Raymond Williams on Television (Routledge Revivals)

Selected Writings

Raymond Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136447563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 1989, this work is based around a monthly TV column which Raymond Williams wrote for The Listener between 1968 and 1972. Those were the years of the Prague Spring, of anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, of fighting in Cambodia and Northern Ireland, of hope for McGovern in the United States and attacks on the Wilson Labour Government in Britain. In The Listener articles Williams comments on all of these events, providing a rare glimpse not only into the events of his daily life but also into the continuing development of a personal sociology of culture.

The articles also discuss such television forms as detective series, science programmes and sports, travelogue, education, gardening, and children's programming. The book also includes Williams' key lecture "Drama in a Dramatised Society", which sets a framework for his analysis; a London Review of Books piece on the Falklands/Malvinas adventure as a "tele-war"; and an interview with Williams on television and teaching.

Cited by The Guardian as "The foremost political thinker of his generation", Williams' writing amounts to a primer on ways of watching television and of critiquing its profound social and political impact.

Part I

Television: Cultural Form and Politics

Drama in a Dramatised Society

Drama is no longer coextensive with theatre; most dramatic perform-ances are now in film and television studios.* In the theatre itself—national theatre or street theatre—there is an exceptional variety of intention and method. New kinds of text, new kinds of notation, new media and new conventions press actively alongside the texts and conventions that we think we know, but that I find problematic just because these others are there. Dramatic time and sequence in a play of Shakespeare, the intricate rhythms and relationships of chorus and three actors in a Greek tragedy: these, I believe, become active in new ways as we look at a cutting bench or an editing machine, in a film or television studio, or as we see new relations between actor and audience in the improvised theatre of the streets and the basements.

Again, we have never as a society acted so much or watched so many others acting. Watching, of course, carries its own problems. Watching itself has become problematic. For drama was originally occasional, in a literal sense: at the Festival of Dionysus in Athens or in medieval England on the day of Corpus Christi when the waggons were pulled through the streets. The innovating commercial theatres of Elizabethan London moved beyond occasion but still in fixed localities: a capital city, then a tour of provincial cities. There was to be both expansion and contraction. In Restoration London two patent theatres—the monopoly centres of legitimate drama—could hardly be filled. The provincial theatre-building of the eighteenth century, the development of variety theatres and music-halls, the expansion of London’s West End theatres in the second half of the 19th century: all these qualified occasion but in the light of what was to come were mainly quantitative changes. It is in our own century, in cinema, in radio and in television, that the audience for drama has gone through a qualitative change. I mean not only that Battleship Potemkin and Stagecoach have been seen by hundreds of millions of people, in many places and over a continuing period, nor only that a play by Ibsen or O’Neill is now seen simultaneously by ten to twenty million people on television. This, though the figures are enormous, is still an understandable extension. It means that for the first time a majority of the population has regular and constant access to drama, beyond occasion or season. But what is really new—so new I think that it is difficult to see its significance—is that it is not just a matter of audiences for particular plays. It is that drama, in quite new ways, is built into the rhythms of everyday life. On television alone it is normal for viewers—the substantial majority of the population—to see anything up to three hours of drama, of course drama of several different kinds, a day. And not just one day; almost every day. This is part of what I mean by a dramatised society. In earlier periods drama was important at a festival, in a season, or as a conscious journey to a theatre; from honouring Dionysus or Christ to taking in a show. What we now have is drama as habitual experience: more in a week, in many cases, than most human beings would previously have seen in a lifetime.

• * Williams’s introductory remarks on the occasion of this public lecture are omitted here.

