Raymond Williams through Sri Lankan eyes

Continued from last week

He rejects the idea that language displaces agency. For him human agency is vitally connected to human consciousness. He placed great emphasis on intentional human practices; this move goes counter to the predilections of contemporary cultural theorists. He was disturbed by what he saw as a certain passivity that marked structuralist and post-structuralist writings. Hence he made a concerted attempt to keep intact issues of subject, agency, intention and consciousness.

While one can appreciate Williams’ standpoint in this regard, it is also true that he could have made his writings more relevant and inspiring had he decided to engage seriously contemporary cultural theory. We in Sri Lanka, as we re-think the philosophical underpinnings of the conjunction between literature and society, and how best to understand them, we need to pay closer attention to the strengths and weaknesses of a supremely important literary and cultural critic like Raymond Williams.

Williams’ style

Sixth, it is important to pay close attention to Williams’ style. He was not, in my judgment, the most elegant of stylists. In his more theoretical pieces, he was often unduly abstract and convoluted. What he had to say was important; how he chose to say it left much to be desired. A passage like the following illustrates this point.

‘These distinctions have considerable practical importance. Both correspondence and homology, in certain senses, can be modes of exploration and analysis of a social process which is grasped from the beginning as a complex of specific but related activities. Selection is evidently involved, but as a matter of principle there is no a priori distinction between the necessary and the contingent, the social and the cultural, the base and the superstructure. Correspondence and homology are then not formal but specific relations; examples of real social relationships, in their variable practice, which have common forms of origin.

Or again, correspondence and homology can be seen as forms of the typical; crystallisations, in superficially unrelated fields, of a social process which is nowhere fully represented but which is specifically present, in determinate forms, in a range of different works and activities.’

Digression

Discussing Raymond Williams’ style, the perceptive cultural commentator Stanley Aronowitz made the following interesting observation. ‘although Williams is never the graceful stylist, his voice was, before the adventures in theory, clear and forceful……In contrast, the theoretical formulations are riddled with qualifiers; the sentences bulge with digression; the circularity of the prose is al too evident. Williams struggles to get a handle on elusive concepts by adopting a strategy of evolving category-definitions.’

These are, in my judgment, some of the prominent deficiencies and limitations discernible in Raymond Williams writings. However, as I have laboured to italicise throughout my columns, Raymond Williams is unquestionably one of the greatest cultural critics of our time. He had a profound impact on the world of arts and letters during his life time, and continues to do so, shaping the thought and imagination of discerning readers. To enter into his thought-world is to be challenged, exhilarated, and inspired; we can return from that thought-world to our preoccupations refreshed and our thinking process sharpened. He was able to shine a light, often in provocative ways, on the darker spots associated with the vicissitudes of life. His commentaries on Cultural Studies add up to a visionary statement of the possibilities and potential pitfalls of Cultural Studies as an established discipline

Legacy

Raymond Williams left a legacy of critical and interventionist cultural analysis that we all can profit from. He wrote illuminatingly on novels, drama, poetry and culture and social change, communication. His promotion of the idea of a cultural materialism was met with great success. Indeed, it continues exert a powerful influence on contemporary thinking. He introduced concepts such as structure of feeling – complex seeing – knowledgeable community that subsequent schools and critics have found to be interpretively useful. Williams’ unconcealed desire to see literary works as social texts and relate literary works to their historical moment paid rich dividends. It can be said that his writings are prophetic in the deepest sense of the term - they call us back to the invigorating spirit of the past and forward to a society marked by democratic participation and equality and social justice. As a pioneer of the field of Cultural Studies which is gaining greater and greater influence in universities across the globe, he succeeded in mapping newer and challenging pathways for cultural analysis.

Let me in conclusion focus on the importance of Williams’ writings in relation to Cultural Studies. The following statement by Catherine Gallagher repays close attention. ‘For students of modern Britain, Williams’ books are more than merely illustrative of Cultural Studies. They are formative of it. Williams can be credited with having invented the field, and no one had a more nuanced understanding of its complexities and perils.

Williams, moreover, was fully aware if the conflicting meanings of the term and resolutely refused simply to choose one definition of culture over another.’ It is evident that in his critical writings he sought to play the meanings of this term off each other with the intention of avoiding reifying the term, which he thought was a cardinal sin.

Model

Cultural Studies have yet to make its mark in Sri Lanka in any significant way. If and when it does, Raymond Williams, it seems to me, would be a model well worth emulating – more so than some of he current leaders of Cultural Studies who are too subservient to, and too obsessed with, high French theory. Unlike most other practitioners of Cultural Studies, he advocated the blending of academic and non-academic perspectives. He also wanted Cultural Studies to be an open-ended discipline never succumbing to rigidities of dogma; that it should be subject to constant re-appropriation and self-revision. We in Sri Lanka should heed that advice.