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129 pages

English

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Raymond Williams was a complex figure with various different facets to his activity. Raymond Williams: Cultural Analyst concentrates on the formation and application of his cultural-materialist methodology and its relation to his politics. Surveying Williams’s extensive writings across the fields of cultural studies, sociology and Marxist theory, the overall objective is to rescue Williams from his routine treatment as a literary scholar, and restore him to his rightful place as a leading scholar of the social sciences, not least for his theoretically sophisticated contribution to the field in the form of cultural materialism. Ultimately, this book argues that Williams should be regarded as a cultural analyst in the sociological rather than narrowly literary sense.

The book is replete with examples of Williams’s ideas and concepts that are of direct and illuminating relevance to twenty-first century problems. Throughout, Jim McGuigan displays a remarkable capacity to explain Williams’s sometimes complex ideas in an inviting and intuitively appealing way, making interesting connections across key concepts. For those familiar with Williams’s work, this new book will come as a breath of fresh air, and for readers coming across Williams for the first time, this offers an inspiring and vivid introduction to his work.

Introduction: Raymond Williams in time and place

Chapter 1: Culture and society

Against cultural conservatism

Debating society

Cultural analysis

Keywords

Chapter 2: Communication(s) and culture

Communications as cultural science

Advertising magic

Alternative communication systems

Towards a common culture

Chapter 3: The materialist conception of culture

The question of Marxism

Modelling hegemony

Materiality of the sign

Cultural production and circulation

Chapter 4: Drama in a screen age

Dramatic form

Politics of television drama

Knowable community

Chapter 5: Techno times

Watching TV

Media determinism and its determination

Mobile privatization

Chapter 6: The long revolution

New Left

Three revolutions

May Day Manifesto

Chapter 7: A short counter-revolution

Fate of ‘the long revolution’

Plan X

Socialism and the working class

Resources of hope

Chapter 8: Public intellectual

‘Our best man’

‘Welsh European’

Settling accounts with cultural studies

Green socialism versus ‘New Times’

