Cultural Studies

ISSN: 0950-2386 (Print) 1466-4348 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20

Popular culture: history and theory

Raymond Williams

To cite this article: Raymond Williams (2018) Popular culture: history and theory, Cultural Studies,
32:6, 903-928, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2018.1521620

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2018.1521620

Published online: 09 Oct 2018.

Submit your article to this journal

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcus20
CULTURAL STUDIES
2018, VOL. 32, NO. 6, 903–928
https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2018.1521620

Popular culture: history and theory

Raymond Williams†

You must first forgive me for coming from an old-fashioned university where
the notion of collaborative discussion of an intellectual project is so bizarre
that you must first forgive my inexperience. And also I feel, since you are
already well into the discussion of this project, that it is a bit like bringing
coals to Newcastle – even if one is a collier. However, obviously this interests
me because, in a way, it is a very important moment. The interest in what is
loosely called ‘popular culture’ has been so marked since the 1950s, for
obviously very crucial reasons, that it really is time – but perhaps it needed
this time – to bring it into a focus which is not simply picking up the obviously
widespread interest in an ill-defined group of phenomena, but of trying to
develop something that is properly an educational discipline.
The difficulty of doing this in England, specifically I think, is that although it
is the case that the English contribution to thinking about popular culture is
probably considerably in advance of that in most comparable cultures, for
different reasons this is nevertheless an anti-theoretical culture and, in a
way, a lot of the work has gone ahead without an awareness even that theor-
etical questions are involved. The distinction of different theoretical
approaches, for example, which is very necessary, is however a distinction
between things which are in some cases genuine theory – or what is
offered as a theory – and other things which are really not much more than
empirical generalizations, or even presumptions, which the analyst may disen-
tangle as theory but, if he did, he would probably be disavowed by the
authors. This unevenness of theory and the different kinds of approach to
what popular culture is, is one of the very first problems.
If I can illustrate this with the notion of culture itself, that uniquely difficult
theoretical term. On the one hand, one tendency presents no problems
because it presents culture as a body of practices with is neither immediately
practical in the sense of producing immediately usable commodities, nor
attached to a cult in the sense of being a body of ritual practices attached
to a unitary and dominant set of meanings. Culture is a body of practices
which has to do with meanings and values within this tendency. It is therefore

†
Transcript of talk given at the Open University on 23rd May, 1978. Talk and discussion edited by Tony
Bennett; transcribed and copy-edited by Nathan Bedsole, March 2018.
© Estate of Raymond Williams 2018. All rights reserved.
904 R. WILLIAMS

a body of artistic and intellectual work and a body of related practices which
necessarily move into things which are not specifically intellectual or artistic,
but which carry meaning and value. This grouping clearly corresponds to the
notion of culture as a ‘way of life’ and, whatever the detailed theoretical pro-
blems with this tendency, one knows the area that one is talking about.
However at the same time, within the definition of culture itself there is a
very strong tendency – and, indeed, in terms of historical development it has
priority – in which culture is precisely the development of certain higher fac-
ulties which are then, from the beginning and in principle, distinguished from
a whole range of other everyday activities. There is the cultivation of a certain
kind of rather rare mental, intellectual, artistic, spiritual development so that,
even in a term like ‘culture,’ you have what is a radical theoretical divergence
but one that it is not too easy, in an a-theoretical culture, to bring to that clear
definition.
If you add the difficult word ‘popular,’ then you are immediately in difficul-
ties. For, on the one hand, the latter kind of definition of culture would exclude
it altogether. Culture would, by definition, not be an activity of a popular kind.
Whether or not culture is associated with a particular exclusive or reserved
class, by definition, if it were this refining activity of a rather rare kind, it
would be excluded from anything that could be called ‘popular.’ On the
other hand, if you associate it with the notion of a body of practices carrying
meaning and value, then the question is whether ‘popular’ means anything
more than that in which many people are involved – whether actively or pas-
sively – or whether it is simply something that is widely distributed. And it is
well-known that, following this sort of tendency, people have adopted the
notion of popular culture to refer to something in which many people are
involved as a distinct entity which can be separated from what is then
‘invented’ to preserve some of the sense of the terms of the theoretical ten-
dencies embodied in the notion of high culture, and to have the principle dis-
tinction between popular culture and high culture, which has been the
assumption for so long.
Now, if you look at the bodies of work that bear on the resolution of these
questions, some of them are theoretical and some, as I began by saying, are
not really much more than generalized observations or assumptions that
people bring to the study. It seems to me that there is no way of breaking
this knot except historically. If you examine popular culture at any level of
empirical observation – what was the audience of a particular art, shall we
say, at any particular period – you would find that it is intrinsic that there
are radical variations in what kinds of art were enjoyed by what kinds of audi-
ence. It is simply not possible to adapt to a supra-historical scheme the notion,
that is to say, of a body of highly important work which is always enjoyed by a
minority and a body of different work, whether valuable or not, which is
enjoyed by a majority. It is simply not possible to adapt to that scheme
 CULTURAL STUDIES 905

such varied phenomena as, for example, the Elizabethan and Jacobean
theatre, the eighteenth and nineteenth century novel or, to move into a
more contentious area, the twentieth century film.
In other words, the application of an a priori theoretical distinction between
minority and majority art (which carries pre-given distinctions and values) is
an act of faith and an act of will – an act of will really against the historical evi-
dence. And one says this even while one is aware how inadequate are the
simply populist conclusions which might be drawn from it. The popular
nature of the Elizabethan audience for what is, after all, one of the great
moments of all in cultural production is a highly specific one and a very
brief one and a precarious one. You can’t assume that there is some norm
in human history and human culture by which all high art is of a generally
available kind so long as certain nameable interests do not obstruct it.
Some people want to defend that proposition; again, it is an act of faith or
an act of will much like the other. In the case of Elizabethan drama, it is as
remarkable that it was a very brief moment in which there was a genuinely
popular and mixed audience for work we now recognize as some of the
highest art ever produced in the world; it is as relevant that it is a brief
phenomenon as that it is that kind of phenomenon, the kind of phenomenon
that breaks down superficial presumptions that there is a permanent distinc-
tion between high and popular art.
Nevertheless, as you begin to look at these historical cases, you realize the
need for theory and, there again, you come across this unevenness that I men-
tioned. Really, I suppose, there are only two contending bodies of theory
which you could call truly theoretical, which have been worked out at the
level of principles as well as of examples. These are, first, the kind of study
of certain societies and cultural institutions and practices which see an intrin-
sically, historically variable relationship between artistic and cultural practice
and the rest of social life which presumes no regular relations between
these, whether of a minority or a majority kind. That’s one body of theory,
and the other body of theory is that which supposes that all cultures are at
any time, in any epoch, basically the production of the dominant class and
that whatever interests or attitudes or values may be, so to say, co-opted
from an area beyond that dominant class, popular culture is always, and
must be, the culture of the dominant class transmitted in an accessible
form. I may be wrong, but my sense of theory is that really only those two
interpretations are in the field. That is not to say that certain very important
positions aren’t held which are quite different from both of those. But
these, I think, are not really at the level of theory. I mean, I don’t think there
is really much theorization at the level of the proposition that important
culture is always that of a minority and that popular culture is always a kind
of threat to the standards of that minority culture. It’s a very well-known,
deeply held, elegantly-argued, richly exemplified tradition, but it is not a
906 R. WILLIAMS

