples assumed as the inherentconnectingterm.The historicalconnection betweenthe figures n thebook thus has a demonstrable relation to literary criticism-theperiodic generational submission of the received meanings to theirexperience. Leavis had developed the earlier idealist dynamics ofEliot's history f literary radition o argue thatliterary tatements remore than personal and literary nsofar as theyare presentheuristicactivities undertaken withiin the flux of experience under thesupervision of and submission to the 'Tradition'. The significantdifferences a vague sense of ideology which lurksthroughCulture;and Society which Williams could not have negotiated, given hisorganic experientialism. or what comes out in the semanticdialecticis thegradual defensive lide in theconcept of culturefrom n originalholistic emphasis to the cold-war elitism.As Williams did not haveM'arx's concept of civil society, he failed to see that the originalholisticemphasis in the idea of culturewas as much ideological as thestubsequentonsecrationof it in an elitist hrineby itshigh priestEliot.By his unwitting subscriptioi to the literary-criticalframework,Williams relayed on its organicist language-consciousnessequation.He shares its idealistic position in positinlg that consciousness is thecentralising n-terpreternd the prescriber f ethicalstandards. He alsosharesitsorganicist osition n reformulatingts standardthat anguageis theorganic callous secreted n the above process of consciousness.At the same time the trend towards objective analysis is alsoapparentin Williams' historical emantics.By his dramaticcriticismhehad come to know what he would later call in Marxism andLiteraturethehistoricalprocess of theformation f the form' tself.34That is, what thelatergenerationwould recognise s a 'form' or genre'is nothingbut the objective establishment f certain conventions to


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AN INTRODUCTIONTO RAYMONDWILLIAMS 43represent a specific social experience. This is already evident inCulture and Society, in the introductionWilliams writes about thenew words that entered into the vocabulary after the industrialrevolution,There is in facta general pattern f change in thesewords,and this can be used as a special kind ofmap bywhich it is possible tolook again at those wider changes in life and thought to which thechanges in language evidently efer.'35He also refers o a 'structure fmeanings' which has close affinitieswith his concept, 'structureoffeeling,which he had alreadyarticulatedby this time.36Williams was instinctivelyorrect n seeing semanticsas the crucialclue for the concept of 'culture'. For all his objective concerns inCulture and Society,where exactlydid thenthe argumentgo wrong?A crucial hint is present in this line: 'The area of culture, . . . is usuallyproportionate to the area of a language ratherthan to the area of aclass.'37 We can findhimrestating his almosta decade later:

. . . if . . . meanings and values are widely, not sectionally, created(and the example that one used in the first nstance was that oflanguage, which is no individual's creation, although certainindividuals extend and deepen its possibilities), then one had totalk about thegeneralfact of a communityf culture. . .38Withinthisdepoliticisedand organicconceptof language, the conceptof dialectics between the past and the presentwas first tated in the1953 essay The Idea of Culture':The history of a word is in the series of meanings which adictionarydefines;the relevanceof a word is in common language.The dictionaryindicates a contemporary cheme of the past; theactive word, in speech or in writing, ndicates all that has becomepresent.To distinguish he interactions to distinguish tradition-a mode of history;and then in experience we set a value on thetradition-a mode of criticism. The continuing process, andconsequentdecisions,are thenthe matter f action in society.39

The absence in these analyses is the central Marxist concept of classstruggle nd class conflict. t was E.P. Thompsonwho first ointedoutthe tendency f Williams' 'quantitativenarrative' o pass by 'a numberof questions highly relevant to the historian of the working-classmovement.'40 Williams failed to recognisethe existenceof a categoryof people called 'intellectuals' who exhibit theirclass allegiances inmatters of cultural production. Consequently he took language as asort of organic index of an equally organic entity alled 'society'. Nodoubt the cultural discourse he sketchedin Culture and Society didregister hanges in society. But the important uestionwas fromwhosepointof view?


