Cultural Materialism On Raymond Williams - Monoskop

Introduction 9
more useful in these introductory observations to refocus both the
work and the commentary on it less as a summary of contents than
as a statement of a number of problematics. I shall concentrate on
two general areas of both possibility and difficulty around the question
of "culture." First, we need to remind ourselves that Williams's
theoretical reflection on culture, however flexible and self-revising,
is also tied to a set of anchoring positions. One point of departure
would then be to consider some of its founding moves and assumptions,
thus indeed going back over the ground but in order to reach
down into its groundings. Second, I shall consider ways in which the
theoretical work on the idea of culture both entails and is developed
as a cultural politics, with particular reference to the troubled question
of Williams's relation to "modernity" (and, beyond that, the
spaces of the so-called postmodern).
A concern with grounds and foundations is an important structural
feature of Williams's work as a whole (ground, interestingly, is also
a recurring term in the opening pages of Arnold's Culture and Anarchy).
In one of the interviews published in the collection Politics
and Letters, for example, Williams speaks of "an absolutely founding
presumption of materialism." The context is a relatively uninteresting,
even unnecessary, argument about ontology versus epistemology
in which, characterizing the moment of structuralism and
semiology as a time of "rabid idealism," Williams claims that "the natural
world exists whether anyone signifies it or not." The substantive
argument is not for the moment the issue (its target—as Michael
Moriarty's essay shows—is in fact a straw man, confirming that, in its
major negative forms, the relation with "structuralism" constituted
one of the few intellectual disaster areas of Williams's work). My
present point, however, bears less on substance and more on rhetoric,
the extent to which Williams's claim illustrates the presence in
his writings of what Simpson rightly calls a "foundational rhetoric."
It is often a strong rhetoric, as instanced here by the adverb absolutely
(we will find the words absolutely and absolute in a similar
connection elsewhere). In our antifoundationalist times, this sort of
thing strikes an oddly disconcerting note. We must, however, attend
to it; it will take us to many of the questions currently relevant to
the interpretation and reception of Williams's work, above all in
connection with the category of "culture."