Can this be merely extension: a thing like eating more beef muscle or wearing out more shirts than any ancestor could have con-ceived as a widespread human habit? It certainly doesn’t look like a straight line extension. To watch simulated action, of several recur-rent kinds, not just occasionally but regularly, for longer than eating and for up to half as long as work or sleep; this, in our kind of society, as majority behaviour, is indeed a new form and pressure. It would of course be easy to excise or exorcise this remarkable fact if we could agree, as some propose, that what millions of people are so steadily watching is all or for the most part rubbish. That would be no exorcism: if it were true it would make the fact even more extraordinary. And it is in any case not true. Only dead cultures have scales that are reliable. There are discernible, important and varying proportions of significant and trivial work, but for all that, today, you can find kitsch in a national theatre and an intensely original play in a police series. The critical discriminations are at once important and unassumable in advance. But in one perspective they pale before the generality of the habit itself. What is it, we have to ask, in us and in our contemporaries, that draws us repeatedly to these hundreds and thousands of simulated actions; these plays, these repre-sentations, these dramatisations?

It depends where you ask that question from. I ask it from watching and from contributing to the extraordinary process itself. But I can hear—who can not? —some familiar voices: the grave merchants whose apprentices and shopboys slipped away to Bankside; the heads of households whose wives, and the heads of colleges whose students, admitted to read English, would read novels and comedies in the morning. These sober men would know what to say about contemporary California, where you can watch your first movie at six-thirty in the morning and if you really try can see seven or eight more before you watch the late movie in the next recurrent small hours. Fiction; acting; idle dreaming and vicarious spectacle; the simultaneous satisfaction of sloth and appetite; distraction from distraction by distraction. It is a heavy, even a gross catalogue of our errors, but now millions of people are sending the catalogue back, unopened. Till the eyes tire, millions of us watch the shadows of shadows and find them substance; watch scenes, situations, actions, exchanges, crises. The slice of life, once a project of naturalist drama, is now a voluntary, habitual, internal rhythm; the flow of action and acting, of representation and performance, raised to a new convention, that of a basic need.

We cannot know what would have happened if there had been, for example, outside broadcasting facilities at the Globe. In some measure, at least, we must retain the hypothesis of simple extension of access. Yet I would argue that what has happened is much more than this. There are indeed discoverable factors of a probably causal kind. We are all used to saying—and it still means something—that we live in a society which is at once more mobile and more complex, and therefore, in some crucial respects, relatively more unknowable, relatively more opaque than most societies of the past, and yet which is also more insistently pressing, penetrating and even determining. What we try to resolve from the opaque and the unknowable, in one mode by statistics—which give us summaries and breakdowns, moderately accurate summaries and even more accurate breakdowns, of how we live and what we think—is offered to be resolved in another mode by one kind of dramatisation. Miner and power worker, minister and general, burglar and terrorist, schizophrenic and genius; a back-to-back home and a country house; metropolitan apartment and suburban villa; bed-sitter and hill-farm: images, types, representations: a relationship beginning, a marriage breaking down; a crisis of illness or money or dislocation or disturbance. It is not only that all these are represented. It is that much drama now sees its function in this experimental, investigative way; finding a subject, a setting, a situation; and with some emphasis on novelty, on bringing some of that kind of life into drama.

Of course all societies have had their dark and unknowable areas, some of them by agreement, some by default. But the clear public order of much traditional drama has not, for many generations, been really available to us. It was for this reason that the great naturalist dramatists, from Ibsen, left the palaces, the forums and the streets of earlier actions. They created, above all, rooms; enclosed rooms on enclosed stages; rooms in which life was centred but inside which people waited for the knock on the door, the letter or the message, the shout from the street, to know what would happen to them; what would come to intersect and to decide their own still intense and immediate lives. There is a direct cultural continuity, it seems to me, from those enclosed rooms, enclosed and lighted framed rooms, to the rooms in which we watch the framed images of television: at home, in our own lives, but needing to watch what is happening, as we say, “out there”: not out there in a particular street or a specific community but in a complex and otherwise unfocused and unfocusable national and international life, where our area of concern and apparent concern is unprecedentedly wide, and where what happens on another continent can work through to our own lives in a matter of days and weeks—in the worst image, in hours and minutes. Yet our lives are still here, still substantially here, with the people we know, in our own rooms, in the similar rooms of our friends and neighbours, and they too are watching: not only for public events, or for distraction, but from a need for images, for representations, of what living is now like, for this kind of person and that, in this situation and place and that. It is perhaps the full development of what Wordsworth saw at an early stage, when the crowd in the street (the new kind of urban crowd, who are physically very close but still absolute strangers) had lost any common and settled idea of man and so needed representations—the images on hoardings, the new kinds of sign—to simulate if not affirm a human identity: what life is and looks like beyond this intense and anxious but also this pushed and jostled private world of the head.

