Introductory Notes on …
Raymond Williams, Keywords and Cultural Studies
Culture: from “Literature” to a “way of life”
When British cultural theorist Raymond Williams first set out to trace a history of ideological contests over culture, he began to compile a series of keywords which were to follow as an appendix for his book Culture and Society, published in 1958. His first keywords were “class,” “industry,” “democracy,” and “art,” which he isolated by reading literature alongside the tradition of late 18th and 19th century literary critics—such as Matthew Arnold, J.S. Mill and Edmund Burke. The result of this side project was, in effect, a new reading practice—a way of clustering together ideas and their representations to show the connection between social relations or formations and cultural production. This study marked the first of its kind and, in some ways and by some critics, becomes credited with the founding of cultural theory.
A working definition of keywords:
According to Williams, keywords mark concepts that are taken for granted as having a unified, self-evident meaning, but when situated in different locations, different communities, and at different times are actually shown to have different meanings. By tracing these multiple and at times contradictory meanings, keywords highlight changing social relations, political contests, and horizons of possibility for the present and the future.
Keywords are key in two regards:
- They are “binding words in certain activities and their interpretation” – they make things seem like commonsense;
- They are also “indicative words in certain forms of thought” – they contribute to how we schematize knowledge and experience.
Williams argues that the terms that we use to talk about things can be “elements of the problems” (p. 16). We assume a commonsense understanding of what something means, until it comes into contradiction with how another community uses that term.
This is what makes keywords a vocabulary. Those encounters (historically, geopolitically, culturally) can illuminate assumptions and the social-historical conditions that produced those assumptions.
It’s important to bear in mind that for Williams, keywords don’t just reflect social changes; rather some important social and historical processes occur within culture and thus within language.
Keywords as a method for reading culture: Step-by-step
- Isolate a keyword
- Consult its meanings (OED)
- Situate it in relation to other keyword clusters that then place it within different communities, different locations, different times.
- Look for multiple, competing, and sometimes contradictory meanings and explore how they suggest different social formations.
- Consider how these different meanings may function as a carry-over or a remainder.
- Acknowledge that one meaning isn’t “right.” Instead deliberate over multiple meanings in order to gain not an “answer” but “extra edge of consciousness” (24)
