Raymond Williams through Sri Lankan eyes

[Part 5]

In today’s column I wish to examine importance of Raymond Williams for the new discipline of cultural studies of which he was an architect. The column will proceed in three parts; the first will be devoted to a discussion of the field of cultural studies, the second to an examination of Williams’ contribution to it and the third the importance of cultural studies and the work of Raymond Williams for those of us in Sri Lanka who are deeply interested in cultural analysis and re-description. As I proceed with my analysis, the relationship of cultural studies to the interests and challenges of Asian scholars will be constantly in my view.

Cultural studies is more than a field of inquiry; it is a mind-set, a critical orientation, a style of thinking, a strategic intellectual practice. During the past three decades or so, cultural studies has made a great impact in western academe and now has begun to influence the thought-patterns and modes of inquiry of many other countries in the world.

Exploration

The books and journals dedicated to the exploration of this field are being published in ever increasing numbers while conferences and workshops devoted to the investigation of this topic are multiplying with vigour. It is evident that cultural studies, that was once regarded as a rather marginal field of inquiry has now moved to the center of humanistic and social scientific inquiry. Cultural studies have been able to focus on the centrality of culture from new angles of vision. The concept of culture, in the hands of the practitioners if cultural studies, has become much wider including both high and mass culture.

The way culture generates meaning and challenges meaning, the problems of representation, the culture of politics and ideology, the changing patterns of production, dissemination and consumption of culture are all areas that evidently stimulate the interests of practitioners of cultural studies. In addition, it likes to speak, as a matter of strategy, from the margins rather than from the centers legitimised by the establishment.

It is important to note that cultural studies are increasingly making its presence in Asian countries as well. As more and more young scholars trained in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and so on seek to put their newly acquired knowledge into practice and as more and more books and essays devoted to cultural studies begin to flood Asian markets, the discipline of cultural studies will assume a great significance in Asian countries as well. It has already happened in India, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Towards the end of this column I plan to focus on the relevance of cultural studies for Sri Lankan scholars and how it might help to channel our investigative energies in more productive directions towards more satisfying ends,

Cultural studies have been variously described as inter-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary and counter-disciplinary. All these characterizations catch an aspect of cultural studies and underscore its complexity. Cultural studies bears some resemblance to anthropology; however, unlike traditional anthropology, cultural studies emerged from investigations into industrial societies.

In terms of its methods of inquiry, cultural studies is both interpretive and evaluative. In many of the writings by scholars of cultural studies a distinct political edge to their work is clearly recognisable. Cultural studies, as the name suggests, deals with culture; however, it rejects the exclusive equation of culture with high culture. It is committed to the proposition that all forms of cultural production and cultural knowledge need to be examined in relation to other cultural practices. Clearly, the emphasis on cultural studies is on the entire range of a society’s arts, values, belief systems, institutions and processes.

The journal cultural Critique, which championed cultural studies early in, stated in its prospectus, ‘we are concerned with culture in the most inclusive sense of the term, as at once a material and discursive human practice.

Values

Thus the goal of Cultural Critique’ may be formulated most comprehensively as the examination of received values, political, social, and aesthetic genealogies, constitutions and effects.’ These statements, I believe, indicate to us the general orientation of this mode of inquiry.

It is no secret that cultural studies has drawn freely on a number of older disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, political science, history, philosophy, literary studies, media studies and feminist studies. However, the intention of the practitioners of cultural studies is to transcend the borders of these diverse disciplines and precipitate a reconfiguration of thought. It is not locked into a single methodology and draws freely on post-modernism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and Marxism where relevant.

In other words, it has no privileged subject or protocols of analysis. Moreover, the emphasis of cultural studies in different countries varies according to local needs. For example, cultural studies in Australia, as attested to by two distinguished practitioners Meagan Morris and John From is less preoccupied with abstract and philosophical issues than specific questions in concrete human situations that carry political resonances’ although, it can be argued, that this itself is a philosophical position.

Cultural studies, I wish to argue, has a very close connection with literary studies. Cultural studies, as we know it today, emerged largely out of the work of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, England established in 1964. Two of the distinguished scholars credited with inaugurating this field of inquiry in England, Richard haggard and Raymond Williams came out of literary studies. We have seen that during the past thirty years or so the emergence of a literary turn in the human sciences, and to a certain extent in the social sciences, especially in the United States, Canada and Australia. This literary turn has had a far-reaching impact on the forward movement of cultural studies.

