Raymond Williams: Cultural Turn of Marxism and the Return of Politics
Studies about culture, literary theory,
media studies, film studies, and Marxism of 21st century would have
remained in the shadow of dogmatic thinking and sterile vocabulary of
capitalist triumphalism, if Raymond Williams was not there with a new reading
of the basics of Marxism. The birth of the new discipline of cultural studies
owes a lot to the work of Williams on the newly built road of cultural
materialism. Outside the dominant Great
Tradition of Leavis and his followers, away from the New Critics’ sacred close
reading without context, passing the vulgar materialism of Soviet orthodoxy a
group of intellectuals including E.P Thompson, Richard Hoggart, and Stuart Hall
started a new formation with a new critical vocabulary indebted a lot to
Gramsci, Frankfurt School, especially to Walter Benjamin, Althusser, later Sartre,
Goldmann, and the newly found Grundrisse. The dichotomy between a
minority culture against mass civilization, dating back to the days of Mathew
Arnold endorsed in various tones by T.S Eliot, Thomas Mann, and many others,
and the notion of culture as the best of thought and written in society have
been questioned and unsettled by this turn of Marxism.
Williams began in his working class
background a quest for locating culture, especially the literary one in the
real world of real people along with the similar attempts of his comrades. The
shocking exposure “culture is ordinary” eroded the elite fantasy of culture as
a site for the privileged. The worldliness of culture and its ordinariness have
been underscored with a new optimism in the subversive power of art and
literature, a point of departure from the New Historicism that overlooked the
radical dimension of art and literature. Instead of the notion of power as a
totality that appropriates everything, the concept of hegemony took centre
stage in the work of Williams. Seeing culture as a mere set of signifying
practices independent of history loses the political content in it and the
inevitable interconnection between political power and culture. The
reinterpretation of hegemony as porous distribution of power is the most
important contribution of Williams to read Gramsci (Alcala).
Cornel West equates Williams to Gramsci for
injecting “notions of contestation and incorporation into the understanding of
class conflict” (in Prendergast xi). The economic determinism prevailed in the
official literature of the left and the often misconstrued category of base and
superstructure have been contested while the structures of feeling and the
enabling programmes of the avant- garde have been incorporated. “It is a
position which can be briefly described as cultural materialism: a theory of
the specificities of material cultural and literary production within
historical materialism”(Williams 5).
Marxism and Literature
This book is the extension of what Williams
started with The Long Revolution (1961) and Culture and Society (1958),
a critical rewriting of cultural paradigms and theoretical assumptions that
formed the foundation of materialism in order to develop the cultural
materialism or the cultural politics of the new left. The misinterpretation of
Marxist principles at the cost of state capitalism disguised as communism
distorted the basics of Marxism. The abject distortion of it in the state
prescribed socialist realism by Lunacharsky, Plekhanov, and to a certain extent
by Trotsky and Christopher Caudwell in England, impoverished the literary
exchequers of many European countries while in China it hit the worst record by
valorising the party leaders as heroes of new romance of the people’s
socialism. The attack from the structuralist front, namely from Althusser and
the future post-structuralists targeted the humanist romanticism of the
Bolshevik commitment, and in turn the human agency to change the world. Even
the word commitment underwent a meaning change denoting subservience to the
party leadership. The Stalinist purge was the last and the worst attack on
revolutionary literature. Williams started his inquiries in these unfavourable
times and put forward a new approach to both Marxism and literature in his
works.
The book is divided into three sections, 1.
Basic Concepts2. Cultural Theory and 3. Literary Theory to deal in concepts as
various as culture, language, literature, ideology, determination, structures
of feeling, genres, forms, authors, etc. the first section offers a guide to
enter into the book with an entirely different awareness about the formation
and existence of culture, language,
literature and ideology. The inseparable interconnection between these four
categories should reveal the complexity involved in the process of human
history. The social production of language as practical consciousness, and the
underlying ideological currents and the role of literature as a functioning
event of communication are discussed here. Opposing structuralist Marxism,
Williams offers a new critical insight into the prevalent practices of treating
of language as stable or static, and objectification of language in imperialist
line.
The second part of the book is a succinct
treatment of the issues in cultural theory. The base and superstructure as two
functions of the socio-economic production relations mutually determine the
existence of each other. The realm of culture and ideology is not mere
reflection of the economic base, but a determining force. The topic of
determination comes up here. As Gramsci upheld, optimism of the will is essential
to change the world whatever type of pessimism is haunting the world. The role
of subjectivity and human agency in shaping the world is undeniable. Social
pressures have a significant role in materialising the real “They are also, and
vitally, pressures exerted by new formations, with their as yet unrealized
intentions”(87). But the abstract determination of quixotic nature is stupendous
but doomed to fail despite the serendipities in history. Productive forces are
taken into consideration to correspond to the will to change the world. The
material forces of history include the forces of nature and the historical
continuum of the dialectical evolution of all beings, and the human will.
Bibliography
Marxism and Literature- Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams-Fred Inglis
On Raymond Williams-Cultural Politics Vol.3.ed. Christopher Premdergast.
“Towards Cultural Materialism: Criticism
and Hegemony in Raymond Williams”-Roberto del valle Alcala. From
revistas.ucm.es web.
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