Raymond Williams Now: Knowledge, Limits and the Future

192 Pages·1998·11.9 MB·English

by  Jeff Wallace

RAYMOND WILLIAMS NOW

Raymond Williams Now
Knowledge, Limits and the Future
Edited by
Jeff Wallace
Senior Lecturer in English
University of Glamorgan
Rod Jones
Senior Lecturer in the History of Art
University of Glamorgan
and
Sophie Nield
Lecturer in Theatre and Media Drama
University of Glamorgan
ffi
Selection and editorial matter © Jeff Wallace, Rod Jones and
Sophie Nield 1997
Text © Macmillan Press Ltd. 1997
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First published 1997 by
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Notes on the Contributors vii
Introduction: * Somebody is trying to think
Jeff Wallace, Rod Jones and Sophie Nield 1
1 Keywords, Ideology and Critical Theory
Christopher Norris 22
2 Ways of Knowing Cultures: Williams
and Bourdieu
Derek Robbins 40
3 'A Slow Reach Again for Control': Raymond Williams
and the Vicissitudes of Cultural Policy
Jim McGuigan 56
4 Drama in a Dramaturgical Society
Lizzie Eldridge 71
5 Rethinking Human Nature and Human Needs:
Raymond Williams and Mass Communications
Nick Stevenson 89
6 Raymond Williams and the Culture of Televisual Flow
Stuart Allan 115
7 Against the New Conformists: Williams, Jameson
and the Challenge of Postmodernity
Kevin Kavanagh 145
8 Raymond Williams's Time
Steven Connor 163
Index 181
v
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Annabelle Buckley at Macmillan, for her patience
and help throughout the editorial process; and to David Adamson, Karen
Atkinson, Dan Baron Cohen, Sue Holdway and Frances Sloan, for their
invaluable work at the 'Knowledge, Limits and the Future' conference
in May 1995, where this project began to take shape. And special thanks
to Fran, Sue and Tim, for all their support and encouragement throughout.
The essay 'A Slow Reach for Control': Raymond Williams and the
Vicissitudes of Cultural Policy is reprinted from European Journal of
Cultural Policy, Overseas Publishers Association, Amsterdam B.V., 1995,
vol. 2 no. 1, pp. 105-115, with permission from Gordon and Breach
Publishers, World Trade Centre, 1000 Lausanne 30, Switzerland.
vi
Notes on the Contributors
Stuart Allan lectures on media and cultural studies at the University
of Glamorgan. He is co-editor of Theorizing Culture: An Interdisci
plinary Critique After Postmodernism (1995), Book Series Editor of
Issues in Cultural and Media Studies for the Open University Press,
and Deputy Editor of the journal Time & Society. Currently, he is
writing a book on the news media, and co-editing a book on gender
and news discourse.
Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck
College, London. He is the author of books on Dickens, Beckett and
Joyce, as well as Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories
of The Contemporary (1989, 2nd edn 1996), Theory and Cultural Value
(1992) and The English Novel in History 1950-1995 (1995).
Lizzie Eldridge is a lecturer in Theatre and Media Drama at the Uni
versity of Glamorgan. Co-author of Raymond Williams: Making Con
nections (1994), she is also a writer and theatre director. Her specific
research interests include the drama of Jean Anouilh and exploration
into the relationship between theatre and everyday experience.
Rod Jones is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University
of Glamorgan. He has published widely on contemporary art, the history
and theory of photography, cultural policy and the heritage industry.
Among his work on images of Wales is, 'Out of the Past: Pictures in
Theory and History' in (ed.) T. Curtis, Wales: The Imagined Nation (1986).
Kevin Kavanagh read English at Oxford as a mature student, and is
now completing a PhD thesis, 'Raymond Williams and the Limits of
Cultural Materialism'. He currently teaches nineteenth and twentieth
century literature and cultural history at Warwick University, and as
sists on the M.A. course in critical theory. In 1995 he organised a
conference at Warwick: 'Media, Margins and Modernity: Raymond
Williams and the Resources of Hope'.
Jim McGuigan teaches cultural studies at Coventry University. He is
the author of Cultural Populism (1992) and Culture and the Public
vn
Notes on the Contributors
Vlll
Sphere (1996); and co-editor of Studying Culture (1993). His forth
coming publications include Cultural Methodologies and Technocities.
