'Tragic utopianism' and critique in Raymond Williams.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Jones, Paul
• Date: 22 September 2005

Preamble

In a 1992 review essay Fredric Jameson noted that one of the peculiarities of the promotion of the cultural studies project was the neglect of Raymond Williams' sociological and political vision and that leading such revisionism was an Australian-based avant-garde. (1) While this trend has perhaps been recently reversed in the work of such authors, there is a longer history within cultural studies of borrowing the shell of Williams' ideas and investing them with a 'new content', often at odds with his own work. (2) This article is a modest extension of my own efforts to rescue the late sociological project in Williams from such tendencies. (3) It also seeks to draw out a broader set of 'utopian' dimensions in Williams' work than is evident in his more explicit discussions of literary utopias or his related prospective analysis in his late work, Towards 2000.

Early Williams: Past or Future Focused?

There is one view of Williams that, despite his invocations of a long revolution, his work remains somehow focused on the past. This retrospectivity is usually attributed to his reliance on the values of his Welsh working-class background and its apparently remarkable depth of industrial and 'rural' community solidarity. (4) While Williams conceded this influence, it is quite distinct from the Leavises' emphasis on the values of a historically lost 'authentic' organic 'rural' community. Williams' conception of modernity was far less regressive. While for the Leavises only 'Literature' now bore redeemable ethical values, for Williams solidarity, for example, was a very real socially embedded ethic.

Complicating this situation further was Williams' acceptance for much of his career of F. R. Leavis' related but distinct thesis that industrialization had also destroyed an entire folkloric culture. One source of Williams' use of the phrase 'way of life' came from this thesis in the work of Leavis. So While Williams rejected Leavis' 'lost organic community' thesis tout court, he appears to have derived his position about the fate of the 'traditional popular culture of England' directly from him. Accordingly, he set aside the post-industrial (folk) ballads as a cultural form capable of bearing an alternative set of social values. They were 'to be seen as a valuable dissident element rather than as a culture'. (5) In practice this tended to mean that Williams remained focused on contesting 'high culture'.

As Georgina Boyes has argued, the key influence here is that of Cecil Sharp's version of Romantic folkloricism (and its role in the contemporary English Folk Revival of the 1930s) upon Leavis. (6) Most especially, one crucial collection of notated folk songs published by Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, had recounted the remarkable maintenance of the English (and Scottish) folk song tradition amongst the Appalachian communities of the United States. Sharp goes to great lengths in his introduction to stress the uniqueness of the Appalachians' 'way of life', most especially their apparent prioritization of leisure time, especially singing over material comforts. (7) For Leavis, the survival of this folk song tradition demonstrated the necessary integration of 'authentic' folk culture within an organic community, a '"way of life" (in our democratic parlance) that was truly an art of social living'. (8) Its negation was the 'mass civilization' of contemporary England. As Leavis saw salvation in the teaching of literature to a deculturated mass, Sharp saw it in his highly disciplined program of teaching of his approved curriculum of folk song and, especially, folk dance. Williams criticized Sharp explicitly--and so revised his 1958 opinion of 'the post-industrial ballads'--in 1973 in The Country and City.

A pattern is discernible here that continues to repeat itself: how Williams reworks his post-Romantic sources often shapes his conception of modern prospects for alternative politico-cultural practices and possible futures. The Leavis-Sharp legacy is the probable source of Williams' ongoing difficulties with forms of popular culture that do not have direct linkages with literature and drama. We can point to the gain in Williams' reworking of the Leavisite project of cultural renewal by the teaching of appreciation of 'great literature' into, instead, the popular teaching of skills more suited to what Williams would later call cultural production. Yet it seems odd that he showed little apparent interest in parallel musical 'reskilling' projects, such as the contemporary folk revival of the 1950s embodied by Ewan McCall's radio ballads for the BBC, the skiffle movement out of which The Beatles and many others emerged, or the reworking of Sharp's collected ballads within 1960s and later folk-rock. (9) These cultural interventions contested Sharp's pedagogical conservatism as effectively as any of Williams' contestations of selective literary and intellectual traditions. But while literary and intellectual traditions were, for Williams, a 'common inheritance' worthy of participatory contestation, popular musical traditions, at least contingently, were not. The Leavis 'death of traditional popular culture' thesis appears to have prevailed in Williams' thinking until the 1970s and even 1980s. His television criticism perhaps aside, only in his late sociology of culture did Williams find a means of adequately typologizing the potential of popular cultural forms to his own satisfaction.