Afterword: Contemporary cultural studies

Sujets

Social Science

Sociologie, société et politique

Literature

Sociology

General officer

Raymond Williams

General

Cultural Studies

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	15 juin 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781789380484
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1550€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2019 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2019 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
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Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Cover image: The Hereford Mappa Mundi, ca. 1300, Hereford Cathedral, England.
Print ISBN: 978-1-78938-047-7
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-049-1
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78938-048-4
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This is a peer-reviewed publication.
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Contents
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I NTRODUCTION: R AYMOND WILLIAMS IN TIME AND PLACE
C HAPTER 1: C ULTURE AND SOCIETY
Against cultural conservatism
Debating society
Cultural analysis
Keywords
C HAPTER 2: C OMMUNICATION(S) AND CULTURE
Communications as cultural science
Advertising magic
Alternative communication systems
Towards a common culture
C HAPTER 3: T HE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF CULTURE
The question of Marxism
Modelling hegemony
Materiality of the sign
Cultural production and circulation
C HAPTER 4: D RAMA IN A SCREEN AGE
Dramatic form
Politics of television drama
Knowable community
C HAPTER 5: T ECHNO TIMES
Watching TV
Media determinism and its determination
Mobile privatization
C HAPTER 6: T HE LONG REVOLUTION
New Left
Three revolutions
May Day Manifesto
C HAPTER 7: A SHORT COUNTER-REVOLUTION
Fate of ‘the long revolution’
Plan X
Socialism and the working class
Resources of hope
C HAPTER 8: P UBLIC INTELLECTUAL
‘Our best man’
‘Welsh European’
Settling accounts with cultural studies
Green socialism versus ‘New Times’
A FTERWORD: C ONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES
B IBLIOGRAPHY
I NDEX
Acknowledgements
I would never have written this book if it were not for the influence of my old postgraduate companions from the University of Leeds, Derek (‘Mac’) McKiernan and Steve Ryan. When I went to Leeds I soon caught their enthusiasm for Williams as a crypto-sociologist. My engagement with Williams’s works in Leeds was further inspired by Tom Steele, then the local Workers Educational Association tutor-organizer, and in the practice of the playwright, Trevor Griffiths. Tom hired Mac, Steve and I to teach communications and cultural studies for the WEA. More recently, Mac made a fantastic reading of the present book in draft. Tom has commented on it too. I must also thank a more recent friend, Marie Moran, for her intellectual acuity and eloquence; and indeed for our shared interest in cultural materialism. Thanks as well to Bridget Fowler for checking out the chapter on cultural materialism. Raymond Williams’s daughter, Merryn Hemp, and Gary Whannel were consulted as well on personal reminiscence. I should also acknowledge the facility provided by the Richard Burton centre at Swansea University for accessing Raymond Williams’s archive apart from one or two rather telling restrictions.
Jim McGuigan
July 2018
Introduction: Raymond Williams in time and place
Raymond Williams was a leading thinker of the British New Left from the 1960s until his death in 1988; and, also, in the formation of an innovative field of interdisciplinary education and research, cultural studies, which crosses over between the humanities and the social sciences. He was born in 1921 in the village of Pandy on the Welsh border with England and he died aged just 66 in the Essex town of Saffron Walden. Williams had recently retired from his professorship in drama at the University of Cambridge but was still writing. He always saw himself as a writer, ideally of ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ texts, novels and plays. However, Williams was much more successful as a non-fiction writer on cultural and political matters.
The black American critic, Cornel West called Raymond Williams ‘the last of the great European male revolutionary socialist intellectuals’. 1
What was it about Williams that drew such extravagant but gloomy praise from West? This is difficult to explain in a Britain where intellectuals are not accorded much respect, quite unlike in neighbouring France. The British, and especially the English, might appreciate the historical significance of a major ‘creative’ writer – a novelist like Dickens, a playwright like Shakespeare, a poet like Wordsworth – or, perhaps how a radical and routinely vilified politician such as Tony Benn had become a ‘national treasure’ by the end of his life. But, public respect for the equivalent of a French philosophe , in the traditional sense derived from the Enlightenment, is much harder to countenance in the British Isles.
Although he engaged in campaigning, Williams was never, strictly speaking, the leader of a political movement. He was acclaimed during his own lifetime for non-fiction writing, most of it densely theoretical. Even within academia, however, Raymond Williams was not so famous as, say, Roland Barthes was in France. Yet it is with such maîtres à penser – including the likes of Bourdieu, Foucault and, in Germany, Habermas – he must be ranked as someone who made a transformative contribution to cultural and political thought.
Confronted with intellectual and social snobbery in Cambridge, Williams declared ‘culture’ to be ‘ordinary’, a feature of everyday life here and now. Looking out of the bus window as he returned to the family home in South Wales, after visiting Hereford Cathedral to look at its medieval Mappa Mundi , Raymond Williams remarked,
Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and direction, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under pressures of experience, contact and discovery, writing themselves into the land. 2
‘Culture’ was not the special preserve of some highly educated elite or confined to the exotic customs of a faraway tribe somewhere in an obscure corner of the Empire. Williams believed in the creativity of working people where he came from and the value and meaningfulness of their lives in relation to one another.
Starting out in literary criticism and the cultural history of drama at university, Williams moved towards social theorizing and broad-based cultural analysis through his scholarly career. Of special interest here is Williams’s methodology of cultural analysis, cultural materialism , and how it developed over the years in the encounter with modern communications, particularly television, and cultures high and low. Critical analysis, for him, was always historical, including interrogation of the balance of power in present-day culture and society. He traced the changing meaning of words in public circulation over time and both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ cultural forms and media. And, most importantly, Williams contested accounts of social and cultural change that privileged technological innovation in isolation from economic, ideological and political factors. He stressed the importance of human agency and its capacity to change the world, albeit within determinate conditions inherited from the past and held in place by dominant structures and institutions.
Williams developed a way of thinking that engaged with the American tradition of ‘communication studies’ and contributed to a European tradition of cultural analysis, which was a product of Western Marxism’s focus upon culture and ideology rather than the privileging of political economy as in ‘orthodox Marxism’. Like his old associate, Stuart Hall, RW appropriated the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci’s theorization of hegemonic leadership and struggle in capitalist society. However, quite unlike Hall, Williams resisted the perennial revisionist tendency on the British Left to accommodate rather too readily to unpropitious conditions. Williams’s cultural materialism and his political intransigence differed markedly from Hall’s highly prestigious version of ‘contemporary cultural studies’ and its theorization of cultural politics that commanded the field in the 1970s but eventually was subject to arbitrary proliferation and forgetfulness.
His cultural-materialist methodology was demonstrated in a number of ways on communications media and symbolic process. He critiqued technological-determinist explanations of how new media come about and are used. And, he questioned dehumanizing thought in general, including its combination with a cynical and nihilistic politics – named ‘Plan X’ by Williams – which has defined global political economy and culture since the 1970s. Alternatively, Williams identified hope in green-socialist politics, manifested in radical social and labour movements that are opposed to the neo-liberal transformation of the social world, with its enrichment of the rich and impoverishment of the poor whilst, at the same time, carelessly putting life on Earth at risk.
Williams had published books before Culture and Society 1780–1950 ( C&S ) in 1958 but it was this book that established his reputation. In one sense, C&S was a disquisition on the changing mean