Culture and Politics

Class, Writing, Socialism

Raymond Williams

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781788738668
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Dissertations en politique et relations internationales

Raymond Williams was a pioneering scholar of cultural and society, and one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century. In this, a collection of difficult to find essays, some of which are published for the first time, Williams emerges as not only one of the great writers of materialist criticism, but also a thoroughly engaged political writer.Published to coincide with the centenary of his birth and showing the full range of his work, from his early writings on the novel and society, to later work on ecosocialism and the politics of modernism, Politics and Culture shows Williams at both his most accessible and his most penetrating.An essential book for all those interested in the politics of culture in the twentieth century, and the development of Williams's work.

1

Herbert Read: Freud, Art, and Industry

In our own century, certain new disciplines of learning, and developments within existing disciplines, have deeply affected our general attitudes to our common life, and hence our attitudes to culture.¹ In certain fields, while the new emphasis is marked, the continuity is evident. In history, for instance, as was observed in the study of Tawney,² there has been minute and scholarly investigation of many aspects of the great changes which nineteenth-century writers had identified from general experience. In the study of literature and language, a wide academic extension has had great effects on the content, if not the form, of the inherited ideas: the names which immediately spring to mind are I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis.³ In political and social theory, we have, essentially, been continuing a nineteenth-century debate, but over large areas of new social experience. In contrast with these kinds of discipline, where the continuity, if also the change, is marked, there are the highly important twentieth-century developments of psychology, anthropology, and sociology, which have, on occasion, been more difficult to assimilate to the established tradition. Sociology, however, has both applied and tested the observations on industrial society made by the nineteenth-century critics. If its methods are characteristically those of an industrial society, and hence, of a certain kind of mind, it is nevertheless true that the co-existence of dynamic ideas with uncertain areas of fact was, in the constructions of both past and present, extremely dangerous. History, on the one hand, and sociology, on the other, are proving, in practice, extremely useful and indeed essential controls on our quick, general constructions of experience. It is, as a result, becoming easier to separate assertions of value, which for good or ill are always indestructible, from the assertions and conjectures of fact which have so frequently accompanied them. This will have an important effect on our attitudes to the creators of our general ideas, although we do not of course escape these by instituting an investigation, or by assuming an indifference to general theory, or until we have different, and comparable, ideas of our own. The life of a factual investigator is busy and absorbing; but no man can reduce himself to an investigator, however much, in an image of practical usefulness, he may try.

Sociology, then, has been useful, and refining, as a supplier and an inspector. Anthropology, one might say, has been similarly useful and refining, but it is evident, in addition, that it has created new ways of social thinking. A work like Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), for example, has been of wide importance in general thinking, although, among anthropologists, it is, I believe, controversial.¹ The most observable effect of anthropology upon general thinking can be indicated in two questions from Benedict:

In culture […] we must imagine a great arc on which are ranged the possible interests provided either by the human age-cycle or by the environment or by man’s various activities. A culture that capitalized even a considerable proportion of these would be as unintelligible as a language that used all the clicks, all the glottal stops, all the labials, dentals, sibilants, and gutturals from voiceless to voiced and from oral to nasal. Its identity as a culture depends upon the selection of some segments of this arc. Every human society everywhere has made such selection in its cultural institutions. Each from the point of view of another ignores fundamentals and exploits irrelevancies.²

If this point of view has given, as it were, a new kind of purchase on one’s own society, the idea that it is but one segment of a great arc being obviously welcome in a time of unrest and fundamental criticism, the related idea of the nature of change has been equally encouraging:

Such a view of cultural processes calls for a recasting of many of our current arguments upholding our traditional institutions. These arguments are usually based on the impossibility of man’s functioning without these particular traditional forms. Even very special traits come in for this kind of validation, such as the particular form of economic drive that arises under our particular system of property ownership. This is a remarkably special motivation, and there are evidences that even in our generation it is being strongly modified. At any rate, we do not have to confuse the issue by discussing it as if it were a matter of biological survival values. Self-support is a motive our civilization has capitalized. If our economic structure changes so that this motive is no longer so potent a drive as it was in the era of the great frontier and expanding industrialism, there are many other motives that would be appropriate to a changed economic organization. Every culture, every era, exploits some few out of a great number of possibilities. Changes may be very disquieting, and involve great losses, but this is due to the difficultly of change itself, not to the fact that our age and country has hit upon the one possible motivation under which human life can be conducted. Change, we must remember, with all its difficulties, is inescapable. Our fears over even very minor shifts in custom are usually quite beside the point. Civilizations might change far more radically than any human authority has ever had the will or imagination to change them, and still be completely workable.¹

