Abstract
Recently, it has seemed that everybody loves Raymond. Or at least, it has appeared to me that – most particularly since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic – many people are rediscovering, or otherwise belatedly coming to, the writing of Raymond Williams, the Welsh theorist, socialist and public intellectual who lived from 1921 to 1988. 1 And yet Williams, as a new book by Jim McGuigan argues, has for the most part been significantly and unjustly overlooked within cultural studies – and indeed more generally – in recent decades. Eclipsed by the towering and charismatic presence (and now legacy) of Stuart Hall, and of what McGuigan calls ‘Hallian’ cultural studies, Williams’s work is not given its proper dues within our collective historicisations of cultural studies’ intellectual and political traditions. McGuigan argues that Williams is implicitly, dismissively cast as ‘yesterday’s man’ – as a kind of anachronistic throw-back who has nothing to contribute to the contemporary field, or to urgent political questions of the moment. For McGuigan, this is to the detriment of our ability to adequately grasp the profound, complex and multidimensional challenges with which we are currently faced.
Raymond Williams: Cultural Analyst is an attempt to rectify this intellectual absence and unjust under-appreciation, and it makes its case compellingly. To read this book is not only to gain a rich and detailed understanding of Williams’s critical oeuvre, but also to appreciate how it is fascinatingly and always bound up with his biography – as someone from a working class background on the Welsh borders, who crossed the borders of nation and class to become a Cambridge University academic and eminent public intellectual. The book permits a much fuller appreciation of cultural studies’ diverse and contested history, and even beyond that, it gives rich insights into the fractious and volatile dynamics of left intellectual thought in Britain in the 20th century more broadly. McGuigan makes no secret of his enormous admiration for Williams’s work, which he argues was bolder, more radical and more genuinely original than Stuart Hall’s.
The book begins with an introduction which locates Williams ‘in time and place’ as ‘a leading thinker of the British New Left from the 1960s until his death in 1988’ (p. 1). It highlights and explores the Black American critic Cornel West’s assessment of Williams as ‘the last of the great European male revolutionary socialist intellectuals’ (ibid.), as well as foregrounding the ways that Williams strove towards an ideal of ‘an educated and participatory democracy’ (p. 7). After this, there are eight main chapters, which are loosely organised around the chronological development of Williams’s critical work. They take in and explicate key texts and concepts such as ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (the title of chapter 1, and name of the famous 1958 essay) and ‘The Long Revolution’ (title of chapter 6, and name of the 1961 book). The closing afterword reflects explicitly on the ways that Williams is (under)valued in contemporary cultural studies, and it is here that the tensions that have been set up by McGuigan between Williams and ‘Hallian’ cultural studies, which flow and simmer like undercurrents throughout the book, come fully and searingly to the surface.
The book is a deeply sympathetic and yet not uncritical presentation of Williams’s key work and ideas. For those who are looking for a way ‘in’ to Williams’s voluminous body of work and his intellectual biography, it is an exceptionally useful and accessible resource. For me, the book is especially valuable in three key ways. First, it underscores the ongoing importance and inexpressibly deep value of familiar concepts of Williams’s such as ‘structure of feeling’ – this was the term which he defined as being ‘as firm and definite as “structure” suggests’ and yet operating ‘in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity’ (cited on p. 17). The ‘structure of feeling’ concept is widely used and firmly established in cultural studies, media studies and beyond, and yet with each revisitation – as with here – it generates insights and rethinkings anew.
Second, this book reminds us of other concepts, developed and coined by Williams, that are on the one hand reasonably well known, and yet simultaneously curiously under-used, given the ways they incisively capture complex social and cultural phenomena. One such example is ‘mobile privatization’, which McGuigan rightly describes as an ‘exceptionally fruitful’ concept, and which he summarises in the book as the paradoxical ways in which ‘[e]nhanced public mobility and the privatization of social life somehow go together today’ (p. 93). Williams developed this concept in relation to broadcasting and motorcars, but it still has exceptional resonance and explanatory power for the paradoxes of the contemporary socio-technological terrain, populated as it is by smartphones and virtual reality gadgets, which permit imaginative travel and new forms of social connectivity at the same time as they reify private individualism.
