Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams: Culture Is Ordinary

In the Normandy bocage in the summer of 1944, a twenty-two-year-old anti-tank officer in the Guards Armoured Division lost contact with two of the four tanks under his command during fighting against Waffen-SS armour. He went on through Belgium and the Netherlands into Germany, helped liberate a Nazi camp, and was appalled by the saturation bombing of Hamburg. Fourteen years later the same man published a book that permanently changed what the English-speaking world meant by the word "culture."

Pandy

Raymond Henry Williams was born on 31 August 1921 at Pandy in Monmouthshire, near Abergavenny, the son of a railway worker who was also secretary of the local Labour Party. The border country between Wales and England — its farms, its signal boxes, its unionised railwaymen — supplied him with both his politics and, later, his fiction. He went from King Henry VIII Grammar School in Abergavenny to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1939, joined the Communist Party there, and co-wrote a Party pamphlet on the Russo-Finnish War with a fellow student named Eric Hobsbawm. His membership simply lapsed when he enlisted in late 1940, since Party doctrine of the moment forbade military service.

He never lost the sense of being a guest in the institution that employed him. "It was not my Cambridge," he wrote later. "That was clear from the beginning."

The War, and the WEA

He came back in 1946, took his degree in English, and then did the thing that shaped his intellectual life more than Cambridge had: for fifteen years he taught adults who were not students. As a tutor for Oxford's Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies he ran Workers' Educational Association evening classes in East Sussex on literature, drama and the environment, arguing about books with people who had done a day's work first. He also founded and edited the short-lived journal *Politics and Letters* from 1946 to 1948. In 1951 he refused conscription for Korea as a conscientious objector and was discharged in May.

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Culture and Society

*Culture and Society* (1958) traced the word "culture" through Burke, Coleridge, Carlyle, Arnold, Morris, Eliot and Orwell and demonstrated that it had been invented as a response to industrialism — that the whole English tradition of complaint about mass society was itself a historical artefact. *The Long Revolution* followed in 1961, and with it the argument that culture is not a treasury of finished masterpieces but a whole way of life, made continuously and by everyone. Culture, in his formulation, is ordinary.

That year Jesus College elected him a fellow. He became Reader in Drama in 1967 and, in 1974, the first Professor of Drama in the University of Cambridge, holding the chair until 1983. He also held a visiting professorship in political science at Stanford in 1973.

The Keywords Method

His most-used book began as a list. *Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society* (1976, expanded by twenty-one entries in 1983) works through terms — aesthetic, bourgeois, culture, hegemony, organic, romantic, violence, work — and shows that a political argument is buried inside each of their histories. He was explicit that this was not lexicography: where the *OED* was philological and etymological, he was after meanings and contexts. The method generalised. *The Country and the City* (1973) alternates chapters of literary criticism and social history to show that the English pastoral has always dated its lost golden age to whichever generation preceded the author.

Alongside it he built the theoretical apparatus that became cultural materialism, drawing on Gramsci: the distinction between dominant, residual and emergent cultural forms, and the "structure of feeling" — the idea, first worked out in the mid-1950s and reformulated in *Marxism and Literature* (1977) as a signifying principle, that a period's lived experience is patterned before it has been articulated as ideology.

Television and the Argument with McLuhan

*Television: Technology and Cultural Form* (1974) is his most quietly influential book. Against Marshall McLuhan's technological determinism, Williams insisted that broadcasting's shape was chosen socially, not dictated by the apparatus. He gave the discipline two of its permanent terms: "flow," the observation that television is experienced as a continuous stream rather than as discrete programmes, and "mobile privatisation," the peculiar modern condition of travelling widely while staying home. On causation generally he was careful: "Determination is a real social process, but never a wholly controlling, wholly predicting set of causes."

Novels and Wales

He wrote fiction throughout, and considered it central rather than a hobby. *Border Country* (1960), about a Cambridge academic returning to his dying railwayman father in Wales, is the closest thing he wrote to autobiography; *Second Generation* (1964), *The Volunteers* (1978), *The Fight for Manod* (1979) and *Loyalties* (1985) followed. He was still writing *People of the Black Mountains*, an experimental history of ordinary lives around his own hills from the Palaeolithic onward, when he died at Saffron Walden on 26 January 1988; his wife Joy prepared the two volumes for publication. He left Labour in 1966 over the government's handling of the seafarers' strike, wrote the *May Day Manifesto* in 1967 with E. P. Thompson and Stuart Hall, joined the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and in the 1980s joined Plaid Cymru, concluding that there would be not one socialism but many.

Why Raymond Is Called a Genius

The word sits awkwardly on Williams and his admirers mostly reach instead for "founder": cultural studies as a discipline, and cultural materialism as a method, both begin with him. The specific faculty is worth naming precisely, because it is unusual. Williams could see that a whole unresolved political argument was sitting inside the ordinary history of a word, and he could invent a concept for something everyone had noticed and nobody had named. "Structure of feeling," "dominant, residual and emergent," "flow," "mobile privatisation" — these are not flourishes but working tools, and they were taken up because they did jobs no existing vocabulary could do. Around 750,000 copies of his books sold in British editions alone, which for a Marxist theorist is extraordinary.

The honest counter-case has three parts. First, his originality is conceptual rather than empirical: he discovered nothing, and his method is synthesis and redescription, powerful but unfalsifiable in a way that irritates social scientists. Second, the prose is heavy going: *Marxism and Literature* is tightly written and effectively for specialists, and the density that gives his concepts their weight keeps most readers out. Third, he revised himself constantly: the critic Bruce Robbins reads the later *Culture* as an implicit self-critique of the earlier positions, honest of Williams but hard to square with any settled system. He was not a systematic philosopher but a man who kept finding the argument hidden in the ordinary, and that is a narrower and rarer gift.

Legacy

Williams gave a generation of academics permission to study television, advertising and popular fiction seriously, and gave the British New Left a vocabulary it still uses. A Raymond Williams Society was founded within a year of his death and publishes a journal of cultural materialism; a foundation in his name funds adult education, which he would have valued more than the chair at Cambridge. The railwayman's son who never felt Cambridge was his ended by changing what its subject matter was.