It is nearly 20 years since the influential cultural critic, Raymond Williams died. The intellectual legacy of the man who, first and foremost thought of himself as a ‘writer’, is a rich one, although these days I suspect somewhat neglected. I, for one, am looking forward to Dai Smith’s forthcoming biography, which I believe will prove to be a much-needed resource. Williams’s contribution to the study of the media was significant, considered and often trenchant. In a piece written as long ago as 1961 he quickly cuts to the chase:

‘It is impossible to discuss communication or culture in our society without in the end coming to discuss power. There is the power of established institutions and there is increasingly the power of money, which is imposing certain patterns of communication that are very powerful in the society as a whole’ (Communications and community).

In this short piece I want to refer to three of Williams’s books to remind ourselves of the importance of the radical critiques he offered in his day. Two of them Communications and Television: Technology and Cultural Form, are centrally concerned with the media. The third, Towards 2000, addresses an even wider set of concerns in a provocative and challenging way. His was the voice of constructive dissent and wary utopianism.

Communications, first published in 1962 as a Penguin Special, went through several editions and in 1976 appeared with Retrospect and Prospect, 1975. Williams did not like speaking about ‘the masses’ or ‘mass media’. These terms, he argued, undermine our respect for people. We do not usually think of ourselves as part of the mass. But whether from the left or the right ‘the masses’ could be seen as available to manipulation – political fodder or a target for the advertisers. It also led to defences of what is transmitted in the media as ‘giving the people what they want’.

To examine communications was to look at the institutions and forms in which ideas, information and attitudes are transmitted and received and to consider the processes of transmission and reception themselves. In an important sense society itself could be seen as a form of communication in which experience is described, shared, modified and preserved. But, more particularly, the modern institutions and forms of communication could be used and abused. They could be abused through the use of propaganda for political control and by the use of advertising for commercial control. Given his critical concerns it is not surprising that when he came across the standard formula for communications research – ‘who says what, how, to whom, with what effect?’ – he noticed that another question was left out – ‘for what purpose?’ This exclusion of intention seemed to him an extraordinary omission. To explore intentions directs us to considerations of the interests and agencies involved in communication: in other words, to real social and cultural processes. Only as we do this can the other questions in the formula be properly addressed. Otherwise, in Williams’s view, the pursuit of these questions could only serve to prop up a sterile, mechanistic form of functionalist theory.

For Williams, the starting point was that modern communications, with all their potential for enlarging and enhancing human experience, were organised, not for use but for profit and were dominated by the drive to sell. All of this is part of the now taken for granted modern world and it is difficult to think beyond it to any genuine alternative directions. Williams pointed to the existence of so-called ‘natural breaks’ in television for advertising purposes which are anything but natural. Not only so but the development of sponsorship of sporting events leads to the omnipresence of advertising symbols and logos even in what is formally public service television. Naturalism, whether in terms of the advertising break or the pervasive presence of advertising at the event as it is being televised, is a contrivance and needs to be recognised as such.

In considering how communications systems could be organised Williams made a fourfold distinction between authoritarian, paternalist, commercial and democratic forms. In the British case he argued that the main struggle going on was between the paternal and commercial systems and in his judgement the commercial form was winning. While such systems may justify themselves in terms of freedom and choice, the practical control of the means of communication, particularly in its more expensive forms can only be in the hands of those individuals or groups who can afford it. In the same way Richard Tawney once pointed out that we are all free to eat at the Ritz hotel, in the commercial system anything can be said provided that you can afford to say it and that you can say it profitably.

When he turned to proposals for the future Williams put great emphasis on developing media literacy. For him the extension and development of modern communications held great possibilities for human liberation. With this in mind he advocated an education system in which was embedded the teaching of speech, writing, creative expression and an awareness of the contemporary arts. These are all active things. Alongside this he recommended that people should come to understand the structure and institutions of modern systems of communication. He pointed out that for many people, impersonal media such as the press, the cinema, radio and television appear almost as acts of God instead of human products. With this in mind he laid great emphasis on discussing the products of the media – comics, newspapers, magazines, television programmes, advertisements and so on. This, for him, was the basis for developing an educated, informed citizenry with sharpened critical faculties. And behind this was a value position which he explicitly identified as radical:

‘We can conceive a cultural organization in which there could be genuine freedom and variety, protected alike from the bureaucrat and the speculator. Actual work would be in the hands of those who in any case have to do it, and the society as a whole would take on the responsibility of maintaining this freedom, since the freedom of individual contribution is in fact a general interest. At the same time, we would have broken out of the social situation in which it is taken for granted that the arts and learning are minority interests, and that the ordinary use of general communications is to get power or profit from the combinations of people’s needs and their inexperience. We would be using our means of communication for their most general human purposes’ (Communications 1976 pp. 178 -179).

