Deja Vu All Over Again

Plus ça change ...

Most towns in Britain are without an adequate independent bookshop. The distribution of books and magazines, outside a few fortunate centres, is in the hands of powerful chains of shops. These chains apply to books and magazines simple tests of quantity. Below a certain likely selling figure, they are not interested, and will not even offer the item for sale. (They are said also to refuse certain publications, on "moral" grounds. These are not exactly apparent, when one looks at the familiar counters.) Thus the successful book or magazine will get around, but the book or magazine which might be bought, if it were available on anything like equal terms, will in many cases simply not be there. Even in paperbacks, where there is quite good distribution of the full range, there is increasing pressure towards the book that will sell quickly, so that there is no problem of holding stocks. If this situation is allowed to persist and develop, the real opportunities of the coming of cheap books will be missed.

The only factor missing from this description of the dismal state of bookselling in the UK (though it should also sound familiar in the US) is online sales, and of course e-books. That's because it was written more than forty-five years ago.

I'm almost done reading Raymond Williams's Communications (2nd edition, Chatto & Windus, 1966), which is where I found the passage I quoted above, on page 153. It's a short book, but full of information and ideas and recommendations. I'll probably be quoting from it again in these parts. What caught me about the quoted passage is that it describes a state of affairs that I thought was relatively new: the corporate concentration of media, the reduction of information to a commodity, the way this process causes even newspapers of high circulation to be closed down because though many people buy them, they don't get enough advertising revenue. And though Williams doesn't say so, it's the audience/readership that is the product in the media as we know them -- including the increasingly corporate Internet -- to be sold to the customer: the advertiser. He does describe the phenomenon, then relatively new, of "inter-company and public opinion advertising", which aims "at no direct or (for most people) conceivable buying. The products they advertise could only be bought by quite large organizations, and often only by quite specialized trades" (40). What they are selling is prestige and image, perhaps the corporate equivalent of a great ape pounding its chest and bellowing its prowess to the world.

The concentration of the media -- where a dwindling number of conglomerates own more and more production and distribution companies, whether television and radio stations or newspapers and magazines -- has gotten worse since Williams wrote this book, and he was not the first person to point it out. But it's important to remember that the problems we face aren't new. (The brief history of media and entertainment Williams spins in one chapter will be useful to anyone who doesn't know much about it yet.) It's also important to remember that solutions, good ones, have been proposed all along the way. But nostalgia for a golden age when every town had an independent bookstore, run by a literate and knowledgeable proprietor, while newspapers printed the truth and left opinion to the editorial page, is as misplaced as most nostalgia.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Plus ça change ...

Most towns in Britain are without an adequate independent bookshop. The distribution of books and magazines, outside a few fortunate centres, is in the hands of powerful chains of shops. These chains apply to books and magazines simple tests of quantity. Below a certain likely selling figure, they are not interested, and will not even offer the item for sale. (They are said also to refuse certain publications, on "moral" grounds. These are not exactly apparent, when one looks at the familiar counters.) Thus the successful book or magazine will get around, but the book or magazine which might be bought, if it were available on anything like equal terms, will in many cases simply not be there. Even in paperbacks, where there is quite good distribution of the full range, there is increasing pressure towards the book that will sell quickly, so that there is no problem of holding stocks. If this situation is allowed to persist and develop, the real opportunities of the coming of cheap books will be missed.

The only factor missing from this description of the dismal state of bookselling in the UK (though it should also sound familiar in the US) is online sales, and of course e-books. That's because it was written more than forty-five years ago.

I'm almost done reading Raymond Williams's Communications (2nd edition, Chatto & Windus, 1966), which is where I found the passage I quoted above, on page 153. It's a short book, but full of information and ideas and recommendations. I'll probably be quoting from it again in these parts. What caught me about the quoted passage is that it describes a state of affairs that I thought was relatively new: the corporate concentration of media, the reduction of information to a commodity, the way this process causes even newspapers of high circulation to be closed down because though many people buy them, they don't get enough advertising revenue. And though Williams doesn't say so, it's the audience/readership that is the product in the media as we know them -- including the increasingly corporate Internet -- to be sold to the customer: the advertiser. He does describe the phenomenon, then relatively new, of "inter-company and public opinion advertising", which aims "at no direct or (for most people) conceivable buying. The products they advertise could only be bought by quite large organizations, and often only by quite specialized trades" (40). What they are selling is prestige and image, perhaps the corporate equivalent of a great ape pounding its chest and bellowing its prowess to the world.

The concentration of the media -- where a dwindling number of conglomerates own more and more production and distribution companies, whether television and radio stations or newspapers and magazines -- has gotten worse since Williams wrote this book, and he was not the first person to point it out. But it's important to remember that the problems we face aren't new. (The brief history of media and entertainment Williams spins in one chapter will be useful to anyone who doesn't know much about it yet.) It's also important to remember that solutions, good ones, have been proposed all along the way. But nostalgia for a golden age when every town had an independent bookstore, run by a literate and knowledgeable proprietor, while newspapers printed the truth and left opinion to the editorial page, is as misplaced as most nostalgia.

Please Master

Richard Seymour (aka Lenin) posted this:

As public citizens we exercise a franchise, but in the private sphere we accept bondage: the discipline of the market compels us to accept it. For most of our waking hours, we cede executive control over our bodily and mental powers to someone else – in the vain hope of one day retiring with a decent pension. Whoops, that’s gone. You’ll just have to save more. But you’ll have to borrow more, because the economy needs you to spend. And we find that in all but the most mundane matters, when it comes to the activities and processes that constitute the major part of our lives, we have no autonomy. We do not govern ourselves.

