Three Phases

From Leavisism, Williams inherited: A commitment to organicist and holistic conceptions of culture and methods of analysis; a strong sense of the importance of the particular, whether in art or in life; and an insistence on the absolute centrality of culture. He rejected its cultural elitism, however, especially as displayed in the idea of a necessary opposition between mass civilization and minority culture.

From Marxism, he inherited a radical socialist critique of ruling-class political, economic, and cultural power. But he rejected the economic determinism of orthodox Communist Marxism, which had sought to characterize culture as a merely epiphenomenal “superstructure” of the economic “base,” along with the later structural determinisms of Althusserian and quasi-Althusserian theories of ideology, which belied the reality of experience and of agency.

It is possible to identify three main phases in Williams’s thought. Each phase is explicable in terms of its own negotiated settlement between Leavisism and Marxism, and each can be characterized, in perhaps overly political terms, in relation to a relatively distinct and consecutive moment in the history of the British New Left.

In the first phase, the moment of 1956 and the foundation of the New Left, Williams played a central role in the development of a peculiarly “culturalist” post-Communist Marxism, a kind of indigenously British “Western Marxism.” The key texts from this period were Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961).

Quite fundamentally, Williams insisted in Culture and Society that “a culture is not only a body of intellectual and imaginative work; it is also and essentially a whole way of life.” He expanded the concept to include the “collective democratic institution,” by which he meant, primarily, trade unions, co-operatives, and working-class political parties. Thus redefined, Leavis’s notion of a single common culture was supplemented, and importantly qualified, by that of a plurality of class cultures.

Despite such qualification, the normative ideal of a common culture remained important to Williams. A common culture might not yet properly exist, but it is nonetheless desirable. Moreover, it provides Williams with the essential theoretical ground from which to mount an organicist critique of utilitarian individualism. In a characteristically leftist move, he relocated the common culture from the idealized historical past it had occupied for Leavis, to the not too distant, still to be made, democratic socialist future.

If the common culture is not yet fully common, it follows that cultural tradition should be seen not so much as the unfolding of a group mind, as it had been for cultural conservatives like T. S. Eliot, but as the outcome, in part, of a set of interested selections made in the present. Selection, Williams observes in The Long Revolution, “will be governed by many kinds of special interest, including class interests . . . . The traditional culture of a society will always tend to correspond to its contemporary system of interests and values.”

Where English literature had revered a “Great Tradition,” Williams would thus detect a selective tradition. But even as he insisted on the importance of class cultures, Williams was careful also to note the extent to which distinctions of class are complicated, especially in the field of intellectual and imaginative work, by “the common elements resting on a common language.”

For Williams, any direct reduction of art to class — of the kind put forward in certain “leftist” versions of Marxism such as Maoism — remained unacceptable. Hence, his development of the concept of structure of feeling for the analysis of literary and cultural texts:

In one sense, this structure of feeling is the culture of a period: it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization. And it is in this respect that the arts of a period, taking these to include characteristic approaches and tones in argument, are of major importance. For here, if anywhere, this characteristic is likely to be expressed; often not consciously, but by the fact that here, in the only examples we have of recorded communication that outlives its bearers, the actual living sense, the deep community that makes the communication possible, is naturally drawn upon.

Marxist Engagements

Such deep community must transcend class, and yet it remains irredeemably marked by class. In Williams’s early writings, this remains a circle that stubbornly refuses to be squared. But in the second phase of his work, that of the moment of 1968 and the emergence of a second New Left, it finally became possible for Williams to explain, to his own satisfaction at least, how it could be that structures of feeling are common to different classes, and yet nonetheless represent the interests of some particular class.

In this second phase, Williams engaged with a series of continental European varieties of Western Marxism, each recently translated into English (Georg Lukács, Lucien Goldmann, Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci), and with various forms of Third Worldist political “ultraleftism.” This engagement paralleled, yet neither reduplicated nor inspired, that of the younger generation of radical intellectuals associated with the New Left Review.

Initially, such engagement for Williams had meant little more than a recognition that not all forms of Marxism were necessarily grounded in economic determinism, as well as a discovery of theoretical preoccupations similar to his own in the work of writers such as Goldmann, a Franco-Romanian cultural sociologist. Later, however, it came to entail a much more positive redefinition of Williams’s own theoretical stance.

The Country and the City (1973) heralds a markedly “leftward” shift in Williams, through which a developing critique of various mythological accounts of rural life (including Marx’s own dismissal of “rural idiocy”) eventually culminates in a defense of Third World insurrectionism. The cultural politics implied in this shift are neither Communist nor Labourite in inspiration, but rather much more obviously akin to Maoism.