On the whole, this emphasis has been valuable, in particular in its promotion of tolerance, as against the dominative element in imperialism. It will be remarked, however, that its criterion is abstract, and that there is an essential neutrality (at once interesting and dangerous) in such a concluding phrase, for the description of a civilization, as ‘completely workable’. The difficulty is real, for intolerance and the fear of change can only be met, for most people, by some such reassurance; and if in fact, in a society like ours, there is not stability but a tension perhaps too great to be ultimately borne, this kind of reassurance is human and positive. This, indeed, is Benedict’s position:

The sophisticated modern temper has made of social relativity, even in the small area which it has recognized, a doctrine of despair. It has pointed out its incongruity with the orthodox dreams of permanence and ideality and with the individual’s illusion of autonomy. It has argued that if human experience must give up these, the nutshell of existence is empty. But to interpret our dilemma in these terms is to be guilty of an anachronism. It is only the inevitable cultural lag that makes us insist that the old must be discovered again in the new, that there is no solution but to find the old certainty and stability in the new plasticity. The recognition of cultural relativity carries with it its own values, which need not be those of the absolutist philosophies.¹

This is reasonable, and it is certainly true that ‘modern thought […] about our changing standards is greatly in need of sane and scientific direction’.² The observation, however, still leaves quite open the vital question of the agency of such direction, in social practice. In the world of ideas, the habit of relativity is liberating; but its values have to reckon, not only with ‘absolutist philosophies’, but, if the phrase can be used, also with ‘absolutist lives’. I mean that while other situations, other patterns, other commitments, are of course theoretically possible, and in fact, elsewhere, exist, it remains as a primary fact that any actual life, as a condition of its coming to being, is shaped in a particular situation, a particular pattern, and by certain commitments. These can of course be separately valued, as an intellectual process; and further, while in one sense they are and must be absolute if the life is to be carried on, they are never static or final. A commitment to an actual life has to precede its criticism, or else there is no experience, but merely observation. The ‘sane direction’, and re-direction, has then to be carried out within this experience; if it is merely carried out on it, it may, as a procedure, be ‘scientific’, but it will, as practice, be dominative and arbitrary. The danger is at least as much to the directors as to the directed.

The point has to be made, for the dominative element is visible in current social practice that has been affected by such thinking. Yet a social anthropologist like Benedict teaches an essential control. From social anthropology generally, as from certain kinds of sociology, the valuable emphasis is received of ways of life as social wholes: whole configurations, necessarily integrated, which are not to be understood by any process of reduction to their parts, as if these were separate. The term culture is used to put this emphasis on ‘a whole way of life’, and this whole trend in social thinking depends, in certain essentials, on the meanings previously given to ‘culture’, in the attempt to maintain attention to the whole life of man. The development of social anthropology has in fact tended to substantiate the ways of looking at a society and a common life which had earlier been wrought out a general experience of industrialism. The emphasis on ‘a whole way of life’, as a value, is continuous from the emphases of a Samuel Taylor Coleridge or a John Ruskin: a personal assertion has become, most valuably, an intellectual method. We can add, in good faith, that although in our own century the earlier constructions of a different way of life, in terms of an idea of the Middle Ages, or of the eighteenth-century village, have continued to exercise some sway, they have been reinforced, and in some cases replaced, by the different ways of life made actual to us through the work of the anthropologists. These are more substantiated than the historical constructions, but they are, of course, no nearer to us in experience. Their function, in our general thinking, is constant: to give reassurance that the human categories of industrialism or the version of life which industrialism urges on us, and which we might otherwise only personally doubt, are not in fact either universal or everlasting. Such reassurance is always a kind of gain.