That is one way of putting it; the new need, the new exposure—the need and exposure in the same movement—to a flow of images, of constant representations, as distinct from less complex and less mobile cultures in which a representation of meaning, a spectacle of order, is clearly, solidly, rigidly present, at certain fixed points, and is then more actively affirmed on a special occasion, a high day or a festival, the day of the play or the procession. But there is never only need and exposure: each is both made and used. In the simplest sense our society has been dramatised by the inclusion of constant dramatic representation as a daily habit and need. But the real process is more active than that.

Drama is a special kind of use of quite general processes of presentation, representation, signification. The raised place of power—the eminence of the royal platform—was built historically before the raised place of the stage. The presentation of power, in hierarchical groupings, in the moving emphases of procession, preceded the now comparable modes of a represented dramatic state. Gods were made present or made accessible by precise movements, precise words, in a known conventional form. Drama is now so often associated with what are called myth and ritual that the general point is easily made. But the relation cannot be reduced to the usual loose association. Drama is a precise separation of certain common modes for new and specific ends. It is neither ritual which discloses the God, nor myth which requires and sustains repetition. It is specific, active, interac-tive composition: an action not an act; an open practice that has been deliberately abstracted from temporary practical or magical ends: a complex opening of ritual to public and variable action; a moving beyond myth to dramatic versions of myth and of history. It was this active variable experimental drama—not the closed world of known signs and meanings—that came through in its own right and in its own power; significantly often in periods of crisis and change, when an order was known and still formally present but when experience was pressing it, testing it, conceiving breaks and alternatives; the dramatic possibility of what might be done within what was known to have been done, and each could be present, and mutually, contradictorily potent, in specific acted forms. We need to see this especially now, when myth and ritual, in their ordinary senses, have been broken up by historical development, when they are little more, in fact, than the nostalgia or the rhetoric of one kind of scholar and thinker, and yet when the basic social processes, of presentation, representation, signification have never been more important. Drama broke from fixed signs, established its permanent distance from myth and ritual and from the hierarchical figures and processions of state; broke for precise historical and cultural reasons into a more complex, more active and more questioning world. There are relativities within its subsequent history, and the break has been made many more times than once. Any system of signs, presenting and representing, can become incorporated into a passive order, and new strange images, of repressed experience, repressed people, have again to break beyond this. The drama of any period, including our own, is an intricate set of practices of which some are incorporated—the known rhythms and movements of a residual but still active system—and some are exploratory—the difficult rhythms and movements of an emergent representation, rearrangement, new identification. Under real pressures these distinct kinds are often intricately and powerfully fused; it is rarely a simple case of the old drama and the new.

But drama, which separated out, did not separate out altogether. Congruous and comparable practices exist in other parts of the society as in the drama, and these are often interactive: the more interactive as the world of fixed signs is less formal. Indeed what we often have now is a new convention of deliberate overlap. Let me give the simplest example. Actors now often move from a part in a play, which we can all specify as dramatic art, to deploy the same or similar skills in the hired but rapturous discovery of a cigar or a face-cream. They may be uneasy about it but, as they say, it’s better than resting. It’s still acting after all; they are no more personally committed to that cigar than to the character of that bluff inspector, for which they were also hired. Somebody wrote it, somebody’s directing it: you’re still in the profession. Commercials in Britain have conventional signs to tell you they’re coming, but the overlap of method, of skill and of actual insectioniduals is a small and less easily-read sign of a more general process, in which the breaks are much harder to discern.