theory. It has never been argued theoretically that this is so. The nearest to a
theoretical approach in that way, I suppose, was Eliot,1 but it is not a theory in
the same sense.
So, I would have thought that you cannot, at the level of teaching in this
sort of area, simply review theoretical positions and compare them with
each other pedagogically, as it were, if only because the positions are so
different in kind. Some really are theoretical, some are just a bundle of empiri-
cal generalizations, others again are prejudices and presumptions. A strict
theoretical comparison would not, it seems to me, be necessarily the right
thing to do. But, once one begins to realize the very varied area of historical
fact to which some of these theories and generalizations speak, then, I think, I
at least can distinguish something which marks out an area that ought to be
distinct and coherent which leaves all the theoretical issues open to argument
but which does not require their prior solution.
This may be optimistic, but it seems to me to be so, and my position is that
there is a radical, qualitative change in the relation between anything that can
be called ‘high culture’ and anything which could be called ‘popular culture’
somewhere in the English eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The period
varies in different societies; that is where it is in England. However, the
reasons for that being the period of qualitative change involve one in all
sorts of theoretical problems. It is a period of very rapidly expanding and shift-
ing class relations; it is a period of highly developed technology, including cul-
tural technology; it is a period of development of democratic political
institutions which are quite closely involved with some of these develop-
ments. The explanatory causes leave plenty of room for debate, but the quali-
tative change there does seem to me to be real and I think it is the first time, in
fact, that people begin to talk about popular culture as an issue. This does not
mean, of course, that before this period there was some kind of unified
culture. But I would argue strongly that there is a qualitative difference
between the relations between popular culture and other kinds of culture
from, say, the early nineteenth century in England on, and the relations
before that date between the culture of the court or the culture of an orga-
nized metropolis and, on the other hand, the culture of the country or the
folk or the various manifestations in which this other activity is defined. I
mean that there is a radically qualitative difference in the relations between
popular culture and whatever its opposite or alternative is and folk culture
and court culture which have precise social locations which influence each
other but which, nevertheless, are quite differently situated socially from any-
thing which we have known since that transforming early nineteenth century
situation.
I suppose one ought immediately to specify some of the ways in which this
is qualitatively new. First, I would have thought, is that popular culture from
this period is self-evidently novel. It is continually productive rather than
 CULTURAL STUDIES 907

reproductive. It’s an obvious characteristic of folk culture that it is highly

reproductive and, in that sense, traditional just because it has those precise
social roots. In a very different kind of society, the popular culture is produced;
it includes as much novelty, as a matter of fact, as anything you could
provisionally call the high culture. It includes new institutions, new relation-
ships of cultural use in new cultural forms. These are as clear as the new
forms and any new relationships in what might be distinguished as the
high cultural field.
I mean, to take a couple of examples, that the melodrama in the nineteenth
century is as much a new form as anything that happens in nineteenth-
century culture. This has nothing to do with its value or its ultimate impor-
tance in human history, but it is radically different from some reproduced tra-
ditional cultural activity within the folk. The melodrama is written in new ways,
for new audiences, in new institutions. There is nothing like it in the culture
used by the majority of the people in earlier periods. At the same time, and
this is really what I think deepens one’s sense of the qualitative change, the
relation between the melodrama and what is happening at the level of
what some people separate out as the high culture is itself a very complex
one. The relation between Dickens and the melodrama would be a very
obvious example. In the same way, the music hall is not some timeless
phenomenon of the natural cheerfulness and health and vitality of the
people. The music hall is a very precise product of a very specific open situ-
ation of a novel kind and incidentally of changes at the level of the official
theatre in the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate theatre and
the way those were changing through changes in the law. And the material
that poured into the music hall, although it has many precedents, also
includes quite novel elements which relate to this unprecedented situation
of people living in social relations, human settlements and therefore
general cultural situations which were, the majority of them, quite
unprecedented.
In other words, the location of popular culture as a proposition, as a mean-
ingful description rather than a kind of residual category for things which have
not made the grade as serious culture is, in that sense, historically related to a
set of precise conditions which had major elements of novelty and which
included novel cultural production. If this is so, I would have thought that
what particularly followed from it is that a useful approach to educational dis-
cussion of popular culture is that one should be at least as much concerned
with these novelties and their conditions as with – as tended to happen in
the first stage of the study of popular culture – their presumed ‘effects’ or
with their implied contrast with more received and recognizable traditional
forms. It really was desperate that for 15 or 20 years nobody could look at tele-
vision, that extraordinary source of novelty of form, without wondering
whether it was damaging the children. It was always the question whether
908 R. WILLIAMS

it was damaging the children which was the polite form of the question of
whether it was damaging anyone else – a much harder question to ask.
People talked about ‘effects’ before they had even begun to look at causes
and you got a certain prejudicial tone towards this from the beginning that
you were examining an evidently deleterious phenomenon which you must
study as to its ‘effects’ by reference to some actually assumed norm.
I don’t want to go into too much detail, but it is very instructive to follow
the story of the study of violence on television. The problem is not that there is
not a great deal of mimed violence on television, but that there is really a lot of
room for argument about its forms and its meanings. But what was very
curious was that people were studying this as if the introduction of violence
and the meanings of violence into the culture had been really undertaken by
this medium, as if either there was no violence in the culture otherwise –
which is rather improbable given the dates of the television phenomena –
or that there had not been other kinds of dramatizations of violence. What I
mean is that, and this is what I meant also by the unevenness of theory,
people get on to the deleterious effects of this – and indeed there are
many – from the presumption that, because this fell outside the definition
of what was known to be culture, that was the necessary way in which to
approach it. And the poor victims, as always, were the children – the one
body of people you can look upon as open to influence and as needing to
be guarded without raising any of the more difficult issues about what collec-
tive responsibility in cultural practice might be.
So, the notion of the study of the production and the study of novelty and
the study of the conditions of this production and novelty – this, I must say,
would be the most valuable emphasis that I would have thought could
come through. Like all sorts of things, you will not find that the novelties
have no history. But you will find that there are significant moments at
which they are changed, either by being in a new set of relations with an audi-
ence or by being adapted to a new particular technology, and some of the
studies of what happens to certain of these things as they go through
these changes are very important.
The example which preoccupies me at the moment, because I have done
some teaching on it, is what one loosely calls police fiction. It is quite clear that
it is a really singular phenomenon of this culture that people watch so many
mimed crimes – really rather more mimed crimes than detection of crimes the
way things are now going. This can be treated at a very crude level as sex and
violence on television as in ‘what is it doing to the children?’ Actually, even
from year to year on television, there is the production of novel crime
fiction forms. In the last two years, let me just give this as a challenging
example, we have had the cop who is totally indistinguishable, except for
the most basic preliminary information that he is a cop, from any villain,
and in particular the detective inspector who behaves like the most way-
 CULTURAL STUDIES 909