The impact of the new psychology has been quite different in character. In its social bearings, the difficulty has been clearly put by Morris Ginsberg:

The relations between psychology, including psychopathology, on the one hand, and sociology on the other are […] extremely complex. The function of social psychology is, it seems to me, to show how the social structure and the changes in this structure affect the mentality of the individuals and groups composing the society, and conversely how the mental condition of the members affects the social structure. The present condition of social psychology suggests that the most promising field of inquiry is the study of small groups. The strength of psycho-analysis was in part due to its concentration on the interpersonal relation within the family. The study of crime also suggests that, where it is possible to make detailed case histories of individuals in their social setting, the psychological approach is enormously helpful. Yet concentration on small groups has its dangers. There is a tendency to forget that the tensions within these groups may well reflect the strains and stresses of the larger social structure of which they are a part, and that the character of the group is determined not merely by the interplay of the personal qualities of its members, but also by the traditions of the larger society. The latter, however, is not open to direct inspection by psychological methods. Herein lies the difficulty of social psychology. Its future development depends in the first place on improvements in the methods for observing group behaviour. But it also depends upon whether better ways can be found for linking its work with history and sociology than have so far been available.¹

These observations are of the greatest importance, for it seems to be true that the gains of psychoanalysis – the real, if still properly controversial, personal illuminations – have to be set against a certain loss, in their consequences upon our social thinking. Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930) is a work of extreme interest which amounts, it seems to me, to a substitute for history as we have known it; and this is not, at its present stage, a substitute that we can accept. Freud has already been usefully criticized by anthropologists for offering as a universal sexual pattern what they insist to be a specific pattern, in a particular culture. The point can be usefully extended when his theory of culture is in question. Indeed, much of the effect of psychoanalysis, on general thinking, has been the abstraction of the individual, or the small family group, from society as a whole; and the abstraction of a particular kind of society – a known and properly observed reality – from the whole flux of human settlement and commitment. The value of psychoanalytic theories of the individual remains to be considered, in its own proper terms; but its contribution to general ideas of culture remains uncertain and unsatisfactory, for the reasons which Ginsberg indicates.

It is of course still very early to look for the full results, in general thinking, of these new sciences of man. The work is necessarily very specialized, and it is right that we should go to it to see if we can learn, rather than, from older positions, to controvert. On the other hand, it is the way in which a specialism can be assimilated into general experience and thinking that finally determines its importance. We have reason to be grateful to those writers who have attempted this process of assimilation; and one of the most interesting of these writers is Herbert Read, to whom (if the case were not as it is) I should have to apologize for making so general an introduction.¹ Read’s work has been of very great interest, and his theories of art and the artist, and of their social functions, are already of practical importance in our contemporary ideas of culture. The point of particular importance to me is that in Read’s work one finds at once a continuation of the tradition hitherto examined and, in the process of this continuation, the attempted assimilation of the new sciences.

In Art and Society (1936), Read discusses Benedict’s views on the integration of cultures, and continues:

The world has probably never exhibited such a lack of cultural integrity as now exists in the capitalist form of modern society. At times – when, for example, we see a typical suburban development – it would seem that the aesthetic instinct itself has atrophied; that men are no longer sensitive to form, but content to live in a chaos of styles, or rather, in a complete aesthetic nullity. But on analysis it appears that these developments are inherent in the methods of production; they are determined, that is to say, not by free choice, but by economic necessity – by the direct necessity of profit-making implied in the methods of production and distribution, and in any case by the ultimate lack of cultural unity implied in the structure of a society organized on a competitive rather than a cooperative basis. There is no escaping the patent fact that the degradation of art during the last two centuries is in direct correspondence with the expansion of capitalism.¹

Such an attitude is quite evidently continuous from Ruskin and William Morris, although in its expression there is also another element – the influence of Karl Marx – evident in the important change from the description of modern society as ‘industrialist’ to its significant description as ‘capitalist’. Yet Read’s general position is not the Marxist one, nor would it be received easily by that large body of English socialists who are in the utilitarian tradition. Taking his instance from a point made by Benedict (‘All the miscellaneous behaviour directed towards getting a living, mating, warring, and worshipping the gods, is made over into consistent patterns in accordance with the unconscious canons of choice that develop within the culture’²), Read continues:

The process of integration is instinctive, and it may be doubted whether a great civilization was ever consciously planned. It is an unconscious growth, and is killed by rationalization. At the present moment we have a civilization which has suffered such a fate. We are at the dead end of a process of rationalization, and by a supreme effort of consciousness we are trying to recognize the fact. Consequently we live in an age of transition, in which a whole way of life and thought is breaking down, never to recover, and if civilization is to continue we have to discover a new way of life.³

The continuity here is from Robert Southey, Coleridge, or even Thomas Carlyle. In particular, the mode of discovery of a new way of life has to be sharply distinguished from the modes which the way we are leaving promoted and sustained. In practice, Read’s emphasis is on the recovery, and integration, of that mode of discovery which is art. ...