The selections from Williams’s Marxism and Literature caught my attention because the ideas and what seems to be the aim are both appealing, but there are points where I have a hard time accepting what appears to be an easy dismissal of the fact of social exploitation, and its role in creating human subjectivity (and individual subjects).
The central problem that Williams tackles in the selections seems to be a redefinition of the relationship between economic production and cultural practices once we de-abstract them from the terms base and superstructure. The promise of such a de-abstraction is that it allows for more agency (individual or communal) in confronting the systems of material or economic exploitation that characterize capitalist production. He tells in the first chapter that these “analytic categories as so often in idealist thought, have, almost unnoticed, become substantive descriptions, which then take habitual priority over the whole social process to which , as analytic categories, they are attempting to speak” (81). The problem being that if any variation in daily practice occurs, it is usually attributed to the superstructure as a meaningless gesture doomed to failure even before it is imagined (because the base itself does not change). As he says, “the base’ has to be considered virtually as an object” rather than a system or set of related processes of production (81). The reason for noting such a problematic homogenized conception is that productive processes are actually much more varied and variable. This chain of thought, in itself, makes sense: the means and modes of production have changed since industrialization began, and working conditions, practices, and products have changed or been changed by them. The problem becomes what meaning we can derive from changes in the processes of production; if they are induced from resistance on the part of workers, does this change the fundamental nature of the relationship constituted in the process itself, or does it refine it, making it more efficient and durable, and thus more insidious?
The answer that Williams suggests in the last chapter we have (“Structures of Feeling”), indicates a conception of social change as a process of development from latent thoughts and feelings in the “true social present” (132) to “formalized, classified … institutions and formations” (132). This model seems to give us a way of imagining social change as progressive and enabling; individuals or communities could renegotiate their relationships with each other and with other sectors of a given society. It also sees individuals as thinking beings, rather than victims subject to the power of god-like institutions and rulers. However, the danger could be in imagining institutions as existing in the social past. I’m not entirely sure if this is what Williams intends, but it seems as if his argument opens up a space for this conception. The result would be that we would envision ourselves as free to re-form our society as we choose by asserting a kind of collective version of individual choice. He does ask us to remember in the second chapter that determination can be positive as well as negative, so individuals being defined by their social environments could be seen as a good thing (87), but, I think, this might assume a level playing field, when the weight of the past (institutions, etc) still has a presence in the present. I’m not saying that individual identity or emerging practices are only an invagination* [to borrow a term from (I think) Lacan] or remix of existing social forms and conventions, but I am also unwilling to accept the idea that individual or collective freedom (creative, practical, etc.) is completely unfettered either. The primary strength of Williams’s writing here is that it argues for recognition of life’s complexity, but I wonder if his model would have to change in order to account for current economic structures and practices (especially given the recent disclosures of the obscene gap between compensation for different classes of workers and the ideological justifications offered for it).
*As I understand it (or at least as I’m using it here), invagination could be compared to a soap bubble (the human identity, psyche, whatever), that, when touched, instead of popping, forms a pocket of outside air floating on the inside so that you have one smaller bubble (the outside air) now forming the interior of the bubble.
Andy DuMont
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I had read Hall's piece "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular" before, but didn't re-read it before I wrote my post for this week. He appears to answer some of the questions that I had about Williams's writing. The value in emergent cultural practices (structures of feeling) comes from whether or not they are critically engaged in the class struggle. I'm not sure Williams addresses this directly, though perhaps it's implicit in his argument. Noting the need for consciousness or awareness of the meaning of practices as they confront the power bloc, as Hall does, seems to be in conflict with the idea of a latent generation of alternative or oppositional practices as Williams describes. I'm still not entirely sure that I'm not missing something in Williams's writing, but this might be a way to think about it.
ReplyDeleteAndy