out private eye. This is a phenomenon of the last two years: the novel pro-
duction of the law upholder who is visibly and literally the law breaker.
Now, I take that just as a local example in what is a very long history of the
development of crime, detective and police fiction in various media since
the mid-nineteenth century and it is very much a phenomenon of this new
society where one is not merely, in a melancholy way, studying this deleter-
ious eruption of low-grade interest in crime or the possible effects of violence,
but studying the production of certain meanings – including certain meanings
which are profoundly destructive, in my view, as well as meanings which are
very challenging – and studying it as production.
In other words, what seems to me to follow from the identification of this,
the ‘popular culture’ category in this historical sense, is that one will primarily
be studying production and conditions of production. And, that being so, one
is studying the body of cultural practices and forms and institutions without
the need for apology – I think that is rather important – but with a rather
new set of problems. It is quite clear that the problems of value which are
actually in the end just as difficult as in, for example, a straight literature or
history of art course, but where there is at least not the ritualized deference
before the art object to carry one over the real difficulties of questions of
value as one approaches work of this kind.
I think it would be much better, actually, if we discussed this rather than me
go on talking, but I wanted to point in a certain direction. As I say, you have
probably already either pointed yourselves towards it or in some quite other,
much more thoroughly thought-out direction, and if so, I would be glad to
hear. But production and conditions of production, within a historically ident-
ifiable body of practices and cultural relations – that is what, I think, a popular
culture course now needs to be. That is what would distinguish it from the
kinds of treatment it has, in the most general ways, had before. This is what
would be the educational challenge, and this is what would seem to immedi-
ately encourage a wide variety of skills because there are many skills and dis-
ciplines which contribute to that definition.

Discussion
Tony Aldgate:2
I obviously don’t know which particular two television crime series you were
talking about. I can think of several, perhaps, which may or may not be the
right ones. But where is the novelty, say, in a serial like Baretta, where the
central character is indistinguishable from the man he is trying to hunt on
the streets, and a mid-50’s film like The F.B.I. where the F.B.I. agent is physically
indistinguishable from the men in the underworld he is trying to infiltrate?
Where is the novelty in crime fiction?
910 R. WILLIAMS

Raymond Williams:
Well that is in itself, of course, a novelty. If you look at the earliest examples of
this genre you first of all get a very curious ambiguity between amateur and
professional which is itself very important. But, given the resolution of that –
that of, broadly, the gentleman detective and the plodding professional, the
man out of uniform and the master of disguise and the man who is always pre-
senting himself visibly as the law – given that ambiguity, then the distinction
between the law as more than nominal, the law really as a body of right
conduct, and the crime as the body of breeches of that conduct has been
visibly tested and pushed, in certain cases, to breakdown. The date of the
emergence of these forms requires more precise study. The thing that
struck me was that you had reached a new point in the particular series I
was teaching at Cambridge last autumn, which was Target, where you actually
had a detective superintendent or whatever rank he held – it really hardly mat-
tered – who was a psychopath.3 This really was a new situation. This kind of
testing, much of it unconscious, of the notions of law and the notions of crim-
inal behaviour and the notions of enforcement and the notions of the relations
between law enforcement and revenge and all similar, related questions really
is new. I don’t know of any comparable testing of these issues in what would
be distinguished as serious writing since, I would have thought, Conrad. The
point is that they are not tested, and this is what makes the critical problem
difficult at what you might call an analytic or even a very analyzable level. I
think this is a very great problem of teaching work of this kind. You often
have to deduce from the form an altered set of relations which, in a
different kind of cultural work, in Dostoyevsky for example, would be specifi-
cally activated inside the work itself, so that you would have much more to
point at. That is why, undoubtedly, it is harder to teach Target than to teach
Dostoyevsky. Because teaching which has to deduce or to infer or to extrap-
olate – which you have to with Target, unless you are to say it’s rubbish and
not teach it at all – is really much harder than the teaching of Dostoyevsky
where the material is producible.
Alright, that is a difference of level, and one should not overlook it. But the
novelty is still there. You asked how that differed from a case in the 50’s. That
would be a matter of the precise history when one saw this arising. But highly
novel forms have arisen through what has been really regarded throughout as
popular culture production and not through the business of creating new
forms. The presumption was that popular culture was a kind of dustbin of
high culture which went on repeating its worn-out and discarded forms in
a weakened way. Of course there is some popular culture of which that
might be true, but there are other areas where ‘novelty’ is the right word. In
any case, if the emphasis is on production and the conditions of production
rather than on categorical presumptions or on subsequent effects, then one
could tackle those questions.
 CULTURAL STUDIES 911

Vic Lockwood:4
To go back to the particular instance you raised. Isn’t it the case that in the
50’s, when a policeman was identified as a villain, it was nearly always pre-
sented as an aberrant case and that the real change over the last two years
is that policemen who appear to be behaving in aberrant forms are now
accepted as a kind of normality which you can tie up to various changes in
popular consciousness about the behaviour of the police?

Raymond Williams:
Well, I find it difficult to know what you can tie it up to because I think that
some of the implicit propositions of these forms, if they were made very con-
scious and explicit, might be rejected by a lot of people who nevertheless
accept the forms. I think this is one of the great problems in working on
popular culture. But that the change happened is certainly true. The relation
between these novelties and changing social conditions has, I think, to be
brought down rather precisely onto questions of who the actual contributors
in each case are. One never knows this. But nothing is more clear now than
that the most popular culture these days is being produced by people with
a University education. This is in itself a different phenomenon. People who
have read English – rather often at Cambridge – often write these series, as
you can tell from the occasional in-joke on Proust which turns up in the
most surprising context. But, and this is one of the perennial problems in
the analysis of popular culture, whether these changes reflect a shift in
public attitudes or merely a shift within these really rather highly-structured
institutions between who is the producer or the head of drama on that run
and which particular people he has involved is often difficult to disentangle.
What is equally significant about Target, of course, is that it was taken off after
a very short run; it was much disliked. Of course you don’t have to get into
that, but this is a detail within the emphasis on popular culture as production
rather than as some mysterious emanation from the many-headed beast.
Because that, after all, is not theory. But this is often the nearest to a theoreti-
cal presumption that you can get from a lot of attention to popular culture:
namely, that it is a mysterious emanation from the many-headed beast and
that when nasty things are seen on television this is some index of an immedi-
ate and visible kind of the state of the popular mind. Anybody who knows
anything about how television programmes get on ought to be skeptical
about this argument.

Susan Boyd-Bowman:5
I don’t see how you can draw conclusions about changes in form only by
looking at conditions of production. I can understand your criticisms of
‘effects’ studies, but isn’t there some notion of the way audiences read
these things which is also important in determining or thinking about how
912 R. WILLIAMS

audiences think of Dirty Harry in Don Segal’s film as being different from
police detectives who have gone before? Don’t you think that there is
scope for looking at the ways in which these things are consumed as well
as produced?

