Book Review: Mats Franzen, Raymond Williams' Sociology of Culture. A Critical Reconstruction: Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 272 pp (original) (raw)

C ulture has in many ways become a central subject within the humanities and the social sciences of today. The so-called cultural turn bears witness to this. The statement that Raymond Williams made a seminal contribution to this development is not controversial, yet wherein this contribution lies is a more controversial issue. Paul Jones' study is of particular significance here with its insistence on Williams' later contributions, and not just his early work, making him one of the founders of cultural studies. Moreover, Jones' book is not an introduction to, or overview of, Williams' oeuvre, rather it focuses particularly on Williams' contribution to the sociology of culture. Its merit is to delineate critically precisely this contribution. Of course, Jones has to bring out what Williams put into the culture category, but this is no easy task. One common interpretation of Williams has to be overcome, and that is seeing him struggling with the tension between high and low culture. Of course Williams talked about culture as an ideal, a process of human perfection and as a particular way of life. One of Jones' points is to recognize that this is not the whole story: culture for Williams is, and very early on, also something documentary, a body of work variously recording human thought and experience. One critical insight of Williams is that so-called high culture is constituted by a selective tradition; in other words, alternative and critical insights are to be found already in the recorded culture. And this has implications also for the study of culture as a particular way of life, which was of great concern for Williams, yet not in the anthropological sense, as the common interpretation conveys, but as a key to the structure of the feeling of the times. Structure of feeling is a notoriously difficult concept in Williams' thinking. As it has to do with what is emergent, it speaks about generations. Jones makes an important observation here, connecting this concept with Williams' interest in the key words of modern life, words like media, communication, artist or conservatism. Semantic shifts in such words have much to say about societal change-an insight Williams shares with the German Begriffsgeschichte. This intellectual parallel is not noticed by Jones, though his discussion of Williams so-called social formalism reveals it so clearly. For Williams, the analysis of cultural forms was a crucial key in the study of culture and society, in detecting their interconnectedness. Innovations in cultural forms do not emerge solely out of pure creativity, but this creativity is socially conditioned. Thus, cultural forms have something to tell about social change-a lesson Williams demonstrated with full force in his study of drama. However, there is a specific cumulativity in cultural forms; thus, old forms are not being substituted by new ones. So, how this social conditioning operates is a historically open question. Indeed, Jones' discussion of Williams' social formalism in aspects like these comes very close to Reinhart Koselleck's subtle clarification of the relations between conceptual and social history. Williams developed his social formalism against structuralism, particularly an unhistorical, aprioristic, understanding of the sign. Discussing this, Jones makes a comparison between Williams and the position of Stuart Hall, the head of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during its most productive years. Despite a certain opposition between their respective positions, depending on a mutual misrecognition, Jones succeeds in demonstrating them as complementary. If Hall's primary focus was the cultural code being transmitted in the media and its reception, Williams focused primarily on the production side of the work and its cultural form. They shared the counter hegemonic ambition. This brings us directly into Williams' sociology of culture. At its heart we find cultural forms, that is, forms that are socially produced and the analysis of which reveals social relations and social material in artworks. Many of Williams' more substantial works deal with such matters, Book Reviews