Even our free time is not really ours. Much of it is spent commuting for a start - the average person's commute is equivalent to four weeks out of a working year. Four weeks - on that tube, that bus, that motorway lane. Think about what that's costing you psychically. Much of the rest is spent recuperating, essentially recovering our ability to labour so that we can go into work and do it all again the next day. And don't forget, of course, that even your free time isn't necessarily your own, because companies now want to organise your fun. Dress-down Friday - because Friday is funday; birthday parties, and office drinks, team-building outings, sporting days. Your fun, your enjoyment, your affection, often your time - on their orders. Awkward socialisation with middle and senior managers, stressful, moronic conversations, and long-winded explanations of what goes on in different departments that you didn't ask for, and you don't need. Then there's voluntary, unpaid overtime, worth £29bn a year to the employers - that's called flexibility, and what a good sport you are for doing that.

And so on; the entire post is worth reading.

"Voluntary, unpaid overtime" used to be one of the signs of the decadence of the Soviet Union. But it was always part of capitalism. That's not really surprising, when you think about it, because "capitalism" and "socialism" are not necessarily mutually exclusive opposites. What the Soviet Union instituted under Stalin was state capitalism, driven by the same logic of industrialization as capitalism in the US, Britain, and elsewhere: concentration, centralization, hierarchy, and mastery. As Raymond Williams pointed out in a 1982 essay, "Socialism and Ecology," (reprinted in Resources of Hope [Verso, 1989], socialists proved no less susceptible than capitalists to the dream of mastering nature:

Because of course these attitudes of mastering and conquering had from beginning been associated not just with mastering the earth, or natural substances, or making water do what you wanted, but with pushing other people around, with going wherever there were things which you wanted, and subjugating and conquering. That’s where the metaphors of conquest and mastery came from. They were a classic rationale of imperialism in just that expanding phase. They were from the whole internal ethic of an expanding capitalism: to master nature, to conquer it, to shift it around to do what you want with it. Engels went along with that and then suddenly remembered where the metaphor came from and said, quite correctly: we shall never understand this if we fail to remember that we are ourselves part of nature, and that what is involved in this mastery and conquest is going to going to have its effects on us; we can’t just arrive and depart as a foreign conqueror. But then he shifted back, under the influence of this very strong nineteenth-century triumphalism about nature, and took up the metaphors again. And still today we read these triumphalist arguments about production. They are a bit less confident now, but if you read the typical case for socialism, as it became standard between the wars in the dominant tendency, it is all in terms of mastering nature, setting new human horizons, creating plenty as the answer to poverty [214].

And:

It has always been a running argument within the Labour Party, especially since 1945, whether we’re going to get equality, and what are usually referred to as ‘the things we all want’ – schools and hospitals are usually the first to be named – when we’ve got the economy right, when we’ve produced enough, enlarged the national cake and so on; or whether equality and the priority of human needs require, as their first and necessary condition, fundamental changes in our social and economic institutions and relationships. I think we now have to see that argument as settled. The usual ‘national cake’ position, the soft political option, can be seen to rest on a basic fallacy, which the United States has demonstrated to the world – and no society is ever going to be relatively richer in gross indiscriminate production than that one – that by getting to a certain level of production you solve the problems of poverty and inequality. Tell them that in the slums, the inner cities, of rich America! All socialists are then forced to recognize that we have to intervene on quite a different basis [222].

I'd add that it isn't only "all socialists" who are "forced to recognize that we have to intervene on quite a different basis." "Socialism" encompasses many different programs and understandings anyway. I'm less attached to the label (though I'll accept it happily) than to the understanding that "gross indiscriminate production" is not going to give "us" equality and "the things we all want." Inequality has increased in the US as gross indiscriminate production has increased, and as capitalism has thrown off regulation and become more and more unrestrained. I'm not calling for the abolition of industrial production, as some will surely jump to assume, but for its control by human beings. As the example of the USSR and China shows, that will be no less necessary, and no less a problem, than it is in the West.

I should add too that I personally suffer less from the invasion of privacy by my workplace than many (most?) Americans. My daily "commute" is about 5 minutes each way. We don't have Casual Day. There are occasional attempts by upper management to encroach on our lives and feelings, but they are ineffectual at the level where I work; I suspect it's different in more white-collar departments. (Notice that the guy in the treadmill above is wearing a suit, not overalls.) One reason I've stayed in my job so long is because it leaves me considerable personal freedom, and when I come home I'm able to recuperate fairly quickly and attend to things that interest me. TV and other such commercial entertainments are the equivalent of junk food for people who don't have much time after the latest lap in the rat race and must unwind as quickly and efficiently as they can. When people have more leisure time for leisure, they'll use it more variously. This is not just a personal beef of mine, but something that affects many people, including people I know, more harshly than it affects me. One of the purposes of specifically "free-market" capitalist organization is to isolate people and make sure that they watch out only for themselves.

Please Master

Richard Seymour (aka Lenin) posted this:

As public citizens we exercise a franchise, but in the private sphere we accept bondage: the discipline of the market compels us to accept it. For most of our waking hours, we cede executive control over our bodily and mental powers to someone else – in the vain hope of one day retiring with a decent pension. Whoops, that’s gone. You’ll just have to save more. But you’ll have to borrow more, because the economy needs you to spend. And we find that in all but the most mundane matters, when it comes to the activities and processes that constitute the major part of our lives, we have no autonomy. We do not govern ourselves.

Even our free time is not really ours. Much of it is spent commuting for a start - the average person's commute is equivalent to four weeks out of a working year. Four weeks - on that tube, that bus, that motorway lane. Think about what that's costing you psychically. Much of the rest is spent recuperating, essentially recovering our ability to labour so that we can go into work and do it all again the next day. And don't forget, of course, that even your free time isn't necessarily your own, because companies now want to organise your fun. Dress-down Friday - because Friday is funday; birthday parties, and office drinks, team-building outings, sporting days. Your fun, your enjoyment, your affection, often your time - on their orders. Awkward socialisation with middle and senior managers, stressful, moronic conversations, and long-winded explanations of what goes on in different departments that you didn't ask for, and you don't need. Then there's voluntary, unpaid overtime, worth £29bn a year to the employers - that's called flexibility, and what a good sport you are for doing that.