Our present society, in ways it is merely painful to reiterate, is sufficiently dramatic in one obvious sense. Actions of a kind and scale that attract dramatic comparisons are being played out in ways that leave us continually uncertain whether we are spectators or participants. The specific vocabulary of the dramatic mode—drama itself, and then tragedy, scenario, situation, actors, performances, roles, images—is continually and conventionally appropriated for these immense actions. It would moreover be easier, one can now often feel, if only actors acted, and only dramatists wrote scenarios. But we are far past that. On what is called the public stage, or in the public eye, improbable but plausible figures continually appear to represent us. Specific men are magnified to temporary universality, and so active and complex is this process that we are often invited to see them rehearsing their roles, or discussing their scenarios. Walter Bagehot* once distinguished between a real ruling class and a theatrical ruling show: the widow of Windsor, he argued, in his innovating style of approving and elegant cynicism, is needed to be shown, to be paraded, before a people who could never comprehend the more complex realities of power. I watched this morning the televised State opening of Parliament. It is one thing to say that it was pure theatre; it is harder to see, and to say, that beyond its residual pageantry was another more naturalised process which is also in part a cousin of theatre. Monarchs, of course, have always done something like this, or had it done for them. Those who lasted were conscious of their images even if they called them their majesties. Moreover, like many actors, people find roles growing on them: they come to fit the part, as he who would play the King. What is new, really, is not in them but in us.

It is often genuinely difficult to believe in any part of this perva-sive dramatisation. If we see it in another period or in or from another place, it visibly struts and frets, its machinery starts audibly creaking. In moments of crisis, we sometimes leave this social theatre or, as easily, fall asleep in it. But these are not only roles and scenarios; they are conventions. When you can see a convention, become really conscious of it, it is probably already breaking down. Beyond what many people can see as the theatricality of our image-conscious public world, there is a more serious, more effective, more deeply rooted drama: the dramatisation of consciousness itself. “I speak for Britain” runs the written line of that miming public figure, though since we were let in on the auditions, and saw other actors trying for the part, we may have our reservations; we may even say “Well I’m here and you don’t speak for me.” “Exactly,” the figure replies, with an unruffled confidence in his role, for now a different consciousness, a more profound dramatisation, begins to take effect; “you speak for yourself, but I speak for Britain.” “Where is that?” you may think to ask, looking wonderingly around. On a good day from a high place you can see about fifty miles. But you know some places, you remember others; you have memories, definitions and a history.

• * Walter Bagehot (1826–77). English writer and political scientist. Author of The English Constitution.

Yet at some point along that continuum, usually in fact very early, you have—what? Representations; typifications; active images; active parts to play that people are playing, or sometimes refusing to play. The specific conventions of this particular dramatisation—a country, a society, a period of history, a crisis of civilisation; these conventions are not abstract. They are profoundly worked and reworked in our actual living relationships. They are our ways of seeing and knowing, which every day we put into practice, and while the conventions hold, while the relationships hold, most practice confirms them. One kind of specific autonomy—thisness, hereness—is in part free of them; but this is usually an autonomy of privacy, and the private figure—the character of the self—is already widely offered to be appropriated in one or other of these dramatised forms: producer or consumer, married or single, member or exile or vagrant. Beyond all these there is what we call the irreducible: the still unaccommodated man. But the process has reached in so far that there are now, in practice, conventions of isolation itself. The lonely insectionidual is now a common type: that is an example of what I mean by a dramatic convention, extending from play to consciousness. Within a generation of that naturalist drama which created the closed room—the room in which people lived but had to wait for news from outside—another movement had created another centre: the isolated figure, the stranger, who in Strindberg’s Road to Damascus was still actively looking for himself and his world, testing and discarding this role and that image, this affirming memory and that confirming situation, with each in turn breaking down until he came back, each time, to the same place. Half a century later two ultimately isolated figures, their world not gone but never created, sat down on the road waiting for what? —call it Godot—to come. Let’s go, they said, but they didn’t move. A ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Series Title
• Series Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Television: Cultural Form and Politics
• Part II: The Listener Columns: Television Forms and Conventions
• Part III: An Interview with Raymond Williams
• Bibliography
• Index