Raymond Williams on Film by D A N A POUKN ;'•••, .F '•'•. ' i S! Abstract: While Raymond Williams's television study is foundationai for the fieid, iess known is that Wiiliams wrote extensively—and intelligently—on cinema. Based in large part on research in the Raymond Williams Papers at Swansea University, Wales, this essay offers a geneaiogy of Wiiliams's continued engagement with film as cultural form. H ad Raymond Williams written nary a word concerning the modern culture of the moving image, his vast body of work would still be of compelling interest to scholars in the areas of film, television, and media study. Williams (1921-1988) is arguably the most important cultural theorist and critic of twentieth-century Britain. His early, groundbreaking intellectual history of English thought on the idea of culture. Culture and Society ( 1958), is readily considered (along with Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy and E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class) one of the triumvirate of works that fundamentally estab- lished the field of Cultural Studies, and his follow-up volume. The Long Revolution (1961), was key to the founding of the British New Left (along with a later text cowritten by Williams and Thompson with others, The May Day Manifesto). His first major work in Media Studies, Communications (1962), was a best seller and made an essential contribution to the discipline in the United Kingdom, and to the in- spired idea of teaching Media Studies through extension programs such as Open University. His works of literary and dramatic criticism, such as The Country and the City (1973) and Modern Tragedy (1966), are models in the unification of techniques of close reading with broader refiection on literary texts' place in society. His ef- forts at sociai theorizing in books such as Problems in Materialism and Culture (1981) and Marxism and Literature (1977) established the value of "cultural materialism" as a mode of analysis. A veritable interdisciplinarian, Williams drew on diverse fields of thought in the humanities (and social sciences) to conduct his cultural investigation—from literary criticism to drama. Media and Communication Studies, social thought and politi- cal theory, linguistics and anthropology, and cultural study more broadly. Concepts and phrases from across the range of his work have become key to the ongoing work of Cultural Studies and, in many cases, have become fundamental compo- nents of the lingua franca of the field: think, for example, of the impact of ideas and phrases from Williams such as "structures of feeling," "keywords," "culture as f , o Dana Polan is Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the author, most recently^ o/" Julia Child's " i h Y á C b í " (DukeUmversityPress,201l). www.cmstudies.org 52 I No. 3 1 Spring 2013 1 Cinema Journal 52 I No. 3 ; Spring 2013 a whole way of life," "residual and emergent cultures," "knowable community," "there is no such th ...

1. Raymond Williams on Film
by D A N A POUKN ;'•••, .F '•'•.
' i S!
Abstract: While Raymond Williams's television study is
foundationai for the fieid, iess
known is that Wiiliams wrote extensively—and intelligently—
on cinema. Based in large
part on research in the Raymond Williams Papers at Swansea
University, Wales, this
essay offers a geneaiogy of Wiiliams's continued engagement
with film as cultural form.
H
ad Raymond Williams written nary a word concerning the
modern culture
of the moving image, his vast body of work would still be of
compelling
interest to scholars in the areas of film, television, and media
study. Williams
(1921-1988) is arguably the most important cultural theorist and
critic of
twentieth-century Britain. His early, groundbreaking intellectual
history of English
thought on the idea of culture. Culture and Society ( 1958), is
readily considered (along
with Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy and E. P.
Thompson's The Making of
the English Working Class) one of the triumvirate of works that
fundamentally estab-

2. lished the field of Cultural Studies, and his follow-up volume.
The Long Revolution
(1961), was key to the founding of the British New Left (along
with a later text
cowritten by Williams and Thompson with others, The May Day
Manifesto). His first
major work in Media Studies, Communications (1962), was a
best seller and made
an essential contribution to the discipline in the United
Kingdom, and to the in-
spired idea of teaching Media Studies through extension
programs such as Open
University. His works of literary and dramatic criticism, such as
The Country and the
City (1973) and Modern Tragedy (1966), are models in the
unification of techniques
of close reading with broader refiection on literary texts' place
in society. His ef-
forts at sociai theorizing in books such as Problems in
Materialism and Culture (1981)
and Marxism and Literature (1977) established the value of
"cultural materialism" as
a mode of analysis.
A veritable interdisciplinarian, Williams drew on diverse fields
of thought in the
humanities (and social sciences) to conduct his cultural
investigation—from literary
criticism to drama. Media and Communication Studies, social
thought and politi-
cal theory, linguistics and anthropology, and cultural study
more broadly. Concepts
and phrases from across the range of his work have become key
to the ongoing
work of Cultural Studies and, in many cases, have become
fundamental compo-