And so on; the entire post is worth reading.

"Voluntary, unpaid overtime" used to be one of the signs of the decadence of the Soviet Union. But it was always part of capitalism. That's not really surprising, when you think about it, because "capitalism" and "socialism" are not necessarily mutually exclusive opposites. What the Soviet Union instituted under Stalin was state capitalism, driven by the same logic of industrialization as capitalism in the US, Britain, and elsewhere: concentration, centralization, hierarchy, and mastery. As Raymond Williams pointed out in a 1982 essay, "Socialism and Ecology," (reprinted in Resources of Hope [Verso, 1989], socialists proved no less susceptible than capitalists to the dream of mastering nature:

Because of course these attitudes of mastering and conquering had from beginning been associated not just with mastering the earth, or natural substances, or making water do what you wanted, but with pushing other people around, with going wherever there were things which you wanted, and subjugating and conquering. That’s where the metaphors of conquest and mastery came from. They were a classic rationale of imperialism in just that expanding phase. They were from the whole internal ethic of an expanding capitalism: to master nature, to conquer it, to shift it around to do what you want with it. Engels went along with that and then suddenly remembered where the metaphor came from and said, quite correctly: we shall never understand this if we fail to remember that we are ourselves part of nature, and that what is involved in this mastery and conquest is going to going to have its effects on us; we can’t just arrive and depart as a foreign conqueror. But then he shifted back, under the influence of this very strong nineteenth-century triumphalism about nature, and took up the metaphors again. And still today we read these triumphalist arguments about production. They are a bit less confident now, but if you read the typical case for socialism, as it became standard between the wars in the dominant tendency, it is all in terms of mastering nature, setting new human horizons, creating plenty as the answer to poverty [214].

And:

It has always been a running argument within the Labour Party, especially since 1945, whether we’re going to get equality, and what are usually referred to as ‘the things we all want’ – schools and hospitals are usually the first to be named – when we’ve got the economy right, when we’ve produced enough, enlarged the national cake and so on; or whether equality and the priority of human needs require, as their first and necessary condition, fundamental changes in our social and economic institutions and relationships. I think we now have to see that argument as settled. The usual ‘national cake’ position, the soft political option, can be seen to rest on a basic fallacy, which the United States has demonstrated to the world – and no society is ever going to be relatively richer in gross indiscriminate production than that one – that by getting to a certain level of production you solve the problems of poverty and inequality. Tell them that in the slums, the inner cities, of rich America! All socialists are then forced to recognize that we have to intervene on quite a different basis [222].

I'd add that it isn't only "all socialists" who are "forced to recognize that we have to intervene on quite a different basis." "Socialism" encompasses many different programs and understandings anyway. I'm less attached to the label (though I'll accept it happily) than to the understanding that "gross indiscriminate production" is not going to give "us" equality and "the things we all want." Inequality has increased in the US as gross indiscriminate production has increased, and as capitalism has thrown off regulation and become more and more unrestrained. I'm not calling for the abolition of industrial production, as some will surely jump to assume, but for its control by human beings. As the example of the USSR and China shows, that will be no less necessary, and no less a problem, than it is in the West.

I should add too that I personally suffer less from the invasion of privacy by my workplace than many (most?) Americans. My daily "commute" is about 5 minutes each way. We don't have Casual Day. There are occasional attempts by upper management to encroach on our lives and feelings, but they are ineffectual at the level where I work; I suspect it's different in more white-collar departments. (Notice that the guy in the treadmill above is wearing a suit, not overalls.) One reason I've stayed in my job so long is because it leaves me considerable personal freedom, and when I come home I'm able to recuperate fairly quickly and attend to things that interest me. TV and other such commercial entertainments are the equivalent of junk food for people who don't have much time after the latest lap in the rat race and must unwind as quickly and efficiently as they can. When people have more leisure time for leisure, they'll use it more variously. This is not just a personal beef of mine, but something that affects many people, including people I know, more harshly than it affects me. One of the purposes of specifically "free-market" capitalist organization is to isolate people and make sure that they watch out only for themselves.

The Nurture of Nature

Some other posts are going to stay on the back burner for a while longer. In the meantime I want to quote some memorable passages from Politics and Letters, the 1979 book-length interview with the great Marxist critic Raymond Williams. I think they are still relevant and even radical, thirty years later.

Take the example of the famous slogan of the mastery of nature. Of course anyone who views history in a materialist way must see the processes of understanding and working within nature as the central founding element of any civilization. But to describe these as mastery was to treat nature as if it was just material to dominate: a transposition of bourgeois ideology into Marxism, with which it cannot be reconciled. Marx’s innocent use of the phrase, or of the terms ‘produce’ or ‘productive’, is comprehensible in his time. But its unthinking repetition today, when we have reason to be aware of the consequences of the formula, is really inexcusable. The anger it arouses in me comes out in the book [The Country and the City], both for personal autobiographical reasons and for contemporary cultural reasons. For the values of the rural capitalist order which first imposed the notion of mastery are now being presented as the height of civilization. Now it is true that the bourgeois country houses and furniture have not ceased to be valuable in the sense that some of them are beautifully made. But at the ideological locus where this connects with a reactionary affiliation today, I found it necessary to say in the crudest ways that these houses were primarily sites of exploitation and robbery and fraud. If anything, the fact that some of them were well-built and were pleasant to look at makes that worse [311-12]. ...

