Cultural Materialism On Raymond Williams - Monoskop

Introduction 13
are aboriginally divided, but that they are simultaneously coextensive
and interacting. The argument is not just that culture is there at
the beginning (as itself "primary") but also that at the beginning, before
separation and specialization, culture is whole or part of a
whole process, once again "connected"; instead of the notion of a
"single effective origin," writes Williams, "the real emphasis should
be on connected practice."
On the other hand, cutting across this story of the originally multiple
and coextensive there is another story that speaks more of
priorities, indeed even of "absolute" priorities. In the Politics and Letters
interviews Williams repeats both the view of the interconnected
wholeness of social process and the buttressing adverb absolutely. "I
am absolutely unwilling to concede to any predetermined class of
objects an unworked priority." Yet when it is a question of contrasting
the allegedly reified formalist notion of system with the more active
notion of process, Williams can also write unhesitatingly that
"here [in the idea of 'social process'], as a matter of absolute priority,
men relate and continue to relate before any system which is their
product can as a matter of practical rather than abstract consciousness
be grasped or exercise its determination" (emphasis added). The
quarrel with the language of system and abstraction thus yields another
fable of origins, in which there is an ultimate grounding or "absolute
priority," reaching back beyond abstraction into the lived, the
primordial domain of experience and feeling. "System" is thus not
only a category of a (contested) mode of thought that thinks in terms
of first and second; insofar as it corresponds to something in reality,
it is itself what comes second, after some kind of primary "relating,"
which would then carry the weight of the loaded vocabulary of experience,
feeling, and emotion. Interestingly, the term absolute, along
with primary, turns up again, in Towards 2000, in an account of
emotion as that which "has an absolute and primary significance." It
also translates importantly into Williams's account of the novel,
specifically Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, where the significance
of the Cathy-Heathcliff relationship—significant for the terms
in which Williams will theorize the "structure of feeling"—lies in the
fact that it is the "kind of relationship" that is "there and absolute before
anything else can be said." In short, if everything is there at the
beginning, it would seem that some things are more at the beginning
than others.