Founding father of Cultural Studiestheorist of mass culture and the media, Raymond Williams had not, to date, been translated into French. Through seven tests, Culture & Materialism offers a stimulating overview of a work that remains to be discovered.
Snubbed for decades by a French academic world, Cultural Studies In recent years, the national intellectual landscape has come in. We must in particular congratulate ourselves from what to “ small »Publishers (here ordinary meadows and lux) make accessible reference texts for this research current. No volume of texts from Williams was to date available, even though he is one of the founders of this research tradition (but not the founder of the Birmingham Research Center as indicated, wrongly, back cover). Without being able to replace the reading of complete books, the seven texts gathered here, spanning 1961 to 1985, shortly before the author’s death, gave a judicious overview of his palette. This contribution is all the more appreciable since Williams has produced strong contributions on the genealogy of the concept of culture, the history of communication and teaching systems and their effects of socialization. This sensitivity to historical depth is also one of the features, well perceptible here, of its contribution. He was also one of the first authors to initiate an analysis of television becoming the central media of the 60s and 80s. The resumption of the text “ Advertising, the magic system “, Which offers something of a socio-history, critical and documented, of the genesis of advertising practices, offers a specimen that are both representative and stimulating of this contribution. Williams makes it intelligible the links between boom in mass consumption, the press with massive diffusion and metamorphoses of the advertising system. One can only be impressed by the force that the passages preserve on the magic component of advertising, the way in which the figure of the consumer erodes that of the citizen, in a text which will soon have half a century. The text dedicated to “ Social Darwinism »In the same way, put on a singular news. Williams was also in the British intellectual left one of those who, relying on Gramsci, fought both the mechanistic and economist visions of Marxism, but also a structuralism reducing the social world to a fabric of messages and Codes, inattentive to the provisions and filtering capacities of consumers of media messages, as evidenced in particular by the text on “ Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory ».
A reader reading ?
The merits of these seven texts cannot blur the question raised by Jean-Jacques Lecerclia in his preface: the reading of Williams is not partly condemned to take on any historical interest or “ nostalgic »» ? We can both be respectful of Williams’ intelligence, adhere to the way he knew-against the tide-distance himself from the intellectual modes of his time and the dogmatisms of his camp, and question the current yield of ‘part of his problematizations. Do the advances in the sociology of culture do not make the dissertations on the basis and superstructure ? The reference to Bourdieu is essential with his invitation to a “ generalized materialism To think of the conditions of production of works of art and culture. Williams was also one of those, within Cultural Studieswho defended the contribution of Bourdieu ; And the way in which he himself invites to enhance the production processes and not only those of reception leads him to ask questions and to formulate analyzes, which are not unrelated to the contribution of the concept of field, for Get out of a problem of “ reflection In cultural production. Likewise, do the empirical analyzes on the reception of the media not answer concretely to some of the good questions raised by the problem of hegemony ? In short, if the social sciences are not intended to give the program of a company of progressive social change, which animated the founders of Cultural Studiesdo they not allow, more effectively than Marxology, to answer a range of questions relating to production and social uses of culture ? The critical reader will sometimes be able to detect – in the very critical evocation of television works – a certain cultural legitimism, or suspect too much optimism in promises associated with interactive media. More fundamentally, he will regret, especially in the two final texts (“ Culture and technology ” And “ The means of communication are means of production »), That the relevance of analyzes like those that challenge technological determinism or the possible contribution of typologies (distinction, p. 233, between amplifying means, storage and substitution in communication) suffers from their too theoretical character . The adjective is not to be heard here as synonymous with abstruse or vain sophisticated, Williams, on the contrary, of all theoreticalism. Theoretical here is to hear as insufficiently articulated in examples and empirical illustrations, which sometimes makes unhappiness of typologies or notions however promising (as Structure of Feelings). Here we find a classic problem, well highlighted by David Morley in his formula Theory Travels Better. What best crosses the translation process are the theoretical statements, while cultural objects and goods specific to the British world that serve as support for this theory are often unknown or misunderstood by foreign readers, hence the double pitfall of theories becoming “ abstract », And universes of cultural goods, the mention of which is only enlightening for the pets of the country of origin of the works.
Williams news
These critical remarks should not lead to giving the depreciative image of an author that is both enlightened and enlightening in his time but now irreparably outdated or outdated. Suggest another job. More than in a conceptual apparatus that would remain most efficient, it is in intuitions, often original lines of research that you have to seek more news, a preserved fertility of Williams. The modernity of “ cultural materialism “That he claims is undoubtedly less in the theoretical sureties of his football notes than in an often sharp intelligence of the relationships between the material conditions for cultural production and development, and its forms and content. If it would ask to be updated, the analysis of the links between modernism and urban forms is on this stimulating level (“ Metropolitan perceptions and emergence of modernism »). But the remark also applies to observations on contemporary developments in production methods and cultural consumption (p. 200-205), on what could mean in the present a concept of cultural public service. Williams’ news also depends on what was one of his constant concerns: articulate a rigorous and demanding theoretical analysis and think of his activity as an intellectual as inscribed in a project of social change. On this specific point the “ Marxism From Williams has not taken wrinkles: if it is necessary to analyze and interpret the contemporary metamorphoses of cultural, such a company can only make sense by articulating it with a aim of social change which aims to fight forms Constantly renewed of inequalities, to think of culture not as a catalog of legitimate works or consumption but as something which injects into human experience values of solidarity and justice.