I should say that when I read the phrase ‘rural idiocy’, it stuck in my throat: yet I knew instantly what they were referring to even in this very different British rural experience. I can remember a time when I had felt like using the same phrase myself. The persistence of certain established mystifications, superstitions, deferences or political abdications, the lack of exposure to the liberating community of other kinds of settlement – when I was moving out of the countryside, I knew very strongly what these meant. But it still seems to me that Marx and Engels should not have used that phrase, because what they were pointing to was a process of deprivation – of ignorance and illiteracy. They were also aware of that very important process by which the exploited pass on their exploitation between men and women and children, the way in which a man who has been brutalized by very hard conditions of work, which exhaust him physically, can nervously reproduce the brutality in his family. But they should have described these as what they were: products of social deprivation and exploitation, whereas they picked up the term idiocy as a conventional form of court dismissal of the country [319]
.
In my view, the industrial working class is going to have to rethink, radically and painfully, its relations with the producers of raw materials as well as of food, and thus enlarge its customarily foreshortened vision which passes for a socialist future. It is in danger of becoming at times, because of its position as consumer, objectively hostile to those producers. You can hear ludicrous complaints today, including from organized working-class opinion, that potatoes cost more in a drought year than in a wet year. This habit of disregarding the production of raw materials, as if their existence went without saying, leads to the notion that the only real work and real human activity is the second-order working on those materials and their transformation. The recent disputes over Welsh water and Birmingham supply are characteristic of the extreme impatience with which even a very militant working class receives rural protestations against the implantations of reservoirs that deprive people of their land, while piping water in such a way that those living literally below the dam cannot get the supply which is flowing across the country to Birmingham. Conflicts like these reveal a loss of real relations dangerously similar to that of a petty-bourgeoisie or bourgeoisie which thinks it is the only important and responsible productive force in society, simply forgetting where the means of its life comes from. Once such an opposition springs up, it can be exploited at either end by right-wing politicians. A lot of the mobilization of rural opinion for reactionary policies draws on resentment at what I would call – since the phrase has got around – an urban idiocy: the idea that food grows in shops. The same problem is even more acute in international politics, where one can by no means rule out the industrial working class in a late capitalist country becoming quite objectively reactionary in its position towards a raw material producer country which is not its own, supporting all kinds of imperialist pressures to drive down the costs of primary products. I think this is going to become a major question in the rest of this century, because to an extent one couldn’t have foreseen in the fifties, when the imperialist order still held with more force, food and raw materials are really now at the centre of the world economic crisis. … The recent programme of the Italian Communist Party is one of the few in the West which takes up this issue – criticizing the concentration on industrial investment for the export market at the expense of agricultural development in Italy [322-23].

(Published by London: NLB, 1979)

The Nurture of Nature

Some other posts are going to stay on the back burner for a while longer. In the meantime I want to quote some memorable passages from Politics and Letters, the 1979 book-length interview with the great Marxist critic Raymond Williams. I think they are still relevant and even radical, thirty years later.

Take the example of the famous slogan of the mastery of nature. Of course anyone who views history in a materialist way must see the processes of understanding and working within nature as the central founding element of any civilization. But to describe these as mastery was to treat nature as if it was just material to dominate: a transposition of bourgeois ideology into Marxism, with which it cannot be reconciled. Marx’s innocent use of the phrase, or of the terms ‘produce’ or ‘productive’, is comprehensible in his time. But its unthinking repetition today, when we have reason to be aware of the consequences of the formula, is really inexcusable. The anger it arouses in me comes out in the book [The Country and the City], both for personal autobiographical reasons and for contemporary cultural reasons. For the values of the rural capitalist order which first imposed the notion of mastery are now being presented as the height of civilization. Now it is true that the bourgeois country houses and furniture have not ceased to be valuable in the sense that some of them are beautifully made. But at the ideological locus where this connects with a reactionary affiliation today, I found it necessary to say in the crudest ways that these houses were primarily sites of exploitation and robbery and fraud. If anything, the fact that some of them were well-built and were pleasant to look at makes that worse [311-12]. ...

I should say that when I read the phrase ‘rural idiocy’, it stuck in my throat: yet I knew instantly what they were referring to even in this very different British rural experience. I can remember a time when I had felt like using the same phrase myself. The persistence of certain established mystifications, superstitions, deferences or political abdications, the lack of exposure to the liberating community of other kinds of settlement – when I was moving out of the countryside, I knew very strongly what these meant. But it still seems to me that Marx and Engels should not have used that phrase, because what they were pointing to was a process of deprivation – of ignorance and illiteracy. They were also aware of that very important process by which the exploited pass on their exploitation between men and women and children, the way in which a man who has been brutalized by very hard conditions of work, which exhaust him physically, can nervously reproduce the brutality in his family. But they should have described these as what they were: products of social deprivation and exploitation, whereas they picked up the term idiocy as a conventional form of court dismissal of the country [319]
.
In my view, the industrial working class is going to have to rethink, radically and painfully, its relations with the producers of raw materials as well as of food, and thus enlarge its customarily foreshortened vision which passes for a socialist future. It is in danger of becoming at times, because of its position as consumer, objectively hostile to those producers. You can hear ludicrous complaints today, including from organized working-class opinion, that potatoes cost more in a drought year than in a wet year. This habit of disregarding the production of raw materials, as if their existence went without saying, leads to the notion that the only real work and real human activity is the second-order working on those materials and their transformation. The recent disputes over Welsh water and Birmingham supply are characteristic of the extreme impatience with which even a very militant working class receives rural protestations against the implantations of reservoirs that deprive people of their land, while piping water in such a way that those living literally below the dam cannot get the supply which is flowing across the country to Birmingham. Conflicts like these reveal a loss of real relations dangerously similar to that of a petty-bourgeoisie or bourgeoisie which thinks it is the only important and responsible productive force in society, simply forgetting where the means of its life comes from. Once such an opposition springs up, it can be exploited at either end by right-wing politicians. A lot of the mobilization of rural opinion for reactionary policies draws on resentment at what I would call – since the phrase has got around – an urban idiocy: the idea that food grows in shops. The same problem is even more acute in international politics, where one can by no means rule out the industrial working class in a late capitalist country becoming quite objectively reactionary in its position towards a raw material producer country which is not its own, supporting all kinds of imperialist pressures to drive down the costs of primary products. I think this is going to become a major question in the rest of this century, because to an extent one couldn’t have foreseen in the fifties, when the imperialist order still held with more force, food and raw materials are really now at the centre of the world economic crisis. … The recent programme of the Italian Communist Party is one of the few in the West which takes up this issue – criticizing the concentration on industrial investment for the export market at the expense of agricultural development in Italy [322-23].