3. nents of the lingua franca of the field: think, for example, of the
impact of ideas
and phrases from Williams such as "structures of feeling,"
"keywords," "culture as
f ,
o Dana Polan is Professor of Cinema Studies at New York
University. He is the author, most recently^ o/" Julia Child's
" i h Y á C b í " (DukeUmversityPress,201l).
www.cmstudies.org 52 I No. 3 1 Spring 2013 1
Cinema Journal 52 I No. 3 ; Spring 2013
a whole way of life," "residual and emergent cultures,"
"knowable community," "there
is no such thing as masses, only ways of seeing people as
masses," and so on. Notions
such as these have been central to the ongoing project of
Cultural Studies, and the
general legacy of Williams is in this respect well assured.
As I note, Williams would be an essential point of reference to
anyone interested in
the study of moving-image culture even if he had never written
on this particular do-
main of contemporary life. But of course, he did write about
modern moving images,
and here his contributions are no less groundbreaking. In
particular, as is well known,
his 1974 volume Television: Technology and Cultural Form, is
widely considered to be a—if
not the—foundational work of Television Studies and continues

4. to have an impact on
research and reflection, even as scholars may have questioned
the pertinence of this
or that idea to the most recent developments in television and
new media practices.
As with his general books in Cultural Studies, Television
offered compelling concepts
for the study of media, and these again have become inevitable
components of the
discipline's fundamental vocabulary: for instance, "mobile
privatization" and the key
concept of flow, around which there is a veritable industry of
secondary scholarship.
Certainly, there is still much critical and theoretical work to be
done with WiUiams's
writings on television. For the record, I think the overattention
to the concept of flow—
certainly a breakthrough concept, but by far not the only idea
Williams had to offer
about television—has meant that other potentially important
aspects of his work on
television have been downplayed and even ignored, both in
Television: Technology and
Cultural Form (where flow is only one topic among many, such
as new modes of exhi-
bition and critical practice in progressive media making) and in
his numerous other
writings on television.^ I'd also argue that the common
understanding of flow as the
undifferentiated and continuous outpouring of images within
and between programs
has missed how Williams anchors flow to the stabilizing (and to
his mind, deleterious)
effects of commercials within and between shows.

5. But, although that critical réévaluation is quite necessary, I
want to concentrate in
the present essay on a much less known—but to my mind no
less compelling or con-
sequential—aspect of WiUiams's engagement with the moving
image: namely, what
turns out to be his quite substantial body of writing on fllm.
Williams in fact wrote ex-
tensively—and, I contend, quite rigorously and perceptively—
about cinema, and even
if this part of his intellectual output were to be brought to light
for purely archaeologi-
cal purposes (i.e., to reveal an area of his research that has
hitherto passed under the
radar in the critical literature on Wuliams), the effort would
seem worthwhile. But as
I hope to suggest, WiUiams's many interventions into film
analysis not only are bio-
graphicaUy or archivally interesting but also stand by
themselves as potentially useful
tools for the ongoing critical projects of Film Studies as a field.
The discussion that
follows combines a critical account of WiUiams's published
writings on cinema with
1 Raymond Williams, Television: Technoiogy and Cuiturai
Form (London: Fontana/Collins, 1974; New York: Schocken
Books, 1975).
2 See, for example, the rich, posthumous collection Raymond
Wiiiiams on Teievision, ed. Alan O'Connor (New York:
Routledge, 1989), which offers concrete engagement, of a depth
and detail only rarely on view in Television: Technoi-

6. ogy and Cultural Form, with specific teievision programs.
Cinema Journal 52 ! No. 3 i Spring 2013
archival work on Williams's papers at the Riehard Burton
Archives of Swansea Uni-
versity, Wales, where the catalog of those papers has recently
been put online, offering
a welcoming invitation to in-depth research to anyone interested
in Williams.
Raymond Williams's Early Engagements with Film. From his
first extended con-
tact with the medium, Williams evinced a passion for the
cinema. His enthusiasm first
manifested when he came to study at Cambridge at the end of
the 1930s from the
small, out-of-the-way village of Pandy, where he had grown up.
While there was much
about the dogmatism, stuffiness, traditionalism, and even
political conservatism of offi-
cial Cambridge University life and studies that dismayed
Williams,* there were many
aspects of its student cultural life that offered a veritable
opening up for a scholarship
boy like Williams to new cosmopolitan experience and new
possibilities for cultural
expression in its encounter with metropolitan modernity.
Although he had already
been politicized at an early age (for instance, he had learned
directly about labor strug-
gle from his father's efforts as a railway signalman to offer
communications support
for coal miners in their consequential strike of 1926 across the

