CONTESTING CULTURE

RAYMOND WILLIAMS IN THE SPATIAL REVOLUTION

When I was in grad school back in the 80s, Raymond Williams was an intellectual force to be reckoned with. That of course was all very long ago. It is a bit surprising to me how much he has been forgotten. Certainly his way of thinking has gone out of fashion. While he was always forthright about calling himself a Marxist, it was always pretty evident that many, probably most, other Marxists were not so keen on claiming him for the club. Central to this hesitation was that, as a Marxist, Williams was very concerned with the condition and well-being of the working class. However, unlike so many other Marxists, Williams did not cook up in his imagination some idealized revolutionary internationalist proletariat chomping at the bit to animate the theory of the Marxists.

Williams, rather, appreciated that the working class – and particularly the English working class about whom he most thought and wrote – were in fact deeply rooted in traditional communities, the customs and rituals of an organic culture, as well as in their families. In a word, they were far more likely to be conservative than progressive. Most other Marxists didn’t want to hear or believe any of that. Their working class was a sleek instrument of rationalist, universalist revolution. That aspiration was hardly facilitated by, nor logically invested in, a working class that turned out to be deeply particularistic and parochial. Again, Williams was a Marxist, but he was astute enough to recognize that the working class had to be addressed at the cultural place where they really lived.

In light of the above observation, as well as the vacuous thinking about “Marxism” that one sees so often on “the right,” which I’ve criticized elsewhere on this Substack (see here, here, and here), there’s probably some value in providing a parenthetical caveat against easily anticipated confusions which may arise from the discussion below. It was not Marxism that created “class conflict,” but rather the spatial revolution, through Its avatar of industrial capitalism, that did so.

Under both commune feudalism and guild corporatism the Marxian classes had been woven into common craft interest, with mutual obligations and responsibilities.¹ Under labor-market fueled capitalism such bonds and obligations were dissolved and the owner had no attachment to the worker beyond the need of that day's production needs. Unions were eventually formed as means to protect workers in this manifestly unbalanced power relation. While there were some benefits along these lines, they also introduced a host of other problems into the equation, from criminal corruption to ruling class capture (always subject to Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy”), while exacerbating rather than resolving the increasing social warfare of class division -- again not created by Marxist theory but by the practices of the spatial revolution’s manifestation as industrial capitalism.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming:

Culture, broadly speaking, was where Raymond Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was most focused on examining historical dynamics. His iconic works were exercises in literary analysis, through which he chartered the historical changes of culture – and associated notions – through what English writers had said, and how they’d said it, about the pivotal forces affecting their time, across the decades and centuries. The main books of Williams that are most of interest for an exploration of the spatial revolution, are Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961), and The Country and the City (1973).²

Here I’ll be focusing primarily on the first of those relevant books, Culture and Society, though down the road we may find occasion to dip into the other two as well.³ As we already saw with Schmitt (see here), and will certainly see with authors yet to come, the spatial revolution was as much as psychological and cultural change as it was a geopolitical, economic, and technological one. Reviewing Williams’ work allows us to track some of these key changes in those dimensions aligning with the spatial revolution within the country which Schmitt had acknowledged as the pivotal one for creating the new nomos of the earth manifested through that spatial revolution.

Williams organizes his study around the exploration of a handful of what he calls keywords. The ones particularly relevant for our purposes are those of industry and culture, and their cognates.⁴ For instance, and particularly relevant to the case at hand, Williams traces the shifting meanings of the word "culture," from its early association with cultivation (agriculture or personal refinement) to its broader modern sense as a way of life or a set of artistic and intellectual achievements. Before the period he’s studying, Williams say:

[Culture] had meant, primarily, the ‘tending of natural growth’, and then, by analogy, a process of human training. But this latter use, which had usually been a culture of something, was changed, in the nineteenth century, to culture as such, a thing in itself. It came to mean, first, ‘a general state or habit of the mind’, having close relations with the idea of human perfection. Second, it came to mean ‘the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole’. Third, it came to mean ‘the general body of the arts’. Fourth, later in the century, it came to mean ‘a whole way of life, material, intellectual and spiritual’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, industry too, during the industrial revolution sees a notable change in its meaning:

...industry, and the period in which its use changes is the period which we now call the Industrial Revolution. Industry, before this period, was a name for a particular human attribute, which could be paraphrased as ‘skill, assiduity, perseverance, diligence’. This use of industry of course survives. But, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, industry came also to mean something else; it became a collective word for our manufacturing and productive institutions, and for their general activities. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), is one of the first writers to use the word in this way, and from his time the development of this use is assured.

William’s argument is that these cases of semantic evolution are reflections of changing social conditions and tensions, particularly as arose from the industrial revolution. The term "culture," in particular, Williams regards as becoming a form of contested linguistics.

As the industrial revolution disrupted traditional social bonds, and I would say the temporal values that cohered those bonds, Williams sees the resulting new society – defined by the newly emerging mechanized, utilitarian world of industrial capitalism – as fragmented and alienated. In this regard, he particularly highlights the discourse and language of Edmund Burke, William Blake, Matthew Arnold, and F.R. Leavis, seeing in their response to the upheaval of the industrial revolution a longing for a lost organic community. In my nomenclature, he characterizes their response to the spatial revolution as a longing for a more time biased society.

