The Long Revolution Raymond Williams Analysis

1. This reading is an extract from the 1961 academic book ‘The Long Revolution’. Within this extract author Raymond Williams tries to define and categorise the term ‘culture’. He looks at typical definitions and general ways in which culture is defined, and analysis’s this in relation to his thoughts on the term. The main idea of the extract highlights the concept that culture is difficult to define. It seems that the definition can alter in relation to the text or area you are looking at, as well as a combination of elements of the social, ideal and documentary ideas (to name a few).
2. Williams begins the extract by stating what I feel is one of the main arguments within the text. He discusses the ‘three general categories in the definition

Considering this, I went over Williams previous discussion on the ‘ideal’ definition and instead considered it as a form of evolution instead of perfection.This I agreed was definitely a more realistic and understandable approach to define culture. In my opinion, I have always considered culture to be something that is ‘timeless’ yet changing and adapting with the times. This concept of timeless, adapting values and a ‘state or process of human’ evolution fits with my personal definition of culture.
4. Williams continues to highlight two other general categories for defining culture. One of which was the ‘documentary’ definition. This considers culture as the ‘body of intellectual and imaginative work’ where human ‘thought and experience are previously recorded’ and are therefore actively ‘described and valued’. I understood this ‘documentary’ definition as being in a way a historical definition reflecting and relating to the society in which the culture

He argued that the breaking up of social practices into autonomous categories and ascribing casual primacy to some and relegating others to the level of ‘effects’ was against Marx’s emphasis on ‘practical consciousness’. The concept, he further said,reduced the “social creation of real men in real relationships”to mere categories. He attacked the polarization of the lived experience of people into the economic, political and cultural spheres. Instead he spoke of seeing society as an indissoluble process which simultaneously integrated the economic, political and cultural practices. Williams argues for seeing literature primarily a social practice which is specific and situated within a complex of social practices. ‘Culture’, he argues, is itself a material activity and not an effect of superstructure which is caused by the economic base. ‘Cultural materialism’ has been chiefly responsible for the emergence of ‘culture studies’ as a distinct discipline in British Universities and also New Historicism in the US. The reason why Williams abandoned pure literary studies is because for him literature was not a privileged category but was one among the diverse cultural practices. His persistent argument has been that literary analysis cannot be undertaken in isolation form the issues of culture. And also, he saw ‘literature’ as a construct implicated in historical