Documentation:Williams

Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was heavily involved with defining and understanding culture and its fluid state, as well as its impact on individuals. He coined the term cultural materialism and expanded his theories through the concepts of dominant, residual and emergent culture. Through these concepts he explores the flexible process of cultural impacts, rather than an unchangeable, untouchable authority. This expands the views and implications of process and power, and reveals a vulnerability of hegemony. Williams' optimistic and explorative concepts lead to him writing and publishing an extensive amount of novels, essays, short stories, critiques, and dramas. He helped shape and reform the field of literary studies, especially for late twentieth century Britain.

Biography

Raymond Williams

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Raymond Williams was heavily involved with defining and understanding culture and its fluid state, as well as its impact on individuals. He coined the term cultural materialism and expanded his theories through the concepts of dominant, residual and emergent culture. Through these concepts he explores the flexible process of cultural impacts, rather than an unchangeable, untouchable authority. This expands the views and implications of process and power, and reveals a vulnerability of hegemony. Williams' optimistic and explorative concepts lead to him writing and publishing an extensive amount of novels, essays, short stories, critiques, and dramas.

Childhood and Education

Raymond Williams was born on August 31st, 1921 in Llanvihangel Crucorney, United Kingdom. He was born into a working class Welsh family where his father was a railway worker. Living in a small community, Williams was influenced by the dominant Liberal views and a strong Welsh identity. His teen years were eclipsed by the rise of World War II and Nazism. As a teen, his exposure to Marxism began when he picked up a copy of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Students were forbidden from speaking Welsh in schools, which enforced the colonization of children into the English ideal. Williams was recognized as a successful and bright student interested in politics and academia. His father and the head master of his school enrolled Williams' at Cambridge University, without his approval. He began his college education at Trinity College at Cambridge.He became a member of the League of Nations, a intergovernmental organization to maintain world peace, as well as the Left Book Club, a publishing group with a strong socialist influence. During his schooling in 1941, Williams was called to serve in World War II, where he was a wireless and tank operator. He began with his assignment to the Royal Corps of Signals, but was quickly reassigned to artillery and anti-tank weapons, serving as an officer. He fought in the Invasion of Normandy, Normandy Landings (D-Day), and was also a part of the freeing of Nazi concentration camps. In 1946 he returned to Cambridge to finish his studies. He was eventually called back to service to help fight in the Korean War, but refused under the terms of a conscientious objector, meaning an inability to serve due to reasons of conscious and moral.

Career

Raymond Williams was mainly an influential academic, novelist and critic. He did, however, try numerous careers--teacher, critic, adult educator, novelist, dramatist, political activist, and founding father of film and television, all alluding to "cultural" studies. His work focused on politics, culture, the mass media and literature, established a cultural materialistic account in cultural studies. Williams is a significant contributor to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Much of his theories and work draw from Antonio Gramsci's ideas. Never establishing himself with the British school system, Williams perceived the intentional segregation of the most intelligent students into elite English schools, to preserve the colonization process, leaving it unharmed and unquestioned. Williams became a Don at Cambridge, as well as an Oxford University Extra-Mural Delegacy Staff Tutor, a well respected and impressive job. During his time studying at Cambridge, Williams joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, which inspired much of his writing. In 1948, inspired by T.S. Eliot, Williams drew on ideas on structuralism and was increasingly interested in culture. In 1950, he began to publish his work, such as Reading and Criticism. He continued to write, publish, and earn a complex reputation.

Legacy

Raymond Williams died on January 26th, 1988 in Waffron Walden, United Kingdom. In the 1980s, Williams made connections with feminism [interlink], peace and ecology movements, extending the position of what may be regularly recognized as Marxism. He helped shape and reform the field of literary studies, especially for late twentieth century Britain. Williams was one of the main founders of cultural materialism. Williams theories were striking due to their optimism, especially related to a Marxist ideological stance. "To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing”.

Dominant, Residual, and Emergent

Williams' Essay, Dominant, Residual, and Emergent, written in 1977, focuses on exploring the impact of society, culture, and ideology through an optimistic and flexible approach. Unlike many other theorists of his time tackling similar concepts, Williams encourages the unique view that "no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention". Williams merges cultural materialism and cultural studies through his theories of dominant, residual and emergent culture. In acknowledging the complexity of culture, Williams theorizes its creation and developments are equally as complex.

Unlike Althusser who approaches the idea of culture and ideology very differently, Williams explains that the dominant, residual and emergent are all parts of culture, which together form an ongoing process. They heavily influence and depend upon one another. For example, the dominant cannot let the residual have much exposure or experience outside itself, at least without risk. Another example is that oftentimes something is disguised as an emerging cultural trend, but in reality belongs to the dominant mindset. Williams approach of a cultural process rather than something static divides hegemony into multiple dimensions. This idea appealed to many critics, who, influenced by Deconstruction, were interested in comprehending the process in cultural formations of power and influence.

Williams encouraged that the patterns of culture were constantly shifting and adapting with dynamic human thought. Residual culture, while being formed in the past and still existing in the present, is still a version of the dominant culture. Whereas the emergent culture represents the new. The dominant often neglects of fails to perceive the emergent. Emergence threatens the dominant, as it introduced and encourages new cultural formation. It is significant to understand, from a Williams reading, the possibility of that which goes against or exists outside of the dominant. While his theories contain that hope, Williams also notes the difficulties of challenging the dominant. At the end of his essay, Williams speculates it is through perceiving pre-emergence one can better grasp the concept of structures of feeling.

Key Terms

Williams believed that vocabulary is constantly shifting and adjusting just as culture itself is in constant flux.

Culture According to Williams, culture is a constantly shifting entity representing the society of a given time or epoch.

Cultural Materialism A method of research which compiles material, behavioral and etic development to explain and understand development of people in socio-cultural systems.

Dominant Culture The culture that is the most influential and common within a society. Can refer to the popular language, religion, beliefs, values, rituals, etc. The normalized way of being for society as a whole.

Residual Culture A part of culture which has been constructed in the past, but is ever present in the cultural process as an competent aspect of the present. Understanding and spotting of residual culture often depends upon its comparison to the dominant.

Emergent Culture New meanings, attitudes, values, ideals, etc. which are continually being formed. The emergent often relates to early social formations where new attitudes and values were being created. Generally, to define the emergent, a comparison must be made in relation to the dominant culture. Emergent culture represents places of experience and ambition which the dominant culture oversees or restrains.

Hegemony A single class, the dominant, who asserts authority and control over the other classes, in return ensuring certain advantages to gain and protect political control.

Ideology A system of values conveying a certain class or groups' interest.

Structures of Feeling The repeating processes of the dominant, residual and emergent within a certain period of time.