Page 104 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy
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Genealogy of Cultural Studies            93

                89. Williams, The Long Revolution, 379.
                90. Hoggart made much the same point, noting that “the temptations, especially
             as they appear in mass-publications, are toward a gratification of the self and toward
             what may be called a ‘hedonistic-group-individualism. . . . Contemporary society has
             developed with particular skill the techniques of mutual indulgence and satisfied ‘or-
             dinariness.’” Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 130–31.
                91. There is also a concomitant and supportive change in the meaning of the in-
             dividual. In The Long Revolution Williams wrote: “Slowly, and with many ambigui-
             ties . . . we have learned to think of the ‘individual in his own right,’ where previously
             to describe an individual was to give an example of the group of which he was a mem-
             ber, and so to offer a particular description of that group and of the relationships
             within it.” Williams, The Long Revolution, 91. A mass may be defined as a colloca-
             tion of individuals, proximate in the sense they receive common messages from a cen-
             tral point or points, yet who are out of touch with one another and are usually physi-
             cally separated.
                92. Williams, The Long Revolution, 379. Gabriel Tarde, in 1901, is credited as be-
             ing the first to see the possibilities of elites controlling common people by segregat-
             ing them even as they retain a common focus on mass media. See Stuart Ewen, PR!
             A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 68. In Culture and Society
             Williams remarked that seeing other people as part of a mass “has been capitalized for
             the purposes of political or cultural exploitation.” Williams, Culture and Society, 289.
                93. Williams, The Long Revolution, 129.
                94. Williams, Culture and Society, 319. See also Ewen, PR!, 68.
                95. Raymond  Williams, “Means of Communication as Means of Production”
             (1978; reprint, Problems in Materialism and Culture, London: Verso, 1997), 56.
                96. Raymond Williams,  Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Glasgow:
             Fontana/Collins, 1974), 23.
                97. Raymond Williams,  Communications (1962; revised edition, Har-
             mondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 116.
                98. Williams, “Means of Communication as Means of Production,” 56.
                99. Williams, Culture and Society, 299.
               100. Raymond Williams, “Literature and Sociology: In Memory of Lucien Gold-
             man” (1971; reprint, Problems in Materialism and Culture, London: Verso, 1997), 19,
             20; emphasis added. In Culture and Society, however, Williams denied any easy in-
             terpretation of Marx (or Engels) on the matter of base and superstructure, writing:
             “Either the arts are passively dependent on social reality, a proposition which I take
             to be that of mechanical materialism, or a vulgar misinterpretation of Marx. Or the
             arts, as the creators of consciousness, determine social reality, the proposition which
             the Romantic poets sometimes advanced. Or finally, the arts, while ultimately depen-
             dent, with everything else, on the real economic structure, operate in part to reflect
             this structure and its consequent reality, and in part, by affecting attitudes towards re-
             ality, to help or hinder the constant business of changing it.” Williams then continued,
             “I find Marxist theories of culture confused because they seem to me, on different oc-
             casions and in different writers, to make use of all these propositions as the need
             serves.” Williams, Culture and Society, 266; emphasis in original.
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