Raymond Williams through Sri Lankan eyes

[Part 12]

In my last few columns, I made a concerted effort to explain the recognisable interests and strengths of Raymond Williams as a cultural critic of distinction. As with all writers and critics, Williams has his own share of faults and blind spots. By examining them carefully we as Sri Lankan writers and critics and discerning readers can carve out ways and means of avoiding them. Hence, to day's column, which will be the last on Raymond Williams, will focus on his deficiencies and the lessons we might draw from an examination of them.

Raymond Williams, as I have italicised throughout these columns is a cultural critic who has made a profound impression on his times, and succeeded in guiding the flow of critical thought towards important destinations. The distinguished cultural critic Cornell West said that Raymond Williams was the last of the great European male revolutionary socialist intellectuals born before the end of the age of Europe (1492-1945).

According to him, 'Williams' major contribution to our present-day challenges is not simply that he taught us how to think historically about cultural practices or how to approach political matters with a subtle cultural materialist orientation in a manner that stands head and shoulders above any of his generation.

Rather, Williams speaks to us today primarily because he best exemplifies what it means for a contemporary intellectual leftist to carve out and sustain, with quiet strength and relentless reflection a sense of prophetic vocation in a period of pervasive demoralisation and marginalisation of progressive thinkers and activists.' West believes that Raymond Williams' career can be valued as a dynamic series of critical self-inventories in which he attempts to come to terms with the traditions and communities that allow him the space for action.

Contribution

As I have stressed throughout these columns, Williams has made a profound contribution to our understanding of culture, literature and social change and we can all profit from his exegeses. At the same time, it needs also to be stated that he failed to address some important issues in his analyses, and we would do well to focus on these shortcomings so that we can overcome them. In this regard, I wish to focus on what I think are six central deficiencies in his analytical writings. Indeed, many of these are interconnected and hence could be most usefully understood in relation to the claims of each other.

The first relates to the question of imperialism and colonialism. For a country like Sri Lanka which was subject to colonial rule this is indeed an issue that is of paramount importance. We cannot discuss any aspect of modern Sri Lankan culture without paying adequate attention to the long shadow cast by colonialism on all aspects of our cultural activity. Raymond Williams, despite his Marxist leanings, never quite managed to engage colonialism in any meaningful way. His work betrays a proclivity to study formation of metropolitan cultures in relation to national discourses and national boundaries, although in his later writings, one discerns a greater interest on Williams' part to address issues of imperialism and colonialism, he never succeeds, however, in theorising them in any cogent manner and he fails to work them persuasively into his analytical frameworks.

The eminent literary scholar Gauri Viswanathan, who has written so perceptively on this aspect of Williams' writing makes the following pertinent comment. 'Williams' peculiar reticence in naming imperialism restricts him to a form of essentialism that robs his cultural model of much of its potency. At the most basic level, Williams' failure to incorporate the historical reality of empire into both his theoretical analyses and his readings of texts exposes a conception of society that is rendered in isomorphic terms, and cultural ideas appear as id produced sui generis rather than by external conditions.'

According to Viswanathan one central defect in Raymond Williams' theorising is that his desire to define culture and imperialism in non-interactive terms, and by means of mutually exclusive analytical frameworks, detached culture and imperialism from one another. This move, I contend, has had great adverse consequences for his cultural analyses.

Methodological trap

Gauri Viswanathan is clear on this point. 'Williams is caught in a methodological trap of his own making from which there is no escape. The result is well known. The idea of culture as it is produced by imperialism receives little emphasis, and at best, only a tenuous, arbitrary relation is established between them.'

This is indeed a deficiency that we as Sri Lankan writers and critics should avoid at any cost. The power and longevity of imperialism and colonialism have to be woven into our culture re-descriptions and exegeses, whether we are dealing with the work of Piyadasa Sirisena and John de Silva or Martin Wickremasinghe and Gunadasa Amarasekera. In other words, in our critical works we need to enforce implacably the connection between culture and imperialism, culture and colonialism.

