Raymond Williams

“Clearly there is something in the psychology of print and image that none of us has yet quite grasped.” Raymond Williams says this after discussing his family’s ability to appreciate “culture”. Their finesse of feeling, quick discrimination, and clear grasp of ideas are evidence of what he calls the false equation of the “badness” of popular culture as a reflection of the mental development of its consumers. In other words, all human beings are able to appreciate art, which has the mysterious quality that engages perceivers regardless of their education, class, religion, time etc…And what remains constant before all these viewers throughout history? Form. But that is a topic for another day. Back to the text.

Williams’ argument that culture is always traditional and creative and made up of both ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings makes sense, especially when you apply this definition to literature. First, tradition is part of a text not in the form of a fixed past but one that is also continuously being rewritten to create new narratives in the present. Secondly, literature engages individuals as part of a common humanity that is in a continual process of development.

While Williams accepts the Marxist theory that there is a strong relationship between culture and production, and that education is restricted to a privileged few, he rejects the notion that there is an ignorant mass of working class people that are excluded from a dying English culture. The Marxists demand a different system of production that can save English culture. However, argues William, culture cannot be prescribed as it is made and remade (organically he might say today) by people who are living. Literature, as we have discussed in class, is always in a process creation.

Williams goes on to disprove several myths about the effects of the development of industrial society. First, he rejects the idea that the price we must pay for economic power and is a “cheapened” culture. Second, he does not agree that commercial culture is a product of popular education, i.e. now that “the masses are educated” culture is going out the window. There are no masses; it is only a word for othering people. In fact, there were just as many trashy newspapers before public education, and there is much more good literature in circulation today.

Finally, Williams calls for a common education that will foster a socialist democratic community whose cultural institutions enrich the lives of ordinary people.

I really enjoyed this reading. His understanding of culture as a continual process that gives agency to individuals and communities, a process that cannot be planned by ideology, describes the conversation that literature forces us to engage in without losing our subjectivity.

Auras from Forms

I am trying to understand what the aura of a work of art is. Benjamin explains that modernity has changed the way we perceive art. In particular, the mechanical reproduction of art has resulted in the loss of the aura. It seems that auras in art only occur when a work is authentic, original and not reproduced, and this is the reason films as reproductions of images do not have them. I have difficulty grasping this idea because I keep thinking of films that Benjamin would consider inauthentic works of art but that I feel that do not aestheticize politics to support a fascist cause.

Trinh Minh-ha’s film Reassemblage would be a good example of politicized art that is original while at the same time reproducible. Films that document daily life have a certain realist aesthetic that engages the audience’s intellect and sensory perceptions in the same way that they are employed in life. Trinh Minh-ha’s film appears to meet Benjamin’ definition of “auraless” art. In her film, Trinh focuses on the mundane and the natural rhythms of a Senegalese village without resorting to the gloss of a didactic ethnographic documentary of the National Geographic kind. There is no voice-over of the traditional ethnographer’s film that tells the audience what to think, and nothing is explained to provoke a particular response in the viewer. Images are woven into a collage of rhythms that we decipher with our senses, so that rather than simply watching the scenes we experience them. She doesn’t produce what Banjamin calls “reception in distraction” or entertainment founded on shock effects. The audience members are left to experience a Senegalese village as if they were there, and to make any conclusions on their own terms. The resulting effect negates the stereotype of the Western anthropologist who has unlocked the secrets of an Other primitive culture. We are presented with a world that exists independently of the West in a form of art that ‘reproduces’ life to show its lack of any one truth.

Trinh’s art entices the viewer into considering the existence of a multiplicity of possible realities in flux. Her editing skills create the form of her work, which is inseparable from the film’s content. As in any art form, the ORIGINAL shaping of the raw footage IS the content of the film.

So we are back to form. The more I read, the more I like the idea that art is form is art. Whatever art does, it all starts with how its form triggers the conversation among the perceiver(s).