26 Culture and Class Struggle in Literature: Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams
Dr. Shashi Khurana
Learning Outcome
This module introduces the key works and ideas of Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams. Gramsci’s ideas of culture, class and the idea of hegemony as a powerful force in capitalist societies have been discussed. Raymond Williams’ seminal work ‘analysis of culture’ has also been thoroughly discussed in the module. Williams’ various theories of culture and different ways of understanding and experiencing culture are contended. The module is aimed at giving a basic idea to understand broad terms such as culture, class and various formations juxtaposing both these ideas. Multiple-choice exercises will help readers assess their knowledge and understanding of the debates and discussions related to class and culture.
Introduction
In Marxist theory, society is divided into two categories: the Base and Superstructure. Briefly, the Base constitutes the means of production (tools, machines, factories, land and raw material) and relations of production (workers, division of work, private property, capital, bourgeoisie and proletariat etc.) and Superstructure comprises of various institutions such as media, religion, judiciary, art, family, philosophy and most importantly culture in a general sense. Since the idea of culture is of utmost importance to various societal formations, a great deal of research, debate on as to what constitutes as culture, and how do we understand it has gone on. Several theorists have tried to theorise and define culture from various perspectives. In this module, we would look at important theorists Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and Raymond Williams (1921-1988) who broadly fall under Marxist criticism but have developed their own space in the history of literary theory and criticism.
Class and Power Struggle
Antonio Gramsci, General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party was arrested in 1926 by the then Fascist Italian state and subsequently sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. However, his long and cruel confinement resulted in one of the finest and most critical work, Prison Notebooks (1926). The concept of hegemony, propounded by Gramsci, has been central to the study of cultural studies from a long time. For Gramsci, hegemony is a political idea formulated to explicate the significant absence of socialist revolutions in Western capitalist societies. The concept of hegemony is employed by Gramsci (2009) to cite to a state in process in which a dominant class (in collision with other classes) does not simply command a society but determines each and every movement of the people by exercising ‘intellectual and moral leadership’. Hegemony necessitates a particular variety of consensus: a social group attempts to project its own specific interests as the common interests of the society as a whole. In a sense, the idea is applied to indicate a society in which, despite of exploitation and oppression, there is a high degree of consensus. Society as a whole comprising of various classes and groups which seem to actively assist and support and strongly follow ideals, objectives, values, political and cultural meanings of the dominant classes. For instance, throughout the history of modern Britain, only two main parties – Labour and Conservative, contested elections. At every election, the electoral competition revolves around the question, who can best manage economy (usually inferred as capitalism). Hence, each time, the political discourse built by media is determined and controlled by the needs of capitalism that are presented as the only interests and needs of society. This instance can be the epitome of how interests of one specific powerful section are universalized and presented as the interests of the society as a whole.
However, this condition seems to be perfectly ‘natural’ since the domination of a particular class is quite invisible. Gramsci argues that capitalism’s hegemony is the consequence of fundamental social, cultural, political and economic changes that have occurred over a period of at least three hundred years. Though hegemony infers a society with a high degree of consensus, one should not misunderstand it as a society with fewer conflicts. It is only meant to indicate a society in which conflict is restricted/controlled and channelled into ideologically safe grounds.
And this sense of hegemony is continually maintained and sustained by dominant sections and classes while building negotiations and concessions to various subordinate groups and classes. For instance, we can observe the classic case of subordination in the historical case of the hegemony of the British over the Caribbean. In order to sustain dominance over the vast majority of the people, Britain dislocated a large number of African men, women and children and transported them to the Caribbean islands as slaves and subsequently imposed British culture on them. Since they were rooted out of their culture, it was easy for the British to control and command the next generations by instituting English as the official language.
However, linguistically, this phenomenon may not be called as imposition, but creation or reception of a new language for a vast majority. Though, the language that has been received is not simply English but transformed English with new grammatical structures, rhythms, stresses, and intonations with some kind of influence from African languages. Gramsci calls this process as the consequence of a negotiation between dominant and subordinate groups.
Appropriation of language can both be seen as incorporation as well as resistance. Hence the process is neither imposed nor voluntarily received but developed as result of hegemonic struggle between two languages: dominant and subordinate languages.
Contours of Hegemony
Gramsci argues that Hegemony is essentially organized by those whom Gramsci calls ‘organic intellectuals’. Intellectuals are categorised by their social function and utility. This means that all men and women posses the capability for intellectual thinking, but only certain men and women in society fulfil the role of intellectuals. Gramsci further explains that each class develops their intellectuals organically. However, some sections of intellectuals construct homogeneity and an awareness of their own function not only in the economic sphere but also in the political and social fields. Along with these intellectuals, the capitalist entrepreneur constructs himself/herself as the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy and the organiser of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc.