Discussing an obvious blind spot in Raymond Williams' writings, Gauri Viswanthan offers the following useful explanation. 'given the conflictual ways in which Williams' cultural materialism is worked out, it is not surprising that Williams has so little to say about British imperialism and its effects on English culture. To advance a different but related argument, his reticence in naming colonialism as a shaping factor in English cultural formation can be interpreted as a reluctance to consider the economics of imperialism as having a final determining power over culture.' She goes on to make the point that this is, to be sure, not an attempt to apologise for Williams' omission of culture; rather, it is to draw attention to the fact that the extremely complicated situation Williams finds himself is a consequence of an insistence on a revision of Marxian analytical categories that are unwilling to comply with ideas of economic determinations as fully explanatory of culture.

Nationhood

Secondly, the idea of nationhood deserves careful consideration. This is indeed closely connected to questions of imperialism and colonialism. From the very beginning, Raymond Williams in his investigations into British culture and society adopted a nation-state framework. There is nothing wrong with this as a starting point so long as one is fully alive to the transnational forces that invariably impact on nations.

It seems to me that Williams failed to pay sufficient attention to this facet of cultural analysis. Nationhood, as with many other forms of identity, turns on the important question of difference - how the uniqueness of one nation differs from that of a comparable nation. Nationhood represents a point of convergence of a number of discourses related to history, geography, politics, culture, ethnicity, ideology, religion, material forces, economics and so on. The idea of difference and the ever active interplay between presence and absence are central to the constitution of nationhood.

The discourse of nationhood can be profitably understood with reference to ideas of boundedness, continuities and discontinuities, unity in plurality, the pull of the past, and the demands of the present. It moves along two important axes; space and time. In terms of the space axis, the predominant question is territorial independence; in terms if the time axis, the compelling question is the velocity of history, and the continuities and discontinuities with the past.

The way in which these two axes come into contact serves to generate outcomes that impinge directly in the problem of nationhood. It is important to keep in mind that the manifold issues connected with these two axes are not natural givens but man-made. To put it differently, they are human constructs straining to achieve the status of the natural.

The idea of resistance lurks behind these constructions. What history shows us is that the privileged narrative of nationhood has a way of submerging the inevitable local narratives of resistance in the lager and more hegemonic discourse of nationhood. All these aspects of nationhood have a direct bearing in the understanding if literature, and Raymond Williams, in his critical writings, displayed a keen understanding if them.

The idea of nation has been theorised in diverse ways by influential scholars in recent times. The one advanced by Benedict Anderson has succeeded in generating a great deal of scholarly interest. He saw nation as a cultural artifact of a particular kind. It s his conviction that we can understand the true shape and significance of this concept by exploring how nationality came into being historically, how it was able to command such powerful allegiance and legitimacy.

Anderson goes on to define nation as an imagined community - both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because of the fact that members of even the smallest of nations can never hope to get to know most of their fellow members or meet them; however, in the imagination of each persists the image of this communion. Anderson's approach to nationhood serves illuminate some important facets of Williams thinking on nation, literature and tradition.

Functions

The problem with Williams is that he did not examine seriously the transnational, the global, forces that invariably shape the progress of nations. We in our examinations and analyses should seek to avoid this mistake. At the same time, it has to be said that Raymond Williams was perspicacious enough to identify some important functions performed by nationhood in cultural analysis he is aware of the twin forces that are inseparably linked to nationhood - the power of the local and the inevitable fragmentation and the power of the global and the concomitant transnational thinking.

At the same time it seems to me that Williams sees a clear benefit of nationhood - the ability to forge a common ground, common culture, common standard, common frame of reference. These are vital, in his judgment, because without these it is easy for a society to decline into warring factions thereby impeding the progress of society.

