Ray Ray Williams: Practicing to be a Cultural Study

In a similar vein to Kurt post which I would inaccurately summarize as "look at how bad-ass Williams is", I want to use my own post to argue for the credibility (cred) of Williams as a writer who practices what he preaches. Those of us who are familiar with Williams' brand of Anti-Arnoldian, Anti-High-brow form of scholarship that directly led to the creation of the discipline of cultural studies probably saw a lot of overlap in "Base and Superstructure" but I want to tease out his reformulation of the base from static economics to an investigation of the"nature of practice and then its conditions" (47). Basically I read this alongside his call to interrogate the neglected "real social conditions" production and not the consumption of cultural works, which encourages us to expand our notion of taste and aesthetics. So we're all pretty familiar with some of his critical approaches to Marxism: Marxism and Literature, Keywords, The Long Revolution, and now, Problems in Materialism and Culture, not to mention numerous other critical studies of communication, radio, television. What I wasn't cognizant of what how much more diverse his writing is; he's the author of seven novels, three plays, criticism of drama and even writings on utopia and even the lowest of the low science fiction! Williams not only studies the social conditions of production but he produced plenty himself. Raymond was a veritable means of production on his own.

I bring this up to inform his sometimes negative approach to "critical theory" and "Marxism" as oppose to "literature with a lower-case l" and "culture". Williams explored almost every genre conceivable to comprehend a truly "emergent" form of culture that is "non-metaphysical and non-subjectivist" (42). Like culture, theory/criticism takes place in "all areas" of society and in literally all genres of writing. (44) Fiction, non-fiction,theory or history, lit or pulp, tv or Werner Herzog, culture and the domination that can come with it, is ordinary. If we are to forget this simple but extensive truism, we are shirk the mantle of cultural studies as Williams understands and produces it.