Culture Workers of the World, Unite!

Call me an idealist, but reading Raymond Williams is always refreshing. I love "batten down the hatches--here comes the revolution" theoretical writings as much as the next guy (or probably more) but Williams' even-keeled approaches to culture and media never fail to convince me and impress me.

In Williams' discussion of Lenin near the end of the "Marxism and Culture" chapter, I came across a piece of particularly sage-like wisdom. " [T]he growth of consciousness is cheapened (as in the mechanical description of the past)" Williams argues, "by being foreseen as 'chaos'. Here, it is not ultimately a question of wise or unwise, free or totalitarian, policy; it is, rather, a question of inadequacy in the theory of culture" (283). Something that enriched my understanding of this class in general, and academic debate more generally. Culture creates the limits of a society's understanding of itself. When a society errs, we have the consumerist catastrophe of modern America or the gulag of the USSR. The point of this is, we all make/participate within culture: it's ours to lose. Armed with a rigorous theory of culture, what we might want to call a "sociology of culture" stemming from Williams/Bourdieu/Gramsci, we might be able to understand what kind of world we want to see. Culture acts as a rubric for understanding history in the present, but if we misunderstand the signs, we fail to comprehend the political status/political potentional of our age.

Of course, though, culture's interaction with the material substrate (the base) is tricky, indirect, and spotty. This doesn't mean we can forget about the base all together, though. What Williams' (and Bourdieu's and Gramsci's) method enable us to think about are the economic elements that enable and "determine" cultural production. This may not help us understand the direct connection between base and superstructure, but at least it combats the scholarly/pseudo-scholarly tactic of debasing either Marxism or culture because of ill-informed readings of each other.

If we should think of culture as a "whole way of life," which I think we should, we have to think of ourselves as cultural producers. This movement from the status of simply consumers to overall producers is not in itself revolutionary or liberating, but it is reflective of culture's power.