Page 17 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

6 INTRODUCTION

twentieth centuries. These writings—now often safely enshrined in academic
curricula—Williams revealed as engaged, critical interventions in their own time
in a set of key debates about the relations between culture and industry,
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democracy and class. What united these various writers into a ‘culture-and-
society’ tradition, in Williams’s view, was not their particular, often very
different, actual positions and judgements, but the mode of sustained reflection
they gave to qualitative questions about the impact on culture of the historic
transformations of the past. Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy and Leavis’s Mass
Civilization and Minority Culture were both shown as deeply engaged, embattled
pieces of cultural criticism, hiding their partisanship a little behind the invocation
to a fixed set of standards nominated as Culture with a capital ‘C’. It is true that,
in emphasizing this highly literary tradition in critical bourgeois thought,
Williams may have underplayed more radical alternative traditions and evidence
from more popular, radical and artisan cultures not easily fitted into the literary
framework. This was one criticism which Thompson levelled at The Long
Revolution in a seminal critique, of which he gave a magisterial counter-
demonstration in The Making of the English Working Class. Nevertheless, the
condensations which Culture and Society effected—giving the thought of ‘the
past’ an immediate reference and connotation in present debates, detaching them
from their traditional moorings in the Eng. Lit. syllabus—was formidable.
Yet in reconstituting this tradition Williams also, in a sense, brought it to a
decisive close. The Long Revolution, which followed almost immediately, was a
seminal event in English post-war intellectual life. It marked the opening of a
strikingly different kind of reflection on past and present. It linked with the
‘culture-and-society’ debate in its literary-moral points of reference. But in its
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theoretical mode and ambition it clearly also broke with that tradition. It
attempted to graft on to an idiom and mode of discourse irredeemably particular,
empirical and moral in emphasis, its own highly individual kind of ‘theorizing’.
It shifted the whole ground of debate from a literary-moral to an anthropological
definition of culture. But it defined the latter now as the ‘whole process’ by
means of which meanings and definitions are socially constructed and
historically transformed, with literature and art as only one, specially privileged,
kind of social communication. It also engaged, if in a highly displaced fashion,
the Marxist tradition, and its way of describing the relation between culture and
other social practices, as the only viable (but, in its existing English form,
unsatisfactory) alternative to more native traditions. The difficult, somewhat
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abstract quality of some of the writing in The Long Revolution can largely be
ascribed to its status as a ‘text of the break’. Bearing in mind the cultural and
intellectual climate of the ‘Cold War’ in which it was conceived and written one
can only register, without further comment here, the intellectual boldness of the
whole venture. 22
It was quickly followed by Thompson’s critique and The Making. The latter,
in its radically democratic emphasis, and its heroic labour of recovery of popular
political cultures hitherto largely lost to serious historical work, is the most