Even as he wrote this Williams was recognising the power of advertising. This he saw as a reflection of a capitalist society where commercial interests claim priority in every area of life and comes to be viewed as part of the natural order. Advertising he had famously labelled ‘the magic system’ – the organised deflection of need and reason, by the organised propagation of false images of need and satisfaction. As he contemplated the situation in 1975 with a Labour Government in power he observed the growing nexus of advertising and public relations, its growing permeation in the whole communications system and the increasing use by the government in what we later would come to call ‘spin’. He concluded that the period covered by Communications represented a movement from a time of warning but also of hope to one that could be interpreted as one of despair. The struggle for democratic communications was being lost.

Yet Williams would never give the last word to despair even when things looked bleak. For him the situation first had to be analysed as clearly as possible and then, where appropriate, challenged and alternatives indicated. This is well illustrated in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (first published in 1975 with a posthumous edition in 1990). His son, Ederyn Williams, who edited the 1990 edition, observed: ‘Much has changed since he wrote it in 1973, though I found it amazing, on re-reading, to see how much of today’s media environment he had accurately predicted then’ (p. 8). Among other things it serves as a vigorous challenge to technological determinism. Indeed, the first chapter, The Technology and the Society, is a masterly exposition of the different versions of the relationship of television technology to society. Technological determinism broadly postulates the invention of new technologies which set the conditions for social change. But against this is a view that restores intention to the process of research and development: certain purposes and practices are already in mind. Technology, that is to say, cannot be seen as an isolated variable. If this is so, then while we may look back with hindsight at the way in which television (or any other) technology has been invented, developed, used and controlled, the possibility remains that other purposes, other uses, in other hands and structures may be envisaged. There are alternatives even though they are sometimes difficult to imagine.

In Television: Technology and Cultural Form Williams describes the various elements that have led to the social construction of television formats, genres and content as we know it. In part, of course, this came out of earlier cultural forms of communication: public meetings, the theatre, the school class, the cinema, radio, advertising bill boards and so on. Bringing all these things together under the rubric of television is itself innovating. The new medium also represents a new kind of visual experience.

Williams deals with this directly in his discussion of the distribution and flow of programming in television. His observations here arose from his own experience as a television critic from 1968-1972 writing in the Listener (See Alan O’Connor ed. (1989) Raymond Williams on Television). Broadcasting makes available a variety of things such as news, comedy, film, documentaries, costume drama in a programmed sequence. Given the availability of alternative programmes we can now enter in and out of sequences at the touch of a button. Today, with video recorders, DVDs, timing devices and the whole panoply accompanying digitalisation, the possibilities are very much greater. It is the immediate availability of this flow and the organisation of the flow itself, including, in what are now taken-for-granted ways, the commercials, the trailers and the devices to hook our attention and smooth the path from one item to the next with scarcely any sense of interval, that is the central experience of communication. Williams pointed out that the analysis of flow can be conducted at different levels – an evening’s viewing, the internal organisation of a particular programme, the sequences of words and images – and he illustrates this in the book. Crucially, for the student of media content this provides a way of identifying the meanings and values of a particular culture.

There are two other things in Television: Technology and Cultural Form which stand out for me, and which have continuing relevance for our contemporary world. The first is his discussion of the effects of television on the wider society. He notices and rejects the tendency to offer simple cause and effect treatments of its agency in social and cultural change. It is not that these have been established but he pointed out attention was directed to certain recurring issues ‘ ‘sex’ and ‘violence’, ‘political manipulation’ and ‘cultural degradation’. As he observed, these are:

‘… of so general a kind that it ought to be obvious that they cannot be specialised to an isolated medium but, in so far as television bears on them, have to be seen in a whole social and cultural process. Some part then of the study of television’s effects has to be seen as an ideology: a way of interpreting general change through a displaced and abstract cause’ (Television op. cit. p.119).

By the same token ‘technology’ cannot be abstracted and treated simply as a medium in the manner of McLuhan, with its own internal laws of cause and effect. Williams reminds us of our location in a real world where, within limits and under pressures, we act and react, struggle and concede, co-operate, conflict and compete. What this implies is that technologies are an extension of general human capacity and while the intentions of particular social groups can shape its use, other groups with other intentions and other priorities can adopt and adapt technologies with different intentions and purposes. There are therefore, often, unforeseen intentions and unforeseen effects which come into the reckoning in the social arena. Hence Williams rejects notions both of technological determinism and determined technology. Clearly this does not leave everything in some kind of free-floating social vacuum. In a taut formulation characteristic of Williams’s writing at his best he argued:

‘We have to think of determination not as a single force, or a single abstraction of forces, but as a process in which real determining factors – the distribution of power or of capital, social and physical inheritance, relations of scale and size between groups – set limits and exert pressures, but neither wholly control nor wholly predict the outcome of complex activity within or at these limits, and under or against these pressures’ (Television op.cit. p.130).

