scholarly journals The Technology is not the Cultural Form?: Raymond Williams's Sociological Critique of Marshall McLuhan

1998 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Jones
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Cultural Materialism ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Compte Rendu ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Contemporary Research ◽  
Raymond Williams

Abstract: This article's prime aim is to provide an exegesis of Raymond Williams's neglected "mature'' theorization of means of communication. Much of this aspect of his cultural materialism is articulated as a critique of Marshall McLuhan. Williams attempts to recover and develop what he saw as the lost early promise of McLuhan's work. The article thus takes the form of an account of the complex relationship between the two authors' projects from their common origins in English literary criticism through to Williams's rejection of McLuhan's proto-postmodern avant-gardism. The normative sociological typologization of means of communication offered by Williams is argued to be directly relevant to contemporary research. Résumé: Le but principal de cet article est de donner une exègèse des théories "matures" négligées de Raymond Williams sur les moyens de communications. Williams articule une bonne partie de cet aspect de son matérialisme culturel sous forme d'une critique de Marshall McLuhan. Il essaie de récupérer et de développer ce qu'il perçoit comme la promesse inaccomplie des premiers ouvrages de McLuhan. Cet article prend ainsi la forme d'un compte-rendu du rapport complexe entre les projets des deux auteurs, -- partir de leurs origines communes dans la critique littéraire anglaise jusqu'au rejet par Williams de l'avant-gardisme postmoderne avant la lettre de McLuhan. L'article soutient en outre que la typologie sociologique normative des moyens de communications offerte par Williams est directement pertinente -- la recherche contemporaine.

Raymond Williams and Communication Studies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim McGuigan
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Cultural Materialism ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams (1921–1988) is often cited as one of the founders of the interdisciplinary field of education and research known as cultural studies (CS). To be more specific, he formulated an influential methodology that he named “cultural materialism,” which has an affinity with CS but is a distinctive perspective in its own right. Williams’s most celebrated book, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958), traced British Romanticism’s critical response to the Industrial Revolution and successive debates on social and cultural change. At the time of publication, Williams declared “culture” to be “ordinary,” thereby challenging the cultural elitism of literary study and opening up questions concerning mass-popular culture. However, Williams distanced himself from the populist study of communications and culture that became fashionable in the 1980s. His transition from literary criticism and history to sociological commentary and speculation on future prospects was signaled further by his 1961 sequel to Culture and Society, The Long Revolution. Williams challenged the behaviorism of American-originated communication studies and drew upon European critical theories in his own work. His academic specialism was dramatic form, which he studied historically and related to theatrical and audiovisual trends in modern drama. His perspective of cultural materialism broke entirely with idealist approaches to the arts and communications media. However, he was firmly opposed to technologically determinist explanations of the emergence of new media and the dynamics of social change, On technical innovation, he emphasized the role of intentionality, the materiality of discourse, and the social conditions of cultural production and circulation. His key concepts include selective tradition, structure of feeling, and mobile privatization. Williams later coined the term “Plan X” to refer to the rise of military recklessness and unregulated “free-market” political economy and communications during the late 20th century. His final non-fiction book (he also wrote novels), Towards 2000 (1985), has been updated to take account of developments in culture, society, and the environment over the past 30 years.

scholarly journals The Role of social Identity in James Joyce`s Dubliners within the Light of Cultural Materialism

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-99
Author(s):  
Mojgan Gaeini ◽  
Fatemeh Sadat Basirizadeh ◽  
Mahnaz Soqandi MA
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Dominant Factor ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Cultural Materialism ◽  
Material Life ◽  
Raymond Williams

