Mulhern, Francis. "CULTURE AND SOCIETY, Then and Now." NEW LEFT REVIEW 55 (2009).

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958. Any retrospect of Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society should begin by acknowledging that the book comes to us through an already-long history of explicit retrospection. It is a work much looked back upon. These acts of retrospection have occurred in every decade, and have differed in kind and relative salience, as of course in critical bearing. They form no consensus beyond the unchallenged assumption that the book was important and perhaps remains so. They do not substantiate a simple narrative of any kind, even if the inertial flow of textbook characterizations is noticeable—and probably inevitable, as derived acquaintance comes more and more to predominate over direct reading knowledge as the ground of Williams’s currency and reputation. The best-known retrospects are those of the nineteen-seventies: Terry Eagleton’s, not only the best-known but also probably the most influential, and then the interviews that made up Politics and Letters. With all qualifications made, it can be said that Eagleton and Williams’s New Left Review interlocutors—I, at any rate—tended then to maximize the continuity between Culture and Society and the antecedent lineage of English cultural criticism and to minimize the continuity with a Marxism that Williams had first embraced, then seemingly abandoned, and was now rediscovering in new or unsuspected forms. The identifying term of this dialogic set was the phrase ‘Left-Leavisism’. The pattern of discussion in the nineteen-eighties was more complex. Williams’s political engagements, in the domestic and international crises of the time, were now declaratively revolutionary, and Marxism was the terrain on which he forwarded the theoretical programme he sometimes called cultural materialism. At the same time, his work was called into question on new grounds, as critical investigations of race and racism and the subordination of women claimed their places at the centre of cultural theory and politics. Indeed, this might have been the decade that forgot Culture and Society, had it not been Williams’s last: he died in 1988. Discourse on his work proliferated now, but in keeping with the protocols of the new situation. Culture and Society was widely recalled, of course: but this was retrospect as memorial. Then, at the turn of the decade, came the final crisis of the Eastern bloc and, in much of the West, the refiguring or dissolution of the Communist parties. At home, this coincided with the ascent of social-liberalism in an exhausted Labour Party and a long season of perverse apologia for commodity culture. In this hopeless conjuncture, Culture and Society showed its most radical face (as in truth did the contemporaneous work with which it was often mistakenly twinned, Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy). The core thesis of Williams’s conclusion—concerning the intrinsic historical creativity of socialized labour—had perhaps never seemed so coolly intransigent as it came to seem in the nineties. Here now, beyond memorial, from an earlier bad time, was ‘a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’. These evocations of the past forty-odd years are one way of saying, by illustration, that Culture and Society is a classic—classic in the sense that Frank Kermode gives the term in his study of the category. It is, notably, diversely readable. Or, to put the matter in another way, it is an elusive text, never quite where you suppose it to be, where, perhaps, you would prefer it to be, whether wishfully or in a spirit of resentment. And certainly the book has had a way of chastening confident hindsight with its own backward glance, as it goes on being read and re-read, and always slightly differently. . . . Download the entire paper here for a limited time: http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2760.

Eagleton, Terry. "Culture Conundrum." GUARDIAN May 21, 2008.

Smith, Dai. Raymond Williams: a Warrior's Tale. Carmarthen: Parthian, 2008. Ever since the early 19th century, culture or civilisation has been the opposite of barbarism. Behind this opposition lay a kind of narrative: first you had barbarism, then civilisation was dredged out of its murky depths. Radical thinkers, by contrast, have always seen barbarism and civilisation as synchronous. This is what the German Marxist Walter Benjamin had in mind when he declared that "every document of civilisation is at the same time a record of barbarism". For every cathedral, a pit of bones; for every work of art, the mass labour that granted the artist the resources to create it. Civilisation needs to be wrested from nature by violence, but the violence lives on in the coercion used to protect civilisation - a coercion known among other things as the political state. These days the conflict between civilisation and barbarism has taken an ominous turn. We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational. It is no surprise, then, to find that we have civilisation whereas they have culture. Culture is the new barbarism. The contrast between west and east is being mapped on a new axis. The problem is that civilisation needs culture even if it feels superior to it. Its own political authority will not operate unless it can bed itself down in a specific way of life. Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence - one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilisation cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it. We can be sure that Williams would have brought his wisdom to bear on this conundrum. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/21/1.

Collini, Stefan. "Upwards and Onwards." LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS July 31, 2008.

