Raymond Williams: Cultural Analyst

By Jim McGuigan

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jun 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789380484

Jim McGuigan

Jim McGuigan is Professor of Cultural Analysis at Loughborough University. He is the author of several books, including Cultural Populism (Routledge, 1992), Cool Capitalism (Pluto, 2009) and Cultural Analysis (Sage, 2009).

Book preview

Chapter 1: Culture and society

Against cultural conservatism

On returning from the war in late 1945 for the final year of his degree course in English at the University of Cambridge, RW fell in with two fellow undergraduates, Wolf Mankowitz and Clifford Collins. Both Mankowitz and Collins were tutees of the Downing College scholar, Frank (F.R.) Leavis, who had co-founded (with L.C. Knights) in 1932 the quarterly journal, Scrutiny, which ran through twenty issues until 1953. In the late 1940s, Leavis and the journal he edited were at the height of his fame and its influence. Williams had little personal contact with Leavis himself but all three were guided by Scrutiny and its rigorous criticism of literary texts in historical perspective.

Although the ‘difficult’ yet inspiring maverick Leavis was marginalized and his stature in his academic field was never fully acknowledged by the university, he attracted passionate allies and followers in establishing what became known as ‘Cambridge English’, including his former student and eventual wife, Queenie.¹

From the 1930s, Scrutiny represented the avant-garde of English studies at Cambridge and, with the passing of time, the teaching of English generally, especially in grammar schools. It had rebelled against the lingering prestige of the classics compared to English literature and also the gentlemanly amateurism of belle-lettreist scholarship in Cambridge that was once epitomised by the literary dilettante, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.²

The influence of rigorously practical criticism, urged on by I.A. Richards and a key feature of Leavisite methodology, is manifestly evident in RW’s first single-authored book, Reading and Criticism (1950), a handbook for adult education.³ It included exemplary texts to analyse, most especially poems and prose extracts and, in addition, an illustrative critical treatment of one whole novel, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. RW also provided examples of advertising copy for critical scrutiny, inspired by the pioneering pedagogy of Leavis and Denys Thompson from the 1930s.⁴

RW and his friends, Mankowitz and Collins, sought to contest the ‘apolitical’ character of Scrutiny, though not its literary-critical methods, with their Leftist but non-communist quarterly, Politics and Letters, and its related publication, The Critic.

Politics and Letters ran for only four issues in 1947–48, though in its short life it managed to publish work by such luminaries as George Orwell and Jean-Paul Sartre.⁵ F.R. Leavis himself had long since sought to clarify his objection to a politicized conception of literature that was apparently being resuscitated in Politics and Letters: ‘if the Marxist approach to literature seems to me unprofitable, this is not because I think of literature as a matter of isolated works of art, belonging to a realm of pure literary values (whatever that might mean)’.⁶ Taking account of social context was not the problem – Knights had advised it at Scrutiny – but failure to appreciate creativity derived from individual experience and, also, the role of tradition, as stressed by T.S. Eliot, were distortions of the proper role of criticism.

T.S. Eliot – American-born modernist poet and high Anglican Tory – was a pivotal figure in the critical debate from the late 1940s. In fact, he may be credited with shifting the argument from ‘literature’ to ‘culture’ with his 1948 book, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Eliot’s conception of culture was strikingly sociological in a structural-functionalist sense, stating that the individual’s culture is dependent upon the group and, in turn, the group is formed by the culture of the whole society.⁷ Moreover, Eliot’s anthropological description of British culture is inclusive albeit quaint:

It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list. And then we have to face the strange idea that what is part of our culture is also part of our lived religion.⁸

The concluding remark here is revealing, in that it echoed Matthew Arnold’s intuition of the mid-nineteenth century that culture would have to supplement and possibly succeed established religion as the glue holding society together.⁹

Eliot identified different socio-cultural levels and a considerable diversity of culture in the population at large. He also reserved a special role for the intellectual elite charged with a spiritual duty at the apex of the class system, a role comparable to Leavis’s petit-bourgeois ‘critical minority’ defending and maintaining standards against the ‘levelling down’ of mass-commercial culture. In sum:

What is important is a structure of society in which there will be, from ‘top’ to ‘bottom’, a continuous gradation of cultural levels. It is important to remember that we should not consider the upper levels as possessing more culture than the lower, but as representing a more conscious culture and a greater specialisation of culture.¹⁰

For Williams, this was ‘Eliot’s fundamentally conservative conclusion’.¹¹ Yet, Williams very much appreciated and made great use of Eliot’s holistic conception of culture, the anthropological notion of ‘whole way of life’.