Raymond Williams:
I agree entirely, but the great problem with that is whether it is a quite open
enquiry or whether it is checking-off against a presumed norm. This is what I
notice in the studies of violence, for example. The presumption in a lot of
studies of violence on television was that everybody who was watching it dis-
approved of violence. And this seems to be a very curious presumption – it
may be a desirable position, but a very curious presumption – given the
actual epoch in which the studies occurred. But it was the norm, and it
even prevented what I think really are necessary studies of how people
read such forms and respond to them. It was like the studies of the effects
of political party broadcasts on voting intentions. The disguised norm was
that people voted either Labour or Conservative and a few voted Liberal
and any deviation from that norm was something that you had to check
against the incidence of party political broadcasting. But whether that is a
norm of political attitude or behaviour remained entirely to be established.
So yes, if you can find a way to do it, it is a very interesting thing to think
about: really how these things are read, how these things are used. But this is
where I made the bad joke about the children. It was precisely that people
would not study the effect on themselves and that children were a convenient
thing to put in front of you as this vulnerable group. I am not criticizing some
of the attitudes involved in this – they are a vulnerable group of people – but it
was a way of not studying one’s own reading of these situations which really,
on these questions, is much more relevant.
And, of course, it is harder to do. In studying production and conditions of
production, one has some immediately accessible evidence. Whilst I am sure
there are available methods for the study of consumption, the most usual one
is assuming the norm and then testing, by questionnaire or whatever,
whether there has been any deviance from that norm as a result of the inci-
dence of this particular kind of production. Given the area in which most
culture (let alone popular culture, specifically) operates, the notion of these
assumable norms is really surely very difficult. We simply don’t know what
people’s sexual norms are before they see this or that presentation of a par-
ticular sexual relationship. This sort of thing has yet to be established, and I
have wanted for years to see somebody really trying – with something of
the precision of certain experiments in experimental psychology – to discover
what is actually observed and remembered, applying these methods with
some precision to certain other things of this kind for which there is no com-
parable, close data.
 CULTURAL STUDIES 913

Ken Thompson:6
One might argue that there is some in sociology. Sociologists do study different
sub-groups, cultures, and the generation of cultures – whether the sub-groups
are age groups, deviant groups of various kinds, sexual, for example, or what-
ever you want to think of. My fear is that your definition of popular culture
boils down so much that we are going to finish up analyzing different cases
without any empirically validated connections between them.

Raymond Williams:
Yes, but really this is an alteration of theoretical direction from the way most of
the tendencies went. I think that wherever one can see some particular corre-
lation between a definable social group and a particular cultural form, then
one should feel very fortunate because it would be a particularly definable
case. But obviously, to a very considerable extent, popular culture has the
quality of leaping over the differentiated groups, at a certain level, of
meeting at least a temporary interest of groups otherwise very much unlike
each other. That is why you have to look at the conditions of production as
well as the conditions of consumption: because in some cases the conditions
of consumption would simply yield a merely miscellaneous return. In analyz-
ing the audience for Kojak,7 for example, you don’t find some group – whether
of bald-headed, sentimental, elderly gentlemen, or the object of their atten-
tions or lovers in New York – but, on the apparent evidence, a rather undiffer-
entiated social group, and you can’t infer the form from the group. Equally,
however, you are quite right to say – if the presumption from that is that
this is merely a passive audience – that, of course, this is not true. Because
it is crucial to that kind of production that the market research operates,
that the follow-up research operates, and that series are put on or taken off
in really quite close relation to the way in which responses have been col-
lected and analyzed. Sure.

Ken Thompson:
There is a kind of assumption that one is effete, though, that a sub-group is
effete and that the mass media are overwhelming. Just because Kojak is
shown nationwide and we admire him, or people tell us we should admire
him because they are closely related to the people who publish the newspa-
pers who say we should admire him as well, it is often argued that sub-groups
and sub-cultures are effete and that the mass-publicised culture is over-
whelming and will therefore certainly deaden them and condition them.

Raymond Williams:
That’s a very good argument against somebody else. It is precisely not what I
am arguing. But, you see, this brings me back to my point. There is no entity
you can call Kojak. Anyone who has watched the current series of Kojak knows
914 R. WILLIAMS

that it is qualitatively different, with a merely nominal continuity, from the

Kojak of two years ago. I would very much like to know why. There has
been a radical difference of form which just happens to have the continuity
of the same name and the same actor.
Now, you can establish that by getting at forms. But if you are saying ‘what
do people really take from it?’ it has always seemed to me, and this is the first
thing that got me interested thirty years ago in any of these questions, that
presumptions were being made about people I knew and the way they
responded to and used the material which, while they were abundant in lit-
erature, never seemed to be observable in any single empirical case. I never
met anybody who responded like these presumed projections. But, surely,
that was just the result of taking the thing, from the beginning, as a degraded
form of activity which found its natural home in a degraded, inattentive, not
very bright, distracted or whatever audience.
Now, I would not want to present the populist alternative to that by
arguing that the television public is alert, critical, discriminating and so on. I
don’t think it is. I know I’m not, so I see no particular hope of there being a
very large number of other people who are. But the other presumption
carried a particular methodology, and that’s all I’m after: namely, that you
could deduce the response from the most external analysis of the form. If it
was about crime, it meant that people who were either bored with their mis-
erable little lives or who had some unhealthy interest in deviant activity were
the obvious recipients of the presumed degraded activity. People never ask
the same questions, at that stage, as they asked about the reader of Crime
and Punishment and even if, in the end, you have to make certain important
distinctions of the kind I indicated earlier between the reader of Crime and
Punishment or the watcher of Kojak or Target, you don’t have to start by pre-
suming that you need not discuss the form because it is merely predeter-
mined by the nature of that kind of audience.

Graham Martin:8
On the value question which you touched on briefly, one of the traditional
approaches – which I certainly have inherited, coming to it from the Leavis,
Denys Thompson, ‘Some Uses of English’ background – has been very
much concerned with the issue of value. There are hostile and sympathetic
approaches to popular culture from this angle, but for both of them the
issue of value has been very critical. You touched on it at little while ago
when you said the difference between Dostoyevsky and some of the Target
material was that the character of Dostoyevsky was to make explicit and
aware and articulate within the work the kind of value structure which the
novelist was adopting, more or less consciously, whereas when you are
trying to talk about Target or the Sweeny or Kojak or whatever, you have
got to do a great deal of spelling out. As a descriptive remark, that would
 CULTURAL STUDIES 915

seem to be pretty straightforward and it would be fairly easy to demonstrate

that when talking about the intrinsic form and qualities of the different kinds
of work. I wonder what you have to say about the traditional value judgment
usually attached to this intrinsic formal difference. Is that a distinction you
would still, by and large, accept? Would you still attach a difference of value
to the difference between traditional high culture and other forms of
culture, whether or not innovative in the way you have described melodrama
and some forms of police fictionale?
I only ask that question because, in discussing it with other people, I have
often found myself in a sort of bind because, when I have argued that there
are great works in the past which are more important and worth spending
more time on than some popular culture, it has been assumed that I have
been adopting an institutionalized cultural frame by saying that there really
was a thing called ‘high culture’ which, after a great deal of teaching about
it, really invited richer deference than these objects. What I wanted to
argue is that there is a form of literary criticism and literary teaching which
does not at all involve ritual deference but which nonetheless may want to
say that it is more important to spend time with Crime and Punishment than
it is with certain forms of popular culture.

