13 Retro Keywords ... and Why They're Worth a Second Look

Art In what follows would like to examine the changing meanings and usages of the term (as well as the concept art) since Raymond Williams encapsulated its historical etymologies and political contexts in Keywords. Such a re-examination necessitates, think, a consideration of Williams's method in the 1970s, and what his materialism means or how it functions today. His conclusions regarding the status of must be placed in a historical context vis-a-vis twentieth-century Critical Theory and Marxism, for Williams's ideas inform or reproduce or anticipate the art world conceptualism of such theorists as Arthur C. Danto and Pierre Bourdieu. Williams's technique in Keywords was to trace a material history of words' meanings in usage. Or, rather, he was interested in words that contained in their history a conflict that was symptomatic of larger struggles. His most important methodological statement in Keywords may be where he links the semantic and the social: the issues could not all be understood simply by analysis of the words. On the contrary, most of the social and intellectual issues, including both gradual developments and the most explicit controversies and conflicts, persisted within and beyond the linguistic analysis. Yet many of these issues, found, could not really be thought through, and some of them, believe, cannot even be focused unless we are conscious of the words as elements of the problems. (16) Here we see Williams veering between the Scylla and Charybdis of twentieth-century Marxism: economism vs. idealism. At one extreme, we have the economism of Stalin, and at the other, cultural studies. (1) idealism in Williams is that which stretches from semiotics to cultural studies: by which Imean stressing the necessity of the letter, of the word. But Williams is hardly some Brit naif His semiotics comes via Volosinov/Bakhtin, (2) and thus he locates his idealism in a class situation: I was given the impression ... that these [differing uses of culture] arose mainly from the fact of an incomplete education (16). Williams's bourgeois interlocutor assumed people using the word culture in an anthropological sense were merely scholarship boys. William's sense of class struggle is also to be found in the anecdote which opens Keywords' Introduction, the origin if you will of the text: his return to Cambridge after military service (in a tank! like Billy Bragg!) during World War n. William's narratives are relevant because they place in a historical situation his methodology: looking at the meaning of keywords as a symptom of class struggle. This technique resolves momentarily the great Saussurean binary of synchrony and diachrony. For, while Williams never makes the historicist or of arguing that we know the etymology of the word when we use ft now, we are nonetheless using a word that arrives sedimented in those moments of dissension. As well, Williams is quite Bakhtinian in that he avoids Saussure's idealism by situating words in the moment of the utterance. i.e., the class structure that obtains to academic speech genres or habitaus. In Mikhail Bakhtin's essay The Problem of Speech Genres (60-102), not available in the West until the 1908, speech genres are conceived of at the level of the utterance, which exists in a social situation with the listener, much as the speaker, integral to the process (since utterances are marked or framed by a change in speaking subject). As we will see below, such a dialectical theory of the use of language is particularly pertinent in the case of art, which exists in a similar binary relationship between the aesthete and the philistine-or what Adorno, using an imperial vocabulary, called the barbarian (r-44). In spite of all this heady pedigree, or, rather, because of it, Williams's method is no longer radical; it has become mainstream even while its politics, and its theory, have been dropped. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.