Organic intellectuals operate as class organizers. It is this class of intellectuals who shape public discourse and organize the reform of the moral and intellectual life of society. Matthew Arnold can be considered as one of the significant organic intellectuals. Gramsci considers these organic intellectuals as one of the elite sections of society, who are supposed to lead and provide leadership in the spheres of culture and ideology in general. Throughout the work of Gramsci, organic intellectuals are individuals who hold immense power to influence society but gradually the concept of organic intellectuals has been exported and understood as an ideological state apparatus in the sphere of cultural studies, especially due to Althusser’s acknowledgement of Gramsci.
Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams is one most influential theorists in the area of cultural studies and his contribution to help understand culture has been enormous. He has contributed significantly to our understanding of literature, cultural history, theory, television, and the media. His work and ideas are immensely influenced by his origins in the Welsh working class and its life style and as an academic – he was Professor of Drama at Cambridge University.
The Analysis of Culture
In ‘The Analysis of Culture’ (1961), Williams avers that there are three general categories in the definition of culture. First, we have ‘the “ideal”, in which “culture is a state, or process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute or universal values” (57). According to this definition, the role of cultural analysis is “essentially the discovery and description, in lives and works, of those values which can be seen to compose a timeless order, or to have permanent reference to the universal human condition” (ibid.). Second, there is the ‘documentary’ record: the surviving and existing texts and practices of a culture. This definition espouses that “culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative work, in which, in a detailed way, human thought and experience are variously recorded” (ibid.). By this definition, the motto of cultural analysis is one of critical appraisal or criticism. This can lead to a form of interpretation akin to that endorsed with concern to the ‘ideal’; which takes us back to Mathew Arnold’s opinion of culture as ‘the best that has been thought and said’. This view also takes us to the historical approach; an act of critical reading and interpretation to observe its importance as a ‘historical document’.
Third category of looking at culture is the “social” definition of culture, in which culture is a description of a particular way of life’ (ibid.). The ‘social’ definition of culture is very significant to the emergence of culturalism. Subsequently, this definition brings in three more methods of defining culture. Firstly, the anthropological view that sees culture as a symbol of a particular way of life; secondly, the view that culture ‘expresses certain meanings and values’ (ibid.); thirdly, the assumption that the interpretation of cultural analysis ought to be the ‘clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture’ (ibid.). Further, the ‘social’ definition of culture as a particular way of life; culture as an expression and representation of a particular way of life; and cultural analysis as a tool of restructuring a particular way of life build both the general perspective and the basic constituents of culturalism. Williams then goes on to define the theory of culture as the analysis of relationships between various components in the whole way of life. The analysis of culture is the effort to attain the nature of the institution which is the amalgamation of these complex relationships. In a sense, analysis or interpretation of certain institutions or works is a study of their essential kind of organization, the relationships which work or institutions incarnate as parts of the organization as a whole.
The Structure of Feeling
While looking at the ‘complex organization’ of culture as a particular way of life, the intention of cultural analysis is essentially to infer what/how a culture is expressing ‘the actual experience through which a culture was lived’; the ‘important common element’; ‘a particular community of experience’ (61). In brief, Williams calls this as ‘the structure of feeling’ (ibid.). He describes the structure of feeling as ‘… the culture of period: it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization’ (ibid.). Structure of feeling is a set of shared values of a specific class, group, or society. This term is employed to depict a dianoetic structure that is a cross between, a collective cultural unconscious and an ideology. For example, he uses, the term to explicate the fashion in which many nineteenth- century novels deploy ‘magic solutions’ to close the gap in that society between ‘the ethic and the experience’. John Storey gives examples of how “men and women are released from loveless marriages as a result of the convenient death or the insanity of their partners; legacies turn up unexpectedly to overcome reverses in fortune; villains are lost in the Empire; poor men return from the Empire bearing great riches; and those whose aspirations could not be met by prevailing social arrangements are put on a boat to make their dreams come true elsewhere”. All the above examples are presented as epitomes of a shared structure of feeling, the unconscious and conscious working out in fictional texts of the contradictions of nineteenth-century society.
The main contention of the cultural analysis is to interpret the structure of feeling through the documentary record ranging ‘from poems to buildings and dress-fashions’ (Williams, 62). He exhibits clearly that what we always look for is the essential life that the whole organization is there to convey. The importance of documentary culture is that, more explicitly than anything else, it shows that life to us in most direct and visible ways, where the living witnesses are absent. Williams argues that culture always exists at three levels. One needs to differentiate and categorize these three levels of culture, even in its most superficial sense. First, there is the lived culture of a particular time and place which is fully accessible to those living in that time and place. And second, we have recorded culture, of every kind, from art to the most everyday life and the culture of a period. There is also, the factor interconnecting lived culture and period cultures – the culture of the selective tradition.
Lived culture is a culture as lived and practically experienced in day-to-day life and its existence is felt in a specific place and at a specific moment in time. And most importantly, the only people who possess full access to these cultures are those who really lived its ‘structure of feeling’. Hence, when that historical moment of practical living is foregone, the structure of feeling also starts to fade. Once that particular moment is gone then cultural analysis would have access only by the documentary record of the culture. But the documentary record itself sherds under the procedure of ‘the selective tradition’.
