Raymond Williams

(1921 - 1988)
 Raymond Williams was an author, academic, cultural theorist, literary critic,
public intellectual, socialist, and a leading figure of the New Left who is known
for his Cultural Materialism. He coined the term to describe a theoretical
blending of leftist culturalism and Marxist analysis.
 The concept of "Structure of Feeling" was developed by him.
 Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He is considered as a left-
wing critic.
 His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are significant
contributions to the Marxist critique of culture and arts.
 He was influenced by Antonio Gramsci and the concept of hegemony, writing
in opposition to the methods of vulgar or mechanical Marxism which fail to
place due emphasis on the dynamic nature of cultural production. As Stuart
Hall has noted, Williams played an integral role in the development of (a
politically engaged) cultural studies. And he theorised the distinctive and
decisive experiences of class, region, and community during an extended
engagement with questions of form; these were all themes which he drew
upon and expertly marshalled in his impressive debut novel, Border Country
(1960).
 Inspired by T. S. Eliot's 1948 publication Notes towards the Definition of
Culture, Williams began exploring the concept of culture. He first outlined his
argument that the concept emerged with the Industrial Revolution in the essay
"The Idea of Culture", which resulted in the widely successful book Culture
and Society, published in 1958. This was followed in 1961 by The Long
Revolution.
 In works such as Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961)
he embarked on what would be a prolonged analysis of cultural development
viewed through, and ingrained within, the transformations of industrial
capitalism and capitalist society.
 Williams was the founder of New Left Review (1960).
 Williams get wider fame with the publication of Culture and Society (1958) and
The Long Revolution (1961). He reconsidered the classic problem of ‘Base and
Superstructure’ in relation to literature.
 Williams' The Country and the City, demolished the notion of country life as
simple, natural and unadulterated.
 Williams challenged the Marxist modal of an economic 'base' determining a
cultural ‘superstructure’ and replaced it with a more flexible modal in which
cultural activities themselves are regarded as material and productive process.
 Raymond Williams developed a theory of relation between literary work and
social classes in terms of homologies that means a correspondence between two
or more structures.
 He was the son of working-class parents from a Welsh border village, an adult
education tutor, a Cambridge professor, and, according to Terry Eagleton,
was and wasn’t a Marxist. From such unique positions, he established a new
mode of critical analysis, cultural materialism, grounded in a concept of
culture which identifies cultural practice as part of an active, dynamic,
historical process.
 In 1981, Williams published Culture, where the term, discussed at length, is
defined as "a realized signifying system" and supported by chapters on "the
means of cultural production, and the process of cultural reproduction".
 The Raymond Williams Society was founded in 1989 "to support and develop
intellectual and political projects in areas broadly connected with Williams's
work". Since 1998 it has published Key Words: A Journal of Cultural
Materialism, which is "committed to developing the tradition of cultural
materialism" he originated.
 In Towards 2000 (1983), published five years before his death, Williams
offered a prescient analysis of ‘nomad capitalism’ and labelled as ‘Plan X’ the
political and economic project of social management now commonly
understood as neoliberalism; for Williams, this was a new form of capitalism
which aimed to ‘grasp’ and ‘control’ the future. He envisioned a powerful
alternative: a radically new kind of politics coalescing around the
disarmament, environment, and feminist movements. Cultural practice would,
of course, play a defining role and Williams’s methodological approach offers
a radical kind of critical analysis, one foregrounding the material processes
and relations of culture itself.

Important Works of Raymond Williams

Novels
1. Boarder Country
2. Second Generation (1964)
3. The Fight for Manod (1979)
4. Loyalties
5. People of the Black Mountains (1989)
Literary Studies
1. Culture and Society (1958)
2. The Long Revolution (1961)
3. Drama from Ibsen to Elliot
4. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence
5. The Country and the City (1973)
6. Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974)
7. Keywords (1976)
8. Marxism and Literature (1977)
9. Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (1980)
10. Writing in Society
 Culture and Society
 This is a book published in 1958 which explores how the notion of culture
developed in Great Britain, from the eighteenth through the twentieth
centuries.
