“New Conformism Redux”

Abstract

To assess future priorities for cultural studies, this essay returns to the later writings of Raymond Williams, in particular his concerns about “new conformism.” It is argued that today we face comparable analytical challenges in which the pressures of institutionalization, and a strain of ahistoricism, have produced a “weak materialism” in contemporary cultural critique. The essay recommends a flexible and context-driven navigation of the current dominant tendencies toward micro-recuperative and macro-epistemological analysis, and proposes that this flexibility is the preferred mode of assuring that the dynamism of culture is captured by our critical methods.

Keywords:

• Cultural studies
• Raymond Williams
• New conformism
• materialism
• popular culture
• cultural formation
• conjuncture

Thanks to Jonathan Sterne, who provided excellent commentary that helped the development of this essay.

Notes

[1] See Tony Pinkney, “Editor's Introduction: Modernism and Cultural Theory,” in Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (Verso: New York), 1989, 1–29; John Higgins, Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism,” (New York: Routledge), 1999, 145–68.

[2] Raymond Williams, “The Politics of the Avant-Garde,” in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (Verso: New York), 1989, 61.

[3] Raymond Williams, “The Estranging Language of Post-Modernism,” New Society, June 16, 1983: 439.

[4] Raymond Williams, “The Future of Cultural Studies,” in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (Verso: New York), 1989, 151.

[5] Raymond Williams, “The Future of Cultural Studies,” in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (Verso: New York), 1989, 157.

[6] Raymond Williams, “The Uses of Cultural Theory,” in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (Verso: New York), 1989, 164.

[7] Raymond Williams, “The Uses of Cultural Theory,” in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (Verso: New York), 1989, 167.

[8] Raymond Williams, “The Uses of Cultural Theory,” in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (Verso: New York), 1989, 170–71.

[9] Sebastiano Timpanero, On Materialism, trans. Lawrence Garner (London: New Left Books), 1975 (1970), 29.

[10] Edward Said, “Introduction: Secular Criticism,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 26.

[11] Anna McCarthy as smartly pointed this out, and developed the implications more fully, in “From the Ordinary to the Concrete: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Scale,” in Questions of Method in Cultural Studies, ed. Mimi White and James Schwoch, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 21–53.

[12] For a sustained, and essential, analysis of the limits of our contemporary critical formation, see Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia University Press), 2006.

[13] Williams, “The Uses of Cultural Theory,” 173.

[14] Williams, “The Uses of Cultural Theory,” 174.

[15] Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2010, which includes our most complete elaboration of conjunctural analysis and politics to date.

[16] Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Revised Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1983 (1976), 22.

[17] Williams, “The Uses of Cultural Theory,” 174.