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44 SOCIALSCIENTISTCriticism rom he left s almostunanimously greedthatthe ethicaland phenomenological sublimation of the structuresof civil society

and politics s due to the lack of a radical tradition.This is an entirelyacceptable description. n fact the word 'contrasts'with whichCultureanldSociety begins shows starklyWilliams' distance fromMarxism.Marx himselfhad used thisword-'significant' word, to borrow oneof Williams' favouritewords fromthisbook-in a differentense. Forhis distinctions nd relations Williams introduces n the beginningofthe book two verydeterminingnd contrastive air of thinkers. urkeand Cobbett; are presentedas belongingto the decisive momentsinthehistory f theformulation f the idea of culture.Accordingto himthis s not onlytheperiod in which we findthe longefforto composea general attitude towards the new forces of industrialism anddemocracy,' but also the period in which the 'major analysis isundertaken and the major opinions and descriptionsemerge'.41 Inbeginningwith the period of IndustrialRevolutionWilliams does notgive us either an analysis of capitalism or its relations of production.On the otherhand, the book beginswith a phenomenological ccountof the contrastive'mood which epitomises,' n his view, the habit ofthinkingof the early industrialgenerations.'42 Burke and Cobbett,Southeyand Owen epitomizefor Williams themood of contrastof theperiod. This contrast n the milieuhad been noted by Marx himself nhis speech deliveredon theoccasion of the anniversary f the Chartist'People's Paper' in April 1856. It is very likely that Williams hadknown this throughone of his sources, Klingender'sMarxism andModern Art where Marx's speech is quoted.43 Referringto theCarlylean signsof time'Marx had remarked,

There is one great factcharacteristic f this our nineteenth entury;a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand there havestarted into life industrialand scientific orceswhich no epoch ofthe formerhuman historyhad ever suspected. On the other handthere exist symptomsof decay, far surpassingthe horrorsof thelatter times of the Roman Empire. In our days, every thingseemspregnant with its contrary:Machinery,giftedwith the wonderfulpower of shorteningand fructifying uman labour, we beholdstarving nd overworking t. The new fangledsources of wealth,bysome strange,weird spell, are turned nto sources of want. . . . Atthe same pace thatmankindmastersnature,man seems to becomeenslaved to other men or to his own infamy. ven thepure lightofscience seems unable to shine but on the dark background ofignorance. All our inventions and progress seem to result in


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AN INTRODUCTION TO RAYMOND WILLIAMS 45endowingmaterialforceswith intellectualife,and in stultifyinghuman ife nto material orce.44

But Marx had not stopped hort t takingnoteof theanti-capitalistantinomies.Afternamingthemhe had shrewdly istinguished is;owndiagnosis rom hat f others':thisantagonism etween heproductive orces nd social relationsof our epoch is a fact,palpable, overwhelming,nd not to becontroverted.omemaywail over t; othersmaywishto getridofmodern rts n orderto getridofmodern onflicts. r theymayimagine hat o signal progressn industry ants o be completedbyas signal regressnpolitics. or ourpart,we do notmistake heshape of the shrewd spirit that continues to mark all thesecontradictions. e know thatto work well thenew-fangledorcesofsociety, hey nlywantto be mastered ynew-fangled en-andsuch are theworkingmen. . .45

Williams eginshis owncontrastiveccount n a different anner. ncontrast o Marx's antagonism etween roductive orces nd socialrelations' he chose to provide a historical analysis of thephenomenologyf the contrastivemood.' Williamspointsto 'theassociationof Burkeand Cobbett, hroughWindham.'46He claimsthatthispersonal ssociation serves s an introductiono the moreimportantassociation' which is not adequately recognised byconventional historical accounts which pigeonhole them intoconservative nd radical camps respectively.he 'more importantassociation', ased on 'experience',s said to be indicative f a socialrealityhat s generallyverlooked ythehistorians:In theconvulsionofEnglandbythestruggleorpolitical emocracynd theprogress fthe ndustrial evolution,manyvoiceswereraised ncondemnationfthe new developments, n the terms and accents of an olderEngland'.47In thustaking ultural iscourse s theorganic ffusion f a totalsocial experienceWilliams ailed o understandhat