 It argues that the notion of culture developed in response to the Industrial
Revolution and the social and political changes it brought in its wake. This is
done through a series of studies of famous British writers and essayists,
beginning with Edmund Burke and William Cobbett, also looking at William
Blake, William Wordsworth, etc., and continuing as far as F. R. Leavis, George
Orwell and Christopher Caudwell.
 Culture and Society is not a history of culture itself, but rather of the idea of
culture. It traces how the idea emerged and evolved across the preceding two
centuries, in the work of key authors from Burke, Mill and the Romantic poets
through to D.H. Lawrence, George Eliot and George Orwell.
 The idea of culture, Williams argues, arose in the late eighteenth century as a
response both to industrialization and to the growth of democracy. These
changes in the organization of society resulted in massive transformations, not
only in everyday life, but in the individual psyche – they produced what
Williams calls ‘a new kind of human being’. For the writers Williams discusses,
culture – particularly in the narrower form of ‘the arts’ – was a means of
challenging these developments, but also of identifying alternatives. Against
what was seen as the deadening influence of mechanization, they understood
culture as a source of individual wholeness and of authentic, ‘organic’
community. Culture was the thing that would save us all.
 Williams identifies several problems and limitations in this line of thought.
From the Romantics onwards, there was a tendency to separate ‘artists’ from
the rest of society, and to regard them as a specialized, superior category;
and in the process, art became steadily divorced from everyday social life.
Faced with the evident challenges of working-class movements, many of these
writers reverted to habitual class-based ideas: the critique of industrialism
and consumer society easily slid into a snobbish and bitter contempt for the
vulgar masses. And, Williams argues, too many of these writers failed to spell
out how any of the alternatives they preferred were ever likely to happen:
they wandered off into abstraction, or sought comfort in nostalgic yearnings
for some imaginary golden age.
 Matthew Arnold: as Williams notes, Culture and Anarchy has remained more
influential than any other single work in this tradition. Writing in the late 1860s,
Arnold was responding, not just to industrialization (which was a well-
established phenomenon by this time) but more specifically to the growing
agitation for working-class suffrage. For him, culture was an alternative to
what he regarded merely as ‘anarchy’, and almost a bulwark against it.
Arnold was an inspector of schools for several years, and he saw education as
key to this: although he sometimes described the pursuit of culture in quasi-
 religious terms, it was not simply an inward-looking, individual matter.
However, as Williams shows, Arnold’s contemptuous and fearful response to
working-class movements left him incapable of really understanding the
wider social and economic causes of what was taking place around him.
 Despite its historical approach, Culture and Society is essentially forward-
looking. Written at a time of what Williams calls ‘expanding culture’ –
especially with the proliferation of modern communications media – the book
aims to provide a new basis for cultural policy and practice, and indeed for
education. Williams’ political aims and sympathies here are clear. While he
offers a very cautious account of Marx (significantly, the only non-English-
speaking thinker here), he is clearly attracted to the proto-socialism of
William Morris: far from being merely nostalgic, Williams argues, Morris
regarded art as embedded in everyday social life, and (unlike most of the
other authors in this tradition) made common cause with the organized
working class.
 Crucially, Williams rejects the narrow conception of culture as ‘art’, in favour
of a broader view of culture as ‘a whole way of life’ – a more sociological or
anthropological view that he identifies in different forms in writers as diverse
as Marx and T.S. Eliot. This idea has often been used as a justification for the
study of popular culture, but its implications are more broad-ranging. In terms
of education, it suggests that it is mistaken to regard ‘culture’ as something
abstracted from society that can then be diffused or transmitted in order to
achieve a more general form of enlightenment. Culture (in this narrow sense)
cannot be extended without changing the ‘whole way of life’ within which it
has existed: as Williams puts it, it’s not about spreading the ‘known gold’
more widely, but about changing the currency.