Raymond Williams:
Well, it is a very difficult question, of course, but I would say this: first, I do not
think that there is any special value attaching to traditional high culture. I
think there is a very great value attaching to works which get classified in
that way which, at the time, are not at all traditional. I really would want to
make that distinction. Crime and Punishment is really a very odd and original
work in its time; but it is not the traditional novel of that time. I think the
examples of reproduction of received high culture forms which now
contend, as it were, between Radio 3 and Radio 4 or parts of BBC 2 and
parts of ITV, really cannot summon Crime and Punishment or whatever to
their aid. A Lawrence Durrell travelogue is just plain worse, in spite of its lit-
erary chat, than even an Alan Whicker travelogue.9 It really is. I am trying to
go as low as I can, and Durrell is below that, although it gets intruded
because there is various chat about the sacred objects.
But the real difference is that actually very little within this category we are
going, for the moment, to call ‘high culture’ since the nineteenth century, has
been in received forms. It really has been in most places, itself, complex, inno-
vative work of a disturbing kind and I certainly don’t want to be reduced to the
absurd kind of argument which maintains that there is some merit in, for
example, melodramas contemporary with Dostoyevsky or with Dickens
which makes them in some way more novel. However, what is very interesting
you see is that, in the first place, I don’t think there could have been Dos-
toyevsky and Dickens if there had not been that particular popular form of
916 R. WILLIAMS

melodrama. I think it was a crucial element, but by no means the only

element, in the formation of those extraordinary original and permanent
works. And whilst the way you put the matter very carefully is acceptable,
something very like it and often confused with it would not be. Because it
is entirely a matter of the way these things are raised. And that is where, it
seems to me, that you come up against the most practical problem. It is
true, I think, what I said earlier: that there is more to produce from Crime
and Punishment to resolve this very difficult question of how a story of a
young man hitting an old lady over the head with an axe and happening
to kill a second one because he gets disturbed is different from works that
one could take as merely sensational involving the same incidents. You can
produce this and see what is involved and what issues are there not by infer-
ence, but as part of the working of the work.
That is both a difference which is there in the works, but I think it is also a
difference – and this, you mentioned Leavis, was the importance of that whole
Leavis moment – that this was a way of reading those works which had, to
some extent, to be discovered. It was by no means evident, really, before
that kind of critical analysis became developed, and developed in a sense
that not only an occasional genius like Coleridge could do it but that
almost anyone could be taught it. This was the most interesting thing,
doing it with a bunch of bright undergraduates last autumn, of just finding
a way of talking about the sequence of something as simple as Target. Just
to talk, not of whether there is anything to produce but of, having produced
it, how you produce the evidence, how you say: ‘look, this is not just my extra-
polation from this, this really is happening.’ There is a vocabulary here which,
however, you can’t simply spell out by going back over and picking certain
key words, certain key rhythms, certain apparent themes. To be able to
analyze this, whether or not it is an uncomplicated and indifferent work,
there is a problem of being able to read that, and to produce one’s demon-
stration that one has been reading it and not free associating with it.
It really was the case, although we have all now received it, that it did take a
couple of generations of very hard study and discussion and educational prac-
tice to reach the state where, to people of normal ability, this practice could be
learned. Until we are in a position that that practice can be learned for work of a
different kind, where the problems of reading and production of evidence are
quite different – and they really are different: to analyze a sequence of that kind
in the same way that one would analyze the description of Mrs. Verdoc killing
her husband which, I take it, is a relevant example because, as has often been
pointed out, it is very filmic; you can go back through that paragraph and you
can pick out the words, the moments, the rhythms, the certain sentences, the
images; you can show how that episode is built up, you can read it10 – to be able
to read a comparable moment in a film or a television play, that is something
that you have to learn and learn collaboratively.
 CULTURAL STUDIES 917

When you have learned, then at least you can tackle the questions of value,
and I am sure we wouldn’t disagree about that. We would certainly find that
there were works of a great deal more substance and, in that sense, a great
deal more value, a great deal more interest to others. But you would, if you
were doing that, be doing the equivalent of what was being done when
that method of reading was being applied to literature in the 20’s. You
would be making the difference between the ritual response of ‘I know it’s
a great poem because it’s by John Donne,’ which Richards blew up in their
faces.11 They did not know once they were not told it was by Donne.
In these cases the danger is, as of the Establishment then, that they knew in
advance which works were good and bad and, therefore, it was a case of
finding out more about them in a sort of contextual way. You did not have
to go into them: you knew about them and you had but to receive their
value and study their context. I think you would have to go into this work
because I certainly find that you will get the occasional play in a police
series – I am taking examples from television – and the occasional comedy
which is of a good deal more dramatic worth than examples of something
that is more recognizable, particularly that dreadful run of plays in the 50’s
which, to simplify, were written about groups of friends in Chelsea who hap-
pened to be called Jason and Medea and Orestes. Truly, any of the first epi-
sodes of Z-Cars12 is much higher culture by any criteria you want to take
than those Chelsea-Jason concoctions.
That is always the danger with received culture: that people see something
which looks like Crime and Punishment or whatever, and they know that that is
more important than the others. The whole positive tendency that came out
of the Leavis phase in response to popular culture could not, by its generation
I think, really begin to enter that popular culture world which was not socially
its own and which it was bound to see as the behaviour of the natives. There
was really no possibility of the first generation seeing it as other than the
behaviour of the natives. But, what they contributed positively was the per-
ception that these distinctions are real and they are real because they
worked – and they are not real if they do not work – and, once one gets to
that point, then one need not fear anything one finds in this way. And in par-
ticular, not that it is traditional high culture because that is always what is
wrong – a lot of the most inferior work is, indeed, the reproduction of previous
forms which, however, have a sort of cultural respect.

Graham Martin:
So, in a way, that is the dustbin?

Raymond Williams:
In the sense that it is often more congenial than the rawest novelty. One need
not go into convolutions trying to deny that it is more congenial. But, equally,
918 R. WILLIAMS

one should not promote congeniality to the level of value. It is only in a kind of
bland repulsion from the previous proposition that one says, look, all the
important new work is being done in popular culture. This is simply to
claim too much. It would be to establish a kind of modishness in its turn
and it would prevent you again working for judgment. This brings us back
to the emphasis that I was trying to argue for: namely, that it is production
and conditions of production rather than the presumptions of value that
must be looked at.

Tony Bennett:
Can I come in on the question of novelty that you have mentioned quite a lot
in what you have had to say? You were saying earlier on that the question of
using the concept of popular culture could only be resolved historically, and
you went on to ask, ‘what happened that was historically new in the nine-
teenth century?’ Your answer seems to be ‘novelty’ in the sense not only
that something new happened, but that within popular culture you keep
getting innovation. This seems to be one of the things you have been
talking about a lot, and I am not too sure about that. I am not too sure
whether the significance of a distinction between something like contempor-
ary crime series and so on is the fact that they are constantly susceptible to
innovation whereas earlier industrial folk song was not, for example.
Because I think that in pre-industrial forms and so on one can speak of inno-
vation; it is rather the nature and the source of innovation that is different.
But the second thing is that, if we are to speak of popular culture as a his-
torically specific category that reflects new technological, social, political, etc.
relationships, then one would expect that this would manifest itself in the
forms produced in other, more substantive terms than merely a tendency
toward innovation, which I agree is a feature of popular culture, and I am won-
dering if there is anything that you have to say on this. You mentioned melo-
drama and you mentioned music hall, but can one see how, within these
particular forms, the particular and unique historical conditions which gave
birth to them are problematically reflected. In other words, is there any
more substance that we can give to the question of what is novel about
popular culture as an historical category? And secondly, it would seem that
if we are to speak of a qualitative transition in the nineteenth century, we
will probably also have to speak of further points of enormously significant
and rapid development associated, perhaps, with the two wars when one
gets further near-qualitative changes occurring in popular culture.
Those two particular questions: is there anything that we can say, of a sub-
stantive nature, of forms that have developed since the nineteenth century
that reflects the historically unique conditions of their making, and can we
locate major periods of development and shift and transition from that
point on in time?
 CULTURAL STUDIES 919