Ideology

As I stated earlier, cultural studies has no single subject or problematic. It addresses a wide gamut of issues that include image production and consumption, problems of ideology and representation, gender and sexuality, race ethnicity, colonialism and post-colonialism popular culture, media, politics of everyday life, knowledge production, poetics and politics of spatiality. An interesting feature of cultural studies is that unlike most other disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, it is unafraid, in fact encourages, the questioning of its own ways of knowledge production and institutional support that invests it with authority. Cultural studies, very often, though by no means always, takes its own location and being as a field of study, as an area of inquiry that should not be skirted.

Cultural studies, as I stated earlier, has begun to make its mark on Asian countries as well. For purposes of analytic convenience and parsimony, I would like to divide Asian scholars interested in cultural matters into three broad groups. First, there are the post-colonial Asian scholars working in western universities. Interesting, and at times innovative as their writing is, they are basically responding to and embroiled in debates within the western academy.

What they have to say about Asian societies and cultures are not uninteresting, but their primary target audience is a western one. Their analytical language and frame of academic reference make this clear. Second, we have the traditional Asian scholars – philologists, cultural historians, editors of classical texts, etc. who write mostly in indigenous languages and do not manifest a great interest in the happenings and theoretical skirmishes within the western scholarly institutions. Their work, by and large, is valuable in terms of indigenous knowledge production.

Third, there are those Asian scholars who are securely located intellectually in their Asian cultures, working in Asian institutions, but are fully conversant with the trends and developments in the western academy. Frequently, they write in their native languages. It is this group that I am most interested in. They have the potential to critique Western theory from different perspectives and offer alternate pathways of inquiry. This is indeed significant in view of the fact that cultural studies has come to maturity as a discipline, and therefore, it is of the utmost importance that Asian scholars give it a local inflection.

Struggle

What is interesting about this third group is that they, for the most part recognise that the East is a contested discursive and representational space where a ceaseless struggle for meaning is taking place. This is an issue that should be of paramount importance to Asian practitioners of cultural studies. Cultural studies underlines the need to appreciate the East is not unitary or monolithic any more than the west is.

We need to pluralise the concept of the East so that the complex ways in various histories, time frames, ideologies, cultural geographies that are contained within diverse cultures that go to form the capacious entity of the East can be explored more fruitfully. One has only to investigate, briefly thought it may be, cultures of Japan, India, China, Indonesia and Sri Lanka to recognise the significance of this stance.

A real challenge for Asian scholars seeking to make use of cultural studies in their own investigative efforts is to avoid applying blindly the assumptions associated with it, but rather to transform it into a new instrument if analysis depending on the specific discursive and material realities of the Asian culture concerned. One of the self-declared objectives of cultural studies is to produce more and more cultural intellectuals dedicated to the pursuit of transforming their respective societies, this can happen only of cultural studies is reshaped in the light of Asian cultures to reflect and address their own distinctive problems.

This, to be sure, is not a plea for some kind of cultural chauvinism or national essentialism. It is, rather, a way of forcing cultural studies answerable to real problems troubling different societies. One of the perils of applying the disciplinary protocols of cultural studies without adequate attention to the cultural specificities and historical contingencies of Asian societies is that the objects of analysis can be turned into pale imitations of western ones. It hardly needs stressing that this is a danger we need to avert.

Literature

The distinguished African-born philosopher Anthony Appiah has pointed out in relation to African societies that it is not necessary to show that African literature is basically the same as Western literature in order to illustrate the point that it can be examined with the same tools. Analogously, the attempt to describe and analyse Asian societies by locking them in western culture and its discourses is bound t prove counter-productive. As I intimated earlier, there are diverse Asian scholars with diverse interests, agendas and objectives.

Hence, as we proceed to press into service cultural studies as a mode of cultural analysis, we need to define and clarify our own distinct politics of location and our subject-positions. It is also important that we lay bare the institutional landscapes that are part of the conditions of possibility of our analyses and productions of knowledge. Such a move would have the salutary effect of underscoring the fact that all investigations arise from certain distinct sets of interests, visions and historical conjunctures. Clearly, it would promote greater clarity and useful dialogue. To make plain the institutional structures within which we operate and our subject-positions is to highlight the fact that our involvement, as Asian scholars and practitioners of cultural studies, is largely connected to the specifics of the historical situation we are in.