7. whole of the United
Kingdom), Cambridge offered new possibilities for collective
activism, and Williams
became a member of the student-run Socialist Union, which had
a very energetic
presence on campus. There, he met a kindred spirit, a budding
filmmaker named Mi-
chael Orrom, and for a long while they became the closest of
friends and the closest
of cinematic collaborators.^ Under pressure from his father,
Orrom was supposed to
major in the sciences, but he had been given a motion-picture
camera for a birthday
in his early teens and was engaging in experiments in this
seemingly most modern of
modern arts with a view to a full-fledged career in filmmaking.
like so many young
people on the Left in the 1930s, Orrom (and Williams soon
after) shared in a belief in
cinema as the supreme art of modernity in the ways it mediated
a direct engagement
with reality through the expressive potentials of medium-
specific forms and stylistic
resources. As for so many others, Orrom and Williams felt the
essence of cinematic
potential to lie in montage as the revolutionary restructuration
of everyday reality, and
Orrom militated for the Socialist Union to include weekly
(Sunday-night) screenings
that simultaneously were social events, venues for discussion of
the most advanced
efforts in cinematic endeavor, and basic occasions to become
acquainted with what
was considered the vanguard of filmic experimentation.
Specifically, the valorization
of montage led to Orrom's programming of many classics of

8. Soviet revolutionary
film, while his concern with the ways filmic codes could
contribute to a concerted re-
structuring of the givens of everyday reality encouraged him to
screen as many works
of German Expressionism as possible. In particular, if Orrom
and Williams appreci-
ated the Soviets for their perfection of montage techniques in
the service of political
3 The catalog can be searched at the website of the Raymond
Williams Papers, at http://www.swan.ac.uk/crew/research
projects/theraymondwilliamspapers/. My thanks to the staff at
the Richard Burton Archives at Swansea University for
welcoming me there for a week of research and for facilitating
access to materials.
4 See, for instance, his oft-cited account of Cambridge elitism
in "Culture Is Ordinary" (1958), in, among other publi-
cations, Williams, Resources of Hope, ed. Robin Gable (New
York: Verso, 1989), 3-18,
5 For the history of Wiliiams's ultimately rocky relationship
with Orrom, see Dai Smith's canonical biography Raymond
Williams: A Warrior's Tale (Cardigan, Wales: Parthian, 2008),
89 and passim.
Cinema Journal 52 I No. 3 ! Spring 2013
argument, they also admired the Germans for their supposed

9. concern with the total
control of the artwork—camerawork, set design, acting, and so
on, all of which were
conceived to work together for desired aesthetic effect.
Orrom and Williams lost touch with each other during the war
but had resumed
their cinema-inspired collaboration by the end of the 1940s.
Their sense of the prom-
ise of cinema was so strong, indeed, that they seemed to give
themselves over fully to
consideration of careers in art cinema production and
promotion. Orrom had already
begun some professional work in documentary film (he would
later go on to be a cel-
ebrated BBC filmmaker), and for his first film endeavor with
Williams, Orrom used his
connections to get Paul Rotha interested as director in a project
on positive and nega-
tive aspects of the modern mechanization of rural society for
which Williams would
write the script. Williams did in fact write up a ñfty-two-page
"treatment" titled "Effect
of Machine on the Countryman's Work,
life, and Community," which, in antici-
pation perhaps of his major study years
later. The Country and the City (1973), ana-
lyzed in detail the contrast between "the
old peasant community, with its settled,
integrated system, with a contemporary
village where there is no real economic
centre." But other than the quick sugges-
tion that the film should be in two parts to
get at the contrast, Williams's text offers
no hints about cinematic style or struc-