Certainly not all responses to the social fragmentation of the spatialist industrial revolution were uniform. Burke, for instance, defends tradition against revolutionary change. While Coleridge and Carlyle seek to counter industrial materialism promotion with appeals to moral and spiritual renewal. Meanwhile, Morris attempted to leverage different forms of the new meanings of culture into a kind of socialist utopia, in which art and labor become interconnected. Such figures, for Williams, shaped a school of cultural critique oscillating between conservative nostalgia and progressive idealism.

Another variable in Williams’ story is how the industrial revolution also occasioned the expansion of mass education in the 19th and 20th centuries. Whereas there had been a tendency within elite circles to emphasize the refinement and craft of high culture in response to the vulgarity of entertainments made available to the working class through industrialization, this expansion of mass education opened new avenues of thinking about what in fact constituted culture, and indeed to whom it belonged.

From Williams’ perspective then, such developments during the industrial revolution gave rise to the newly emergent concepts of culture as a site of social and class struggle. Culture is actually made out of the actions of real people aggregated over the full set of their actions, relationships, and aspirations. Or, at least, this is the understanding of culture which Williams sees emerging from the discourses responding to the upheavals of the industrial revolution. Such a perception of culture was distinct in a couple of important ways – both of which got Williams into some hot water back in the mid-20th century.

On the one hand, he was rejecting the validity of the elitist notion of culture: Arnold’s "the best that has been thought and said." While that attitude is a notable and understandable response to the perceived vulgarization of culture under commercialization and mass production, Williams’ review of key and influential thinkers over the period revealed that it was much more than this. The working class was making culture too, both as producers and consumers. And in many cases, such making was rooted in their own conservative community values and traditions.⁵ Hence Williams’ claim that culture had become a contested terrain.

It may be understandable that such an approach, in the 1950s, may not have been well received in English academic circles, where the attitudes tended toward elite dispositions. Williams’ approach here though also got him in trouble with his presumed allies, most other Marxists. For according to Marxist orthodoxy, culture was part of the superstructure. Which for most Marxists meant that any specific form of culture was a more or less automatic manifestation of underlying forces of production.

That clearly was not what Williams had discovered in his study. Certainly, he agreed that culture was produced from material forces, but far from being reducible to an ideological instrument of the ruling class, as noted, reviewing the literature of the era, Williams found that culture was produced by different conflicting forces, with their own objectives and agenda, dynamically interacting with one and other.

The history of the idea of culture is a record of our reactions, in thought and feeling, to the changed conditions of our common life. Our meaning of culture is a response to the events which our meanings of industry and democracy most evidently define. But the conditions were created and have been modified by men.

This understanding of culture contributed importantly to the growing conclusion within latter 20^th century Marxist thought that culture had to be considered “autonomous,” rather than a mechanical manifestation of productive forces.⁶ Unfortunately, this attitude often constituted an over-correction of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction, but that’s a discussion for another day. For now, it is important to focus on this new popular conception of “culture” which Williams’ identifies as resulting from the disruption of traditional community and family life in the wake of the industrialized spatial revolution.

If I can be forgiven for a little projection, I think what Williams was getting at (to what extend he realized it, I’m unsure) is that prior to the industrial revolution – and more to the point, the spatial revolution – the organic nature of culture made it largely invisible. Certainly people had their institutions, traditions, customs, and rituals, but for the most part, as a daily matter, they were taken for granted. As such societies were more likely to be populated with temporals, inclined to respect borders and rules, and adverse to novelty and transgression, such cultural parameters were rarely questioned and so rarely required consideration or defense on the basis of their own inherent assumptions.

It was only with the spatial revolutionary arc of the phenotype wars, as spatials – with their appetite for novelty, and transgressive attitude to rules and boundaries – that organic and traditional cultures came to be challenged at the base of inherent (temporalist) assumptions. It is only at this point that culture ceases to be the water to the fish of Gemeinschaft and becomes an arena of explicit contestation. And of course the real story here is not just that temporals who never previously thought in terms of rationalist (much less universalist) defense of their culture, now found themselves required to do so if they wanted to preserve their traditional way of life.

Of even greater significance, that very defense of traditional society was increasingly demanded to be presented in the domain of rationalism. Once the defense of traditionalism became dependent upon rationality, the horse was long gone from the barn. Attempting to close the barn door became little more than – what was ubiquitously regarded as – exhausted appeals to an antiquated and depleted nostalgia.

Williams of course doesn’t quite say all this, but it is not to my reading of him at all unfair or excessive to interpret his conclusions along these lines of theory. For him, though, the main lesson is clear: under the influence of the industrial revolution, and all that it entailed (of course, I’d say, primarily, the spatial revolution), culture which had once had an uncontested organicity to it, became instead an arena of high contestation. This involved not only elite efforts to define culture away from the vulgarities of working class life, but through the unintended consequences of mass public education, the working class itself became agents of cultural curation, both as producers and consumers.

