Raymond Williams’s Sociology of Culture: A Critical Reconstruction

269 Pages·2006·3.22 MB·English

by  Paul Jones (auth.)

Raymond Williams’s
Sociology of Culture
A Critical Reconstruction
Paul Jones
Raymond Williams’s Sociology of Culture
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Raymond Williams’s
Sociology of Culture
A Critical Reconstruction
Paul Jones
School of Sociology, University of New South Wales
Australia
© Paul Jones 2004, 2006
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-0-333-66662-3
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First published in hardback 2004
First published in paperback 2006 by
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ISBN 978-0-230-00670-6 ISBN 978-0-230-59689-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230596894
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Paul
Raymond Williams’s Sociology of culture:a critical reconstruction/Paul Jones.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Williams, Raymond. Culture. 2. Culture. I. Title.
HM621.J66 2003
306—dc21 2003056409
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
For My Parents
Norma Jones
and
Robert Jones (1924–1975)
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Contents
List of Tables and Figures ix
Preface to the Paperback Edition x
Preface: Looking Both Ways xi
Acknowledgements xvi
List of Abbreviations xviii
Dates of First Publication and/or First Editions
of Key Works by Williams xx
1 Settling Accounts with ‘Culture’ 1
1.1 Preliminaries: culture is ordinary? 1
1.2 Against class reductivism and a mythologized
‘organic community’ 4
1.3 Problems of ‘Culturalism’ or ‘Cambridge’?: cultural
studies parts company with Williams 13
1.4 ‘This is a problem of method...’ 18
1.5 Williams’s undeclared method: immanent critique 25
1.6 Post-Romantic Enlightenment: later formulations of ‘culture’ 29
2 Cultural Materialism versus‘Received Marxist Theory’ 37
2.1 Cultural materialism: a modest proposal 37
2.2 Back to Marx but beyond base and superstructure? 38
2.3 ‘The Brumaire solution’ and the attractions
of homological analysis 42
2.4 Enter ‘cultural production’ 46
2.5 Problems of ‘cultural production’: Márkus’s critique 51
2.6 Excursus: Williams’s ‘cultural production’ and some
apparent ‘fellow travellers’ 58
3 From Criticism to Critique 61
3.1 Entertaining the Frankfurt School: emancipatory critique 62
3.2 From Goldmann to Gramsci? 68
3.3 Adorno and Benjamin: mediation, cultural productive
forces, correspondence 76
3.4 Ideology, critique and form 83
vii
viii Contents
4 Social Formalism 92
4.1 Against formalism and ‘the language paradigm’ 92
4.2 Language, signification, practical consciousness 95
4.3 Williams versus Birmingham cultural studies? 105
4.4 Social formalism and cultural forms 115
5 Towards a Sociology of Culture 127
5.1 Williams’s (re)mapping off the sociological field 127
5.2 ‘Culture’: the final settlement? 134
6 Cultural Production and Means of Communication 142
6.1 The cultural production typologies 143
6.2 Formations, avant-gardes, intellectuals, autonomy 146
6.3 Symmetries and asymmetries in cultural production
and social reproduction 153
6.4 Overcoming conflations and ‘projections’
in McLuhan’s ‘media’ 156
6.5 Overcoming technologicaldeterminism: the social
shaping of means offcommunication 163
6.6 Means of communication and ‘mediated’ cultural forms 168
6.7 Means of communication as means of socialization? 171
6.8 Excursus: the infrastructure of modernity? 176
7 The Long Revolution(s) of Modernity 181
7.1 Modernity, modernism and public sphere 182
7.2 Tragic utopianism 187
Notes 195
Bibliographyy 219
Index 235
List of Tables and Figures
Tables
1.1 The Long Revolution’s preliminary typologization
of ‘The Analysis of Culture’ 17
1.2 Cultural analyses of Sophocles’ Antigonee 19
2.1 Williams’s cultural duplication of ‘the base’ 50
3.1 Key features of Williams’s account of hegemony 73
3.2 Benjamin and Adorno: correspondence and homology 82
4.1 Williams’s typology of cultural forms 122
5.1 The ‘convergences’ in meanings of culture presented
inThe Sociology of Culture 128
5.2 Historical semantics of ‘reproduction’ 140
5.3 Transpositions andprojections from ‘the language paradigm’
compared with Williams’s schemas 141
6.1 ‘Human and non-human’ means of cultural production 143
6.2 Social relations of innovation 146
6.3 Forms of relationshipbetween cultural producers
and socio-cultural institutions 147
6.4 Institutional relations of exemplary contemporary (1981)
artforms 149
6.5 Modes of organization of formations (abandoned version) 149
6.6 Types of modern formation 150
6.7 McLuhan’s historical typology of ‘the media’ 161
6.8 Variants of determinacy involving means of communication
as means of (‘general’) production 164
6.9 The social shaping of broadcasting 167
6.10 Television: technology and cultural form(s) 169
6.11 Williams’s typology of means of communication 171
Figures
1.1 The Long Revolution’s ‘three levels of culture’ 22
5.1 Williams’s (re)mapping off the sociological field 129
ix