 This all implies a rather different function for education, as compared with the
approach of Arnold (and indeed Gove). Williams challenges the notion of
education as a ‘ladder’, a social mobility device that will enable a few
individuals to escape their working-class origins. Rather than simply
cultivating appreciation of ‘the best’, or focusing on a narrow selection of the
arts or literature, education about culture should address the ‘whole way of
life’, and seek to create a dynamic and democratic ‘common culture’. A
genuinely popular education should not function simply as a means of
keeping people quiet, or forcing them to defer to received authorities. It is not
about promoting appreciation of what an elite minority chooses to define as
self-evidently ‘the best’, but of critically examining what Arnold himself called
‘stock notions and habits’. Ultimately, Williams argues, ‘nobody can raise
anybody else’s cultural standard’: what education should do is to provide
critical understanding, and offer people access to the full range of material
available.
 Interestingly, Williams follows this tradition of thinking through to two
twentieth century literary critics who played a major role in establishing the
subject of English in education. I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis remain influential
in defining the aims and methods of English teaching, and (perhaps especially)
setting its limitations. Williams praises Leavis’s proposals for teaching about
 popular culture, for example in his book Culture and Environment (with
Denys Thompson, 1933) – although these proposals have been justly criticized
by subsequent generations of educators. However, he also challenges the
cultural pessimism of this approach, its nostalgia for an imaginary ‘golden
age’, and what he calls its ‘pseudo-aristocratic authoritarianism’. And he notes
that, in the world of modern communications media, ‘technical’ changes have
run far ahead of practical educational responses.
 Culture and Society doesn’t deal directly with media (there is more in the two
books that follow), but it does identify some important basic principles.
Williams rejects the idea of ‘the masses’, not least because of the contempt
(and the fear of the ‘mob’) that generally accompanies it. ‘There are in fact no
masses,’ he argues; ‘there are only ways of seeing people as masses’. The
idea of ‘mass communication’, which follows from this, is also rejected, not
least because it tends to overstate the differences between ‘old’ and ‘new’
media, or elite and popular forms. Williams does not deny the need to make
judgments about value, but he challenges the tendency to over-generalise,
both about media and about audiences. At the same time, he refuses any easy
equation between class and culture, and any sentimentality about ‘working
class culture’; and he argues for a more far-reaching democratization of media
institutions. As we’ll see, these ideas are developed much more concretely in
his subsequent work.
 The scope of Culture and Society is obviously phenomenal, but so is the care
and thoughtfulness of its arguments. Williams treats each of the thinkers he
considers with a kind of intellectual generosity, rather than engaging in easy
individual attacks: he reads them symptomatically, as representative of their
times. Yet although he criticizes some of these writers for falling into
abstraction, this is a problem with his own writing too – and perhaps
especially in his concluding chapter, which seeks to provide the basis for an
alternative approach. The insistence on complexity, and the care and nuance
of the argument, make it hard to pin down much beyond general principles.
The idea of ‘common culture’, for example, implies a fundamental challenge
to the narrow and elitist ideas of ‘minority culture’ that he has been discussing.
It’s linked to arguments about democratization and equality, although it’s
evidently not about ‘dumbing down’, or about the eradication of diversity and
individuality. But, like the idea of culture as ‘a whole way of life’, it’s hard at
this point to see what it means, except in general terms.
 Culture and Society has a historical focus, but it also speaks to its own time,
and to the future. All three books I’m considering here were written on the
cusp of the 1960s, at a moment of social and cultural democratization (or
‘expansion’) in Britain; and while he’s aware of the forces that are working
against this, Williams remains fundamentally optimistic. As Britain goes into a
decisive election, our current situation seems much more precariously poised:
it may be that the kind of democratic socialism Williams represents can no
longer be sustained in the face of the global wave of right-wing populism.
