Culture and the Industrial World

...What is perhaps most striking to the reader is the unity of response which Williams recovers from 170 years of cultural criticism...

...They can, for example, point out that a separate working-class culture has much more of a vitality in class-ridden England than in the U.S., that the process of "massifica-tion" has proceeded at a quicker tempo here...

...mostly with his later work, is integral to this development...

...Williams' answer to this question is that of a radical democrat and Socialist, and it stands in sharp opposition to much of what is being written in the United States...

...This Williams has done brilliantly with regard to the analysis of culture...

...But what if the whole structure of the period changes, what if there is severe economic dislocation as a result of automation or recession, what if the issues of foreign policy precipitate sharp debate...

...If, after all, American society (or Communist society) has found the formula for brainwashing the people through mass communications and a manufactured and inferior culture, then there can be no possibility of an autonomous development, of real change...

...By now, the readers of America's journals of comment, however cultural and democratic they may be, must feel a certain sympathy for this sentiment—not, to be sure, because of agreement with totalitarian anti-intellectualism, but rather out of boredom...

...The problem remains...

...The present, as Orwell noted in his brilliant essay on James Burnham's Managerial Revolution, is often eternalized by the sociologist...

...This picture proved too simple, and not a few intellectuals have spent the last decade or so apologizing for their youthful visions...

...It is well to be reminded that perhaps the "masses" are a mirror into which the sociologist looks, seeing his own impotence at a given historical moment and making it eternal...

...Now, as one looks back, it is their community which comes as a surprise...

...For many of our cultural critics have adopted a stance of aesthetic anarchism, a mood of sophisticated hopelessness...

...Yet, simply stating the problem in terms of its implications—if the analysts of mass culture are right, then democracy is unworkable—is hardly to answer it...

...If there is to be transformation, then it must depend upon the benevolence of an elite which will itself seize control of the instruments of mass communications and turn them to good ends...

...There have been many 19th centuries...

...Most of the answers of the 19th century—Coleridge's clerisy, Arnold's remnant within all classes—have failed...

...Thus, some American intellectuals have argued that the very essence of modern society tends toward the corruption of democracy and toward authoritarianism...

...Or, to put it positively, there is a rich tradition upon which we can draw when we face our complex modernness...

...As Iris Murdoch put it in her essay in Conviction, "What is needed is an area of translation, an area in which specialized concepts and recommendations can be seen and understood in the light of moral and social ideas which have a certain degree of complexity and yet are not the sole property of technicians...

...But others find themselves in an interminable dilemma...

...These theories would have predicted a Thomas Dewey victory in 1948, since almost all of the American communications system was ranged against Harry Truman...

...Yet something refreshing can be said...

...But two points stand out as worthy of general comment: the persistence of cultural criticism in English letters, and the serious implications for democracy of some of the current cliches about mass culture...

...This is clear enough from a reading of Raymond Williams' new book, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (Columbia University Press...

...Since these writers continue to affirm democracy as a value, the flavor of their analysis becomes anarchist, and individualist anarchist at that...

...And here, the decisive factor was the common environment of all these minds, the same England moving inexorably into the modern world...

...In Williams' study, a similar, but contrasting, process is at work...

...and there is the Dickens who could not have been discovered until Franz Kafka had published, the author of a dark, pessimistic and most unsentimental Bleak House...

...Perhaps the most difficult single intellectual feat is that of transcending the assumptions of a given period...

...But the analysis is of the urban mass incapable of action, and without a tradition of response to the trumpet call...

...Indeed, a single author can become his own antagonist: There is the Dickens of David Copperfield, a sentimentalist, the writer par excellence of the middle class...

...But the surprising thing is that beneath this disagreement, there is so much agreement that one could substitute the descriptive analysis of a conservative for that of a radical and, but for stylistic hints, not really notice the change...

...indeed, it is central to the immediate present...

...These men differed profoundly, of course, on the means which should be chosen to solve the problem...

...Yet this is superficial, for the fundamental experience of both Malraux and Woolf is of the same moment of Western culture...

...Williams documents this point brilliantly with regard to the English tradition of cultural criticism, yet his method has implications which go beyond his specific analysis...

...What Marx called alienation—the spiritualization of the material, the materialization of the spiritual, machine the creator and man the worker—is deeply embedded in the consciousness of the great English writers of the 19th and 20th centuries...

...History is almost always a surprise...

...But it is important to know that our present fascination is not so contemporary...

...There was the 19th century of Jacob Burckhardt and Soren Kierkegaard, prophetic and apprehensive...

...because the present is almost always a shocking angle of vision upon what has gone before...

...On the one hand, they oppose mass culture precisely because of their democratic and/or socialist values...

...In the '50s, there is another version of the social reality: The worker is seen seated before a television set drinking a bottle of beer and shunning the union hall like the plague...

...They have become hypnotized by the power of their own analysis: For them, the gulf between the writer who laments the spiritual poverty of the mass and the mass itself is unbridgeable...

...5.00...

...A conservative like Burke and a radical like Cobbet, Matthew Arnold and Coleridge, R. H. Tawney and D. H. Lawrence—all of these most varied figures exhibit the same fundamental concern...

