Page 48 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

LEFT CULTURALISM

Despite such qualification, the ideal of a common culture remains
of quite fundamental importance to Williams. A common culture
may not yet properly exist, but it is nonetheless desirable, and moreover,
it provides for Williams, as for Eliot and Leavis, the essential theoretical
ground from which to mount an organicist critique of utilitarian
individualism. A common culture, Williams argues, could never be
truly established on the basis of that kind of vicarious participation
which Eliot had all too readily sanctioned: “The distinction of a culture
in common is that…selection is freely and commonly made and remade.
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The tending is a common process, based on common decision”. In
a characteristically radical move, Williams thus relocates the common
culture from the historical past to the not too distant future. And
insofar as any of the elements of such a culture can indeed be found in
the present, then they occur primarily within the culture of the working
class itself: “In its definition of the common interest as true self-interest,
in its finding of individual verification primarily in the community,
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the idea of solidarity is potentially the real basis of society”. Where
Eliot and Leavis diagnosed cultural decline, Williams, by contrast,
discerns a “long revolution” leading towards, rather than away from,
the eventual realization of a presumably socialistic, common culture.
There is, however, an important second sense in which Williams
makes use of the concept of a common culture. For, even as he insisted
on the importance of class cultures, Williams was careful also to note
the extent to which such distinctions of class are complicated, especially
in the field of intellectual and imaginative work, by “the common
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elements resting on a common language”. For Williams, any direct
reduction of art to class, such as is canvassed in certain “leftist” versions
of Marxism, remains entirely unacceptable. In studying literature,
and other cultural artefacts, Williams develops the key concept of
“structure of feeling”. “In one sense”, he writes, “this structure of
feeling is the culture of a period: it is the particular living result of all
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the elements in the general organization”. He continues: “in this
respect…the arts of a period…are of major importance …here…the
actual living sense, the deep community that makes the communication
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possible, is naturally drawn upon”. So, for example, the English
novel from Dickens to Lawrence becomes, for Williams, one medium
amongst many by which people seek to master and absorb new
experience, through the articulation of a structure of feeling, the key
problem of which is that of the “knowable community”. 60

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