Third, for those (like myself) who are not yet familiar with the full range of Williams’s scholarly writing, there are new critical-intellectual gems to be discovered. Since reading the book, I have kept recalling McGuigan’s discussion of a paper that Williams gave in 1978, which had argued that ‘the means of communication are themselves the means of production’ (p. 54). McGuigan explains that, for Williams, even Marxist theories of base and superstructure are ‘insufficiently materialist’ because they posit that the ideational superstructure operates separately and differently from the economic base – that is, the superstructure is not itself construed as material. Why, the book prompts us to wonder, do we not draw from Williams’s intellectual resources so much more often?
The methodology for which Williams is best known, and which is explained at length here, is ‘cultural materialism’. This approach develops the critique of the base-superstructure model, to argue that culture is not simply an effect or reflection of the materialist base of society – but neither is it free floating, autonomous from, or undetermined by it. Williams rejected technological determinism – which is disparaged throughout McGuigan’s book – but instead he theorised more complexly how various determinations exert pressures and set limits on human activity, but never in so doing removing the capacity for human agency and intention. McGuigan argues that our analyses of media and culture, following Williams, must be ‘multidimensional’; a cultural materialist approach seeks to ‘articulate the interaction of conditions of production and consumption with media texts and their meanings within specifiable socio-historical contexts’ (p. 87).
McGuigan refers to Williams as a man who was ‘stubborn and humane’ (p. 137) and this also seems an apt way to describe Williams’s writing. His scholarly works are not exactly scintillating or breathtaking or intoxicating in their style, but rather they are patient, clear and methodical, offering brilliant insights through a mode that does not dazzle, but illuminates. Throughout the book, McGuigan counterposes Williams against other theorists who were ‘charismatic’ or ‘fashionable’ or thought of as ‘maîtres à penser’ – Marshall McLuhan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucualt – and Williams invariably emerges from these juxtapositions as the decidedly less flashy but more inestimable critic whose thinking will more meaningfully endure.
McGuigan writes that in Williams’s political and intellectual critiques of others’ work, he did not often explicitly name the objects of his critical ire. The same is not the case in this book, which does not hold back from often scathing criticism of individuals, including that directed towards Fred Inglis, whose biography of Williams, and overall understanding of his life and work, frequently come in for castigation and critique, sometimes of a personal nature (see especially p. 112).
The unrestrained tone with which McGuigan regularly defends Williams against his critics, or against the unjustness and ignominy of being ‘left behind’ by the fashionable flows of academia, renders the book an invigorating read. It can, however, veer into uncomfortable terrain, such as when Stuart Hall is discussed in relation to Williams and argued to be a ‘derivative thinker’ in comparison (p. 151), or as someone whose research and politics came to represent ‘little more than a multicultural version of social democracy’ (p. 149). For McGuigan, as he was for E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams is ‘our best man’; in contrast, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and others at the ‘Birmingham School’ are positioned – mostly implicitly, but occasionally explicitly – as not just less estimable thinkers than Williams, but sometimes as actively scuppering some of the political momentum and value of his cultural materialist approach.
A case in point is Paul Gilroy, whose critique of the ethno-centrism in Williams’s writing is dismissed by McGuigan as ‘uncomradely’; moreover, because he drew conceptual links between Williams’s writing on place, nation and identity with that of the racist Enoch Powell’s, Gilroy is presented as ‘enraged’, ‘incensed’, ‘intemperate’ and as having gone ‘too far’. This dismissal of Gilroy’s critique of Williams as merely the product of anger, rather than critical reason, represents a lost opportunity, I would suggest, to think more openly about Williams’s failure to account for gender and race in his analyses – a conceptual gap which McGuigan acknowledges, if only as a ‘serious blind spot’ (p. 142) – and how this might be fruitfully addressed through meaningful engagement with feminist and critical race theory. It is not as though the critique of Williams’s work as overly amenable to ethno-centrism came only from the Birmingham School – Marshall Berman (2017 [1965]), for example, worried that Williams’s writing tended towards a conflation of rural rootedness with authentic belonging in a way that bore too-close resemblance to a regressive politics of ‘blood and soil’.
