Page 47 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CULTURALISM

a powerfully socialistic critique of the political and economic
establishment, but rejected the economic determinism of the so-called
base/superstructure model with which communists had attempted to
explain cultural phenomena. We shall have occasion to explore some,
at least, of the detail of Communist cultural theory in the chapter that
follows. But for now let us consider Williams’s own position in some
little detail itself.
Williams’s originality in relation to the culturalist tradition, as he
had encountered it in the work of Eliot and Leavis, is to effect a
dramatic reversal of socio-cultural evaluation, such that a distinctly
working-class cultural achievement comes to be valorized positively
rather than negatively. Doubtless, this reversal has its deepest roots in
the facts of Williams’s own biography: a Welshman of Welsh descent,
his father was a railwayman, a trade unionist and a supporter of the
Labour Party. But its theoretical consequences are at their most apparent,
first, in Williams’s further expansion of Eliot’s anthropological
conception of culture, and second, in his substitution of a theory of
(actual and potential) cultural progress for that of cultural decline.
Quite centrally, Williams insists that “culture is ordinary”, and, more
famously: “a culture is not only a body of intellectual and imaginative
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work; it is also and essentially a whole way of life”. In principle this
is little different from Eliot. But in the practical application of that
principle, Williams so expands its range as to include within “culture”
the “collective democratic institution”, by which he means, primarily,
the trade union, the co-operative, and the working class political party. 52
Thus redefined, the notion of a single common culture becomes
supplemented, and importantly qualified, by that of a plurality of class
cultures: “The basis of a distinction between bourgeois and working-
class culture…is to be sought in the whole way of life… The crucial
distinction is between alternative ideas of the nature of social
relationships”. For Williams, the antithesis of middle-class individualism
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is no longer the minority culture of the intelligentsia, but rather proletarian
solidarity. If the common culture is not yet properly common, then, it
follows also that the literary tradition must be seen not so much as the
unfolding of a group mind, but as the outcome, in part at least, of a set
of interested selections made necessarily in the present: “selection will
be governed by many kinds of special interest, including class interests…
The traditional culture of a society will always tend to correspond to its
contemporary system of interests and values”. 54

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