The ideasof theruling lassare inevery pochtheruling deas, .e.the classwhich s therulingmaterial orce fsociety,s at the sametime tsrulingntellectualorce.The class whichhas the means ofmaterial roductiont itsdisposal, s control t the sametime verthe means of mental production,so that thereby,generallyspeaking,the ideas of those who lack the means of mentalproductionre subject o it.48As a result,hematerial istoryf conflictndstruggless processedntheculturalised istoriographyf Williams.The language paradigmwhich allows Williams to see it as the existential olution of theobjective nd subjective; actors orrodes hepolitical tructuref the


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46 SOCIALSCIENTISTsociety. What becomes apparent in Williams' strategyof relatingcontents of personal statements o historical contexts is the unstatedand continuously maintained argument against their positivisticreduction to a causal, necessary,and one-to-one relationship.As amaintained distance from the-then reductive-Marxist practice ofr-eadingcultural statements as the direct distillation of economicfactors, hiswas perhapsa necessarygesture.But in tryingo overcomethe positivistic imitationsof reductiveMarxism, Williams, in turn,bvpasses importantquestions regarding the relation of two differentcontexts n history. he initial imitation s theconceptof historytself.The Crocean historiography by which the real structure andmovement of the civil society is ethically reduced to moments of'consent' presides over Williams' reappropriation of the culturaltradition. As I remarkedabove, if the lack of the concept of civilsocietyforcesWilliams to conceptualiseit as systemic rganicism,theresultant ack of the concept of class struggle n the field of cultureforces him to conceptualise writing as the hermeneuticrecord of'immediate' living.This limitsWilliams' treatment f cultural contents n a numberofways. The absence of the concept of civil societyprimarily ffects hecriteriaby which the thinkers re selected forscrutiny. he historical-hermeneutic ttitude to culture as the lived reality that is accessibleonlv in its 'realisation' in the present imposes, by necessity, theliterary-criticalelectivity.49The selectedpassages are then offered srepresentative f an individual and his body of writing.Further, heabsence of the concept of civil societydeprives Williams of a radicalconceptionof class. This leads him to accept individualstatements nan Arnoldianbasis as the best that is said and thought'. As examinedin the case of Burke,the contents re accepted phenomenologically tthe individual and ethically t the social level. As a resultthe contextsare thoroughlydepoliticised. While Williams is capable of isolatinghistorical-existential contexts by the advantage of retrospectiveanalysis, he does not explain how such contexts change orprocessually graduate into the next instance. Therefore, ontexts areseparated fromeach other only in terms of the successive phases ofculturaldiscourse on them. Instead of providing n historicalaccountof contexts by negotiating how change occurs in them, Williamsdissolves them nto a seriesof moral postulates of the contents of hisfigures. For example, Williams constantly refers to changed andchanging circumstances' nd 'conditions' and, because of the inabilityto see dynamicconnectionsbetweencontexts,we are nevertold howthishappens. One realisesat thisstage thatWilliams stillhas problems