In Raymond Williams: Cultural Analyst, as well as technological determinism, the other great intellectual foe is ‘identity politics’. McGuigan follows Eric Hobsbawm when he argues that ‘identity politics is typically self-regarding and, in practice, selfishly lacks the altruism of socialism’ (p. 145). Cultural studies, in this account, has catastrophically lost its grounding in socialist politics, or a cultural materialist approach. In many ways I am in broad agreement with this argument, and its parallels with debates within feminism; for example, Nancy Fraser (2013) argues that, in recent decades, the feminist movement has lost sight of its revolutionary goals and instead has become too narrowly concerned with questions around identity, or ‘recognition’. For Fraser, the politics of recognition has gone ‘rogue’, and without its grounding inter-relationship with the politics of redistribution, has become all too amenable to co-optation by neoliberalism, and in so doing has lost its radical, emancipatory potential.
But to call identity politics ‘selfish’ and socialism ‘altruistic’ has the unfortunate but historically established effect of positioning feminists and queers, and any others who insist on radical difference, as intolerable usurpers of the left. McGuigan invokes Fraser in service of his argument; he says that Fraser ‘defends a traditionally socialist emphasis on redistribution’ against the philosopher Axel Honneth, who instead ‘stresses recognition of difference and respect for identity’ (p. 145). However, Fraser’s central thesis is not to defend redistribution against recognition, but rather to first reconceive recognition as non-identitarian, and then to integrate this with a politics of redistribution. It is not either/or, but must always be both. The feminist work that has been painstakingly poured into trying to synthesise different strands of justice, rather than to binarise them as questions of either ‘socialism’ or ‘identity politics’, seems dishearteningly absent here. The impulse to position different approaches to theory and justice as a stark ‘choice’ to be made also seems present in the antagonistic juxtaposition of Williams’s ‘cultural materialist’ approach with ‘Hallian’ cultural studies. It seems unfortunate and, I would hope, unnecessary that a better appreciation of Williams’s work must depend upon a downgrading of ‘Birmingham’ cultural studies, and that a re-appreciation of cultural materialism must come at the expense of Hall, Gilroy, as well as the feminist work done at Birmingham, which is similarly dismissed as merely interested in consumption.
McGuigan writes compellingly that to properly appreciate Williams’s life and work, we must understand the central importance of his persistent ‘sense of being on the border and crossing borders’ (p. 144). Williams crossed borders in a biographical and geographical sense, from his boyhood in the Welsh village of Pandy to his life in the bourgeois city of Cambridge, but also in an intellectual sense of having ‘broke[n] boundaries of academic disciplines’. The writer Lynsey Hanley (2020) says that the brilliance of ‘Culture is Ordinary’ is that it shows, in the bus journey that it opens with – in which we are transported almost imperceptibly from England into Wales – that ‘borders are arbitrary and formative at the same time’ (Hanley, 2020).
Raymond Williams: Cultural Analyst is a compelling, provocative and indispensable resource for understanding the eponymous thinker’s work, and the richness, perspicacity, and deep, ongoing value of Williams’s theorising. My hope is that it is possible to appreciate the value of this book without submitting to the view that the boundaries and divisions between Williams’s work and that of the Birmingham School – and relatedly, those between socialism and ‘identity politics’ – are unscalable, formative and concrete. For me, it seems that the concept of borders as thresholds to be crossed, boundaries to be breached, or divisions to be disregarded allows for the possibility of a different reading of the intellectual and political past, present and future of cultural studies. It is in this way that we might be able to freely range across, and cross back and forth between, its different traditions; in so doing, we can also refuse any logics of patrilineal loyalty to one ‘founding father’ or another.
Nancy Fraser’s work points to the possibilities of doing justice to the intellectual legacies of important thinkers for the left (such as Jürgen Habermas and Karl Polanyi) – she does this by foregrounding their exemplary critiques of capitalist markets while simultaneously illuminating their failures to take patriarchal power and its operations into account. Rather than dismissing these theorists wholesale, Fraser instead more valuably and radically exposes their conceptual limitations precisely in order to generate more multidimensional, expansive and more genuinely progressive articulations of their theories.
McGuigan’s book, and its defence and explication of Raymond Williams’s ‘cultural materialist’ methodology and ‘green socialist’ thought more broadly, is incredibly welcome and important in this moment of acute, multidimensional and systemic crisis. But it seems to me that to do the deepest justice to Williams’s work, and its great potential for helping make sense of the knotted complexities of the contemporary conjuncture, would be to explicitly render it more conceptually open to feminist, queer and postcolonial critique. In these terms, it would make the most sense to draw upon the fullest possible range and diversity of cultural studies’ different strands and its teeming critical traditions – not to close the intellectual borders, but to open them, so that we can keep on crossing them, ceaselessly.