The Process of Selectivity and the Formation of Traditional Culture
Williams warns that between a lived culture and its reconstitution in cultural analysis, evidently, a great deal of detail is lost. For instance, he points out that no one can claim to have read all the novels of the nineteenth century. Rather, what we have is the specialist critic/writer/thinker who claims to have read a few hundreds and subsequently the enthusiastic academician who probably reads fewer, further, the ‘educated reader’ who reads few. Hence, we find a clear process of selectivity which allows the above three groups of readers from disseminating a sense of the nature and feature of the nineteenth-century novel.
Moreover, no nineteenth-century reader would in fact have read all the novels of that century. However, Williams argued that the reader of nineteenth-century ‘had something which . . . no later individual can wholly recover: that sense of the life within which the novels were written, and which we now approach through our selection’. For him, it is very important to note that through selectivity, it is invariably producing a cultural record, and a tradition while we witness ‘a rejection of considerable areas of what was once a living culture’. Furthermore, as Williams argues in his seminal work Culture and Society, there will always be this kind of selectivity determined and controlled by the dominant class of that time. This crucial argument takes us forward to understand the relation between culture of selectivity and interests of the dominant class of society. Within a given point of time, this selectivity is determined by different kinds of special considerations, especially such as class interests. Hence, the traditional culture of any society seems to match and serve its contemporary value system and the various interests of the dominant classes through a body of work , though via continuous selection and interpretation.
This idea of selectivity and formation of traditional culture is particularly important for the student of culture. Since the selection is inevitably constructed on the basis of contemporary class interests, and given the instances of ‘reversals and rediscoveries’, it follows that ‘the relevance of past work, in any future situation, is unforeseeable’ (64). In this critical background, it is extremely difficult to fix certain categories such as, what is good and what is bad, and what is low literature and what is high literature in contemporary culture, because of obvious influences of the dominant classes on these ideas.
Another important argument in Williams’ cultural analysis is that the selective cultural tradition is not only a selection but also, more importantly, an interpretation. Though one cannot overrule or alter the dominant tradition, but by going back to the text or practice, to its historical moment, through cultural analysis, one can demonstrate other ‘historical alternatives’ to contemporary interpretation and ‘the particular contemporary values on which it rests’. With this effort, one can comprehend clear differentiations between ‘the whole historical organization within which it was expressed’ and ‘the contemporary organization within which it is used’. This process as argued by Williams would provide real cultural processes.
While confronting the ideas of Mathew Arnold and F. R. Leavis on the idea of culture, Williams departs radically from Leavisism in a number of ways. He argues that art has no special place as it is like any other human activity along with other activities and espouses the case for a democratisation of culture as a way of life. His work Culture and Society distinguishes between middle-class culture as ‘the basic individualist idea and the institutions, manners, habits of thought, and intentions which proceed from that’ and working-class culture as ‘the basic collective idea, and the institutions, manners, habits of thought, and intentions which proceed from this’. He further argues and appreciates the achievements of working culture. He opines that the working class because of its inherent right from Industrial revolution, developed a unique culture in the form of the cooperative movements, the trade unions, or a political party. Hence, he strongly argues that the working class culture is fundamentally social rather than individual, collective rather than personal. And given a context this collective imaginative work is a remarkable creative achievement.
It is in this context that Williams states that that definition of a culture, as the ‘lived experience’ of ‘ordinary’ men and women and their culture as essentially ‘ordinary’. They produce the texts and practices out of their daily interaction of everyday life. He passionately puts forward his argument in the essay ‘Culture is Ordinary’
Hence, this sets the basis for a democratic definition of culture. While supporting Leavisism’s common culture, he strongly contests Leavisim’s hierarchical culture of difference. Further, Williams asserts a crucial difference between commodities of cultural industries and what people make of these products. He disagrees with the proposition of equating popular culture with working-class culture and argues that the main origins of this ‘popular culture’ rest outside the working class altogether as it is funded and controlled by the commercial bourgeoisie and situated in the typical capitalist mode of production and distribution. In that sense, people should not be reduced or identified to the commodities they consume.
Major ideas of class and culture are discussed in Raymond Williams’ seminal essay ‘The Analysis of Culture’ which is part of The Long Revolution. The text is considered as ‘a seminal event in English post-war intellectual life’ by eminent cultural theorist, Stuart Hall.
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Reference
- Forgacs, D., Nowell-Smith, G., & Boelhower, W. (2012). Antonio Gramsci: Selections from cultural writings. Lawrence & Wishart.
- Gramsci, A., & Buttigieg, J. A. (2011). Prison notebooks. New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press.
- Gramsci, A. (2000). The Gramsci reader: selected writings, 1916-1935. NYU Press.
- Storey, John (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 4th edition, Harlow: Pearson Education, 2009.
- Williams, R. (2015). Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Williams, R. (1989). Resources of hope: Culture, democracy, socialism. London: Verso. Williams, R. (1961). The Long Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus, pp, 57-70.