...On the surface, for example, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Andr...

...Is it possible that some will have to apologize for this simplification, that the absolutes of many theories of mass culture are actually the relativities of the '50s...

...In such a time, theories of the incapacity of the mass seem ever so right...

...They have an ?lan, a vital seriousness, which goes far beyond the tired impressionism and the tired positivism of so much contemporary American writing...

...The dead change along with the living...

...To them, the problem is not one of a political campaign to put mass communications to good use, for in such a case the representatives of the democratic majority would themselves succumb to the environment of modern technology...

...there are only ways of seeing people as masses...

...In short, if the extreme version of the mass culture theorists is accurate, then we confront the end of democracy...

...Yet qualifications can be attached to the reluctant enthusiasm of some of our mass culture analysts, qualifications which tend toward Williams' point of view...

...The question then remains: Does this social process continue in a straight line leading to the end of democracy...

...In many ways, this line of thought harks back to Karl Mannheim: The masses are inevitably betrayed in their march toward political power...

...Williams' Culture and Society could take Murdoch's plea for a new synthesis as a motto...

...The aristocratic attempt to transcend death which is at the heart of Man's Fate is also the journey to the lighthouse...

...These writers may be right, and Williams, with his continuing commitment to the more traditional ideas of change taking place within the mass, may be wrong...

...It is, of course, impossible to discuss such an intricate essay in this brief space...

...We are in Williams' debt, for he has delineated this tradition...

...For, in a sense, this is the epochal debate, the one which rises above the immediate conflict and asks whether man can, under the best of circumstances, be human in the 20th century...

...only a classless elite can transmit values so as to humanize an industrial civilization...

...It has filled two plump anthologies, provided the red thread of a theme for several magazines, and naturalized a word like kitsch into the American language...

...Williams is one of a group of younger Socialist intellectuals in England who have revived the tradition of the radical, moral critique of society...

...In this particular case, the present is a decade of cold war and conservatism, marked in America by the absence of vast social conflict (the civil rights struggle is the main exception...

...The answer at this point is that the evidence is not in...

...The source of hope becomes the battered trumpet of the peasant jacquerie, as in A Handful of Blackberries...

...For almost 200 years now, men have been concerned with how to provide some area for autonomy and creativeness within an industrial world which has been increasingly hostile to the specifically human...

...The contrast of themes is, of course, significant...

...He writes: "There are in fact no masses...

...Some writers in the United States have followed this line of thought to the bitter end and become elite theorists...

...The problem for each of them is how to maintain a humane way of life within the environment of a technological society...

...The fact is, surely, that a way of seeing other people which has become characteristic of our kind of society has been capitalized for the purposes of political or cultural exploitation...

...This is another way of saying that each generation creates a new version of the past, not through a process of falsification, but MICHAEL HARRINGTON is a young critic who has written on political and cultural subjects for such magazines as Partisan Review, Commentary, Commonweal and Dissent...

...It is well to be reminded that this is not simply a contemporary concern, that we have a long and usable tradition to fall back upon...

...The result is that they increasingly adopt the mood of an individualist anarchism —and the identification with Ignazio Silone...

...There was the 19th century of Herbert Spencer, evolutionary and optimistic, satisfied with its certitudes...

...But what use shall we make of this tradition...

...As time goes on, I suspect we shall find a similar community in the first half of the 20th century...

...but as we gain perspective upon them, and upon all the writers of the first half of the century, what will surprise us is that their eyes and their feelings, like those of Williams' critics, were responding to a single world...

...I think so along with Williams, and his book is an extremely valuable contribution to this crucial discussion...

...Everywhere, there is passivity and vacuousness, and Ortega y Gasset, with his threnody for the end of aristocratic culture, is the true prophet of this century...

...During the past few years, there has been a bedlam of analysis, mainly centering on mass culture...

...It is quite complex and specialized, a study of over a century and a half of English cultural criticism which proceeds on the basis of careful quotation and close interpretation...

...It is extremely important that we detail these curious communities and understand the dialectic of individual response which takes place within the massive movement of a century...

...Williams' central pclitical point stands in contrast to this attitude...

...Or, to enlarge the point, an entire tradition can shift, as when T. S. Eliot announced the exile of the Romantic poets and John Milton, and placed Donne in a major position...

...In the '30s, there was a superficial, liberal and radical image of the people: The worker was a bronzed proletarian moving toward revolutionary consciousness, active night and day in the formation of his local of the CIO...

...But on another level, there is an even more serious implication: that democracy is, ultimately, unworkable...

...On the other hand, they have developed a theory which tends toward the denial of the very possibility of democracy (or socialism...

...On one level, this leads to the phenomenon of the over-estimation of the power of mass society and assertions of the powerlessness of the people in the face of controlled mass communication systems...

...And yet, it is also a work of the moral imagination, for all of the detail is made relevant to a committed concern with the fate of democracy...

...Malraux's Man's Fate are profoundly different: the distance between them reaches from the Chinese Revolution to Bloomsbury...

...and in Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, such an attitude specifically argued that an event like the Hungarian Revolution would be impossible because of the atomiza-tion of Communist society...