Page 82 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Cultural Studies 71

ical party. And this, too, is culture—albeit in the broader and deeper sense of
“a whole way of life.” 64
Moreover, Williams noted, working class people often engage in a wide
range of “skilled, intelligent, and creative activity,” such as gardening, car-
pentry, metal working, and politics, which not only give pleasure but also im-
prove community life. From the contemptuous eye of the highly literate, such
activities are likely be scorned. But for Williams (displaying a high degree of
reflexivity), the contempt of the highly literate “is a mark of the observers’
limits, not those of the activities themselves.” Indeed, he maintained that the
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highly literate are “deluded” when they judge the quality of life by the stan-
dard of great literature: “The error resembles that of the narrow reformer who
supposes that farm labourers and village craftsmen were once uneducated,
merely because they could not read.” 66
Rather than seeking out and documenting “proletariat literature” or other
working class “works,” Williams proposed it would be better to focus on “al-
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ternative ideas of the nature of social relationship.” Whereas individualism
is the hallmark of bourgeois social relationships, and service (or noblesse
oblige) characterizes an authoritarian, aristocratic, protective stance,
Williams claimed we can “properly associate” the following with the work-
ing class’ conception of social relationship: communism, socialism, coopera-
tion, community, solidarity, neighborhood. Each of these terms connotes a
conception of society neither as neutral (as in the bourgeois or liberal view),
nor protective (as in the paternalistic conception), but rather as “the positive
means for all kinds of development, including individual development.” 68
Like Hoggart, Williams was at pains to distinguish between popular culture
as transmitted by mass media, and authentic working class culture: “We can-
not fairly or usefully describe the bulk of the material produced by the new
means of communication as ‘working class culture,’” he insisted. “For neither
is it by any means produced exclusively for this class, nor, in any important
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degree, is it produced by them.” Williams and Hoggart both saw commod-
ified entertainment, rather, as eroding authentic working class culture.
Williams dated the onset of commercialized culture, particularly the rou-
tine commodification of literary works, to the late eighteenth century. In sup-
port of this claim he cited Adam Smith, who not only noted the narrow, class-
based origin of most cultural works (an observation having affinity to Innis’
monopolies of knowledge), but who also may be regarded as anticipating
Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. 70 For Williams, however, Smith’s remarks
were most notable for depicting conditions whereby artists’ work was “pur-
chased, in the same manner as shoes or stockings.’” The commodification
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of cultural production, Williams added, “followed inevitably from the institu-
tion of commercial publishing.” 72