Page 233 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

222 ENGLISH STUDIES

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Williams, in whose major theoretical writing literature becomes one specially
privileged level or instance of a ‘cultural totality’, itself composed of many
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different levels, several ‘particular histories’. The art and literature of a society
are aspects of its culture: and culture is understood as the crucial meanings and
values which distinguish the ‘way of life’ of one particular society from that of
another. Culture, in this sense, is expressed and carried not simply in literature
and the arts but in every level and activity which go to make up the social
totality. It is there ‘in institutions and ordinary behaviour, in implicit as well as in
explicit ways’. Literature is one of the specially privileged ways in which such
key meanings are expressed, clarified, discovered and transmitted.
The key question is how this privileged activity and its product, the
literary text, are related to other activities in the totality. Here Williams dispenses
with a formulation which would give prior determination to any one level or
activity— for example, the economic ‘base’ which art, in a simplified Marxism,
reflects as part of the ‘superstructure’. He argues that, if literature really is a part
of the ‘whole’, there is ‘no solid whole, outside it, to which…we concede
priority’.

The art is there, as an activity, with the production, the trading, the politics,
the raising of families. To study the relations adequately, we must study
them actively, seeing all the activities as particular and contemporary
forms of human energy.
If ‘culture’ can be said to ‘relate’ in any sense, then it is as an expression of the
way in which all the activities hang together—‘the theory of culture is the study
of relationships between elements in a whole way of life’. The same pattern or
structure, then, might be revealed as active in very different, apparently unrelated
levels within this totality. Thus the study of literary texts, provided it was
undertaken in this ‘many-sided’ way, could ‘stay in touch with and illuminate
particular art works and forms’ while at the same time being connected to the
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‘forms and relations of more general social life’. Williams’s work represents a
long, sometimes displaced critical engagement with the Marxist tradition on
these questions. In his early substantive work (Culture and Society) Marxism is
discussed in terms of English Marxist literary theory of the 1930s—an
engagement with traditional literary criticism which, Williams argues, Scrutiny
won and deserved to win. In the theoretical sections of The Long Revolution
Marxism provides the hidden ‘sub-text’ of the argument but the key terms and
concepts are retransplanted and reshaped. This applies, above all, to the problem
of base/superstructure, which, despite the reshaping, emerges from Williams’s
work as the key problematic of the whole field. Base/superstructure is the classic
framework within which the relationship of ‘being’ and ‘consciousness’, of ‘ideas’
to their ‘social base’ has been formulated in Marxist thinking. In ‘From Leavis to
Goldmann’ Williams acknowledges that some way of conceptualizing the
relations of determination—‘the economic base determines the social relations