Culture and society, then and now

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 55, 2009, Pages 31-45

  Mulhern, Francis ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 59649130307     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (36)

1. This is the revised text of a lecture given to the Raymond Williams Society in London, November 2008, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Culture and Society. A part of the argument was first aired in a lecture for the Cultural Theory Institute in the University of Manchester in 2005. References to Culture and Society are to the Pelican edition, London 1961; hereafter CS.
2. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, London 1976, ch. 1; Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, London 1979.
3. See, for example, Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation [1987], London 2002, pp. 50-51.
4. Patrick Parrinder, 'Culture and Society in the 1980s', in his The Failure of Theory: Essays on Criticism and Contemporary Fiction, Brighton 1987, p. 69, faulted Williams's 'common culture' as an idea foreclosed against 'the proliferation of cultures', characteristic of a multicultural society'.
5. For critical reflections from feminist standpoints see Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, London 1986;
6. Jane Miller, Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture, London 1990.
7. Richard Hoggart, Uses of Literacy, London 1957.
8. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, London 1970, p. 257.
9. The Classic, London 1975.
10. Two volumes, Frankfurt 1965.
11. Cambridge Review 90, 30 May 1969, pp. 366-68, reprinted in Eric Homberger, William Janeway and Simon Schama, eds, The Cambridge Mind: Ninety Years of the Cambridge Review 1879-1969, London 1970, pp. 162-66.
12. Hornberger et al., The Cambridge Mind, pp. 164-65.
13. Paul Jones advances a very similar thesis in his recent study Raymond Williams's Sociology of Culture: A Critical Reconstruction, London 2004, pp. 62-68, although in the context of a discussion of method - the practice of immanent critique.
14. Williams, 'The Idea of Culture', Essays in Criticism, vol. 3, no. 3, 1953, pp. 239-66.
15. Adorno, Prisms [1955], London 1967, pp. 19-34.
16. See Dai Smith, Raymond Williams: A Warrior's Tale, Cardigan 2008, pp. 332-401, for the gestation of Culture and Society.
17. Lindsay, 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge (I)', Arena, February-March 1951, vol. 2, no. 6, pp. 36-49;
18. 'Coleridge (II)', Arena, April-May 1951, vol. 2, no. 7, pp. 29-43.
19. Thompson, 'William Morris and the Moral Issues Today', Arena, June-July 1951, vol. 2, no. 8, pp. 25-30;
20. also 'The Murder of William Morris', Arena, April-May 1951, vol. 2, no. 7, pp. 9-27.
21. CS, p. 17.
22. CS, p. 263fr.
23. CS, pp. 268-69.
24. CS, pp. 30-31.
25. Others did, in different ways. Richard Wollheim, in his pamphlet Socialism and Culture, warned against the cultural centring of family, arguing that this would inevitably favour 'conservatism and conformism' (Fabian Tract 331, London 1961, pp. 12-13).
26. Just a few years later, Juliet Mitchell placed the family at the strategic centre of feminist thinking in her pioneering essay 'Women: the Longest Revolution', NLR 1/40, November-December 1966, pp. 11-37.
27. 'Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind' (Book IX), J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, translated and edited by F. M. Barnard, Cambridge 1969, p. 313.
28. Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), Harmondsworth 1973, p. 162.
29. For a searching account of the complex play of interests in multiculturalism, and an affirmation of social 'conviviality', see Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Conviviality, Abingdon 2004.
30. The phrase 'a new civility' is Tom Paulin's: see his Ireland and the English Crisis, Newcastle 1984, p. 22.
31. 'Wake Up, Activists Are Pounding on the Doors of Ivory Towers', Times Higher Education Supplement, 28 May 2004.
32. See Gupta, ed., From Homebreakers to Jailbreakers: Southall Black Sisters, London 2003.
33. For an example, see Bikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory, Basingstoke 2000.
34. It was David Goodhart, the editor of the monthly Prospect and a self-described 'sensitive member of the liberal elite', who reimagined the official multiculturalist dream as nightmare ('Discomfort of Strangers', Guardian, 24 February 2004, pp. 24-25, reprinted from Prospect for the same month), suggesting that social solidarity was being strained to snapping-point in the UK. In the ensuing controversy, against the background of a legislative ban on the wearing of religious tokens in state schools in France, suggestions that the proposed European constitution should formally honour the Christian heritage of its core region, civilizational resistance in high places - in France again, and elsewhere - to full EU membership for 'Muslim' Turkey, and all this in a sustaining conjuncture of US-British 'war on terror', the idea of culture became, and remains, a political force (and counter-force).
35. CS, p. 285.
36. Elsewhere, in a notebook, he wrote: 'Theory of culture is a deep response to a deep disturbance of the common life of exceptional complexity, but this is its relevance.' (Cit. Smith, Raymond Williams, p. 443.) The choice of but over and makes the crucial suggestion.