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AN INTRODUCTIONTO RAYMOND WILLIAMS 47with the dynamics of change, a problem which he shared as thecoeditorof Politics and Letters n pigeon-holdingcontemporaryfact'to 'rational change' and 'private meaning' to 'evolutionary socialchange.' Change is inevitablyreduced to the level of meaning: 'Theforceswhichhave changed and are stillchangingour world are indeedindustryand democracy. Understanding of this change, this longrevolution ies at a level of meaningwhich it is not easy to reach.'50The choice of the word 'forces' to describe the agency of change issignificant. emocracy and Industry re denoted here as 'forces' as ifthey are physical entities acting from outside. This can be comparedwith the plural 'we' in Williams' reference o culture. ndeed this is anunconscious reproduction of the romantic anti-capitalist antinomybetween 'culture' and 'civilisation'. The dichotomyfirstgrasped inPolitics and Letters between 'private meaning' and 'public fact'receives differentialtatement n Culture and Society n that Williamscan now see a historical and social relationship between 'changedsocial structure nd changed social-feelings' n a mutually involvingand interactiveway; but while he can talk of patterns f change' in hiskey words, he cannot account for the changed social structure.5Social change in this account gets reduced a scenario of shiftingphenomena which are in their process responsively arrested andarticulated.Thus Williams' contextsare severely imited.His historicalcontexts are elaborate restatements f their own phenomenologicalaccounts as they appear in the texture f the contentsof his figures. nother words, he creates pseudo contexts by extracting phenomenalaccounts of historyfromthe personal statements f his figures.Sincethese accounts are already ideological versions, they corroborate inestablishing hevalidity f the social thinking' f his figures ver whatmight then be dubbed as superficial and evanescent 'politics'.Historical-material ontextsbecome merelythe inside out versionsofthe 'experience' of social change as registeredphenomenally in thepersonal statements. This results in the evacuation of either theempirical or theoreticaldetails of the social agency of change. Theevacuated reality then presents itself as the terms of 'immediateexperience' to which figures n the book constantlysurrendertheirinheritedmeanings and significancesto derive their contemporaryrelevance.As a resultone constantly aces two modes of social reality.On the one hand there is realityas the meaning-in-the-making-thephenomenal and the experiential n the process of getting rticulatedas staged response.This is the existential ealitywhichaccounts for the'complexity'of cultural response at any given moment.About Burkeand Cobbettwe are told that

The growthof the new societywas so confusing, ven to the bestminds, that positions were drawn up in terms of inheritedcategories,which then revealed unsuspectedand even opposingimplications.There was much overlapping,even in the opposite


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48 SOCIAL SCIENTISTpositionsof a Cobbett and a Burke,and thecontinuing ttackoInUtilitarianism and on the driving philosophy of the newindustrialism as to make manymorestrange ffiliations. .52The caution one is being givenhere is that it is easy to iron out thecomplexityof this existentialrealitythrough retrospective nalyticalprocedures. n the case of Burke,Williamspersuades us that the fluxof history nd judgement' s easily overlookedwhen we tryto set him'against the subsequent known march'.'53 On the otherhaind here sthe second reality, hereality f thefactualand the analyticalmode asgiven in the history of ideas, etymologyand to some extent, asWilliams seems to suggest,Marxism itself.The transformation ndlimiting of the objective criteria of social history into shiftingphenomena arrested; in response, its reintroduction to validatepersonal statements romwhichtheywere extracted exturallyet up agap between the evacuated empiricaldetails of the agency of changeand the ethical emphasis; on the existential spects of reality. n otherwords the fact/value ichotomybeyondwhichWilliams set out to goin his original aspiration to findalternatives o positivismreappears.The value in question here being the distinctionof lived quality, itgoes without saying that Williams is restating a literary-criticalemphasis.54 Williamshimselfbest describesthis as the result of [his]literary raining': The hard-learnt rocedureof literaryudgmentwasa kind of suspension before experience'.55 The literary-criticaldistinction of culture as the heuristic response to the contingentmaterialfactsof social lifesets up languageas therepository f such aculture to be internally ealised. Further, ince such an expressive andencultured anguage was seen as emaciatedby the industrialmentality,received iteraturenevitablybecame the bastion of culture.Looked at

fromthis angle, it can indeed be argued that Williams is not onlytaking literary-criticalhabits across to historical facts, but doingsomethingfundamentallydifferent.He is just shifting he object ofliterary-criticalnalysis frombelles-lettres o Romantic anti-capitalisttexts. n doing so Williamsunconsciously upposes that therelation ofthese texts to history s the same as the relation of literary exts.Hethus overlooks the fact that in social discoursespeople are mediatedby definitematerial factors and are not pure ethical beings. It isbecause of this that Culture and Society becomes, in the words ofThompson, a procession of disembodiedvoices.56 Thus although thebook is given the inclusive title Culture and Society, 'society' itselfdoes not figure n the book in any real sense. The actual materialmatrix of 'society' is phenomenologically rocessed by Williams as an