Raymond Williams:
Well, there is a cluster of questions there. On innovation first, I think this is very
important. I think it is still the first distinction one would notice between nine-
teenth century popular culture, in a set of unprecedented social relations and
conditions, and what you could fairly distinguish as folk culture or the people’s
culture or local culture comprising previous forms of cultural activity. You have
actually only to follow through a lot of the folk plays to know that, in fact, they
have changed much more than their participants realize. But if this were
pointed out, this would be slightly regretted. The offer always was that we
go word perfect what our grandfathers did. A lot of the value came of the
repetition.
There is also the sense of the occasion. One of the crucial qualitative dis-
tinctions is that pre-industrial popular culture is attached to certain specific
days, certain fetes, certain festivals, certain holidays, certain times of the
year at which you do certain things. The secular popular culture of the nine-
teenth century is characteristically on offer all of the time and becomes by, the
mid-twentieth century, a permanent, large-time secular offering. This is really
a qualitative distinction, and it is associated with the notion, for one thing, that
you would have to have innovation once you’ve got a secular full-time
offering because there just would not be enough of received forms to go
around.
But innovation is, of course, much more complex than that. You cannot
look at the melodrama or at the music hall without realizing that there is inno-
vation – that is to say, themes which were actually not expressed anywhere
else or themes which were not expressed in those ways anywhere else do
get into those popular forms. But, and this is a radical thing about the question
of novelty in art, much of the new material is, of course, and remains – this is a
very striking fact about a large amount of contemporary film and television –
the relatively novel adaptation of quite familiar material. Re-dressing, slightly
novel presentation, adaptation, up-dating, all those sort of processes which I
think, from a critical point of view, you would have to distinguish from inno-
vation are new and unprecedented.
It really is new, I think, in the melodrama to confront the experience in
those terms of really finding that every man’s hand in society is against you
– the theme upon which both Dickens and Dostoyevsky eventually draw
for much more developed work. That is a new thing in melodrama. What is
not a new thing at all is the various manoeuvres around crime and the discov-
ery of crime which had been going on at that level throughout. What is new is
this very particular sense of isolation, and this is a quite distinguishable and
relatable feature of the form. In the same way, in music hall in fact, you get
the working class monologues – people like Sam Hall and so on who really
are talking about things that had not been expressed in art at all before, I
think, or at least only very locally – and, at the same time, you get Champagne
920 R. WILLIAMS

Charlie and various tinsel burlesque shows and so on which are clearly repro-
ducing various kinds of private aristocratic entertainments for a larger audi-
ence, and there is nothing novel about them at all. Once you look into
innovation and novelty, you have to make those distinctions.
Again, if you follow it in police fiction, there really is a moment when the
experience of committing crime is faced within this complex of quite familiar
material in which crime is taken as the datum of common interest – who did it,
how, and so on. We were talking about Dostoyevsky. What is new in his work
is, radically, the description of what it is like to commit a brutal murder, not
that the brutal murder or anything else about it is at all new.
So yes, that is right. On the question of, well it is a related question really on
innovation, I think one of the things you see very strongly in this is, first of all,
that there is a whole body of material about this new kind of society which
simply has to be represented in new forms because the old forms cannot
contain it – of what it is like, for example to live in a human settlement in
which you not only do not know all your neighbours but may know none of
them, in which you can make no necessary presumptions about them and
their behaviour – in other words the emergence, which is present at all levels
in that period, of themes of isolation, alienation, feeling others as a threat, as
hostile, as mysterious and so on. New forms come out of that. And the other
thing, which actually relates to much later developments, is the experience of
mobility itself. The very fact of both social mobility and quite physical mobility,
the experience of seeing the world at 30 miles per hour or at 60 miles per hour –
which really was a qualitatively different visual experience from anything that
was there before – becomes one of the problems facing artists and producers
of all kinds from this time on. But this was notably advanced within the field we
conventionally classify as popular culture because certain of the crucial techni-
cal devices which came to serve an expanded audience happened to be inher-
ently mobile, the moving picture camera above all.
You are then into the very difficult theoretical question of whether people
invented the moving picture camera because they were seized by mobility, or
whether it was a technological inevitability or whether there was some inter-
action, but what I mean is that there are certain things which immediately the
motion picture camera could do which were new even when what was done
with them was not significantly new at any other level. There was thus
immediately a kind of art which related to people’s experience of the world
in a way that no other previous period, however good, could do just
because people had had the experience of seeing the world moving, and
moving fast. All sorts of considerations about sequence disconnection, the
way others perceive, the way environments are perceived would have to be
considered together with what was also going on within the cultural expan-
sion and the availability of new technology which produced and permitted
cheaper large-scale production of much the same things, or reproductions
 CULTURAL STUDIES 921

of much the same things being taken to a much larger number of people who
would probably have been glad to have them anyway earlier if they could
have been got to them that cheaply and that easily.
This is precisely what one means by saying one has to study the conditions
of production rather than a presumed unitary process. There are these qual-
ities of real innovation; there are the qualities of technical innovation which
sometimes permit real innovation; there are the qualities of reproduction,
of what would have been welcome before but was not accessible and so
on. When you classify popular culture, you find that it is all those things
and it is the difference between these things that the ordinary category
usually overrides. One has got to break the classification down by the specifi-
cities of production and conditions of production. The totally different need
for a newspaper, for example, and particularly for national and international
newspapers – which has obvious relations to the wars – and the sense that
people have to orientate themselves at the beginning of each day to a very
large world or to seem that they are orienting themselves to the selection
of interests newspapers embody is just one of the things I have in mind.

Tony Bennett:
Can I just respond to what you are saying? I agree with what you have said,
but in your talk earlier you were saying that something happens in the nine-
teenth century that is different in the political set up and so on, and what you
have argued is ‘new themes,’ ‘new technologies,’ and so on and so forth. But it
seems to me, although I have not had time to investigate the area, that what
one also has coming into being – and I think you touched on this when you
said that in the nineteenth century you have a new set of relationships coming
into being between popular culture and high culture that was not the same as
that which existed before between folk culture and court culture – are now
sets of social and cultural relationships at a more general level. It seems to
me, or at least I would be interested to know whether it is a possible argument
to develop, that what is at root in the development of these cultural forms in
the nineteenth century is a whole shift in the political and cultural relation-
ships between classes.