(Published by London: NLB, 1979)

My Mother the Television

I just read Raymond Williams's Television: Technology and Cultural Form, which was originally published in 1974. Williams had agreed to revise and update it just before his death in 1988, but didn't have time to do so; still, the book has useful ideas and information in it, and is held in high esteem by at least some contemporary scholars. In particular his rejection of technological determinism ("the medium is the message" -- he was sharply critical of Marshall McLuhan) needs to be remembered and understood. Here are some bits that I liked.

Many people who are aware of the manipulative powers of radio and television, or of its apparently inexhaustible appeal to children, react in ways which implicitly suppress all the other history of communication. Thus it is often indignantly said that television is a ‘third parent’, as if children had not in all developed societies had third parents in the shape of priests, teachers and workmasters, to say nothing of the actual parents and relations who, in many periods and cultures, intervened to control or to instruct. Against those real alternatives this switchable communication has profound attractions. Or it is said that people are exposed to propaganda by television, as if there had never been masters, employers, judges, priests [135]. ...

This explains the realities of contemporary mediation, but it explains also the apparently irrepressible search, by listeners and viewers, for other sources. Many British working-class people welcomed American culture, or the Americanised character of British commercial television, as an alternative to a British ‘public’ version which, from a subordinate position, they already knew too well. In many parts of the world this apparently free-floating and accessible culture was a welcome alternative to dominant local cultural patterns and restrictions. Young people all over Europe welcomed the pirate broadcasters, as an alterative to authorities they suspected or distrusted or were simply tired. of. The irony was that what came free and easy and accessible was a planned operation by a distant and invisible authority – the American corporations. But in local and immediate terms, as in the other cases mentioned, this did not at first greatly matter; a choice was being exercised, here and now.

Television has been a majority service for a whole generation. It has had certain intended effects corresponding to certain explicit intentions, explicitly declared by the variable character of television institutions. But it has also had unforeseen effects, among them the desire to use the technology for oneself. In the young radical underground, and even more in the young cultural underground, there is a familiarity with media, and an eager sense of experiment and practice, which is much an effect as the more widely publicized and predicted passivity. Indeed, by prolonged use of a technology which had seemed to be contained and limited to commercial or paternal or authoritarian ends, many people – we do not yet know whether they are enough people – conceived quite different intentions and uses. …

… Yet this does not mean that the issue is undetermined; the limits and pressures are real and powerful. Most technical development is in the hands of corporations which express the contemporary interlock of military, political and commercial intentions. Most policy development is in the hands of established broadcasting corporations and the political bureaucracies of a few powerful states. All that has been established so far is that neither the theory nor the practice of television as we know it is a necessary or a predicting cause [136-137].

But a community is also a real social fact: not an idealized notion but a social system containing radical inequalities and conflicts of interest [155].

My Mother the Television

I just read Raymond Williams's Television: Technology and Cultural Form, which was originally published in 1974. Williams had agreed to revise and update it just before his death in 1988, but didn't have time to do so; still, the book has useful ideas and information in it, and is held in high esteem by at least some contemporary scholars. In particular his rejection of technological determinism ("the medium is the message" -- he was sharply critical of Marshall McLuhan) needs to be remembered and understood. Here are some bits that I liked.

Many people who are aware of the manipulative powers of radio and television, or of its apparently inexhaustible appeal to children, react in ways which implicitly suppress all the other history of communication. Thus it is often indignantly said that television is a ‘third parent’, as if children had not in all developed societies had third parents in the shape of priests, teachers and workmasters, to say nothing of the actual parents and relations who, in many periods and cultures, intervened to control or to instruct. Against those real alternatives this switchable communication has profound attractions. Or it is said that people are exposed to propaganda by television, as if there had never been masters, employers, judges, priests [135]. ...

This explains the realities of contemporary mediation, but it explains also the apparently irrepressible search, by listeners and viewers, for other sources. Many British working-class people welcomed American culture, or the Americanised character of British commercial television, as an alternative to a British ‘public’ version which, from a subordinate position, they already knew too well. In many parts of the world this apparently free-floating and accessible culture was a welcome alternative to dominant local cultural patterns and restrictions. Young people all over Europe welcomed the pirate broadcasters, as an alterative to authorities they suspected or distrusted or were simply tired. of. The irony was that what came free and easy and accessible was a planned operation by a distant and invisible authority – the American corporations. But in local and immediate terms, as in the other cases mentioned, this did not at first greatly matter; a choice was being exercised, here and now.

Television has been a majority service for a whole generation. It has had certain intended effects corresponding to certain explicit intentions, explicitly declared by the variable character of television institutions. But it has also had unforeseen effects, among them the desire to use the technology for oneself. In the young radical underground, and even more in the young cultural underground, there is a familiarity with media, and an eager sense of experiment and practice, which is much an effect as the more widely publicized and predicted passivity. Indeed, by prolonged use of a technology which had seemed to be contained and limited to commercial or paternal or authoritarian ends, many people – we do not yet know whether they are enough people – conceived quite different intentions and uses. …

… Yet this does not mean that the issue is undetermined; the limits and pressures are real and powerful. Most technical development is in the hands of corporations which express the contemporary interlock of military, political and commercial intentions. Most policy development is in the hands of established broadcasting corporations and the political bureaucracies of a few powerful states. All that has been established so far is that neither the theory nor the practice of television as we know it is a necessary or a predicting cause [136-137].

