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Contemporary Cultural Theory

for study are already deemed valuable, this amounts in practice
to little more than an indoctrination into a particular set of pre-
existing values. The logic of the process was nicely caught in
Baldick’s conclusion that: ‘The title of “criticism” was usurped
by a literary discourse whose entire attitude was at heart uncrit-
ical. Criticism in its most important and most vital sense had been
gutted and turned into its very opposite’ (Baldick, 1983, p. 234).
Neither the ‘literariness’ of literature nor the ‘popularity’ of
the popular is an inherent property of a certain type of text; each
is a function of how different kinds of text are socially processed
by cultural producers, distributors, critics, audiences, and so on.
As Eagleton argued: ‘There is no such thing as a literary work or
tradition which is valuable in itself, regardless of what anyone
might have said or come to say about it. “Value” is a transitive
term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific
situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given
purposes’ (Eagleton, 1996, p. 11). Such valuations are not
random for, as Eagleton also insisted, ‘they have their roots in
deeper structures of belief’ (p. 16). Whatever else the literary and
the popular might be, they are also social constructions.
Williams’ move from literary into cultural studies had been
occasioned, in part, by an aversion to criticism of this sub-
Arnoldian kind. In Keywords, for example, he had indicted
criticism as ‘ideological’ on the grounds that it ‘actively prevents
that understanding of response which does not assume the habit
(or right or duty) of judgement’ (Williams, 1976, p. 76). In Com-
munications, he insisted that we ‘have to learn confidence in our
own real opinions, and this depends on a kind of openness and
flexibility... which much that is called “criticism” does nothing
to help’ (Williams, 1976a, p. 147). At one point in a discussion of
radical realist television, he even went so far as to describe
contemporary British society as ‘rotten with criticism’, insisting
that ‘we need not criticism but analysis... the complex seeing
of analysis rather than . . . the abstractions of critical classification’
(Williams, 1989b, p. 239).
But there is more to Williams’ work than mere descriptive soci-
ology. Indeed, part of the point of what Williams ‘came to say’
was always, as with Arnold, to do some ‘good’ for his readers.

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