Keywords for Today
This feature is from Robyn Jakeman, a producer at the Derek Jarman Lab. It first appeared as a ‘scrapbook’ feature in May 2020, for Birkbeck Arts Weeks.
Keywords
In 1948, when Raymond Williams was working as a teacher in adult education after studying at the University of Cambridge, T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture was published, after first appearing as a series of articles in the New English Weekly. Eliot argued that the highest levels of culture could only flourish in a truly civilised society, and that such a civilisation could only exist if class structures were preserved. For Williams, this was an argument that he ‘grasped but could not accept’ (Williams, Keywords, 13). Central to Williams’s difficulty with the text was the way in which Eliot understood culture, and he began to explore the word in his classes, linking it with the words class and art, and industry and democracy. On looking up culture in the Oxford English Dictionary, he discovered that Eliot’s understanding of the word was the result of a semantic shift that had developed in the nineteenth century, and that the connections he had perceived between culture and class, art, industry, and democracy did in fact exist in the earlier, broader sense of the word, as ‘intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development’ (Williams, Keywords, 90). This enquiry formed the basis of his book Culture and Society (1958), which explored how the notion of culture developed in the West from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.
Realising that a significant number of words posed similar intellectual problems, Williams wrote sixty short essays, which he originally intended to be included as an appendix to Culture and Society, but had to be cut for reasons of space. It is that cut appendix that became Keywords—one of Williams’s most enduring works. Keywords was first published in 1976, and a second, revised edition, with twenty-one additional words, appeared in 1983.
Keywords are ostensibly simple words with a single meaning, but they actually operate as sites of contestation and debate, encompassing multiple and conflicting meanings. For Williams, who subtitled his book ‘a vocabulary of culture and society’, his text was a study of both the particular and relational meanings of words, as they have existed over history and in different communities, revealing different inflections and implications. Keywords shows a way of investigating problems of meaning, and demonstrates that language does not only reflect culture and society, but that it also plays an active role in shaping them.
In the video below, Williams considers the keyword nature at the ‘Linguistics of Writing’ conference at University of Strathclyde in 1986.
Keywords in the Twenty-First Century
Over twenty years after the second edition of Williams’s Keywords, the Keywords Project—a collaborative research initiative sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh, Jesus College, Cambridge, and Critical Quarterly—brought together a diverse group of academics who then spent over a decade attempting to determine the keywords of our contemporary culture and society. The result of this endeavour, Keywords for Today (2018; edited by Colin MacCabe and Holly Yanacek), has updated and expanded Williams’s text for the twenty-first century.
Certain words included in Williams’s text, almost inevitably, do not assume the same importance as they did over forty years ago, and have been dropped from the book. Examples of such words include alienation, generally referring to the feeling of division between human and society; another is bourgeois, used frequently in the 1970s, most specifically in a Marxist sense, but which is much less common today.
Other words have shifted in meaning or importance over the decades, and their entries consequentially needed to be updated. Ecology, one of the twenty-one words added by Williams to the second edition, had been a relatively new word to describe the relationship between human and environment in 1976, but by 1983 it was beginning to form a important part of the political landscape, and it has dramatically increased in usage as the climate crisis plays an ever more significant part in political debate in the twenty-first century. Culture, always a complex and contested term, has in recent years expanded to include popular culture as well as ‘high’ art forms: in many ways contemporary uses of culture have, the editors note, ‘realized Williams’s definition of culture as a “whole way of life”’ (Keywords for Today, 87).
Perhaps most intriguing for scholars of the English language are the new words that have merited inclusion in this updated text, and which above all reveal the topography of our contemporary cultural and political landscape. Appropriation has become a key term of cultural debate in recent years: for some it signals the artistic practice of reusing and altering pre-existing images or objects; in criminal law it is a term for theft. Perhaps most notably, as ‘cultural appropriation’, it identifies the selective adoption by dominant cultures of elements of oppressed, minority cultures, and the erasure of their historical, cultural, and religious significances in the process. The entry for Queer highlights its development from a derogatory term to a ‘positive and empowering term of identification’, encompassing myriad forms of gender identity and sexuality (Keywords for Today, 288). European is a signifier not only of geographical borders, and cultural and racial identity, but also, particularly since the 2016 Brexit referendum, political values.
MLA annual conference 2020. Photo credits: Heather Kresge.
Keywords for Today – The Film
Keywords for Today (the film) follows the three launches of Keywords for Today (the book) in Pittsburgh (USA), London (UK), and Peradeniya (Sri Lanka). Produced by the Derek Jarman Lab, and funded by the University of Pittsburgh, the film premiered at the Modern Languages Association annual conference in Seattle, in January 2020.
The film shows how the process of researching keywords in the English language takes place in a global setting. At the University of Pittsburgh, four students present their own modern keywords: access, privilege, security, and trans. The London launch features a keynote address by Professor Paul Gilroy, winner of the 2019 Holberg Prize. At the launch in Peradeniya, Professor Arjuna Parakrama and students consider the use of English from a South Asian perspective.
The Future of Keywords
When Williams published his seminal text in 1976, he insisted on the inclusion of blank pages at the end of the book. This was done so that readers might jot down their own notes on both extant and absent entries, indicating that the field of enquiry remained open.
In the spirit of this continuing endeavour, Bea Moyes has created a short video, which considers the word ‘transition’:
References and Further Links
Raymond Williams, Keywords, 2nd edition (London: Fontana, 1983)
Colin MacCabe and Holly Yanacek, eds., Keywords for Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)
The Keywords Project, <https://keywords.pitt.edu/> [accessed 18 May 2020]
The Raymond Williams Society, <https://raymondwilliams.co.uk/> [accessed 18 May 2020]
‘Raymond Williams: A Tribute’, YouTube, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcgmUOF4hUI> [accessed 18 May 2020]