Culture and Society

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780-1950. New York: Columbia UP, 1958. Print.

I read the introduction and the chapter on D.H. Lawrence.

In short, Williams sets out to trace the development of culture as “the general state of intellectual development in society as a whole” (xvi). He argues that the word culture only took on this meaning towards the end of the 18th century, along with the rise of the interconnected concepts of industrialization, democracy, class and art, which only came into their modern meanings since the dawn of the modern age at the end of the eighteenth century. In his introduction, he discusses how the etymology of each of these words changed, and states his intention to give concrete examples of the emergence of these interconnected concepts––both fictional and critical texts––throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, until his present day in the 1950s.

I read his chapter on D.H. Lawrence at an apt time, since I am also reading Women in Love on audiobook while I knit. I’ve discovered it takes a long time to listen to something on audiobook, but it is enjoyable, and a nice break from reading on paper. I downloaded the version I am listening to on Librivox for free. It’s really well done.

In his chapter on Lawrence, Williams focuses on Lawrence’s pervasive critique of industrialism. He even goes so far as to call Lawrence “bitter” (200). I’m not sure I agree that he’s “bitter” but I am also going on Women in Love and Son and Lovers alone. Williams did bring out a number of issues I’d noticed in Women in Love, however. He talks about how Lawrence believes that humans have become like machines, that their relationships have become mechanized, and their “mechanical, disintegrated, amorphous” states of mind have led to the ugliness of industrial society, not industrialization itself (Lawrence qtd in Williams, 201). He also talks about Lawrence’s focus on consciousness, a word I’ve noticed Lawrence using over and over. Lawrence is obsessed with delving into the consciousnesses of his characters, but the characters don’t seem to be able to establish such a transparent connection with one another.

According to Williams, Lawrence believes that industrial society hinders the “instinct of community” (205). Lawrence rejects abstract notions of equality. Instead, he argues that people are neither equal nor unequal, but rather, are simply other to one another. They are only made equal or unequal by material society, and as long as they meet each other through material society’s norms, they cannot know one another (211). (This vaguely reminds me of Butler’s notion in Giving an Account of Oneself of having to meet the other through a “linguistic web of relations”). As Williams puts it, Lawrence knew “how the consciousness and the environment were linked” (212). Lawrence defies the categorization of human energy. He believes that living is about growing into oneself through “spontaneous life activity” (208, 209). In more post-modern terms, I think I could call this an anti-biopolitical impulse, since biopolitics is all about categorizing and managing people (and, of course, biopolitics is tied in with the rise of modernity as well, a la Foucault).

Although I––a daughter of the post-death-of-the-author episteme––am somewhat suspicious of William’s biographical approach (he does a lot of speculating as to Lawrence’s intentions, based on his working-class upbringing), I did find many of his observations useful to my ongoing reading of Women in Love.