Culture and Society : A Note on Tradition

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초록

πlÏs metacritical essay on one of the late Raymond Wil1iams’ major critical acllievements founds itself on a double sense of πaditíon : the "culture and society" tradítíon itself wllich Wil1iams fírst presented in its unique coherence, and,in keeping with Wil1iams’ own keen interest in pedagogícal polítícs, the tradítíon of teaclling tllis particular tradition of critícal discourse. At the same time,moreover, Wil1iams' signifícant lifework that uniquely stood at the converging points of diverse disciplines -- literary studies, media studies, linguistics, and social theory -- certainly demands in itself the kind of careful scrutiny due to a body of writing approaclling the status of a distinguished traditíon. But tllis is by no means to suggest that we should nail a canonizing lid on Williams' coffin. If anytlling,llis death should not close off the essentìal open-endedness of hìs works and their rich suggestíveness. Such insσuctive openness of his works ís what we aim to ìl1usσate by lìsting some key contradìctions that seem to guarantee paradoxically the very vitality of the tradition that he reconstructed in Culture and Society, llis fìrst m멍or publica다on. In our vìew, the areas of ambiguìtìes and impuritìes wìtllin the "culture and society" tradìtion disqualifies it as a closed, sanctìfied canon. Yet this is precis려y what makes it a vibrant tradition that ìs open not only to new pllilological or critical findíngs but to notlling less than the secular llistory outsìde the world of literary heritage itself.
We begin, then, in a properly Williamsian fasllion, with the key term of "culture," wllich is itself tom apart by two opposing meanings -- culture as a body of exceptionally representative textual relics and culture as what Williams calls "a whole way of life. 1I1) It is primarily in the former sense that the idea of culture links itself to the notion of tradition, in particular, that of a "great tradition"seπing as a monumental criterion and ground for understanding and assessing the identity of a particular cultural community. Obviously enough, the slightest emphasis on the coherence of a self-coherent heritage can easily lead to various forms of exclusion along the line of ethnic, class, or gender divides. For this reason, the idea of heritage (Erbsch야)， as Michel Foucault points out, needs to be balanced with the Nietzschean notion of Herku핸 (descent, derivation, provenance),so that we may "not be deceived into thinking that this heritage is an acquisition,a possession that grows and solidifies." Instead, Þoucault goes on, heritage should be conceived as "an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from underneath."2) The heterogeneous and dynamic instability of "culture and society" as a πadition，however, situates itself dialectically between the opposing poles not only of the two versions of culture, but also between "culture" and "society." If in the first opposition, the closure of literary or intellectual history is dismantled by the general "way of life" which at once envelops and eludes the cultured tradition, in the second opposition, "culture" is made to confront rival questions and claims which the problematic of "society" necessarily brings in. In a sense, the conflict between the two senses of culture can be seen to be a part or moment of the conflict between culture and society, for conceiving culture as "a whole way of life" is to indicate the point where "society" antagonizes the literary-textual sense of culture.

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