Culture and Materialism. Raymond Williams

project certain kinds of objective material which can be held to be value-free because none of the connections to the rest of experience or to other kinds of relationship are made. Even values themselves can be studied in this way, as in a more or less sophisticated opinion polling: that while a percentage believes this another percentage believes that, and this result, until the next time, is the end of the research. And I wouldn’t want to say that the results of these kinds of work mightn’t contribute, very valuably, to the central business of social studies, which because they must deal with men in social relationships and in history must, whether they know it or not, deal with active values and with choices, including the values and choices of the observers. All am saying is that in the end it is this centre that is absent, or is insufficiently present; and that from this very default, compounded by the historical failure to develop British social studies in any adequate way (and we remember the difficulty of getting them established in Cambridge at all), the claim began to be made that in literature, in English, where values and their discussion were explicit, a real centre, a humane centre, might be found.

      But this is where the central problem of the relation between literature and social studies at once arises. We must not think, by the way, that in literary as in social studies the pursuit of the falsely objective wasn’t undertaken. The classical languages, and by a hasty derivation their literatures, could be studied by a rigorous internal textual methodology, which has had its effect on nearly all literary studies. The study of other languages in the same spirit, by isolated set texts and the like, has similarly been inserted into the process of literary study, often explicitly as a way of providing at least some rigorous discipline. In our own studies of the very rich and important English medieval literature, such internal methodologies, and a relative isolation from active questions of value and of history, have made considerable headway. Everything is again justifiable, in its own immediate terms; it is the connection of those terms to the central inquiry that has become problematic or, more graciously, ultimate.

      The outstanding difference between physical and humane studies is not only a matter of inevitable questions of expressed and active values. It is also a matter of the nature of change: that societies and literatures have active and conflicting human histories, which are always inseparable from active values. But in literary as in some social, historical and anthropological studies these facts of change can be projected into an apparent totality which has the advantage of containing them and thus of making them at last, like the rocks, stand still. Except, of course, that in the actual physical sciences we soon learn, even against everyday experience, that only some rocks stand still, and that even these are the products of change: the continuing history of the earth. It is not really from science, but from certain philosophical and ideological systems, and I suppose ultimately from religions, that these apparent totalities, which contain, override or rationalize change, are projected.

      In literature the most common of these false totalities is ‘tradition’, which is seen not as it is, an active and continuous selection and reselection, which even at its latest point in time is always a set of specific choices, but now more conveniently as an object, a projected reality, with which we have to come to terms on its terms, even though those terms are always and must be the valuations, the selections and omissions, of other men. The idea of a fixed syllabus is the most ordinary methodological product of just this assumption. And of course, given this kind of totality, the facts of change can then be admitted, but in particular ways. We can be positively invited to study the history of literature: only now not as change but as variation, a series of variations within a static totality: the characteristics of this period and the characteristics of that other; just as in empirical history we come to know this period and that, but the ‘and’ is not stressed, or is in any case understood as temporal variation rather than as qualitative change.

      Similar false totalities have been very widely projected in economics, in political theory, in anthropology and even in contemporary sociology, where variation is seen as a fact but as only a fact, which does not necessarily involve us with the disturbing process of active values and choices. Certainly, as is so often said, we cannot do without the facts, and it is a hard, long effort to get them. But this persuasive empiricism is founded, from the beginning, on the assumption that the facts can be made to stand still, and to be, as we are, disinterested. Theory, we are told, can come later, but the important point is that it is there, tacitly, from the beginning, in the methodological assumption of a static, passive and therefore empirically available totality. The most obvious example, from literary studies, is the methodology of the study of ‘kinds’ or ‘genres’. There, making all the empirical work possible, is the prior assumption of the existence, within the ‘body’ of literature, of such ‘permanent forms’ as epic, tragedy, or romance, and then all our active study is of variations within them, variations that may be admitted to have proximate causes, even a social history, but that in their essential features are taken in practice as autonomous, with internal laws: an a priori and idealist assumption which prevents us not only from seeing the important history of the generation of such forms—which whatever might be said are never in fact timeless—but also from seeing those radical and qualitative changes, within the nominal continuity of the forms, which are often of surpassing importance in themselves, and which indeed, at times, make a quite different method of study, a method not depending on that kind of general classification, imperative.

      The Limits of ‘Practical Criticism’

      Yet it is on none of these methods, with their apparent objectivity, that the claim of literature to be the central human study has rested. It has been on ‘practical criticism’, which deserves attention both in itself and because it is from this, paradoxically, that much of the English work in literary sociology has come. I know Goldmann would have been surprised—every visitor is surprised—to meet the full intensity, the extraordinary human commitment, of this particular and local allegiance. In his attack on ‘scientism’ he might for a moment have assumed that there were Cambridge allies, who had attacked the same thing in the same word. But this wouldn’t have lasted long. Goldmann’s attack on scientism—the uncritical transfer of method from the physical to the human sciences—was above all in the name of a critical sociology; whereas that word ‘sociology’ has only to be mentioned, in practical-critical circles, to provoke the last sad look at the voluntarily damned. And I would give it about fifteen minutes, as Goldmann began to describe his own methodology, for that crushing quotation to be brought out from Lawrence: ‘We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotions and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudo-scientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.’ So no methodology here, thank you; only sincere and vital emotion. But who decides the sincerity and vitality? If you need to ask that you couldn’t begin to understand the answer. People decide it, in themselves and in an active and collaborative critical process.

      But which people, in what social relationships, with each other and with others? That, at whatever risk of damnation, is the necessary question of the sociologist. Practical criticism is vulnerable at several points: in its hardening into an apparently objective method which is based, even defiantly, on subjective principles; in its isolation of texts from contexts; in its contemplative aspects, which have often made it hostile to new literary work. But all these weaknesses are most apparent, we say, when it is badly done: well or badly being again an internal criterion. In fact, however, all these weaknesses, or potential weaknesses, follow from the specific social situation of its practitioners. The real answer to that question—which people, in what social relationships?—was, as we know, precise and even principled: the informed critical minority. What began as the most general kind of claim, a visibly human process centred on the apparently absolute qualities of sincerity and vitality, ended, under real pressures, as a self-defining group. But then, because the critical activity was real, very different social relations—a sense of isolation from the main currents of a civilization in which sincerity and vitality were being limited or destroyed, an implacable opposition to all agents of this limitation or destruction—emerged and forced a generalization of the original position. English literary sociology began, in effect, from this need of a radical critical group to locate and justify its own activity and identity: the practical distinction of good literature from the mediocre