During the 1960s, in a brilliant yet bombastic essay, Perry Anderson surveyed what he called ‘the components of the national culture’,¹² which meant for him the array of academic disciplines on the university curriculum. He found ‘an absent centre’ to be specific, a place occupied by the authority of a major social theorist comparable to France’s Émile Durkheim, Germany’s Max Weber, Italy’s Vilfredo Pareto and the USA’s Talcott Parsons. British sociology was characteristically empiricist and oriented towards immediate problems of social policy, which is true. But, on the absence of a grand theorist, Anderson was simply wrong, having failed to note the role of Herbert Spencer in the late-nineteenth century. Spencer theorized ‘Social Darwinism’,¹³ applying evolutionary theory to society for distinctly ideological and hugely influential, indeed imperialist, purposes.

Still, Anderson made an illuminating point when he argued that it was in the disciplines of social anthropology and literary criticism that a conception of society as a totality was articulated rather than in British sociology. According to Anderson, this put the Left in Britain at a disadvantage, a deficiency that Williams had sought to rectify with his 1958 book, Culture and Society.

Williams claimed that his work of the 1950s was devoted to combating English cultural conservatism, what he called ‘the official culture’. Referring to Culture and Society, he said, ‘my primary motive in writing the book? It was oppositional – to counter the appropriation of a long line of thinking about culture to what were by now reactionary positions’.¹⁴ However, he treated latter-day representatives of reaction – Eliot and especially Leavis – with learned respect. Rather more viscerally hostile, however, was his response, as a young working-class student from Wales, to the snobbery of highly educated and affluent people in Cambridge:

I was not oppressed by the university, but the teashop, acting as if it were one of the older and more respectable departments, was a different matter. Here was culture, not in any sense I knew, but in a special sense: the outward and emphatically visible sign of a special kind of people, cultivated people. They were not, the great majority of them, particularly learned; they practised few arts; but they had it, and they showed you they had it.¹⁵

Against cultural conservatism and social elitism, Williams declared unreservedly ‘culture is ordinary’ and, furthermore, he insisted that ordinary people are not culturally deprived.

Debating society

In the 1963 preface to the reissue of his most celebrated book that was originally published in 1958, Culture and Society 1780–1950, Williams explained its purpose as tracing the emergence of the idea and use of the word ‘culture’, during and since the Industrial Revolution. He discerned the formation of ‘a new general theory of culture […] a theory of the relation between elements in a whole way of life’.¹⁶

The moment of emergence was marked by fresh and different use of five words: in addition to culture, art, class, democracy and industry. For Williams ‘[t]he first important word was industry’. It had moved from referring exclusively to a ‘human attribute’ to signifying ‘a collective word for our manufacturing and productive institutions’.¹⁷ Shifting meanings and use of such ‘keywords’ signalled transformations in the wider culture and society.

Culture and Society traces the debate amongst writers on social change in Britain since the late-eighteenth century. This was a tradition of argumentation that did not necessarily exist as a self-conscious debate about society until Williams construed it as such. Moreover, the tradition under consideration was not, strictly speaking, one of aesthetic development encompassing formal trends in poetry and prose, especially the novel, and drama. Williams had already traced such an aesthetic tradition in his published research on modern European theatre, Drama from Ibsen to Eliot.¹⁸ What Williams actually traced, then, in Culture and Society was a succession of arguments and debates on ‘the constitution of society’.

That Williams showed more interest in the dialectic of social and political argument than in the history of artistic form in his famous book is notably evident in a remark on William Morris, whom Williams regarded as a ‘pivotal figure of the tradition’:

For my own part, I would willingly lose The Dream of John Ball and the romantic socialist songs and even News from Nowhere – in all of which the weaknesses of Morris’s general poetry are active and disabling, if to do so were the price of retaining and getting people to read such smaller things as How We Live, and How We Might Live, The Aims of Art, Useful Work versus Useless Toil, and A Factory as it might be.¹⁹

So, Williams preferred Morris’s anarcho-communist essays and lectures to his poetry and utopian fiction. Like Williams himself, Morris was on the Left; yet similar to several other writers in the Culture and Society tradition, there was a conservative, backward-looking aspect to Morris. His utopian future imagined in News from Nowhere²⁰ recalled a medieval ‘golden age’ that was believed to have existed before the ravages of industrialism. Though enunciated by different writers within the tradition, thus, an organizing binary opposition of nineteenth-century thought was the idealized harmony of organic society (set in the past but to be regained in the future) versus the inhumanity of the machine and mechanical society (of the dismal present).