Given both the period that Williams was writing about, and writing from, it’s perfectly understandable that his emphasis in unpacking this spatial revolution reorientation of culture as contested terrain should be upon the conflict between classes, and particularly the role of the working class within these processes and dynamics. However, from our vantage point, a quarter of the way through the 21^st century, the players and themes of cultural contest look quite different. We live in a world in which the spatial revolution has been hard at work for the nearly three quarters of a century since the publication of Williams’ book.

A variety of cultural relativist movements – e.g., poststructuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction – have been hard at work undermining the foundations of temporalist epistemology. A vast range of social justice or grievance studies (depending upon your phenotype) efforts to radically undermine received culture have wielded narrative framing informed by appeals to universal justice (even, oddly, when denouncing appeals to such status by temporalist culture) to emphasis failures to live up to abstract standards of rationality and other French Enlightenment values. This, despite the fact that, prior to their confrontations with the spatial revolution, temporal cultures would rarely imagine themselves as purveyors or protectors of individualism, equality, inclusiveness, and the rest of the spatialist cultural shopping list.

In contrast to the world studied and lived by Raymond Williams at the time of writing this book, the contestation of culture by differing classes seems quaint to our world in which the contested terrain of culture is fought over upon terms of patriarchy and misogyny, institutional racism, colonialist guilt, the great replacement, globalist erasure of national identity, heteronormativity, and the plasticity of gender, sex, self, and the human. And, sometimes, even occasionally, class.

Today, in the age of the self-described “culture wars” it may seem a tad obvious, maybe even intellectually pedestrian, to propose that culture would be a contested terrain. However, that was hardly so evident back in the 1950s, when Williams was writing his book. His genius it seems to me, was both his recognition that such a battle over culture was barreling toward us like a runaway train, and at least as importantly to have recognized that this constitution of culture, far from inevitable or intrinsic to the domain, was precisely the product of an historical erosion of the organic, traditional culture of Gemeinschaft by the revolutionary forces, which he’d have characterized as industrial, though I think we’re increasingly recognizing as spatial.

Over the next several posts to this series, we’ll dig deeper down into these cultural conflicts, into endogenous expansion of the spatial revolution, into Schmitt’s spatial mind and its consequences. So, if you want to be the first on your block to see that discussion, and haven’t yet, please…

And, as ever, if you know someone who’d be interested in what we get up to hereabouts, please…

Meanwhile: Be seeing you!

1. The best place I can recommend to follow up on this topic is my most recent book, Michael McConkey, Recalling the Pluralist Constitution. Though, in the meantime, the curious reader can review the series on the history of guilds posted to this Substack. The index to that series is here.

2. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950, 2nd edition (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983); Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, Reprint edition (Cardigan, Wales: Parthian Books, 2012); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1975).

3. A brief biographical note, if it’s of any interest. The first book I read of Williams was The Long Revolution, in the mid-80s, and I read it in close proximity to another book discussed on this Substack: Alvin Gouldner’s The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (see here and particularly interesting for our purposes here). The combined effect of reading these two books in close proximity exposed my young(ish) mind to a way of conceiving the scale and arc of history which had previously been unfamiliar. In hindsight, it seems funny now, considering the work I’ve been doing in recent years, unpacking the model of the phenotype wars, to recognize how long such ideas have been percolating in the back of mind, only all these decades later congealing into a coherent explanatory theory for the West’s historical longue durée.

4. Though, to be clear, along the way Williams is considering a far vaster swath of linguistic and discursive changes during the period: “[There are] a number of other words which are either new, or acquired new meanings, in this decisive period. Among the new words, for example, there are ideology, intellectual, rationalism, scientist, humanitarian, utilitarian, romanticism, atomistic; bureaucracy, capitalism, collectivism, commercialism, communism, doctrinaire, equalitarian, liberalism, masses, mediaeval and mediaevalism, operative (noun), primitivism, proletariat (a new word for ‘mob’), socialism, unemployment; cranks, highbrow, and pretentious. Among words which then acquired their now normal modern meanings are business (= trade), common (= vulgar), earnest (derisive), Education and educational, getting-on, handmade, idealist (= visionary), Progress, rank-and-file (other than military), reformer and reformism, revolutionary and revolutionize, salary (as opposed to ‘wages’), Science (=natural and physical sciences), speculator (financial), solidarity, strike and suburban (as a description of attitudes). The field which these changes cover is again a field of general change, introducing many elements which we now point to as distinctively modern in situation and feeling.”

5. Though we won’t dig into it in this post, a contemporary of Williams who was both theoretically and methodologically revolutionizing much of this kind of thinking, particularly in regards to traditional working class culture and its confrontation with what I’d call the spatial revolution, in a 1957 book, was Richard Hoggart, ed., The Uses of Literacy, 1st edition (New York: Routledge, 2017).

6. Incidentally, though I’m sure Williams’ would have been horrified to have been labeled a biological determinist, or even realist, his understanding of culture has remarkable similarities to that theorized by one of the pioneers of biological realism as a foundation for sociology. See chapter 2, Richard D. Alexander, Darwinism and Human Affairs (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982).