Smith, Dai. Raymond Williams: a Warrior's Tale. Carmarthen: Parthian, 2008. If Williams could at one point have been seen as ‘the English Lukács’, not least for his sustained engagement with the historical place of literary realism, he now came to be seen as ‘the English Goldmann’ or even ‘the English Bourdieu’ (such labels always exhibited a disregard for the fact that he was not English, as he pointed out with increasing insistence). And indeed, since cultural materialism’s attentiveness to non-literary contexts and its repudiation of ‘evaluative criticism’ was seen by many to have affinities with the academically still more powerful school of New Historicism, Williams could even be classified, at least when seen down the wrong end of a transatlantic telescope, as ‘the English Greenblatt’. Fortunately, his standing was never confined to the world of academic literary studies. His work, early and late, on ‘communications’, especially television, meant that he was a constant point of reference in the fast expanding field of Media Studies (‘the English McLuhan’), just as several of his books from Culture and Society onwards were regarded as founding texts, although frequently repudiated, in the diverse field, or movement, now established as Cultural Studies (‘the English Gramsci’). And, of course, his more directly political writing always engaged with a much wider, non-academic, left-leaning public, to whom he spoke inspiringly of the continuing value of ‘community’, of the imperative to pursue a thoroughgoing democratisation of economic and cultural as well as political institutions, and of the need to cultivate ‘resources for a journey of hope’ towards a possible form of socialism (‘the English Habermas’?). In his concern with the natural environment, especially in the form of the relations between country and city, he provided the elements from which a ‘Green Williams’ could be constructed, just as his reflections on the consequences of colonial settlement and cultural dominance, here drawing explicitly on his Welshness, could even be made to yield a sketch of a ‘post-colonial Williams’. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n15/coll01_.html.

Hare, David. "I am of my Tribe." GUARDIAN May 24, 2008.

Smith, Dai. Raymond Williams: a Warrior's Tale. Carmarthen: Parthian, 2008. The author of Culture and Society and The Long Revolution is now the object, it seems, more Google hits than all other New Left writers added together. But a combination of extreme personal privacy in his character and an ill-defined posthumous celebrity have conferred on him something pretty close to complete unknowability. The groups that gather in his name to discuss his ideas invoke his spirit without ever quite managing to identify his cause. A compulsive evader and non-joiner during his life - "Hello, I must be going" would have been as good a biographic title for Williams as for Groucho Marx - he has become, 20 years after his death, a fascinating spectre haunting the decline of the organised left. There is a strong feeling, in the present atmosphere of debauched intellectual panic, that if Raymond were still here, there would be somebody around who could make sense of all this. You may say, of course, that it is in the essence of all the most lasting legacies of influence that the charismatic teacher should be always more than a little evasive. Nothing dilutes influence more quickly than clarity. But Williams's case is particularly acute. With hindsight, it seems quite extraordinary that British radicals of the 1960s should have sought to answer their need for direction and leadership by turning to, of all things, a literary critic - and, what's more, one who made no claim to be notably expert in the more conventional fields of economics or history. Dai Smith's new biography concentrates exclusively on the first 40 years of his subject's life. Its special intention is to prove by the daunting extensiveness of its family research, and by its unique access to Williams's own archive, that Williams never even thought of himself as a critic, least of all one mired in the occupational spite and nastiness of the English faculty at Cambridge University. No, Raymond Williams wanted to be a playwright. He wanted to be a novelist. . . . Read the rest here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,,2281946,00.html.

Hall, Stuart. "The Life of Raymond Williams." NEW STATESMAN February 21, 2008.

(First published February 5, 1988.) I first met him in Oxford in the mid-1950s when a number of us, looking for a way out of the impasse of the elitism of F. R. Leavis’s reading of English literary traditions, were given by him, and read with mounting excitement, the early chapters of what was to become Culture and Society. Thereafter, our paths continually crossed. He became a contributor to and a key figure in the early New Left. In 1966, he took the lead in drafting the May Day Manifesto, an attempt to formulate a socialist alternative to Harold Wilson’s grimly technocratic vision. Intellectually, his work dominated the development of cultural studies. He was a founder member of the Socialist Society. I never had the privilege of being taught by him, but he was the most formative intellectual influence on my life. I often had the uncanny feeling that we had stumbled unawares on to the same line of thinking — only he had given it, already, so lucid and compelling a formulation. However, it is through his work and writing that he influenced several generations across the world, and it is by this that future generations will measure him. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.newstatesman.com/200802210055.