Language, Social identity and Religion are three major concerns of cultural studies. Language in literary texts plays a major role in constructing meaning and reflecting the author`s intention. Likewise religion as a cultural politics is a dominant factor in shaping mind as well in affecting the framework of literary text. Religion is one of the emerging issues in the modern era and forms the backbone of most literary works. Religion as a theme is seen to influence the operation of those who believe in it. It forms the functional framework that predetermines ones actions and behavior. Furthermore, social identity decides on the status of the social class and their material life situation.  Social identity relates to how we identify ourselves in relation to others according to what we have in common. All these issues are interrelated since they all cooperate and construct a social and cultural materiality. James Joyce could be placed among the most dominant cultural authors whose concern is the material life, social class, social identity and cultural crisis. As an outstanding author, Joyce is well known for his typical depiction, musical decoration as well as his sticking to proper cultural and social materials and issues such as religious matters. His major short story collection, Dubliners, revolves around the lifestyle of the Irish middle-class in Dublin around the late 1800s and early 1900s. This collection is decorated with violated norms and ritualistic behavior that are part of social constructs. Addressing social, religious and cultural issues, cultural materialists believe that “literature can serve as an agent of change”, since a culture`s hegemony is unstable. Raymond Williams views culture as a “productive process” that is, part of the means of production, and cultural materialism often identifies what he called “residual”, “emergent” and “oppositional” cultural elements. Seemingly, James Joyce`s Dubliners pertains to the notion of language, social identity and religion as cultural practices within the framework of cultural materialism. This study aims to clarify how James Joyce`s Dubliners reflects the notions of language, social identity and religion as cultural practices and how they construct social and cultural products within the framework of cultural materialism to show how James Joyce criticizes Irish culture at the beginning of the Twentieth century.

scholarly journals The Role of Language and its Analysis in James Joyce`s Dubliners within the Light of Cultural Materialism

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-26
Author(s):  
Mojgan Gaeini ◽  
Mahnaz Soqandi ◽  
Fatemeh Sadat Basirizadeh
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Dominant Factor ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Cultural Materialism ◽  
Material Life ◽  
Raymond Williams

Language, Social identity and Religion are three major concerns of cultural studies. Language in literary texts plays a major role in constructing meaning and reflecting the author`s intention. Likewise religion as a cultural politics is a dominant factor in shaping mind as well in affecting the framework of literary text. Religion is one of the emerging issues in the modern era and forms the backbone of most literary works. Religion as a theme is seen to influence the operation of those who believe in it. It forms the functional framework that predetermines ones actions and behavior. Furthermore, social identity decides on the status of the social class and their material life situation.  Social identity relates to how we identify ourselves in relation to others according to what we have in common. All these issues are interrelated since they all cooperate and construct a social and cultural materiality. James Joyce could be placed among the most dominant cultural authors whose concern is the material life, social class, social identity and cultural crisis. As an outstanding author, Joyce is well known for his typical depiction, musical decoration as well as his sticking to proper cultural and social materials and issues such as religious matters. His major short story collection, Dubliners, revolves around the lifestyle of the Irish middle-class in Dublin around the late 1800s and early 1900s. This collection is decorated with violated norms and ritualistic behavior that are part of social constructs. Addressing social, religious and cultural issues, cultural materialists believe that “literature can serve as an agent of change”, since a culture`s hegemony is unstable. Raymond Williams views culture as a “productive process” that is, part of the means of production, and cultural materialism often identifies what he called “residual”, “emergent” and “oppositional” cultural elements. Seemingly, James Joyce`s Dubliners pertains to the notion of language, social identity and religion as cultural practices within the framework of cultural materialism. This study aims to clarify how James Joyce`s Dubliners reflects the notions of language, social identity and religion as cultural practices and how they construct social and cultural products within the framework of cultural materialism to show how James Joyce criticizes Irish culture at the beginning of the Twentieth century.

scholarly journals Gælden, gaven og geden: Om skyldnere og humanitær økonomi

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (125) ◽  
pp. 219-242
Author(s):  
Devika Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Charitable Giving ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Humanitarian Relief ◽  
Cultural Form

This article centers on the complex relationship between debt and gifts – or, more to the point, between the neoliberal economy of debt as diagnosed by Maurizio Lazzarato, among others, and humanitarian subjectivity; Between debt government and humanitarian government. Drawing on the work of Ananya Roy and looking to objects of debt/humanitarian relief such as Greece and Haiti, I suggest that what Lazzarato terms ‘indebted man’ today co-exists in hitherto unexamined ways with ‘humanitarian man’, and that these two forms of subjectivity in fact share dispositions of guilt and shame. In order to further examine the guilty or ‘indebted’ disposition of everyday humanitarians I then continue to discuss a particular humanitarian product, namely the ‘charity goat’ and other third-party gifts. Here I draw in particular on Lilie Chouliaraki’s notion of post-humanitarianism in order to suggest that third-party charitable giving gives cultural form to the experience of indebtedness of the humanitarian gift-giver. This experience is, I finally suggest, part of a broader Scandinavian, but not exclusively Scandinavian, predicament of privilege.

