Difference between revisions of "Williams 1977"

Latest revision as of 19:00, 6 January 2019

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: UP, 1977. Print.

• base/superstructure: sum of relations of production --> superstructure, which is scaffolded on the base
  • superstructure: institutions
  • forms of consciousness which express class view
  • political and cultural practices: where awareness of economic conflict gets fought out
• 79: "according to the materialist conception of history the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life" - Engels
• why isn't book history more explicitly Marxist? In terms of intellectual genealogy and ideological politics it is but in explicit political terms it isn't
• determination: settling bounds, limits, exertion of pressures
  • not opposed to direct agency: "we make our history ourselves, but in the first place under very definitive assumptions and conditions" (Engels)
• 85: objectivities passage -

Since, by definition, within Marxism, the objective conditions are and can only be the result of human actions in the material world, the real distinction can be only between historical objectivity -- the conditions into which, at any particular point in time, men find themselves born, thus the 'accessible' conditions into which they enter -- and abstract objectivity, in which the 'determining' process is 'independent of their will' not in the historical sense that they have inherited it but in the absolute sense that they cannot control it; they can seek only to understand it and guide their actions accordingly.

• 87: society quote - good to relate to Gaskell N and S
• productive forces: any and all of the means of the production and reproduction of real life
  • qt on 93
• mediation vs reflection
  • mediation is in the object itself
• 98-9 “Art reflects reality” versus “art mediates [alters, makes] reality”: not a more psychoanalytic mediation (repression, sublimation) but “Here the change involved in ‘mediation’ is not necessarily seen as distortion or disguise. Rather, all active relations between different kinds of being and consciousness are inevitably mediated, and this process is not a separable agency – a ‘medium’ – but intrinsic to the properities of the related kinds. “Mediation is in the object itself, not something between the object and that to which it is brought.” [Adorno, ‘Thesen zur Kunztsoziologie’] Thus mediation is a positive process in social reality, rather than a process added to it by way of projection, disguise, or interpretation.”
• hegemony
  • state relations (classical) -- class relations (Marxism) - Gramsci: complex interlocking pol/soc/cultural forces based on distribution of power: dominance and subordination
  • beyond ideology: "not only the conscious system of ideas/beliefs, but the whole lived social process as practically organized by specific and dominant meanings/values"
  • hegemony is "the whole body of practices and expectations...on shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world" & ff. on 110
  • Gramsci's solution: an alternative hegemony
• "grasp[ing] the hegemonic in its active and formative but also transformative processes" - unpack?
  • where cultural processes, e.g., works of art, actually do authentically break with hegemony - but what does that look like?
• 114: "Thus cultural process must not be assumed to be merely adaptive, extensive, and incorporative. Authentic breaks within and beyond it, in specific social conditions which can vary from extreem isolation to pre-revolutionary breakdowns and actual revolutionary activity, have often in fact occured. And we are better able to see this, alongside more general recognition of the insistent pressures and limits of the hegemonic, if we develop modes of analysis which instead of reducing works to finished products, and activities to fixed positions, are capable of discerning, in good faith, the finite but significant openness of many actual initiatives and contributions. The finite but significant openness of many words of art, as signifying forms making possible but also requiring persistent and variable signifying responses, is then especially relevant."
• dominant, residual, emergent
  • 121 cannot wholly abstract a cultural system ("bourgeois culture") away from social reality of being in time, rubbing up against other things, in process
  • 122 residual: effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process...thus certain experiences, meanings, and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue...of some previous social and cultural institution or formation.
    • fine differentiation between the archaic/inactive and effective/active residual process of, e.g., the monarchy
  • it is in the incorporation of the actively residual -- by reinterpretation, dilution, projection, discriminating inclusion and exclusion -- that the work of the selective tradition is especially evident.
  • 123 emergent: ...new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship are continually being created. But it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture (and in this sense 'species-specific') and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it: emergent in the strict sense, rather than merely novel.
  • since we are always considering relations within a cultural proecss, definitions of the emergent, as of the residual, can be made only in relation to a full sense of the dominant.
• 125 what has really to be said, as a way of defining important elements of both the residual and the emergent, and as a way of understanding the character of the dominant, is that no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefor no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention. ... it is a fact about the modes of domination, that they select from and consequently exclude the full range of human practice.
  • 126 Yet, in our own period as in others, the fact of emergent cultural practice is still undeniable, and together with the fact of actively residual practice is a necessary complication of the would-be dominant culture.
• 128 qt

In most description and analysis, culture and society are expressed in an habitual past tense. The strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity is this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products. What is defensible as a procedure in conscious history, where on certain assumptions many actions can be definitively taken as having ended, is habitually projected, not only into the always moving substance of the past, but into contemporary life, in which relationships, institutions and formations in which we are still actively involved are converted, by this procedural mode, into formed wholes rather than forming and formative processes. Analysis is then centred on relations between these produced institutions, formations, and experiences, so that now, as in that produced past, only the fixed explicit forms exist, and living presence is always, by definition, receding.
When we begin to grasp the dominance of this procedure, to look into its centre and if possible past its edges, we can understand, in new ways, that separation of the social from the personal which is so powerful and directive a cultural mode. If the social is always past, in the sense that it is always formed, we have indeed to find other terms for the undeniable experience of the present: not only the temporal present, the realization of this and this instant, but the specificity of present being, the inalienably physical, within which we may indeed discern and acknowledge institutions, formations, positions, but not always as fixed products, defining products. And then if the social is the fixed and explicit -- the known relationships, institutions, formations, positions -- all that is present and moving, all that escapes or seems to escape from the fixed and the explicit and the known, is grasped and defined as the personal: this, here, now, alive, active, 'subjective'.... it is the reduction of the social to fixed forms that remains the basic error.

• • think through the arg of "Structures of Feeling"
• 136: "now capitalist economic activity and cultural production are inseperable" -- they weren't in the C19, scale shifted earlier...
• implications of 137-8 direct for print culture studies
  • sociology of culture -> add study of forms (what does that entail here?)
• qt about forms on 190: unpack?
• 191 rehabilitating New Criticism formalism and updating its project