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AN INTRODUCTION TO RAYMONDWILLIAMS 49ethical-cultural reoccupation of his figures, o that society n 'cultureand society' becomes a cultural 'common field', a commonpreoccupation. Culture now becomes the area of ethical concernwhile civilisation becomes the realm of the. material forces. AsWilliams himself uts it, the mistakefollowsfrom heoriginal strategyof the book, which is the recoveryof a very specific tradition. Theresult was to project back the appearance of a coherent discourse,which prevented him]fromfullyre-engaging uccessivethinkerswiththeirhistory.'57Positivist derivationsof reductiveMarxism, foreclosing ulture andtheconceptionof meaningas an active historicalprocess, an activity fhuman agencyforcedWilliams to the opposite extremeof interpretingmeanings as ethical and personal responses. Thompson formulatedthis Williamsian hesitancy before the-then discredited Marxism asfollows:

the major intellectual socialist tradition in this countrywas socontaminatedthat Williams could not hope to contest withreactionat all unless he dissociated himself rom t: the folliesof proletcult,the stridency and crude class reductionism which passed forMarxist criticism in some circles, the mixture of quantitativerhetoric and guilty causism which accompanied apolegitics forZhdanovism-all these seemed to have corroded even thevocabulary of socialism. With a compromisedtradition t his back,and with a brokenvocabulary in his hands, he did the only thingthat was leftto him: he took over the vocabularyof his opponents,followed them into the heart of their own arguments, nd foughtthem to a standstill n their wn terms.58Accordingto Thompson this accounts in the main forthe prominentshortcomings f both Culture and Societyand The Long Revolution-the 'tone' which induces in the reader a feelingof being 'offeredaprocession of disembodied voices,' the suppression of two culturesinto one of a 'tradition' of 'genuine communication" nd the offeringof 'abstract social forces' through the 'collective "we" of anestablished culture'.59 Thompson points out that in the fiftiesWilliams fought a lonely battle against 'the pressuresof a decade,'against,that is, the liberal-conservative onsensus, fromwhich he 'didnot emerge unmarked'.60 Thompson fell thatWilliams had 'acceptedto some degree his opponent's way of seeing the problem,and ha[d]followed them nto theirown areas of concern,while at the same timeneglecting other problems and approaches which have been theparticularconcernof the socialist tradition'.61Nothing expresses thisgenerallack of a radical traditionbetter han Williams' own commentabouitCulture and Society.


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50 SOCIALSCIENTISTthe origins of the book lie in ideas of either explicitly onservativeor contradictory thinkers in the nineteenth century-butconservativeswho, at the point of irruption f a qualitativelynewsocial orderput many of the right uestions to it but of course cameout withwrong answers-or people with whom [he] shared certainimpulses, like Leavis, moving towards explicitly reactionarypositionsin thetwentieth entury.62

REFERENCES1. In Cuilturenzd SocietyCaudwell represented or Williams the vulgarity f base-superstructure eduction.After he paternalistic ecognition hat His theoriesandoutlines; have been widelv learned'Williamshad feltthathe had 'littleto say, ofactual literature, hat is even interesting.'Williams thenexpresseshis practical-criticaldissatisfactionbout Caudwell's 'account of the development f mediaevalInto Elizabethan drama' and his 'paraphrase of the sleep' line fromMacbetIbpositionshighly eminiscent f L.C. Kinghts'Scrutinywork. [Culture and Society,p.268. Hereinafter S]. In the nterviewsWilliamscorrectshis literary-criticalndpre-semioticnimosity owardsCaudwell. He said, 'I rejected llusion anidRealityin such a peremptory av in Culture and Society because I took it in the terms nwhich it was presented. . . You must remember hat I was then a very sharp