Williams formally announces this renewed interest in and enthusiasm for unorthodox versions of Marxism in Marxism and Literature (1977). Here, as before, Williams argued against the orthodox Communist base/superstructure model for cultural analysis, on the grounds that culture is both real and material:

From castles and palaces and churches to prisons and workhouses and schools; from weapons of war to a controlled press: any ruling class, in variable ways though always materially, produces a social and political order. These are never superstructural activities. They are necessarily material production within which an apparently self-subsistent mode of production can alone be carried on.

But here Williams decisively opts for a Gramscian theory of hegemony, which he now described as “one of the major turning points in Marxist cultural theory.” For Williams, Gramsci’s central achievement consists in the articulation of a culturalist sense of the wholeness of culture with a more typically Marxist sense of the interestedness of ideology. Thus hegemony is “in the strongest sense a ‘culture,’ but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes.”

For Williams, as for Gramsci himself, the counter-hegemonic moment continues to be especially significant. Hence his attempt to expand upon Gramsci’s initial distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals, so as to identify what he terms dominant, residual, and emergent cultural elements.

There can be little doubt that Williams is able to deploy this scheme with some panache in the analysis of particular texts. We might also add that Williams’s reading of Gramsci almost certainly reconstructs the original author’s intention a great deal more successfully than Althusser was able to manage through his theory of ideology.

Postmodern Questions

In the third and final phase of his work, produced during the 1980s, the developing internationalization of corporate capitalism and the promise of a postmodern radicalism centered around the new social movements obliged Williams to think through the theoretical and practical implications of an apparent decentering of the British nation-state on the one hand and class politics on the other. The key texts here are Towards 2000 (1983) and the posthumously published, sadly unfinished The Politics of Modernism (1989).

Both books quite directly address the cultural politics of postmodernity. The more explicitly postmodern moments in Towards 2000 are contained in two aspects of the work. Firstly, there is its sense of the contemporary world system as having become so radically internationalized — “paranational” in Williams’s phrase — as to undermine the cultural legitimacy of the “official community” of nation-states such as “the Yookay,” as he derisively called it. Secondly, there is its recognition of the peace, ecological, and feminist movements, along what Williams terms the movement of “oppositional culture,” as major “resources of hope” for a journey beyond capitalism.

Williams is careful, however, to acknowledge the continuing importance both of localized communities and of the labor movement, if not the Labour Party. For Williams, it is a “misinterpretation” to see the social movements as “getting beyond class politics.” In fact, he argues, “there is not one of these issues which, followed through, fails to lead us into the central systems of the industrial-capitalist mode of production and among others into its system of classes.”

In The Long Revolution and in Culture and Society, Williams had respectfully but determinedly aired his differences with the guardians of Leavis’s minority culture. By Towards 2000, he had become much more dismissive: “There are very few absolute contrasts left between a ‘minority culture’ and ‘mass communications.’” Moreover, he insists that the older modernisms, which once threatened to destabilize the certainties of bourgeois life, have become transformed into a new “‘post-modernist’ establishment” that “takes human inadequacy . . . as self-evident.”

Williams was thus already deeply skeptical of what he terms the “pseudo-radicalism” of “the negative structures of post-modernist art.” In The Politics of Modernism, he would state the case much more forcefully:

If we are to break out of the non-historical fixity of post-modernism, then we must search out and counterpose an alternative tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin of the century, a tradition which may address itself not to this by now exploitable because quite inhuman rewriting of the past but, for all our sakes, to a modern future in which community may be imagined again.

Before Williams, British literary and cultural studies typically subscribed to a kind of “objective idealism” by which truth was seen to inhere in cultural tradition itself. Williams’s deconstruction of this notion, through the idea of the selective tradition, brings about a relativizing turn similar to that of post-structuralism in relation to structuralism.

It does so by virtue of an appeal to the role of the collective reader. It more than gestures in the direction of recognizing the imbrication of power within discourse, in the way that the later work of Michel Foucault acknowledged. It also moves toward a recognition of the materiality, historicity, and arbitrary variability of the linguistic sign, similar to what we can find in both Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

All of this remains coupled to a sense of genuinely free communicative action — a truly common culture — as normative, of which even Jürgen Habermas might have approved. With good reason, Terry Eagleton could eventually conclude that “Williams’s work has prefigured and pre-empted the development of parallel left positions by, so to speak, apparently standing still.”