Page 83 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

72 Chapter Two

For Williams, like Adorno, the commodification of cultural artifacts caused
a rift in conceptions both of art and the role of the artist. “When art is a com-
modity,” he advised, “taste is adequate, but when it is something more, a more
active relationship is essential.” 73 In the period of the Romantics (Blake,
Shelley), genuine art was viewed as issuing from the superior imagination
and as being a vehicle for the perfection of humankind, whereas art for the
74
marketplace stems merely from “the calculating faculty.” From this distinc-
tion, it was not a huge leap to set “high” art (as appreciated by the elite)
against “low” art (or art for the plebs). For Williams, however, that distinc-
tion bore all sorts of antidemocratic ramifications, which he set about recti-
fying, his method being, essentially, the recasting of the notion of culture as
art into the axiom culture as a whole way of life. 75
In support of culture as a whole way of life, Williams referred to and com-
pared novelists Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens. Regarding Gaskell’s
Mary Barton, he remarked that what he found most impressive “is the inten-
sity of the effort to record, in its own terms, the feel of everyday life in the
working class homes . . . the carefully annotated reproduction of dialect, the
carefully included details of food prices . . . the itemized description of the
furniture of the Barton’s living-room.” In contrast, Dickens’s Hard Times,
76
for Williams, was “an analysis of Industrialism, rather than an experience of
it.” He conjectured that Dickens likely had Mill’s Political Economy (1849)
in mind in making his general indictments of industrialism, adding: “In terms
of general understanding of the industrial working people Dickens is obvi-
ously less successful than Mrs Gaskell.” For our purposes, though, what is
77
most significant is that Williams chose to juxtapose and compare Gaskell and
Dickens, the first proffering through fiction a study of working class culture,
the second through narrative a critique of classical political economy.
In Culture and Society, and consistent with his interweaving of political
economy, Williams claimed that “the dominant class can to a large extent
control the transmission and distribution of the whole common inheritance.”
He explained:

A tradition is always selective, and that there will always be a tendency for this
process of selection to be related to and even governed by the interests of the
class that is dominant. These factors make it likely that there will be qualitative
changes in the traditional culture when there is a shift of class power. 78

Williams insisted, however, that “communication is not only transmission;
it is also reception and response.” Thereby he again proposed a unity be-
79
tween what are now known as cultural studies and political economy. Re-