He is currently writing books on postmodern culture and managerial
discourse.
Sophie Nield lectures in Theatre and Media Drama at the University
of Glamorgan. Her research interests include space and theatricality in
public and political life, aspects of film and museology. She has pub
lished on space and popular theatre, and nineteenth century theatre
architecture. She is Assistant Editor of the journal Theatre Annual.
Christopher Norris is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Wales, Cardiff. Among his many publications are: Derrida (1987);
Uncritical Theory: postmodernism, intellectuals and the Gulf War (1989);
What's Wrong With Postmodernism?: critical theory and the ends of
philosophy (1990); Deconstruction: theory and practice (1991) and Truth
and the Ethics of Criticism (1995).
Derek Robbins read English at Cambridge in the 1960s and was super
vised by Raymond Williams for his doctoral research. He has taught
at the (now) University of East London since 1970. He was a founder
member of the School for Independent Study there and is now a Reader
in the Faculty of Social Sciences. He has published The Rise of Inde
pendent Study (1988) and The Work of Pierre Bourdieu (1991). His
Bourdieu and Cultural Analysis will be published by Polity Press in
1996/7.
Nick Stevenson lectures in Sociological Studies at the University of
Sheffield. He is the author of Understanding Media Cultures; Social
Theory and Mass Communication (1995) and Culture, Ideology and
Socialism; Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson (1995). His forth
coming publications include Globalisation, Media and Cultural Citizen
ship (Longman).
Jeff Wallace is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Glamorgan.
He is co-editor of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species: New Interdisci
plinary Essays (1995), and of the book series Texts in Culture, and
has also published on D. H. Lawrence, Raymond Williams and Italo
Calvino. He is currently working on a book on D. H. Lawrence and
science.
Introduction: 'Somebody is
trying to think ...'
Jeff Wallace, Rod Jones and Sophie Nield
This volume contributes to the continuing effort to evaluate and ex
tend the project of Raymond Williams's work. It is entirely appropri
ate that this effort has so far been characterized by a sense of having
to maintain momentum1, for Williams's writing was a 'project' in the
strictest sense - always purposive, embodying a sense of work to be
done, its value often seeming to lie in sketching future developmental
possibilities or in suddenly highlighting, through a felicitous conjunc
tion or realignment of knowledges and disciplinary procedures, new
fields of enquiry into the cultural past. But also implicit in Williams's
own work is the necessity of a constant critical vigilance towards that
project, and therefore an obligation to justify any re-evaluation from
the emergent perspectives and demands of the present.
The essays collected here, initially deriving from a conference held
at the University of Glamorgan in May 1995, respond to the invitation
to see 'Knowledge, Limits and the Future' as a useful contemporary
formula for moving from and beyond Williams's work. 'Future', be
cause Williams indeed invested heavily in the future: from Culture
and Society 1780-1850 (1958) to Towards 2000 (1983), he developed
a vision of modernity as a long, ongoing, complex and often-compromised
struggle towards greater conditions of democratic and co-operative
socialism or 'socialisms'. Now, as the fin de siecle approaches, the
Utopian dimensions of his thought and his own interest in utopianism
take on a renewed significance, allied to a fresh contemporary concern
with the conceptualization of the movements of time and history. 'Limits'
has been described by Andrew Ross as, along with 'nature' and 'en
vironment', 'one of the more important political keywords of our times'.2
In Williams's work, the concept of limit can be seen as subtly crucial
to the active contestation of available versions of the future; it charac
teristically and dialectically combines a belief in reason and rational
planning with the necessity of maintaining a notion of an open, inde
terminate and unforseeable future, directed by the limitless potential
of human creativity. Moreover, while 'limits' inevitably calls to mind
the appeal for the later Williams of a rapprochement between the 'Red'
1