Raymond Williams:
Well, of course, this is true. If you think of Stephen Duck, or the whole line of
labour poets in the eighteenth century or of poor man’s scholars like Samuel
Johnson and so on, who were extraordinarily productive and possessed real
creative and intellectual ability, their work was located within a class which
was not, by inherited position, either a culture-using or a culture-producing
class. If you look at what happened to those people then, of course we only
know about the few who survived, because that was the situation. Duck
starts by writing a poem, certainly in the received form, about the experience
922 R. WILLIAMS

of thrashing which is radically different from what court poets had written
about the joys of rural labour, but he writes it in their verse form and, when
he needs a patron a bit later on, he starts writing precisely like the court
poets and he ends up dressed up as a peasant in a pavilion in one of the
Royal Gardens showing aristocratic guests around a rustic scene.13 This is a
dreadful history, but it is in a very wide sense the case of these contributors
from a different social class before these altered relations. They had to
some extent to adopt the prevailing and predominant cultural forms.
They were very skilful. Johnson, who we happen to be thinking about a lot
at the moment and who, in the end, comes out as a classic high culture figure
tried nearly everything within those conditions and even invented the parlia-
mentary debate by the marvelous expedient of not going to the House of
Commons but by imagining what people as intelligent as himself would
have said if they had had access to his kind of intelligence.
People were so flattered that they actually adopted his reports of the
debates as what they had said. I recognize in that the sort of intelligence
that, in the nineteenth century, would have had freedom to move into
forms within this altered relationship where there would have been a
different sort of exploration. Before this change, people really had to adopt
the predominant recognized forms. If you go to an earlier period, such a
man, perhaps in a monastery perhaps not, perhaps a lay cleric or perhaps
not in the church at all, would have thought it totally appropriate not to
centre himself in London at all but to write a play for his local guilds to
perform. He would have been in that situation. In the nineteenth century, pre-
cisely because there is a popular market, because the thing is being commer-
cially distributed, because the demand is rising with increases in literacy, very
rapid distribution and constantly falling production costs – the key to that
whole nineteenth century expansion – there is much new production.
Of course a lot of the things that are done is still reproduction of the
favoured forms that people now recognize, but there is a lot of experimen-
tation with what is possibly new. The career of someone like Jerrold in melo-
drama is precisely this. He is trying to take an audience through to new
themes and new possible forms and a great case like Dickens, when
drawing on much of that, really does establish a new kind of novel. There
are altered relations which certainly are altered fundamental social relations
including very obvious class relations. Of course, this is right.
This is looking at it, however, simply from the side of production. If we look
at it from the side of distribution, there is a lot more to say and I don’t know
whether I would have time to say it, but just briefly there is undoubtedly a very
key moment when it is recognized that universal suffrage really has altered
the political relations within society and, incidentally, ever since it has been
impossible to discuss certain areas of popular culture without discussing
this quite conscious element of what people are going to be reading,
 CULTURAL STUDIES 923

seeing, hearing and what effect it will have on their political and social behav-
iour. This often means that what starts out as a very rough market as what sells
most to most people is qualified in certain important areas by people’s willing-
ness to invest, even at a loss, in devices to control production so that what is
produced in this altering, precarious situation is not in that sense politically
threatening.
But in the early stages I know no group of people with whom I have a
greater sense of really initial deep respect than that group of labour poets
of the eighteenth century who clearly had something new to say, and who
would have found it very difficult in any case and who were really over-
whelmed by the predominance of a definition of culture in terms of a singular
static class. That situation was really transformed once there was this qualitat-
ive change and this quantitative expansion.
Looking at it again, I cannot think of any example of people who repeated
the history of Duck. You would really have to compare somebody like Stephen
Duck and somebody like, say, Jim Allen writing television plays.14 It really
would be a relevant comparison. These historical things never work, of
course, because people are born in their time but Jim Allen can write now
the sort of plays of his well-known fierce, sectarian kind but very politically
involving and exploring certain conflicts inside working-class movements
which it would have been even ludicrous to propose as a notion to Duck.
This is the qualitative difference, that Allen could have that possibility and,
moreover, that he is not writing this for the Liverpool branch of the
dockers’ union to put on their May Day parade, which an earlier man of
such talent would have done, but he is writing it for BBC television. This is a
qualitative difference and it is only the last situation which you can call
popular culture as an historically distinct phenomenon.

David Walker:
At the beginning of your talk you offered us two contending theories. One,
you said, was intrinsically, historically variable, assuming no regular relations
between artistic and intellectual productions and the rest of life. That is
hardly a statement of theory anyway, is it? It’s just a sort of a position you
can have on whatever you could use ad hoc.

Raymond Williams:
No, on the contrary, it happens to coincide with ad hoc empiricism, but it really
is a theoretical position and I could defend it theoretically if you wanted me to.

David Walker:
I would like you to say something about that and the other one that you set up
against it, which was culture as the production of the dominant class. I would
be interested to know if you countenanced it as such.
924 R. WILLIAMS

Raymond Williams:
Well, for a long time it was the predominant teaching of Marxist theory of
culture that culture was always ultimately the production of the dominant
class. This is always very difficult to establish but, on the other hand, in its
sophisticated forms, it is quite difficult to refute because, as we have seen
with some recent examples, people use not only evident reproduction of a
particular class outlook, class perspective, class interest, but various forms of
disguised manifestation or of the cunning combination of this with just
another reproduction of the perspective of another class for it to be there
and not recogniseable and yet determined and so on. It is a reputable theor-
etical position. The question of theory goes right back to the nature of cultural
production itself. It has its strongest form in the contemporary theory of repro-
duction, in which all cultural production is a reproduction of already existing
social relations and orientations which, however, pass through some sort of
mediating process which means that they are not always immediately recog-
nizable as such but are only recognizable by a very special kind of analysis
which, having pushed through what are superficial characteristics, finds
that, structurally, this is what is being reproduced.

Graham Martin:
That’s a very glum kind of theory, isn’t it?

Raymond Williams:
I find it so, but, on the other hand, wholly to overlook it would be to live in an
impossibly and almost inanely cheerful world. The difficult thing about the
theory is that there is clearly quite a lot of such reproduction. I happened
to spend a period recently watching Watch with Mother.15 I wish Tel Quel
had got onto this, because here was a very perfect illustration of the
English social order being done in the most charming, tinkly ways of either
kings and queens or squires and employers around whom these little tales
revolved. It was really a very clear case. One would seem so ridiculous
saying it but for that one sees a similar thing at another level with the
costume drama, which is called historical drama or historical biography,
which is now so significantly popular and which seems to me to be reprodu-
cing a class-dominant order, a particular class perspective of the nature of
history and the nature of human significance in a very obvious way. If you
reject that, you would not have any purchase on any of this activity at all.
The difficulty is that, of course, any theory of that kind is bound, theoretically,
to exclude innovation – which is one of the great problems – except at
moments of rupture of another sort. When it is in that more sophisticated
form, it would then deal with the phenomena we have been discussing by
saying the industrial revolution was a particular type of rupture. It therefore
produced new forms, but still new forms of a class-dominant kind. The
 CULTURAL STUDIES 925

