Abstract
The critique of mass communication and the struggle for popular culture are recurrent themes in Raymond Williams’s work, though in certain respects elusive and slippery, dispersed as they are across a wide range of theoretical, historical, critical and polemical writing from the 1950s until his death in 1988. What is the meaning of this couplet — ‘mass communication’/‘popular culture’ — in Williams’s very complex and politically engaged discourse? It is tempting to see them simply as the positive (‘popular culture’) and negative (‘mass communication’) terms of a binary opposition: the culture produced by ‘the people’ from below and the culture imposed upon them from above. Yet nothing in Williams’s discourse could ever be read as so simple, categorical, or fixed. Minimally, there is an interaction and, maximally, a crucial site of contestation.
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Notes
S. Heath and G. Skirrow, ‘An Interview with Raymond Williams’, in T. Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment (Indiana University Press, 1986) p. 3.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958: Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961) p. 289.
Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976) p. 162.
‘The Press and Popular Culture’, in G. Boyce et al. (eds), Newspaper History (London: Constable, 1978) p. 49.
Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: New Left Books/Verso, 1979).
Raymond Williams, ‘You’re a Marxist, Aren’t You?’, in Resources of Hope (London: Verso, 1989; originally published in 1975).
T. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976) p. 22.
Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981) p. 228.
The chapter on ‘The Growth of the Popular Press’, in Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) can hardly be read as ignorant of economic and political determinations, the role of capital and the capitalist state. Significantly, I think, both Eagleton and Barnett pay scant attention to Williams’s work on non-literary communications, which is perhaps the main reason for the partiality of their criticisms.
Raymond Williams, ‘Advertising: The Magic System’, reprinted in Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980) p. 184.
See Williams’s excellent discussion of Marx’s writings in relation to ‘Culture’ in D. McLellan (ed.), Marx - The First 100 Years (London: Fontana, 1983).
See Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London: New Left Books, 1973), and his ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1973).
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) p. 97.
Raymond Williams, ‘Marxism, Structuralism and Literary Analysis’, in New Left Review, no. 129 (September-October 1981), reprinted in Raymond Williams, Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1984).
Raymond Williams, Towards 2000 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) p. 244.
See T. Bennett, ‘Theories of the Media, Theories of Society’, in M. Gurevitch et al. (eds), Culture, Society and the Media (London: Methuen, 1982).
See S. Giner, Mass Society (London: Martin Robertson, 1976).
F. R. Leavis, ‘Mass Civilization and Minority Culture’, in his Education and the University (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, originally published as a pamphlet in 1930).
Raymond Williams, ‘Communications as Cultural Science’, in C. W. E. Bigsby (ed.), Approaches to Popular Culture (London: Edward Arnold, 1976).
Raymond Williams, ‘The Growth and Role of the Mass Media’, in C. Gardner (ed.), Media, Politics and Culture (London: Macmillan, 1979).
See M. Tracey, ‘The BBC and the General Strike’, in his The Production of Political Television (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).
See Dave Morley’s The ‘Nationwide’ Audience (London: BFI, 1980) and Family Television (London: Comedia, 1986).
V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986, originally published in the Soviet Union in 1929) p. 11.
Raymond Williams, Communications (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) P. 9.
See, for instance, John Hartley’s Understanding News (London: Methuen, 1982).
Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (London: Chatto & Windus, 1953)
Raymond Williams, Drama in Performance (London: Frederick Muller, 1954)
Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966)
Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968). Williams originally invoked his concept, ‘structure of feeling’ in a book on film, Preface to Film (London: Film Drama, 1954), co-authored with Michael Orrom.
Raymond Williams, ‘A Lecture on Realism’, in Screen, vol. 18, no. 1 (Spring 1977) p. 70.
Raymond Williams, ‘ITV’s Domestic Romance’, in A. O’Connor (ed.), Raymond Williams On Television (London: Routledge, 1989) p. 109, also in Williams, Communications, p. 88.
Raymond Williams, Television, Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fontana, 1974) p. 87.
J. Ellis, Visible Fictions (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982) p. 118.
A. O’Connor, Raymond Williams - Writing, Culture, Politics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) p. 98.
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McGuigan, J. (1993). Reaching for Control: Raymond Williams on Mass Communication and Popular Culture. In: Morgan, W.J., Preston, P. (eds) Raymond Williams: Politics, Education, Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22804-1_8
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