 The ideas of culture that Williams considers in Culture and Society are partly a
response to industrialization and modernity. The advent of digital media –
 which some have described as a ‘second industrial revolution’ – would seem
to present new opportunities, but also some fundamental challenges. Williams
would certainly insist (as indeed he did in his later book, Television:
Technology and Cultural Form) on the need to see technology in relation to
broader economic, social and political changes. As I’ve argued elsewhere,
early ideas about the democratic promise of digital technology are now
giving way to a much more pessimistic understanding of how technology is
being used for profoundly anti-democratic purposes – and this again has
significant implications for education.

The Theory of Cultural Materialism

o Cultural materialism in literary theory and cultural studies traces its origin to
the work of the left-wing literary critic Raymond Williams. Cultural
materialism makes analysis based in critical theory, in the tradition of the
Frankfurt School.
o A theory which views culture as a productive process, focusing on arts such as
literature. Within this culture art is translated as a social use of material means
of production. The concept of “literature” is seen as a social development,
which according to Williams, only truly developed between the 18th and 19th
century, within our culture. The critic explains in his essay Culture is Ordinary,
“a culture is a whole way of life, and the arts are part of a social organisation
which economic change clearly radically effects”
o Cultural materialism emerged as a theoretical movement in the early 1980s
along with new historicism, an American approach to early modern literature,
with which it shares common ground. The term was coined by Williams, who
used it to describe a theoretical blending of leftist culturalism and Marxist
analysis. Cultural materialists deal with specific historical documents and
attempt to analyze and recreate the zeitgeist of a particular moment in history.
o Williams viewed culture as a "productive process", part of the means of
production, and cultural materialism often identifies what he called "residual",
"emergent" and "oppositional" cultural elements. Following in the tradition of
Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci and others, cultural materialists extend the
class-based analysis of traditional Marxism (Neo-Marxism) by means of an
additional focus on the marginalized.
o Cultural materialists analyze the processes by which hegemonic forces in
society appropriate canonical and historically important texts, such as
Shakespeare and Austen, and utilize them in an attempt to validate or inscribe
certain values on the cultural imaginary. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield,
authors of Political Shakespeare, have had considerable influence in the
development of this movement and their book is considered to be a seminal
text. They have identified four defining characteristics of cultural materialism as
a theoretical device.
o Cultural materialists seek to draw attention to the processes being employed
by contemporary power structures, such as the church, the state or the
academy, to disseminate ideology. To do this they explore a text’s historical
context and its political implications, and then through close textual analysis
 note the dominant hegemonic position. They identify possibilities for the
rejection and/or subversion of that position. British critic Graham Holderness
defines cultural materialism as a "politicized form of historiography".
o Through its insistence on the importance of an engagement with issues of
gender, sexuality, race and class, cultural materialism has had a significant
impact on the field of literary studies, especially in Britain. Cultural materialists
have found the area of Renaissance studies particularly receptive to this type of
analysis. Traditional humanist readings often eschewed consideration of the
oppressed and marginalized in textual readings, whereas cultural materialists
routinely consider such groups in their engagement with literary texts, thus
opening new avenues of approach to issues of representation in the field of
literary criticism.
The Long Revolution (1961)
o With this book Williams led the way in recognizing the importance of the
growth of the popular press, the growth of standard English, and the growth of
the reading public in English-speaking culture and in Western culture as a
whole. In addition, Williams' discussion of how culture is to be defined and
analyzed has been of considerable importance in the development of cultural
studies as an independent discipline.
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
o It is a book by the Welsh Marxist academic Raymond Williams published in
1976 by Croom Helm.
o Originally intended to be published along with the author's 1958 work Culture
and Society, this work examines the history of more than a hundred words that
are familiar and yet confusing: Art, Bureaucracy, Culture, Educated,
Management, Masses, Nature, Originality, Radical, Society, Welfare, Work,
and many others.