notion I have been arguing is that, as well as this, there were also produced by
the alteration of social forces contributions which were not reproductive of
that dominant order.
I have no doubt whatever that that latter statement is correct. I find it
impossible to read the history of literature – which is already, of course, a rela-
tively unwelcome thing to do – in terms of the former theory without knowing
that it is incorrect, without knowing that certain radical innovations occur in a
variable relation with radical social change. They occur both before it, during
it, after it, at an oblique angle to it, and in direct relation to it. This is what I
meant by saying that it is a theoretical position that these relations are vari-
able – not that they are mysterious but that they are variable – and in the
popular culture field I think that this appears. I think that the Blue Lamp is
reproductive culture. If you want to illustrate the former theory in a simple
way, you take a police series like the Blue Lamp.16 If you take that across to
the early Z-Cars, I think you are in trouble because you have to exclude all
the elements that are actually innovating in order to discover the elements
of continuity with the earlier form which allow you to reclaim it as merely
reproduction of the dominant culture: that it still is the police, that they are
still a class enemy and so on. You can’t do it.
In the end, the most honest exponent of the former theory – who I think
was Goldmann – got in to trouble because he was obliged, and he was a
peculiarly honest man, to invent a criterion of central and marginal significa-
tions in order to establish that the core and central meanings had indeed this
kind of relation. But after all, this becomes very much a device because the
difference between the centrality and the marginality of evidence is deter-
mined by the presumption that you have got a regular relationship. So if
you do not find a regular relationship, the evidence is marginal. This cannot
survive intellectual scrutiny for very long. But Goldmann was an honest
man and he expounded it.
Very often innovation is only marginal, and this whole typology I have been
trying to develop is one which really can recognize a form which has innovative
elements even if it is finally contained and constrained by dominant forms so that
it cannot complete itself. And there are certain cases where, often by repeated trial
and error, an innovative form breaks through, and I know this to be the case about
the history of culture. I know it to be the case that this is the way it happens.
One then goes back into a deeper theoretical difference about the relation
between the nature of a social and economic order and the nature of cultural
practice. I don’t know how far one would want to take that. It is, in the end, an
argument about this old Marxist proposition of base and superstructure which
has misled so many for so long. On the other hand, I would not want to put this
forward as you took it, as mere relativism. It is not relativistic. There really are
very different groups and different phases. How could you talk, for instance,
to bring it back to our essential theme, about British television drama since
926 R. WILLIAMS

the 50’s without distinguishing the very different phases and periods that it has
gone through? There has been virtually no difference in the relations between
capital and television institutions, yet the television drama of the mid-60’s is
observably different from that of the late 50’s or the early 70’s and, if you
were to say that they are all reproductions of the dominant order, it is like
saying that every day is weather: it is true, but not interesting.

Ken Thompson:
Would there be any great mileage in making the French distinction between
the world at play and the world at work, seeing popular culture as partly con-
cerned with the world at play? There would not then be a direct relationship
with the relations one associates with work and cultural reproduction, but
rather with overturning them – the frolics and the banter and going
beyond them and so on.

Raymond Williams:
There is some of that, undoubtedly. It is very important in comedy, which is
usually the neglected area of popular culture. People with literary interests
tend to home-in on crime. I do myself. But comedy has made a very remark-
able contribution to modern popular culture and it includes some really quite
innovative things. But, on the other hand, you find some of the most deliber-
ately disheartening and controlling material in comedy. The tinsel and plush
extravaganzas of the early music hall could be taken as the play element
against the drab, industrial world work, though it was actually much more
the ratification of that world at work than things like the Sam Hall mono-
logues,17 which happen to be my favourites, which really embody a very
wry experience of what it is like almost to be last in the line. These are
much more genuinely alternative to a drab working world than Champagne
Charlie18 or The Black and White Minstrel Show.19 These are clearly not play
in any real sense. They glitter in front of the world of work but they are not
an alternative to it, whereas there is some subversive comedy which says
there are more things to do with human energy than clock on and so on.
That is alternative.

David Walker:
Do you have any thoughts about the phenomenon of popular music, particu-
larly things that do seem to be manufactured outside the dominant class, that
don’t belong to them at all? I’m thinking of thinks like punk rock, or the new
wave of music.

Raymond Williams:
I speak as even more ignorant in these matters than the others, but my own
impression is that it is a very interesting case just in itself and for the light it
 CULTURAL STUDIES 927

throws on this theoretical argument. For, on the one hand, it is undoubted

that some of the prehistory of these forms is in quite centrally established
forms which have been adapted to the uses of an alternative class. This is
clearly true of jazz which bears a relation to the hymns of established if dis-
senting religious culture. It nevertheless is clear that, in the process of that
adaptation, some qualitative change happens which means that quite new
kinds of things are done – which again is incompatible with any reproduction
theory because these things are really novel assertions of a certain kind of
human energy and human recklessness, even, as against what the social
order manifestly is directing people to do and think about. I notice also,
however, and surely one could not live through the 60’s not noticing how
very quickly and precisely the organized culture moved in on that, did
certain things to it, usually with the willing cooperation of most of its origin-
ators, defused elements of it so that you continually got attempted reconsti-
tutions of alternatives which had a different base. That is just the sort of
movement that I would expect from my theoretical presupposition that
some people will start doing the variations on it and, in the course of the vari-
ations, will invent a different kind of that, finally, becomes widely acceptable –
in a way, just because the variations may relate to some changed attitudes
among a much larger number of people who then love this music because
it is then commercially profitable and people won’t try to get you back to
singing the hymn; they will say ‘How can you market the new thing and
above all how can we so organize it, clean it up, clean up these people’s
lives, how can we produce ancillary industries to it?’ Wherever one gets at
popular culture, it is those sort of processes one finds. And this is really
much more interesting than reproduction. It is also more interesting than
the notion that the many-headed beast will always be vulgar unless there
are a few people around to give it something better to think about.

Notes
1. Williams is referring here to T.S. Eliot’s Notes on the Definition of Culture - a work
he engaged with critically on a number of occasions.
2. Lecturer in History in the Open University’s Faculty of Arts.
3. Target was broadcast on BBC1 from 1977-1978. A response to the success of the
commercial channel ITV’s series The Sweeney, its high levels of police violence
occasioned a good deal of controversy.
4. One of the BBC producers who worked on the Popular Culture course.
5. One of the BBC producers who worked on the Popular Culture course.
6. Reader in Sociology at the Open University.
7. A US crime series broadcast by CBS from 1973 to 1978. Set in New York, its star
Terry Savalas acquired a cult following.
8. Professor of Literature at the Open University.
9. Williams is contrasting here the literary travelogues of Lawrence Durrell – an
expatriate British novelist, poet and dramatist also noted for his travel writing
928 R. WILLIAMS

on, for example, Greece and Sicily – with Whicker’s World, a regular BBC travel
program presented by British journalist Alan Whicker.
10. Williams refers here to a character in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.
11. Williams refers here to the work of Ivor Armstrong Richards, and particularly to
his 1929 text Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement, London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
12. Z Cars was broadcast by the BBC from 1962 to 1978. Set in a fictional Merseyside
location, it introduced a new northern strain of ‘grainy realism’ into the British
police procedural.
13. Williams draws here on his more extended discussion of Duck’s work in The
Country and the City (St Albans: Paladin, 45–6, 110–113).
14. Jim Allen, from a working-class background, was a socialist playwright whose work
had a notable presence on British television, often in collaboration with Ken Loach.
15. Initiated in 1953, Watch with Mother was the first BBC TV series directed at pre-
school children.
16. The Blue Lamp was a 1950 film, set in London, that served as a model for the later
BBC police series, Dixon of Dock Green, broadcast by the BBC from 1955 to 1976,
which presented a somewhat idealised picture of the police as the incorruptible
guardians of society.
17. A folk song tradition in the form of a set of monologues on the part of an unre-
pentant criminal condemned to death.
18. A 1944 film with a music hall setting.
19. A song and dance show broadcast by the BBC from 1958 to 1978 in which the
roles of black minstrels were played by blacked-up white performers.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.