When we focus on the challenges that lie ahead for Asian scholars committed to cultural studies, it is imperative that we pay special attention to the issue of post-coloniality. It has generally being contended – and with a large measure of justification in my view – that cultural studies and critical theory are very much Eurocentric in origin, and employ the west as the inescapable point of reference for their respective explorations and interpretations. One way of overcoming this blind spot, according to some, is to focus more on the theories and formulations associated with post-coloniality. In this regard the stimulating work of such scholars as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Anthony Appiah, despite their divergent points of emphasis, can be illuminating. Admittedly, the writings of these post-colonial theorists are important; however, we as Asian students need to adopt a very critical view of them. Only if we do so would we be able to exploit this body of writing for the very specific tasks and challenges facing us. It is indeed true that post-colonial theorists have raised several significant issues connected to knowledge, politics of culture and ideology and power.

However, they seem to be imprisoned within the interests and agendas of the western academy. Their battles, it seems to me, are with the denizens of that world. How many of them are capable of writing in indigenous languages so that they can reach the people most affected by colonialism? As we ponder the ways in which we can convert cultural studies into an instrument that is responsive to our local needs we need to bear in mind this desideratum.

Problems

Another important challenge for Asian scholars and students of cultural studies is the critical engagement with history. One of the obvious problems with many cultural analyses of Asian societies produced by western scholars is the refusal to recognise the centrality of history. As a result, Asian cultures are often portrayed as static and timeless, thereby depriving them of their historical vitality. One useful function that champions of cultural studies in Asia, including Sri Lanka, can perform is to bring the topic of history back to the formulations and commentaries of culture in a very central way. Modern historians have told us that historical facts are not found but made. The deeply held and long-privileged virtues of historical analysis such as objectivity, neutrality, and the investment in the production of truth have proved to somewhat chimerical. History is best understood as a form of narrative (I have discussed this point at length in my earlier columns); therefore, cultural studies practitioners need to bring history to the center of their discussions while recognising the newer and more realistic understandings of history that have emerged in recent times.

We as Asian students and practitioners of cultural studies need to pay close attention to the relationship that exists and should exist between cultural studies and the public sphere. A problem with cultural studies, as it has developed and branched out in western countries is that it has become a part of the academic establishment. Consequently, it is rapidly losing its adversarial power and is retreating into a kind of ivory tower. This indeed was not the expectation of architects of this discipline such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P.Thompson. This should be avoided at all costs; it would be a great pity if cultural studies were to turn into a discipline that is marked by an absence of participation in public conversations and thereby forfeiting public accountability.

It is my fervent belief that cultural studies in Asia should be an adjunct of the public sphere; it should participate in the public life of the people to the fullest extent possible. This can happen only if we do not artificially confine it to university departments; it is important that we solicit the participation of journalists, social commentators, writers, literary intellectuals in important ways.

The concept of the public sphere can be made into a fellow-traveller in our pursuit of indigenising cultural studies. How can cultural studies become an active and creative force in social life? How can we prevent it from retreating into a narrow ivory tower existence? How can a meaningful alliance be forged between cultural studies and the public sphere? These are the kind of questions that should stir the imagination of practitioners of cultural studies.

Cultural studies and its relationship to policy is another domain that should engage the interests of Asian practitioners of cultural studies. There is a tendency, very often, to dismiss policy as the special territory of governments and officialdom, and cultural critics are committed to an oppositional stance; that they should play no part in shaping policy. This is, of course, to adopt an unnecessarily restrictive, and therefore counter-productive, attitude towards policy. Cultural policy addresses issues related to cultural practices and products, modes of circulation, and consumption that are a central part of our lives; the way of eliminating the harmful effects of these and enhancing their positive aspects is at the root of cultural policy. That is why distinguished critics such as Tony Bennett have argued – quite persuasively in my view – for the conjunction of cultural studies and cultural policy.

Another challenge for Asian practitioners of cultural studies is to pay more attention to and bring to the fore cultural texts produced in indigenous languages.Post-colonial critics, by and large, deal with texts written in English, and they themselves write in English for an English-speaking audience. This has the unfortunate consequence of paying a disproportionate amount of attention on diasporic writings and virtually ignoring indigenous cultural texts. It is important to remind ourselves that there is a vast body of writing being produced in Mandarin and Bengali and Sinhala. These hardly get noticed in the generality of cultural studies analyses. To ignore this corpus of writing is to miss out on an excitingly significant segment of Asian cultural production. Consequently, one formidable challenging confronting modern practitioners of cultural studies – and one that they could ignore only at their peril – is to interpret, examine, re-describe and evaluate texts produced in indigenous languages in a way that is relevant to present concerns both theoretical and practical.

