Page 43 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

the trade union, the co-operative and the working-class political
party (Williams, 1963, p. 313). 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’
(p. 311). For Williams, the antithesis of middle-class individual-
ism was no longer the minority culture of the intelligentsia—it
was 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 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’ (Williams, 1965, p. 68). Despite such qualification, the
ideal of a common culture remains of quite fundamental impor-
tance to Williams. In a characteristically radical move, he
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 prima-
rily 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, the idea
of solidarity is potentially the real basis of society’ (Williams, 1963,
p. 318). Where Eliot and Leavis diagnosed cultural decline,
Williams, by contrast, discerned a ‘long revolution’ leading
towards, rather than away from, the eventual realisation of a
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 imag-
inative work, by ‘the common elements resting on a common
language’ (p. 311). For Williams, any direct reduction of art to

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