Dialectical Radicalism

At one time the end of this excerpt of Raymond Williams would have given me chills. He taps into this nerve of my old self when he claims that "There is no way to teach a man to read the Bible--a predominant intention in much early education in literacy--which did not also enable him to read the radical press" (110). Of course, this kind of dialectical radicalism is also a paradox for the materialist analysis. How can the agent of oppression--here the church, but in a larger sense, capitalism in all its costumes--also be the worker's saving grace? His name for this paradox is "asymmetry," or the failure of ends and means to line up like one would expect them to. His example is the Marxist tract or the Anarchist cookbook that circulates to a wide audience due to market-driven print capitalism. I think it's hard not to think of the "digital DIY" when Williams explains that "The older though continuing tensions between cultural authority and cultural independence have been transformed by the increasingly dominant social relations of the new means of production and reproduction" (103).Here Williams is coming close to what he will call "emergent social function" in Marxism and Literature. When I first read Williams--way back in 2006--I thought that digital reproduction, things like MySpace, BitTorrent, Napster, you name it, were exactly these emergent social formations that signaled a new cultural means of reproduction. Now, I'm not so sure.

We must notice that in his discussion of "new media," a word that has come to mean more than Williams could have even imagined, the first thing he does is graft it onto the "corporate professional" artist (50-53). Of course TV writers and radiomen were corporate professionals because they got their patronage from a network of film company, but Williams is actually quite perceptive of the future of our "newer" media. The artist is no longer just a "salaried professional" but now she is a "post-industrial" producer. The difference is more than nominal: the writer no longer just writes, she designs with text. Even in new media production seemingly outside the capitalist mode of production, i.e. the gift economy/ meritocracy of the blogosphere, the cultural production takes place strictly on globalized capital's terms (this blog we are contributing to is owned by Google, for example, the fiber-optic cable we connect to the internet to are owned by corporate interests, we taking this class under the catalog one of the most corporatized universities in the world, etc.) Though I once thought Williams offered us unbridled hope of understanding new social formations, I've come to realize he offers us much more: a way to contextualize the "newness" of new media, which, in turn, gives us ammunition in our struggle for truly "alternative" cultural production.