10. ture, just pure sociological and economic
analysis. In any case, the project foun-
dered immediately when the potential
sponsor, the government's Central Office
of Information, declared that it wanted
to turn the film into a mere prologue to
a longer project, and Rotha, in protest,
dropped out as director.'
But Orrom and Williams remained
committed to cinema as a veritable life
Figure 1. in 1953, Raymond Williams and Michael
Orrom formed a joint private company, Film Drama
Ltd. They hoped that their written work would serve
as a manifesto to undergird fhe fiim productions that
they planned to come up with in the following years.
(Back cover, Williams and Orrom, Preface to Film,
1954). .; ., • - .
choice. Forming a joint private company.
Film Drama Ltd., in 1953, Williams and
Orrom set out boldly to create a new
aesthetics of film both by writing about
6 In his famous, book-length interview with the editors of the
New Left Review, Williams puts it this way: "In the late
thirties admiration for Dr. Caligari [Robert Wiene, 19201 or
Metropoiis [Fritz Lang, 1927] was virtually a condition of

11. entry to the Socialist Club at Cambridge." Williams, Politics
and Letters: interviews witi) New Left Review (London:
Verso, 1979), 232.
7 "Effect of Machine on the Countryman's Work, Life, and
Community" can be found in file WWE2/1/4/4 ("Film and
Cross-Over Works"), Raymond Williams Papers, Richard
Burton Archives, Swansea University, Wales (hereafter, Wil-
liams Papers).
Cinema Journal 52 I No. 3 I Spring 2013
the possibilities of new expressive directions in the art and,
more important, by actu-
ally setting out to script and make films. The critical writing
manifested itself as a
self-published book. Preface to Film (1954), whose title, as the
authors later explained,
was meant to capture both the ways in which dramatic traditions
before and up to
film (i.e., stage drama) had reached expressive impasses that it
would be the mission
of film to overcome and Orrom's and Williams's own desire that
their written work
serve as a manifesto to undergird the film productions that they
hoped to come up
with in the following years (Figure 1).̂ Indeed, right after
Preface, Williams wrote two
screenplays for Film Drama Ltd., ^ Dance of Seeing and
Legend, and he and Orrom ex-

12. pended much energy in trying to refine the scripts into workable
productions. A Dance
of Seeing was abandoned, however, after several drafts. Legend
got far enough along for
Orrom and Williams to submit the script for financing from the
British Film Institute,
but it was rejected. - : . í . . ,
Interestingly, the script for Legend in the Williams collection at
Swansea includes
a two-part critical preface that acknowledges the difficulties of
finding funding for
art cinema production and turns the financial issues into a
justification for new cul-
tural policy. Specifically, Orrom and Williams militate for
funds to be designated for
noncommercial, experimental work by government, industry,
and private sponsors,
and the two men even go on to the bolder demand that there be
set up a new sort of
film institution devoted to supporting ongoing effort in
experimental film production.^
This emphasis on the articulation of a cultural policy that would
push both the state
and the private sector to ensure regular resources for creative
work is something that
remains throughout Williams's work in the sociology of
communication. Nonetheless,
the failure to find a direct positive outcome for Legend's own
funding difficulties seems
to have soured Williams on this particular project. For personal
reasons (including dis-
like of Orrom by Williams's wife Joy), the friendship between
Orrom and Williams was
foundering. WüHams made the halfhearted suggestion that he
and Orrom might work

13. up an unpublished novel he had written (an existential thriller
called Adamson) into a
commercial venture, but Williams quickly declared that the
project didn't engage him
anymore, and he gave up on a career in ñlm production.
Perhaps that was for the best. No doubt, the aforementioned
conjunction in Or-
rom and Williams of an emphatically political Soviet cinema
and a more artistically
intended German one was not without its tensions regarding the
essential vocation of
cinema: WiUiams and Orrom's collaboration did not always
resolve the extent to which
they were assuming that artistic experimentation on cinematic
form was progressive
per se, or, rather, needed politically radical intent to make it so.
This critical hesita-
tion would, I contend, manifest strongly in Orrom and
Williams's practical film work
in the 1950s, in which aestheticism threatened to overtake any
measure of political
commitment. In particular, despite his budding efforts as a
government and industry
documentarian, Orrom appears to have had a strong investment
in imagining cine-
matic form not as encouraging a capturing of the real but as
conjuring transcendental
8 Raymond Williams and Michael Orrom, Preface to Film
(London: Fiim Drama Ltd., 1954).
9 Williams and Orrom, "On the State of Fiim as an Art,"
memorandum to /.egend script, file WWE2/1/4/2, Wiiiiams
Papers.