But a community is also a real social fact: not an idealized notion but a social system containing radical inequalities and conflicts of interest [155].

A Touch Of Class

I’m still reading through the work of Raymond Williams, which is going to take a while. He’s always readable, but I keep coming across ideas and arguments which are unfamiliar to me, which slows me down. And that’s fine: I take a lot of pleasure, and also relief, in finding that I’m still learning new things as I get older. (And also, I confess, frustration that there will not be time to learn everything I need and want to learn.) I’m getting through Politics and Letters slowly, slowly. But here’s something I found in the posthumous collection What I Came to Say (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989). It comes from an autobiographical essay in which Williams describes his arrival at Cambridge University as a scholarship boy from Wales in 1939.

In this and other ways, over the first week, I found out what is now obvious: that I was arriving, more or less isolated, within what was generally the arrival of a whole formation, an age-group, which already had behind it years of shared acquaintance, and shared training and expectations, from its boarding schools. I was reminded of a conversation my father had reported to me, from his advance visit. The porter had asked him, rather haughtily, whether my name was already down. ‘Yes, since last autumn.’ ‘Last autumn? Many of them, you know, are put down at birth.’ I try to be charitable, and find it easier now. But I remember sitting on the benches in hall, surrounded by these people, and wishing they had been put down at birth. There was little personal difficulty or dislike, but the formation was easy to hate – is still easy to hate – and I have to record that I responded aggressively. The myth of the working-class boy arriving in Cambridge – it has happened more since the war, though the proportion is still quite unreasonably low – is that he is an awkward misfit and has to learn new manners. It may depend on where you come from. Out of rural Wales it didn’t feel like that. The class which has dominated Cambridge is given to describing itself as well-mannered, polite, sensitive. It continually contrasts itself favourably with the rougher and coarser others. When it turns to the arts, it congratulates itself, overtly, on its taste and its sensibility; speaks of its poise and tone. If I then say that what I found was an extraordinarily coarse, pushing, name-ridden group, I shall be told that I am showing class-feeling, class-envy, class-resentment. That I showed class-feeling is not in any doubt. All I would insist on is that nobody fortunate enough to grow up in a good home, in a genuinely well-mannered and sensitive community, could for a moment envy these loud, competitive and deprived people. All I did not know then was how cold that class is. That comes with experience.

The first thing this passage makes me think of is the Harry Potter books. Harry also arrives at Hogwarts alone, though he’s quickly adopted by the Weasleys, and is preceded by his reputation as the boy whom Voldemort tried and failed to kill. Unlike Harry, who was raised by his hostile human relatives in isolation from other wizards, Williams grew up in a very self-aware working-class community. His father (unlike Harry’s) was alive and able to instruct him, having participated in the great railroad strike of 1926, and labor organizing and activism were in the air Williams breathed as a child and adolescent. Williams’s excellence as a scholar, rather than his parentage (indeed Harry’s race, as a Wizard rather than a Muggle), was what won his way into Cambridge; and thanks to his background Williams was much less conflicted than Harry about his outsider status; unlike Harry, Williams never seems to have felt pressured to be an insider.

Williams’s description of the upper-class students at Cambridge will be familiar to Potter readers; he could easily be describing the Malfoys and the others who felt it was their right to rule. I recognize them too, as a subset of the students I encountered at the large state university I attended, and where I still work. Though my family was working-class, like most Americans we thought of ourselves as middle-class, so I didn’t have Williams’s identification with a working-class community and its traditions of organizing and struggle; my parents were pretty apolitical, and since we weren’t churchgoers either, I grew up with little sense of community outside my family. (Considering my background, I find it interesting that when I came out, getting involved in gay politics and activism seemed like the natural course for me, though in the end I never did that much, and I turned out more like my parents in this respect than I like to acknowledge.) So it took me a long time to realize that a large part of my feelings of alienation came from class differences. Unfortunately I didn’t have a background of “class-feeling,” as Williams did, to make sense of my situation.

Eventually I came to recognize myself as a familiar enough type: the intellectual from a working-class background who ends up feeling out of place whether among my class of origin, or among the class I’m supposed to aspire to. That’s one reason I find Williams so interesting: despite that alienation, he found a way to build a career of important work that was true to his principles without being imprisoned by his background (which actually seems to have supported and liberated him) or by the structure of the great English universities.

A Touch Of Class

I’m still reading through the work of Raymond Williams, which is going to take a while. He’s always readable, but I keep coming across ideas and arguments which are unfamiliar to me, which slows me down. And that’s fine: I take a lot of pleasure, and also relief, in finding that I’m still learning new things as I get older. (And also, I confess, frustration that there will not be time to learn everything I need and want to learn.) I’m getting through Politics and Letters slowly, slowly. But here’s something I found in the posthumous collection What I Came to Say (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989). It comes from an autobiographical essay in which Williams describes his arrival at Cambridge University as a scholarship boy from Wales in 1939.

