Communication Revolution?

Williams understood culture to be a whole way of life, not merely the body of high intellectual and creative works, “the best that has been thought and said,” as Williams’ theoretical predecessor Matthew Arnold had argued. And though Williams maintains that the interests of the ruling class shape society, he believes that society can be influenced by culture just as culture can influence society. Consequently, the self-identified “cultural materialist” was deeply invested in revising the traditional Marxist conception of culture. In Karl Marx’s definition of “determinism” he used a spacial metaphor of a“base and the superstructure” to describe the way in which the economic means of production constitute the “base” of human life while elements such as politics and culture constitute the “superstructure” born of that economic base. Williams, of course, sees this relationship as interactive, fluid, and, above all, inevitably effected by our ever-changing word.

In Culture and Materialism, he undermines the strict Marxist dichotomy through, one, a theoretical reconfiguration of communication. According to Williams, the means of communication are both products and means of production. As socially and materially produced forms and the manifestation of the productive forces and social relations of production, Williams treats the means of communication – specifically television, film, and the printing press – as powerful windows into the enigma of social order and relationships. Moreover, these medium represent the power of class ideology, predominantly that of the bourgeois, in manufacturing consent and thwarting resistance. I am particularly interested in, what I would deem, Williams “solution” to the dangers of unequal access to the means of information production and, more fundamentally, our consciousness regarding the true nature of communication production and consumption.
Williams calls for “the recovery of a ‘primitive’ directness and community” as well as “the transformation of elements of access and extension over an unprecedently wide social and inter-cultural range.” This abstract proposal will inherently generate new means of production – new, advanced, complex means that will benefit community. I think Raymond Williams would be overwhelmingly disappointed with youtube, the world of blogging, etc…which suggest a disproportionate, explicit focus on the means of production and institutional reform in his work and a desire for a revolutionary consciousness rooted in a socialist, liberal wisdom. It seems that while Williams’ desires must be practically rooted in theory based on, at least superficially, economic/material structures like the means of production, his desire bears much closer resemblance to a moralist revision of social order.