practical critic and it provoked that professionalresponse in me. . . . I shouldhave realized that his pressurewas greater than mine.' [Politics and Letters:Interviews with the New Left, p. 127.1Williams recognized that Caudwell,however crudely,was searchingformaterialistic xplanations for language andconsciousness.2. See LonigRevolution,p. 137f HereinafterR).3. p. 97. Hereinafter eferred o as PLINl intthe notesand as Interviews n the text.4. Raymond Williams, 'Second Thoughts: I-T.S. Eliot on Culture,' CriticalQuarterly, V, 3 (July 956), p. 307.5. PLINL, p. 96-98.6. Ibid, p.97.7. Ibid, p. 98.8. Ibid, pp. 97 and 98.9. See PLINL, p. 175. The interviewersemark,... in the twentyyearsbetweenthewritingof the two books [Culture and Society and Keywords] your ideasobviously altered and developed. Keywords takes the principle of looking atchanges of historicalmeaningmuchfurthernd moresystematicallyhan Cultureand Society.' Even though thevgo on to enquire, Were you influenced by orinterested n other kinds of linguistic tudy in the interim,which had a directbearing on keywords?' the idealist language paradigm on which Williamsconstructed is social reality n Cultureand Society nd The Long Revolutionarenot considered.10. PLINL, p. 176.1 1. Keywords,p. 23 (Hereafter W)

12. CS, pp. 285-28613. CS,p.277.14. CS, p. 287.15. CS, p. 287.16. CS, p. 286-287.


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AN INTRODUCTION TO RAYMOND WILLIAMS 5117. PLINL, p.98f.18. Ibid, p.100.19. PLINL, p. 1001.20. PLINL, p. 107.21. PLINL, pp. 108 and 10722. Raymond Williams, 'The Future of Marxism,' Twentieth Century, 170 (July1961), pp. 129-130.23. CS, p. 18.24. CS, p. 18.25. CS, p. 19.26. CS,p.285.27. CS, p.18.28. CS, pp. 24-25.29. PLINL, p.120.30. CS, p. 18.31. CS,p. 18.32. CS, p.30.33. CS, p.30.34. See Marxism and Literature (hereafter ML) p. 191: 'This whole range ofconscious, half-conscious, and often apparently instinctive shaping-in anintricate complex of already materialized and materializing forms-is theactivation of a social semiotic and communicativeprocess,more deliberate,morecomplex, and more subtle in literary reation than in everyday xpressionbut init through major area of direct specifically ddressed) speechand writing.Overthiswhole range,fromthe most indifferentdoption of an establishedrelationallinguistic form to the most worked and reworked newly possible form, theultimatelyformative moment is the material articulation, the activation and

generationof sharedsounds and words'.35. CS, p. 13.36. CS, p. 13.37. CS, p. 307.38. Raymond Williams, 'Culture and Revolution: a Comment', in Terry Eagletonand BrianWicker ed. From Culture to Revolution The Slant Symposium1967),London, Sheed and Ward, 1968, pp. 28-29. Emphasis added.39. Raymond William, The Idea of Culture', Essays in Criticism,3 (July1953), p.242.40. E.P. Thompson, 'The Long Revolution', rev. of The Long Revolution, NLR, 9(May-June1961), p.28.41. CS,p.286.42. CS,p.23.43. F.D. Klingender,Marxism and Modern Art. An Approach to Social Realism(Marxism Today Series), ed. by Prof. Benjamin Farrington,London, Lawrenceand Wishart, 1942, pp.29-30.44. Karl Marx quoted in Klingender,bid, p.29.45. Karl Marx, quoted in Klingender,bid, p. 30.46. CS,p.23.47. Cs, p. 23. Williams' insistence n 'personal association' typicallyCambridgeaninone sense. This is ostensibly a Lawrencian mode intended to undercutretrospectiveanalytical abstraction. See Leavis' recollection of Wittgenstein['MemoriesofWittgenstein'n F.R. Leavis, The Critic as Anti-Philosopher,d. G.Singh,London, Chatto and Windus, 1982, pp. 129-145]; Williams' on method

in highlighting the 'experience' in Hume ['David Hume: Reasoning andExperience', n CS, p. 121-141.]; or his description f Elizabeth Gaskell's letters:'Yet the collection is worth having and reading, just because so many of theletters re ordinary: n example and a reminder f the experiencefromwhich shewrote,and fromwhich she drew all her values: an experienceof work and helpand the ties of love and relationship,which (when it intersectedwith earlyindustrialcapitalism) made her the necessaryand crucial witness.' [RaymondWilliams, Ordinary Letters',rev. of The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, (ed. byJ.A.V.Chapple and Arthur ollard,Manchester,ManchesterUniver. Press) New Society,VIII, 218 (1 Dec 1966), p. 844.