At the same time, though, it is important to recognise the new geographical consciousness that has emerged with its emphasis on decentralisation and multiply-centered world. As we examine Raymond Williams' views on nation, tradition and literature we need to keep in mind his strengths as well as weaknesses and how best we can move beyond his preferred understandings

Third the lack of a feminist understanding of cultural issues is a glaring omission in Williams' writings. Indeed, this is a deficiency discernible in many of his contemporaries as well. In their cultural interpretations, the role of women was almost always added as an afterthought; feminist thinking became a mere residual category. We in our cultural investigations need to avoid this pitfall resolutely. The role of women in social change, nationalist struggles, cultural enrichment has been systematically ignored or downplayed by scholars both in the humanities and social sciences. It is only now, somewhat belatedly, that we are coming to recognise the crucial part played by women in social and cultural transformation.

The absence of this facet of social experience in Raymond Williams' writings is a conspicuous omission, and we in our investigations and interpretive activities should make it a point to focus centrally on the role of women. The experience of women, their interests and viewpoints, should become a central part of the way we make sense of the world and the way we make sense of making sense.

It seems to me that Raymond Williams could have explored the role of women in social transformation on two fronts.

On the one hand, he could have focused on the efforts of women to gain a sense of collective agency despite severe odds; the numerous obstacles placed in their way by patriarchal ideology could have been usefully examined. On the other hand, the way women were constructed by the dominant social discourses, the containment of women's agency in current cultural practices could have productively explored. It seems to me that Raymond Williams' cultural analyses of British society, which are extremely perceptive in many ways and inspiring, are vitiated by a lack of engagement with feminine issues and investments.

It is here that the writing of a scholar like Mary Poovey, who shares many academic interests with Williams, becomes extremely important. She focuses and brings to the centre of her analysis women's experience in a way that Raymond Williams was never able to. Here again is an area that we in Sri Lanka should engage dedicatedly.

Division

Fourth, Raymond Williams' division between culture and society - two terns that are central to all his writings - needs further clarification. It is indeed true that he was able to focus on the conjunction between culture and society in interesting and challenging ways. However, it appears to me that there is a tendency in Williams' writings to privilege culture over society, which at times could lead him down a path full of perils.

His contention was that we need to substitute the word culture for society when and where feasible; he felt that culture designated a complex of lived relationships that served to illuminate social living that the abstract term society could not. One can appreciate the argument advanced by him. In an interview he made the following illuminating remark.

'Historically, culture was cultivation of something - it was an activity; whereas society can seem very static I often liked the term for this reason. Its modern derivation is actually from Vico, who used it with precisely the emphasis on process. The term long resolution was meant to convey a similar sense of a movement through a very long period.' For him, culture is vital and resilient, and on the move; society, on the contrary, appeared to be static and inert. This easy division, to my mind, weakens some of Williams' interpretations. Catherine Gallagher who has written insightfully on this deficiency has advanced the following argument.' Precisely because culture connoted presence, particularly, irreducibility, and fullness, though, it also doomed him to a necessary analytical shortfall, a shortfall often experienced in reading Williams' works an asymmetry between the programmatic buildup and the often rather modest yield of the readings themselves.' She then goes on to ask the following important question.

'But how could any readings, no matter how skilful or insightful, possibly give an adequate sense of that living, particular, unique, common, communicative, active, interacting, creative, ordinary, daily, exceptional thing that Williams called culture. All the adjectives in the previous sentence are taken from one page of The Long Revolution.

Our very sense that Williams' analyses are somewhat deficient or truncated, therefore, is ultimately in the service o the mystique of culture that privileges an excessive particularity.'

She makes the point that Williams argues that all social products and practices are cultural insofar as they are involved in signification, some, to be sure, more powerfully than others. In this regard, she raises the following important question. 'But how we might still ask, can we tell the difference between signifying systems that announce signification as their primary function and those that dissolve signification in what Williams calls other processes.'

It seems to me that this is indeed a murky area in Williams' formulations, which for the most part are thoughtful and path breaking.

Fourth, reading Raymond Williams' writings on imaginative literary works, one gets the impression that he is more interested in their value as social texts than as creative works.

To be continued