The Country and the City
o It is a book of cultural analysis by Raymond Williams which was first
published in 1973.
“Dominant, Residual, and Emergent”
o The concepts of dominant, residual and emergent are drawn from Raymond
Williams.
o These concepts can give us a framework for understanding the complex and
dynamic ways in which a culture operates as it continuously attempts to maintain
stability and balance in the face of ever-changing views.
o While one perspective tends to be dominant at a given point, other perspectives
are also contending for meaning, some older or more residual, some newer or
emergent.
o The dominant perspectives are the ones that are embodied in the majority of the
society (hence termed dominant) - or by its ruling and most powerful class.
o Within the dominant values of any culture, there are many elements of the past
are being filtered - "reinterpreted", diluted, projected - so that they can be
incorporate into dominant culture.
o If something residual is truly oppositional to the dominant, the dominant tries to
forget it or marginalize it.
o At times dominants are successful and at times not.
o Along with the aforementioned concepts, cultural complexity is also
explained by interrelations between movements and tendencies in a culture.
Williams argues against a systems-based approach to culture, which regards
culture as a coherent system dominated by a singular tendency (ie. feudal or
bourgeois culture, or culture in transition between one system and another),
privileging a static “type” as the essence of a culture taken as an object. In its
place, Williams advocates studying the “internal dynamic relations of any
actual process,” classifying these relations into dominant, residual, and
emergent categories.
o A residual relationship does not denote something that is archaic, in the sense
of recognizably belonging to a past era, but which has been “formed in the
past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as
an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present. Thus certain
experiences, meanings, and values which cannot be expressed or
substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived
and practices on the bases of the residue – cultural as well as social – of some
previous social and cultural institution or formation.” Something that stands in
a residual relationship to culture can be oppositional to the dominant
tendencies, but can also be incorporated into dominant tendencies. The
dominant culture, being threatened by too many experiences that are
interpretable in terms of past cultural formations and institutions weakening
its legitimacy, incorporates residual elements into itself: “It is in the
incorporation of the actively residual – by reinterpretation, dilution,
projection, discriminating inclusion and exclusion – that the work of the
selective tradition is especially evident.”
o Formations that are in an emergent relationship to dominant culture are not
only “new meanings and values, new practices and kinds of relationship”, but
specifically those which are “substantially alternative or oppositional to it:
emergent in the strict sense, rather than merely novel.” New experiences, not
interpretable within the dominant tendencies, foster the creation of new
cultural forms, and often the most active incorporation of cultural elements
occurs with emergent formations, leading Williams to posit the axiom that “no
mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no
dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice,
human energy, and human intention.” Classes and the variety of experiences
in the social world, even among the dominant class, are constant sources of
emergent cultural forms, and remain in their subordinate position to the
dominant tendencies coordinately with the social and economic position of
the class unless it is incorporated into the dominant tendencies.
o Dominant cultural formations not only include the “mainstream” of culture, but
more importantly “what the dominant has effectively seized is indeed the
ruling definition of the social.” The cultural formations which are understood
to be the definition of all experiences within a culture and which dominate
 other cultural forms, which they relegate to realms like the “personal or the
private, or as the natural or even the metaphysical.” Inasmuch as a dominant
cultural formation is hegemonic, it constitutes the sense of reality over all of a
society, and reaches into as many practices and activities as it can to interpret
them in terms of the dominant tendencies.
o In advanced capitalism, “because of changes in the social character of labor,
in the social character of communications, and in the social character of
decision-making, the dominant culture reaches much further than ever before
in capitalist society into hitherto ‘reserved’ or ‘resigned’ areas of experience
and practice and meaning.” Williams therefore concludes that the processes
of emergence are especially important to study now, and so turns to “pre-
emergence, active and pressing but not yet fully articulated, rather than the
evident emergence which could be more confidently named.”
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