In this and other ways, over the first week, I found out what is now obvious: that I was arriving, more or less isolated, within what was generally the arrival of a whole formation, an age-group, which already had behind it years of shared acquaintance, and shared training and expectations, from its boarding schools. I was reminded of a conversation my father had reported to me, from his advance visit. The porter had asked him, rather haughtily, whether my name was already down. ‘Yes, since last autumn.’ ‘Last autumn? Many of them, you know, are put down at birth.’ I try to be charitable, and find it easier now. But I remember sitting on the benches in hall, surrounded by these people, and wishing they had been put down at birth. There was little personal difficulty or dislike, but the formation was easy to hate – is still easy to hate – and I have to record that I responded aggressively. The myth of the working-class boy arriving in Cambridge – it has happened more since the war, though the proportion is still quite unreasonably low – is that he is an awkward misfit and has to learn new manners. It may depend on where you come from. Out of rural Wales it didn’t feel like that. The class which has dominated Cambridge is given to describing itself as well-mannered, polite, sensitive. It continually contrasts itself favourably with the rougher and coarser others. When it turns to the arts, it congratulates itself, overtly, on its taste and its sensibility; speaks of its poise and tone. If I then say that what I found was an extraordinarily coarse, pushing, name-ridden group, I shall be told that I am showing class-feeling, class-envy, class-resentment. That I showed class-feeling is not in any doubt. All I would insist on is that nobody fortunate enough to grow up in a good home, in a genuinely well-mannered and sensitive community, could for a moment envy these loud, competitive and deprived people. All I did not know then was how cold that class is. That comes with experience.

The first thing this passage makes me think of is the Harry Potter books. Harry also arrives at Hogwarts alone, though he’s quickly adopted by the Weasleys, and is preceded by his reputation as the boy whom Voldemort tried and failed to kill. Unlike Harry, who was raised by his hostile human relatives in isolation from other wizards, Williams grew up in a very self-aware working-class community. His father (unlike Harry’s) was alive and able to instruct him, having participated in the great railroad strike of 1926, and labor organizing and activism were in the air Williams breathed as a child and adolescent. Williams’s excellence as a scholar, rather than his parentage (indeed Harry’s race, as a Wizard rather than a Muggle), was what won his way into Cambridge; and thanks to his background Williams was much less conflicted than Harry about his outsider status; unlike Harry, Williams never seems to have felt pressured to be an insider.

Williams’s description of the upper-class students at Cambridge will be familiar to Potter readers; he could easily be describing the Malfoys and the others who felt it was their right to rule. I recognize them too, as a subset of the students I encountered at the large state university I attended, and where I still work. Though my family was working-class, like most Americans we thought of ourselves as middle-class, so I didn’t have Williams’s identification with a working-class community and its traditions of organizing and struggle; my parents were pretty apolitical, and since we weren’t churchgoers either, I grew up with little sense of community outside my family. (Considering my background, I find it interesting that when I came out, getting involved in gay politics and activism seemed like the natural course for me, though in the end I never did that much, and I turned out more like my parents in this respect than I like to acknowledge.) So it took me a long time to realize that a large part of my feelings of alienation came from class differences. Unfortunately I didn’t have a background of “class-feeling,” as Williams did, to make sense of my situation.

Eventually I came to recognize myself as a familiar enough type: the intellectual from a working-class background who ends up feeling out of place whether among my class of origin, or among the class I’m supposed to aspire to. That’s one reason I find Williams so interesting: despite that alienation, he found a way to build a career of important work that was true to his principles without being imprisoned by his background (which actually seems to have supported and liberated him) or by the structure of the great English universities.

Politics And Letters

I've begun reading Politics and Letters, a long collection of interviews with the great Welsh Marxist historian and critic Raymond Williams (1921-1988). Williams was born in Wales, but won a scholarship to Cambridge and moved to England at 18. After fighting in World War II he became involved in adult education (there's a fascinating essay on that topic in What I Came to Say), but in 1961 he returned to Cambridge to teach and write.

I first stumbled on Williams's work through his book Keywords (1976; new edition 1984), a sort of historical dictionary of key words (get it?) in the humanities. Keywords is a book that I think everyone who's interested in culture and politics should at least consult, if not read all the way through, because not only does it show how important concepts have changed their meaning over time, it reminds you that different meanings co-exist at any given time. I'd realized years ago that it was very hard to pin down the meaning of terms like "capitalism" and "socialism", though this didn't stop people from throwing such words around as though they were clearly defined and it was just a matter of knowing the definitions. More recently I'd been bothered to see writers using words like "identity", "sex", and "culture" without always being aware that they had different shadings and connotations, which led to a great deal of confusion. I thought people were supposed to learn to be careful about such things in graduate school, anyway, but evidently not.

I began reading Williams's The Country and the City (1973) a couple of years ago, but found it overwhelming, so put it aside for a while. (Not because it was hard to read or understand -- far from it -- but because it had great emotional power for me.) Since then I've read his book on George Orwell (first published in 1971 but updated several times) and a posthumous collection of essays, reviews, and speeches, What I Came to Say (1989), which, again, affected me very powerfully. I've also read his autobiographical first novel, Border Country (1960) -- about the son of a Welsh railway signalman (a veteran of the 1926 General Strike,) who becomes an academic in England but goes home when his aged father becomes ill -- and was tremendously impressed by it. A later novel, The Volunteers (1978), is a political thriller set in the early 1980s; not quite science fiction, and not as powerful as Border Country, but still good work. He didn't limit himself to conventional literature; I'm looking forward to reading his writing about television, for instance. There are a couple of essays in What I Came To Say on the news media which should interest anyone who's interested in how the media cover war and politics, especially those of us who've read Chomsky on that subject.

For Politics and Letters (NLB, 1979) Williams was interviewed at great length -- the book is over 400 pages of small type -- by members of the editorial committee of New Left Review.
The interviews begin with an account of his early life, and I was struck by this account (pp 34-35) of how this Welsh schoolboy, involved from the beginning in labor struggles, saw the world. The words in bold type still seem timely; I think a lot of people today make the same mistake about their political opponents.

Reconstructing your vision of the world up to the time of the university, what would have been your most representative image of the ruling or exploiting class?

The first one to come to mind would actually have been a very antique figure – the rural magnate or landlord, whom we mocked. The immediate cultural image was that of a Tory squire.

