Language and Community

Extract

The intention of this paper is to test the hunch that there must be some correlation between theory of language and theory of community. Why this seems worth doing should come out in the course of the paper. It should be said that it was meant to fit between a paper by Raymond Williams and one by David Cooper, in a symposium on the theoretical basis of a ‘common culture’.

Raymond Williams writes: ‘We live in almost overwhelming danger, at a peak of our apparent control. We react to the danger by attempting to take control, yet still we have to unlearn, as the price of survival, the inherent dominative mode’ (Culture and Society 1780-1950, Penguin edition, p. 322).

We have to unlearn the dominative mode in social relationship. That programme is part of a complex argument, the whole of which I have no intention of spelling out here, in my crude orthography. But the point of the case is that the line of writers and thinkers studied in Williams’ book, the tradition he presents there, from Burke and Cobbett down to George Orwell, is a tradition of criticism of, and protest against, the official ideology and the prevalent consciousness of our society: ‘The development of the idea of culture has, throughout, been a criticism of what has been called the bourgeois idea of society. The contributors to its meaning have started from widely different positions, and have reached widely various attachments and loyalties.