With this awareness hope can be sustained, since the possibilities for renewable social action and cultural struggle can be envisaged. This precisely leads to the second and related point namely, the recognition of the rapidly developing nature of television technology, but alongside this, the insistence that these developments – such as cable systems, new types of receiver, reactive and interactive devices, satellite communications – whatever the intentions of those groups, corporations and states powerful and rich enough to be able to institute them, can also become sites for alternative uses. With considerable vigour, given his awareness of the forms of surveillance and control of the citizenry which such technologies can engender, Williams stated: ‘These are the contemporary tools of the long revolution towards an educated and participatory democracy, and of the recovery of effective communication in complex urban and industrial societies’ (Television op.cit. p.151). This was not a sanguine, complacent conclusion but offered a rooted, radical opposition to social fatalism and cultural pessimism.

It is in Towards 2000 (1985) that we find what Williams termed ‘resources towards a journey of hope’ further explored. The book was an extension of The Long Revolution (1959) part of which he reproduced in the later publication. He was addressing a situation in which he believed it was possible to look back and even gain some re-assurance as we recognise the human accomplishments that have overcome limitations and dangers in the past. But, at the same time, there are those who simply look back and recoil from what they see as present dangers and a short and disastrous future. In the face of real threats to the future of our species and our planet he wrote:

‘But there are also discovered and discoverable reasons for a kind of hope which has accepted the facts underlying these fears and can see ways beyond them which are fully within our capacity. A major element of what is going to happen is the state of mind of all of us who are in a position to intervene in its complex processes, and at best to determine them for the general good’ (Towards 2000, p. 5).

One of the central intellectual tasks he set himself in Towards 2000 was to critique what he saw as the unholy combination of technological determinism and cultural pessimism. We have already seen how Williams dissected and de-mystified the category of technological determinism. His attack on cultural pessimism is first a comment on the way in which innovative forms of artistic achievement, whether labelled ‘modern’ or ‘post-modern’, have been subject to a process of incorporation, which among other things has led to the widely accepted notion of the ‘global village’ and which was presented as a necessary outcome of technological development. This masked the possibilities of a different social and cultural order:
‘What was being addressed was a real development of universal distribution and of unprecedented opportunities for genuine and diverse cultural exchange. What was ideologically inserted was a model of homogenised humanity consciously served from two or three centres: the monopolising corporations and the elite metropolitan intellectuals. One practiced the homogenisation, the other theorised it. Each found its false grounds in the technologies which had “changed and opened up the world, and brought it together”. But nothing in the technologies led to this theory or practice. The real forces which produced both, not only in culture but in the widest areas of social, economic and political life, belonged to the dominant capitalist order in its paranational phase. But this was the enemy that could not be named because its money was being taken’ (Towards 2000, op.cit. p.143).

The strong implication from Williams’s analysis is that this combination, albeit based on a mistaken epistemology, is tied up with processes of globalisation that do not address the vast structural inequalities between North and South. These processes further sustain and promote the practice and threat of war and ravage the environment of the planet we inhabit. As we know, these processes have continued and accelerated since he wrote. Williams was in no doubt as to the seriousness of the situation. At the end of the book we find him writing about Plan X, a new politics of strategic advantage. This politics thinks about the future but it operates on an undercurrent of pessimism. While those engaged in this kind of politics may speak the language of ‘solutions’ or ‘stabilities’, and deploy the arts of public relations to expound this, their real politics is based on the acceptance of an indefinite continuation of extreme danger and crisis. We can remind ourselves that all this was written before 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’, before Kyoto and the present concerns over climate change, before the war in Iraq and its continuing repercussions. When he concluded that the social and cultural conditions for the adoption of Plan X, as the only possible strategy for the future, was very powerful indeed, he knew whereof he spoke. Against this he pointed to the social movements concerned with peace, the environment and feminism, grounded in a sense of our common humanity, as well as new activity in theatre, film, community writing and publishing. Slender though they may sometimes appear to be they do exist to challenge what now most controls and constrains us. The search for answers, hard answers, will be difficult and call for the exercise of individual and collective energy. We will need to call on our emotional and intellectual capacities. There is a learning, there is a sharing and there is a making of new possibilities. At the end of what is probably his most well known book, Culture and Society (1961) and after a different intellectual journey, Williams concludes with some words which we may choose to appropriate for our own times:

‘There are ideas, and ways of thinking, with the seeds of life in them, and there are others, perhaps deep in our minds, with the seeds of a general death. Our measure of success in recognizing these kinds, and in naming them making possible their common recognition, may be literally the measure of our future’ (Culture and Society 1961, p.324).