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52 SOCIAL SCIENTIST48. Marx and Engels,The German Ideology, p. 64.49. I am using the phrase 'literary-criticalelectivity' o differentiatemy sense ofWilliams' selectivityfrom suggestions that this was a conscious procedure.

Michael Skovmand, for example, writes, With his Cambridge background in'practical criticism',Williams gives us a number of eve-opening readings of,admittedly, arefully electedpassages of the writers f this selectivetradition', ouse one of his own phrases'. ['Culture, Anger,Community:Williams, Hoggartand theStrangeconjuncture f the Late Fifties',The Dolphin Publicationsof theEnglish Department,Univ. of Aarhus,4 (Dec. 1980), pp. 63-64.]. Eagleton alsospeaks of 'an inattention' hat is 'evidentin the drasticallypartial and distortedreadings of particularwriters Carlyle,Arnold and Lawrence in particular),whowere wrested from their true ideological loci and manipulated by selectivequotation and sentimentalmisconceptionnto the cause of a 'socialist humanism.'['Mutation of Critical Ideology' pp. 25-26] Skovmand's 'carefully selectedpassagesA nd Eagleton's 'manipulatedby selectivequotation' imputea consciousstrategy.However, the selectivity as to be seen as the necessary effectof theliterary-criticaltrategy f going for significant etails' in a giventext. Williams'professedpurpose of 'distinguishing he meanings' naturally took him to thoseparts of texts in which he had direct referenceto Romantic anti-capitalistcategories,namely Culture and the Industrial ociety.50. CS,, p. 321.51. CS,p. 17.52. CS,p.38.53. CS,p.31.54. see PLINL, pp. 122-123 where Williams says, 'There is a sense in which thecomposition of a specific ndividualat any point of time is irreducible o whatmav neverthelessbe more importantquestions about him-the degree to whichhe represented omething,whetherhe did more harm thangood, whetherhe wasrightor wrong. I probably valued this sense the more than I don't think t is arelationshipthat is sustainable with a piece of writing,but one could imaginesuch a relationshipwith an irreducible nstancefrom period of the past whichwas otherwise naccessibleto one; not when the partieshad separated out and thefull tendenciesof opinion had settled, but when these were actually interactingand contradictingach other within n individualmind. think have always hada stronger ense of the inherent ontradictions nd confusionswithin the actualprocess of somebody's work than anotherkind of account which summarize tsoverallproductand say that s what theperson stood for.'55. PLINL, p. 21.56. 'The Long Revolution,'rev.of The Long Revolution,NLR. 9(May-June, 961), p.24.57. PLINL, p. 108.58. Edward Thompson, The Long Revolution,' NLR, 9(May/June 961), p. 27.59. Ibid, pp. 24-2760. Ibid, p. 28.61. Ibid, p. 29.62. PLINL, p. 109. Williams' 'rightquestions' and 'wrong answers' is an angledreference o the social formationnoted by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto:'This [petty-bourgeois] chool of socialism dissected with great acuteness thecontradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare thehypocritical pologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly,he disastrouseffects f machinery nd division of labour, theconcentration f capital and landin a fewhands, overproduction nd crises; t pointedout the inevitableruinof thepetty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy inproduction, hecryingnequalities n thedistribution fwealth,the industrialwarof extermination etweennations,the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the oldfamily elations, f the old nationalities.


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AN INTRODUCTION TO RAYMOND WILLIAMS 53In its positive aims, however, . . it is both reactionary nd utopian.' [KarlMarx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. by MartinMilligan, New York, PrometheusBooks, p. 234.]

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