Art (2004)

13 Retro Keywords ... And W hy They’reWorth a Second Look Art In what follows I would like to examine the changing meanings and usages of the term “art” (as well as the concept “art”) since Raymond Williams encapsulated its historical etymologies and political contexts in Keywords. Such a re-examination necessitates, I think, a consideration of Williams’s method in the 1970s, and what his materialism means or how it functions today. His conclusions regarding the status of art must be placed in a his­ torical context vis-à-vis twentieth-century Critical Theory and Marxism, for Williams’ s ideas inform or reproduce or anticipate the “art world” con­ ceptualism of such theorists as Arthur C. Danto and Pierre Bourdieu. Williams’s technique in Keywords was to trace a material history of words’meanings in usage. Or, rather, he was interested in words that con­ tained in their history a conflict that was symptomatic of larger struggles. His most important methodological statement in Keywords may be where he links the semantic and the social: the issues could not all be understood simply by analysis of the words. On the contrary, most of the social and intel­ lectual issues, including both gradual developments and the ESC 30.4 (December 2004): 5-65 Clint Burnham is a Vancouver writer and teacher. He currently works at Emily Carr Institute. Recent publications include “On Dre,” in Open Letter 12:5 (Spring 2005), an essay on contemporary Vancouver art in Flash Art (Nov.-Dec. 2004), and “Jameson, Haraldsson, and Architecture,” in TheJameson Critical Reader, ed. Sean Homer & Doug Kellner (Palgrave, 2004). His novel, Smoke Show, will appear in the fall of 2005 from Arsenal Pulp Press. He was in the hallway of the University of Victoria English department when he learned of Williams’ death in early 1988. most explicit controversies and conflicts, persisted within and beyond the linguistic analysis. Yet many of these issues, I found, could not really be thought through, and some of them, I believe, cannot even be focused unless we are conscious of the words as elements of the problems. (16) Here we see Williams veering between the Scylla and Charybdis of twen­ tieth-century Marxism: economism vs. idealism. At one extreme, we have the economism of Stalin, and at the other, cultural studies.1The idealism in Williams is that which stretches from semiotics to cultural studies: by which I mean stressing the necessity of the letter, of the word. But Williams is hardly some Brit naïf. His semiotics comes via Volosinov/Bakhtin,1 2and thus he locates his idealism in a class situation: “I was given the impres­ sion ... that these [differing uses of culture] arose mainly from the fact of an incomplete education” (16). Williams’ s bourgeois interlocutor assumed people using the word “culture” in an anthropological sense were merely scholarship boys. Williams’s sense of class struggle is also to be found in the anecdote which opens Keywords’introduction, the origin if you will of the text: his return to Cambridge after military service (in a tank! like Billy Bragg!) during World War 11.Williams’ s narratives are relevant because they place in a historical situation his methodology: looking at the meaning of keywords as a symptom of class struggle. This technique resolves momentarily the great Saussurean binary of synchrony and diachrony. For, while Williams never makes the historicist error of arguing that we know the etymology of the word “art”when we use it now, we are nonetheless using a word that arrives sedimented in those moments of dissension. As well, Williams is quite Bakhtinian in that he avoids Saussure’ s idealism by situating words in the moment of the utter­ ance: i.e., the class structure that obtains in academic speech genres or habi1 Therefore, “most works of art are effectively treated as commodities and most artists, even when they justly claim quite other intentions, are effectively treated as a category of independent craftsmen or skilled workers producing a certain kind of marginal commodity” (42): this is Stalinist, or economist, in the sense that Williams mistakes an economic transaction (the purchasing of art) for a determining condition. Some art is sold: but the differences between that...