Did they really exist within the compass of your experience?

You could not go and see them. You could see a park wall, not beyond it. After that, we would characteristically have thought of bankers. I remember long discussions with my father about the ownership of industry by banks. Then, of course, there were the railway-owners and the mine-owners. But the rather archaic agrarian stereotype was still dominant. I don’t think that it was just because I lived in a rural area. This displacement away from the dominant class enemy of the last hundred and fifty years, the industrial employer, to older antagonists has been surprisingly persistent in the perception of the ruling class on the British left. In my case, I also had the natural adolescent reaction that the ruling class was not just wrong but out-of-date – the characteristic conviction of the young that the rulers are old, irrelevant and not of our world. I thought all Tories were stupid by definition. This was a very common rhetoric in the thirties. It carried certain real feelings. On the other hand, it disarmed people, including me and a lot of my friends, from understanding the intelligence and capacity of the ruling class, and its contemporary implantation.

In my case, distance from London probably did have some importance. I never saw any of the central metropolitan power definitions. Of course, I knew of what the troops had done in the mining valleys – we were constantly told of it. But that was second-hand. We were in no doubt at all about the character of the employers, but the ruling class still did not seem very formidable. The result was to build up a sense, which was very characteristic of wide sectors of the Labour movement at the time, that the working class was the competent class that did the work and so could run society. That was said so much after the General Strike. It was disabling ultimately. But as an adolescent I remember looking at these men even with a certain resentment – they seemed so absolutely self-confident. I have never seen such self-confident people since.

Politics And Letters

I've begun reading Politics and Letters, a long collection of interviews with the great Welsh Marxist historian and critic Raymond Williams (1921-1988). Williams was born in Wales, but won a scholarship to Cambridge and moved to England at 18. After fighting in World War II he became involved in adult education (there's a fascinating essay on that topic in What I Came to Say), but in 1961 he returned to Cambridge to teach and write.

I first stumbled on Williams's work through his book Keywords (1976; new edition 1984), a sort of historical dictionary of key words (get it?) in the humanities. Keywords is a book that I think everyone who's interested in culture and politics should at least consult, if not read all the way through, because not only does it show how important concepts have changed their meaning over time, it reminds you that different meanings co-exist at any given time. I'd realized years ago that it was very hard to pin down the meaning of terms like "capitalism" and "socialism", though this didn't stop people from throwing such words around as though they were clearly defined and it was just a matter of knowing the definitions. More recently I'd been bothered to see writers using words like "identity", "sex", and "culture" without always being aware that they had different shadings and connotations, which led to a great deal of confusion. I thought people were supposed to learn to be careful about such things in graduate school, anyway, but evidently not.

I began reading Williams's The Country and the City (1973) a couple of years ago, but found it overwhelming, so put it aside for a while. (Not because it was hard to read or understand -- far from it -- but because it had great emotional power for me.) Since then I've read his book on George Orwell (first published in 1971 but updated several times) and a posthumous collection of essays, reviews, and speeches, What I Came to Say (1989), which, again, affected me very powerfully. I've also read his autobiographical first novel, Border Country (1960) -- about the son of a Welsh railway signalman (a veteran of the 1926 General Strike,) who becomes an academic in England but goes home when his aged father becomes ill -- and was tremendously impressed by it. A later novel, The Volunteers (1978), is a political thriller set in the early 1980s; not quite science fiction, and not as powerful as Border Country, but still good work. He didn't limit himself to conventional literature; I'm looking forward to reading his writing about television, for instance. There are a couple of essays in What I Came To Say on the news media which should interest anyone who's interested in how the media cover war and politics, especially those of us who've read Chomsky on that subject.

For Politics and Letters (NLB, 1979) Williams was interviewed at great length -- the book is over 400 pages of small type -- by members of the editorial committee of New Left Review.
The interviews begin with an account of his early life, and I was struck by this account (pp 34-35) of how this Welsh schoolboy, involved from the beginning in labor struggles, saw the world. The words in bold type still seem timely; I think a lot of people today make the same mistake about their political opponents.

Reconstructing your vision of the world up to the time of the university, what would have been your most representative image of the ruling or exploiting class?

The first one to come to mind would actually have been a very antique figure – the rural magnate or landlord, whom we mocked. The immediate cultural image was that of a Tory squire.

Did they really exist within the compass of your experience?

You could not go and see them. You could see a park wall, not beyond it. After that, we would characteristically have thought of bankers. I remember long discussions with my father about the ownership of industry by banks. Then, of course, there were the railway-owners and the mine-owners. But the rather archaic agrarian stereotype was still dominant. I don’t think that it was just because I lived in a rural area. This displacement away from the dominant class enemy of the last hundred and fifty years, the industrial employer, to older antagonists has been surprisingly persistent in the perception of the ruling class on the British left. In my case, I also had the natural adolescent reaction that the ruling class was not just wrong but out-of-date – the characteristic conviction of the young that the rulers are old, irrelevant and not of our world. I thought all Tories were stupid by definition. This was a very common rhetoric in the thirties. It carried certain real feelings. On the other hand, it disarmed people, including me and a lot of my friends, from understanding the intelligence and capacity of the ruling class, and its contemporary implantation.

In my case, distance from London probably did have some importance. I never saw any of the central metropolitan power definitions. Of course, I knew of what the troops had done in the mining valleys – we were constantly told of it. But that was second-hand. We were in no doubt at all about the character of the employers, but the ruling class still did not seem very formidable. The result was to build up a sense, which was very characteristic of wide sectors of the Labour movement at the time, that the working class was the competent class that did the work and so could run society. That was said so much after the General Strike. It was disabling ultimately. But as an adolescent I remember looking at these men even with a certain resentment – they seemed so absolutely self-confident. I have never seen such self-confident people since.