So far, I have discussed the nature of cultural studies and the kind of problems and challenges that it has to confront, keeping in mind specifically the role of Asian practitioners of this discipline. Now I would like to explain, if I may, the important role that Raymond Williams has played in shaping this newer field of inquiry. Williams is regarded as one of the pioneers of cultural studies, and he continues to exert a profound influence on the growth of this field. His books such as Culture and Society and The Long Revolution – I have commented on them in my earlier columns – have acted as formative factors in the emergence of cultural studies. Raymond Williams focused on a number of issues that are central to cultural studies and which were enlarged and expanded upon by later scholars. Among them are the ideas that culture is ordinary, culture includes both high and mass cultures, culture is a site of meaning creation, there us a political edge to cultural analysis, materialist factors are integral to cultural investigation, cultural convention are social products. All these ideas have had a great impact on the evolution of cultural studies.

Culture

Let us, for example, consider his view that culture is ordinary. (This stands in sharp contrast to the view of culture expressed by elitist critics such as Matthew Arnold and F.R.Leavis.) This idea has had the effect of destabilising the clearly literary notion of culture – culture as a tribute to and triumphant assertion of, artistic achievements of exemplary products of elite sensibility. When Williams says that culture is ordinary he is calling attention to the idea of culture as a common activity. As he observed, ‘it is not a question of relating art to the society, but of studying all the activities and their inter-relations, without any concession of prioritising to any of them we may choose to abstract.’ What this slogan does is to de-mystify the privileged uniqueness of works of art by pointing to the representational spaces of activities commonly pursued by all. This notion ties in with Williams’ idea that, culture should be seen as the ‘creation of conditions in which the people as a whole participate in the articulation of meanings and values.’ This line of thinking is central to the rise and growth of cultural studies.

This is just one example of the way in which Raymond Williams’ ideas have re-inflected cultural studies. Due to limitations of space it is not possible to cite more examples. Let me, however, allude to two other examples. Raymond Williams, in his interpretive writings, underlined the importance of the working classes. As he remarked, ‘we all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle-class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.’ Williams, therefore, underlined the important of a more accommodative vision. And it is evident that in the work of cultural studies in the early period produced by scholars like Stuart Hall this inclination is clearly in evidence. While Richard Hoggart, who was the other founder of cultural studies, was somewhat pessimistic about the potentialities of the working class, William clearly saw things differently.

Another area that interested Williams was education. In his formulations, there is a close connection between education and culture. After all, as I had indicated in some of my earlier columns, his interest in cultural analysis grew out of his experiences in adult education. He saw education as one of the most powerful and rich resources of hope. He valued working class culture; at the same time he was eager to promote a healthy interaction between elite and working class cultures, and education was clearly the gateway for this enterprise. As one commentator remarked, ‘he insisted that the commodities of high culture should not be denied to the workers, in a way not dissimilar to traditions of the German and Austrian culture of workers’ education……on the one hand, he emphasized the cultural significance of the first-hand (daily) experience of ordinary people; on the other, he wanted ti save the best of high cultural tradition for them.

In this spirit Williams’ writings on education tried to pursue a critical pedagogy that fairly optimistically centered on collaboration, interaction, and the dialogue between teacher and students on an equal footing.’ This educational function seems to have faded as a consequence of the massive, and at times unproductive, investment in high theory.

I have discussed the nature, significance and challenges facing cultural studies and the seminal role played by Raymond Williams in shaping this field of inquiry. Finally, I would like to highlight the fact that cultural studies can prove to be a field of inquiry, a mind-set, a style of thinking that can prove to be valuable to us in Sri Lanka as we address issues of modernisation, nationhood, globalism, consumer society and culture.

Cultural studies as a domain of inquiry has yet to take root in Sri Lanka and promote an active conversation regarding issues of culture and social change. When we compare the situation with that of our neighbor in India, we see a stark difference. In India cultural studies has generated a great deal of interest and there are centers for the promotion of this discipline; conferences and workshops centered round cultural studies themes are regularly held in both English and indigenous languages.

At a time when popular culture is spreading in Sri Lanka rapidly and in unanticipated ways, we can learn a great deal from the cumulative wisdom of cultural studies in how to frame issues related to popular culture. Let us take two highly prominent areas: popular music and television dramas. Both of these have become integral parts of popular culture in Sri Lanka. How can we analyse these modes of cultural expression with profit? How do we develop an aesthetic adequate to the evaluation of popular culture? How can we come up with a new analytical lexicon for the exploration of popular culture products? A careful study and deep acquaintance with cultural studies, I contend, will prove to be of inestimable value in coming to grips with these formidable questions.

To be continued