RAYMOND WILLIAMS’ CONCLUSION

TO
CULTURE AND SOCIETY
 Culture is according to Williams’ a reaction to
changes “in the condition of our common life”
(314)
 there are many different kinds of culture:

 “The idea of culture describes our common inquiry

but our conclusions are diverse, as our starting
points were diverse. The word, culture, cannot
automatically be pressed into service as any kind
of social or personal directive.”
PHASE Industry Democracy Art
1. 1790 – 1870: a The rejection of Concern at the A period of
phase of working production and the threat of minority questioning the
out new attitudes social relations of values by popular intrinsic value of
to industrialism the factory system supremacy of the art and its
and democracy. new masses. importance to the
common life.
2. 1870 – 1914: Sentiment versus Emphasis on Defiant exile: art
narrower fronts, the machine. community, society for art’s sake.
specialism in the versus the
arts, direct politics. individual ethic.

3. 1914 – 1945: a Acceptance of Fears of the first The reintegration of

phase of large machine phase are renewed art with the
scale organisations production. in the context of common life of
and the mass ‘mass-democracy’ society centred on
media. and ‘mass the word
communications’. ‘communication’.

http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/raymond_williams_conclusion/
 MASS AND MASSES

 Masses------mob: “…gullibility, fickleness, herd-

prejudice, lowness of taste and habit. The masses,
on this evidence, formed a perpetual threat to
culture. Mass-thinking, mass-suggestion, mass-
prejudice would threaten to swamp considered
individual thinking and feeling. Even democracy,
which had both a classical and a liberal
reputation, would lose its savor in becoming mass-
democracy.” (317)
 Media influence
 MASS COMMONICATION

 The development of media >>>> one way

sending.
 Mass communication

 Multiple transmission
 “The traditional popular culture of England was, if
not annihilated, at least fragmented and
weakened by the dislocations of the Industrial
Revolution.” (339)
 “if the major part of our culture, in the sense of
intellectual and imaginative work, is to be called,
as the Marxists call it, ‘bourgeois culture, it is
natural to look for an alternative culture, and to
call it proletarian… the body of intellectual and
imaginative work… is always…something more
than the product of a single class.” (339)