A series of contrasts between pairs of writers are set up by Williams in the earlier part of the book, beginning with William Cobbett versus Edmund Burke. Both in their own way were ‘conservative’. Albeit affiliated to the Whigs rather than the Tory party, Burke stands at the origins of modern political conservatism defending the old society, which must be conserved, in a time of turbulent change, represented in his own period by the blood-letting challenge of the French Revolution. Cobbett championed the traditional way of life in the countryside and told of the small farmer’s plight faced by the rentier juggernaut of capitalist agriculture.²¹

A similar unanimity across political differences is noted regarding the two Roberts, of Left and Right: ‘Owen is […] with Southey, and against the political economists, in discerning the cause of our difficulties, not in human nature, but in the constitution of society’.²² Culture versus industrial civilization with its arduous toil, ugly and unhealthy environment and its ultimate reduction of everything to the ‘cash nexus’ (Carlyle) is a sentimental tension that runs right through the tradition up to the era of Leavis and Orwell.

Opposition to industrialism as such gives way, however, in the later period to the critique of commercialism generally and capitalist exploitation in particular, though Williams distanced himself from Marxism during the 1950s.

In the chapter on the Romantic Artist, Williams says: ‘[t]han the poets from Blake and Wordsworth to Shelley and Keats there have been few generations of creative writers more deeply interested and more involved in study and criticism of the society of their day’.²³ Sometimes backward-looking and occasionally reactionary, never the less, Romanticism, in a sense, occupied the space of an absent classical sociology by criticizing the society as a whole. This was the very tradition that Williams was to draw upon in constructing a more sociologically aware practice of cultural analysis and, eventually, by making his own cultural-materialist contribution to social theory.

The final chapter of Culture and Society is a summation of the argumentative tradition and represents Williams’s point of departure from it. He had throughout the book sought to demonstrate that ‘[t]he idea of culture is a record of our reaction in thought and feeling to the changed conditions of our common life […]. The working out of the idea of culture is a slow reach again for control’.²⁴ Conditions continue to change, however, and the challenge of culture has to be perpetually renewed. The keywords cited at the beginning of the book – art, class, culture, democracy and industry – are recalled and connected differentially to the three-part periodization of the tradition in question:

In the first period, from about 1790 to 1870, we find the long effort to compose a general attitude towards the new forces of industrialism and democracy; it is in this period that the major analysis is undertaken and the major opinions and descriptions emerge. Then from about 1870 to 1914, there is a breaking-down into narrower fronts, marked by a particular specialisation in attitudes to art, and, in the general field, by a preoccupation with direct politics. After 1914 these definitions continue, but there is a growing preoccupation, approaching a climax after 1945, with the issues raised not only by the inherited problems but by new problems arising from the development of mass media of communication and the general growth of large-scale organisations.²⁵

The task of making sense of the modern media of communications gives rise to further terminological issues, not least of which is the one concerning ‘[m]asses […] a new word for mob’.²⁶ RW insists that this word signifies, at the very least, a demeaning attitude to ordinary people. Incidentally, in so doing he does not consider the positive Leninist sense of ‘revolutionary masses’, signifying the collective subject of revolutionary change.

RW questions the way in which ‘mass’ has been connected to ‘communication’. It is mistaken to label such media with, in effect, a derogatory term for ordinary people in large numbers. Instead, Williams says, it is important to appreciate that modern media are about ‘multiple transmission’ of messages since printing onwards and all that entails. Audiences are larger now because of advances in technology and education, not because of the eruption of ignorant and dangerous crowds indicative of ‘a conception of society which relegates the majority of its members to mob status’.²⁷ ‘There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses’.²⁸ ‘The masses’ are always ‘other people’, never one’s own group of identification.

When it comes to communication, it is not only a question of transmission but also of reception and response. How do people respond to the newer media of communications? Inequality prevents ‘effective communication’ in modern society. The few are empowered to speak to the many. Williams does not mean here ‘effects’ as understood in behaviourist models of communication but, instead, the prevention of communicative exchange, dialogue, between sender and receiver. Inevitably, the question of class arises.

Williams challenges how ‘working-class culture’ had been thought about on the communist Left during the 1930s. For one thing, it is not simply a matter of working-class people writing novels – ‘proletarian literature’. For some time, he held grave doubts about this and, indeed, the catch-all denunciation of ‘bourgeois culture’ as well. The extension of education means that culture thus labelled is no longer so closed off from the working class.