So, to recast all this in Williams' later theoretical language, for the early Williams there exist embedded social values such as social solidarity that are alternative to those that are hegemonically dominant (for example, individualist meritocracy) but which lack cultural forms capable of more than dissident contestation. Residual cultural forms such as balladry are insufficient. Part of the counter-hegemonic project must be the (re)skilling, by popular education, of those who might become cultural producers of a new culture via more adequate cultural forms, probably located within 'high' culture. There would thus have been little point for Williams in undertaking the form of redemptive critique of many mass cultural forms that Fredric Jameson demonstrates in his 'Utopia and Mass Culture'. (10)

But what of the future? There is Williams' equally ambiguous early theorization of this sense of pre-articulated culture as 'structures of feeling'. The reconstruction of the 'lived experience' and structure of feeling of the 1840s in the 'Analysis of Culture' chapter in The Long Revolution--via mainly literary (in the broad sense) materials--is much lauded by commentators. However, taken by itself, it also tends to suggest a cultural analysis focused on the past (and certainly on the superior redemptive possibilities of autonomous art over popular culture). Yet in the context of the whole book it is only one step towards the concluding analysis of the coming decade, 'Britain in the Sixties'. It is such prospective analysis, as Williams later called it, towards which much of his analytic work builds. As if to confirm this focus on the future, the first edition of Communications, published the following year in 1962, was fore-titled 'Britain in the Sixties'.

Is this then the utopian dimension in Williams' work? Not quite. Indeed, the answer to that question is almost always both yes and no, but even the reasons for the call each time, shift according to the varying contingencies--the socio-political 'balances of forces'--through which Williams lived. Certainly, once he moved beyond his early Communist Party affiliation, there was never any prescriptive vision of a specific socialist future. His judgement in 'Culture Is Ordinary' that such (Stalinist) prescriptivism 'is strictly insane' never seems to have subsequently wavered:

I did some writing while I was, for eighteen months, a member of the Communist Party, and I found out in trivial ways what other writers, here and in Europe, have found out more gravely: the practical consequences of this kind of theoretical error. In this respect, I saw the future, and it didn't work. The Marxist interpretation of culture can never be accepted while it retains, as it need not retain, this directive element, this insistence that if you honestly want socialism you must write, think, learn in certain prescribed ways. A culture is common meanings, the product of a whole people, and offered individual meanings, the product of a man's [sic] whole committed and personal social experience. It is stupid and arrogant to suppose that any of these meanings can in any way be prescribed; they are made by living, made and remade, in ways we cannot know in advance. To try to jump the future, to pretend in some way you are the future, is strictly insane. Prediction is another matter, an offered meaning, but the only thing we can say about culture in an England that has socialized its means of production is that all the channels of expression and communication should be cleared and open, so that the whole actual life, that we cannot know in advance, that we can know only in part even while it is being lived, may be brought to consciousness and meaning. (11) The same openness is visible in the critique of Leninist vanguardism in Culture and Society, which also deploys the radical demand of the democratization of cultural skills:

if we are to agree with Marx that 'existence determines consciousness', we shall not find it easy to prescribe any particular consciousness in advance, unless, of course (this is how in theory it is usually done), the prescribers can somehow identify themselves with 'existence'. My own view is that if, in a socialist society, the basic cultural skills are made widely available, and the channels of communication...