1 - The missing keyword: Raymond Williams, Paul Valéry

Summary

To dismiss an individual because of his class, or to judge a relationship with him solely in class terms, is to reduce humanity to an abstraction. But, also, to pretend that there are no collective modes is to deny the plain facts.

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958: 327)

In the Conclusion to Culture and Society (1958), Raymond Williams reflected on potential misunderstandings of the nature of class and class consciousness. I pause these reflections here on a phrase: ‘reduce humanity to an abstraction’ (Williams 1958: 327). Williams has been arguing that class is ‘a collective mode and not a person’ and, accordingly, that it would be foolish to interpret individuals ‘in rigid class terms’. The phrase, ‘reduce humanity to an abstraction’, seems to have a familiar currency as a means of springing to the defence of the human. Surely we would all agree that humans are more than abstractions? There is, of course, a faultline, in that ‘humanity’ is itself already an abstraction, insofar as it is a generalisation; I would be tempted to say that we will let this pass, except that Williams's not-noticing of it matters. Williams clearly wants ‘humanity’ to signify individual human beings. Yet as his own consistent emphasis upon language as a historical entity was to demonstrate, we cannot simply make a word do what we would like it to do. In any case, Williams argues something supplementary: in signifying a collective mode such as ‘class’ or ‘humanity’, abstractions are just as plainly real things as are individual human beings. If those abstractions are at the same time reductive, does this mean – as Williams's seeming lack of self-consciousness about it might evidence – that it is part of our fate as human beings to abstract?

‘Culture’ was the keyword of Culture and Society's keywords (alongside class, industry, democracy and art), a term whose ownership was also fiercely at issue, and which was also, Williams felt, in danger of abstraction. As a means of signifying a ‘whole way of life’, culture had newly emerged in industrial society ‘as an abstraction and an absolute’ (we assume here that ‘abstraction’ and ‘absolute’ are not necessarily synonyms but are nevertheless semantically related) (Williams 1958: xviii).