Cultural Materialism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Bertens
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Social Order ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Cultural Materialism ◽  
Louis Althusser ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Material Conditions

Cultural materialism as a literary critical practice—this article will not address its anthropological namesake—is a Marxist-inspired and mostly British approach to in particular Shakespeare and early modern English literature that emerged and became prominent in the 1980s. Its emphasis on the historical and material conditions of the production and reception of texts has remained influential, even if its political commitment and interventionist purposes have largely been abandoned and increasingly ignored. While certain of its formulations would seem to echo Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, or other thinkers of the period, the main influence is the British literary and cultural critic Raymond Williams, and his re-theorization, following Antonio Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony, of the orthodox Marxist binary of base and superstructure. For Williams, who coined the term “cultural materialism,” culture is neither a mere reflection of that base nor wholly independent of it. This does not rule out intentional human practice, but rejects the idealist position in seeing that practice as inseparable from specific historical conditions. Still, with culture not wholly determined by an economic base, it plays its own role in the construction and/or reproduction of the social totality, and inevitably becomes the site of ideological struggle. Next to the dominant, hegemonic cultural formation we will thus find declining, residual formations and nascent, emergent ones. Cultural materialism focused on the ideological forces at work in Shakespeare (and early modern literature more generally), in Shakespeare studies, and in contemporary re-stagings and representations—in for instance secondary education and advertising—of Shakespeare and/or his work. Rejecting humanist beliefs in transcendent, ahistorical, truth and in an essential human nature, cultural materialists insisted on historicization and argued that Shakespeare—and the study of literature in general—had been hijacked by a conservative humanist ideology that presented itself as timeless and “natural” and perhaps unwittingly colluded with a profoundly unjust and rapacious social order. One of cultural materialism’s main interests was social stratification and the way in which the dominant social order sought (and seeks) to legitimize itself—for instance through the construction of socially marginalized groups as “other,” a practice that led to an early interest in issues of gender and race, and would substantially contribute to the rise of queer studies. Inspired by its belief that ideological hegemony is never absolute and that all ideology at some point contradicts itself, cultural materialism reads texts for signs of subversion and political dissidence, arriving at often provocative interpretations whose ulterior purpose was to serve as interventions in current political debates.

scholarly journals Accounting the ‘self’: From diarization to life vlogs

2020 ◽  
pp. 135485652094761
Author(s):  
Yasmin Ibrahim
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
The Self ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
New Media Technologies

The diarization of the self emerged through historically contingent social and economic relations and the practice of accounting as an integral aspect of industrialization and capitalism. From the journal to new media technologies, the recording of everyday life is about the governance and construction of the self, illuminating the ‘everyday’ as a salient dimension of sense-making in relation to the wider world. Accounting the self today has gained renewed prominence through new media technologies and social media platforms and its increasing incorporation into everyday life, inviting a public interface. The teleology of older forms of accounting the self (i.e. the journal) to new media technologies needs to be seen through a continuum in which sociocultural and economic forces enmesh with the medium of communication as a tool of self-expression to capture the self in its diurnal mode. This article utilizes Raymond Williams’ notion of cultural materialism, in linking the diary as a modern technology of self-expression with vlogs in the post-digital terrain wherein material practices shed light onto our lifeworlds construed through the resources available within material and immaterial infrastructures, offering both agency and abstraction by capital. As such, the manifest cultural form is intimately mediated by cultural technologies.

scholarly journals Revisiting the Political Economy of Communication

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Garnham ◽  
Christian Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Information Society ◽  
Current Status ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
Cultural Materialism ◽  
Audio Recording ◽  
Research Seminar ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
The University

This tripleC contribution is based on a  research seminar that took place at the University of Westminster on January 22, 2014. It featured a conversation with Nicholas Garnham that was chaired by Christian Fuchs. We publish here both the audio-recording as well as a printed version, for which the audio version acted as foundation, but that was entirely re-written.The task of the paper and the seminar was to revisit some of Nicholas Garnham’s ideas, writings and contributions to the study of the Political Economy of Communication and to reflect on the concepts, history, current status and perspectives of this field and the broader study of political economy today. The topics covered include Raymond Williams’ cultural materialism, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture, the debate between Political Economy and Cultural Studies, information society theory, Karl Marx’s theory and the critique of capitalism.

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