Eventually, Williams reaches his main argument about differences between bourgeois and proletarian ‘ways of life’ and their related class values:

We may now see what is properly meant by ‘working-class culture’. It is not proletarian art, or council houses, or a particular use of language: it is rather the basic collective idea, and the institutions, manners, habits of thought, and intentions which proceed from this. Bourgeois culture, similarly, is the basic individualist idea and the institutions, manners, habits of thought, and intentions which proceed from that. In our culture as a whole, there is both a constant interaction between these ways of life and an area which can properly be described as common to or underlying both. The working class, because of its position, has not since the Industrial Revolution, produced a culture in the narrower sense. The culture which it has produced, and which it is important to recognize, is the collective democratic institution, whether in the trade unions, the cooperative movement, or a political party. Working-class culture, in the stage through which it has been passing is primarily social (in that it has created institutions) rather than individual (in particular intellectual or imaginative work). When it is considered in context, it can be seen as a very remarkable creative achievement.²⁹

Towards the end of Culture and Society, Williams is concerned with restoring ‘community’ to modern complex society. This project would require the construction of a genuine common culture of widespread participation, not, as some progressives at the end of the 1950s still thought, by merely disseminating Arnold’s ‘the best that has been thought and said’ to ‘the masses’. By ‘community’, Williams meant more than the usual sociological binary opposition to ‘society’. ‘Community’, in effect, referred to an imaginary social order that was envisaged through cultural debate, representing the desire for a better society that could and should be brought into being.

Cultural analysis

At the beginning of his 1961 publication, The Long Revolution, RW said, ‘[t]his book has been planned and written as a continuation of the work begun in my Culture and Society 1780–1950’.³⁰ He even expressed some regret at not having tackled, in the earlier book, ‘questions in the theory of culture, historical analysis of certain cultural institutions and forms, and problems of meaning and action in our contemporary cultural situation’. The book that followed bore a closer resemblance to sociology and social history than to Culture and Society’s intellectual history and literary criticism. The first part of The Long Revolution, amounting to nearly 150 pages, was RW’s most extended piece of theoretical writing hitherto. Before examining the component parts of ‘the long revolution’, the ‘democratic’, ‘industrial’ and ‘cultural’ revolutions (see Chapter 8 of this book for discussion of ‘the long revolution’ idea), RW discussed issues of creativity and experience, as Leavis insisted should be done, and set out his own innovative framework of cultural analysis before going on to address topics concerning the individual and society, and images of society.

RW was struck in particular by psychological evidence of cognitive agency; that, in a sense, the perceiving subject actively constructs the world and is not just a passive recipient of sense impressions. This universal human attribute is the basis of artistic creativity. According to RW, the artist creates representations of the world out of experience. And, there is an inter-play between the polarities of fantasy and reality in the artist’s communicative reworking of experience. RW sums up the general argument thus: ‘The true importance of our new understanding of perception and communication is that it verifies the creative activity of art in terms of a general human creativity’.³¹ He goes on to complain of how aesthetic theory fails to grasp the process of communication without which art would be meaningless. Art is, ‘at every level, an offering of experience, which may then be accepted, rejected, or ignored’.³² RW recommends ‘speak[ing] of art in terms of the organization of experience, especially in its effect on a spectator or an audience’.³³ Treated in this way, art would no longer be seen as an entirely separate sphere of activity from ordinary life and the circulation of common meanings.

In the second chapter of The Long Revolution, ‘The Analysis of Culture’, RW sets out his own distinctive methodological framework for cultural analysis that would subsequently be expanded and refined over the years but never really discarded. Immediately, he identified ‘three general categories in the definition of culture’, as follows:

1. Ideal Culture – which signals ‘the drive towards human perfection’, transcending time and place to achieve universality and what might typically be called now, ‘excellence’;

2. Documentary Culture – ‘the body of intellectual and imaginative work’ that leaves traces of earlier times in artefacts to be analysed historically;

3. Social Culture – referring to ‘the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture’.³⁴

RW goes on to observe:

It seems to me that there is value in each of these kinds of definition. For it certainly seems necessary to look for meanings and values, the record of creative human activity, not only in art and intellectual work, but also in institutions and forms of behaviour.³⁵

However, cultural history is mainly concerned with analysis of documentary culture, material from the past out of which particular ‘social characters’ (Erich Fromm) and ‘patterns of culture’ (Ruth Benedict) may be discerned in reconstructing ‘the whole way of life’.³⁶ It is at this point that RW introduces his own concept of structure of feeling, which he says is

as firm and definite as ‘structure’ suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity. In one sense, the structure of feeling is the culture of a period; it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization. And it is in this respect that the arts of a period, taking these to include characteristic approaches and tones in argument, are of major importance […]. One generation may train its successor, with reasonable success, in the social character of the general social pattern, but the new generation will have its own structure of feeling, which will not appear to have come ‘from’