14. Cinenna Journal 52 1 No. 3 I Spring 2013
alternatives to it. It is noteworthy, for instance, that when Shell
Oil provided a zoom
lens for an industrial documentary about the company that
Orrom was working on,
he immediately thought of the device's transformative potential:
as he put it in a letter
to Williams about a fantasy film they were developing, the
zoom lens would "begin to
give us the cinematic equivalent of what I've always been
wanting—the equivalent of
differential distortion in a flat painting. It really will be
exciting."
The aestheticizing side of Orrom and Williams's collaboration
perhaps accounts
for a mythologizing tendency in the Dance of Seeing and
Legend scripts by which humans
are deprived of historical situatedness to become instead
symbols of universal human
significance: A Dance of Seeing is about an artist whose
aesthetic commitments lead him
to become alienated from his wealthy fiancée until he learns to
include her in his aes-
thetic ambitions by imagining her dancing with him in a
transformative performance
that leaves everyday reality behind, whereas Legend is about an
artist whose aesthetic
commitments lead him to become alienated from the everyday
urban world until he
flees to a redolent, resplendent countryside where he dances
with a mystery woman in

15. a transformative performance that leaves everyday reality
behind (with the additional
nvist that when he returns to the city, he finds it too
transformed by his aestheticizing,
imaginative powers).
More successful are the several critical writings on film that
Williams offered in the
early 1950s and that took this cultural form as an object of
analysis rather than as a
mode of artistic practice that he was intending to make his
vocation. In the case of the
longest text, "Film and the Dramatic Tradition"—Williams's
contribution to the coau-
thored volume Preface to Film—the emphasis on film as an
object for analysis is perhaps
understandable: as noted. Preface was intended by Williams and
Orrom to serve as a
manifesto for new modes of film production, but the authors
took this to necessitate a
look back at the existing traditions (and what those both
enabled but also blocked), and
the task of this retrospective analysis fell to Williams—who was
already exhibiting a
historical, even genealogical, bent through his scholarly
research in the 1950s for what
would eventually become his breakthrough book. Culture and
Society, published in 1958.
"Film and the Dramatic Tradition," in fact, makes a major claim
about cinema's
historical origin and emergence that would remain throughout
Wilhams's intellectual
career (and that would, in the 1960s and 1970s, be extended to
television, too): namely,
that modern moving-image narrative forms such as cinema are

16. modes of dramatic
performance and need to be understood within the longer and
larger history of drama.
(Williams admits in this respect that his approach works best
for the fiction film and
not for animation or nonfiction.) Film, Williams argues, is
about the performed repre-
sentation of the activities of people, although one of his central
points is to assert that
this is to make no particular claim about the type of activities
represented, which may
be as much psychological as physical or sensational. For
Williams, the idea that film is
a representation of human performance needs to remain at that
somewhat general,
even abstract or vague, level, so as not to constrain any
particular effort (cinematic and,
before that, theatrical) within dogmatic notions of what is
properly dramatic or cin-
ematic. Indeed, behind "Film and the Dramatic Tradition" lies a
polemic by Williams
10 Letter from Orrom to Williams, September 14, 1953, in file
WWE/2/1/4/1, Williams Papers.
6
Cinema Journal 52 I No. 3 I Spring 2013
against a certain doxa as to what is the right mode of narration
and performance for
dramatic work: namely, a naturalism obsessed by notions of
superficial accuracy that,
as he saw it, was dominating contemporary theater and traded

17. any deeper analysis for
the fetish of getting a few gritty details correct.
Interestingly, "Film and the Dramatic Tradition" likely contains
Williams's earliest
direct reference to a key concept that would run through his
career, and that in many
ways would be taken to be one of his privileged contributions to
cultural study, namely,
the complicated notion of structures of feeling. Williams argues
in "Film and the Dra-
matic Tradition" that while at each moment in the history of an
artistic form there is
a crystallization of aesthetic practices into a set of conventions
(which can then risk
becoming dogmatized and ontologized as the essential and right
employment of that
form), the ongoing movement of social history impels the arts to
evolve new conven-
tions in order to grasp new life experience. As he asserts, "In
principle, it seems clear
that the dramatic conventions of any given period are
fundamentally related to the
structure of feeling in that period. . . . Conventions—the means
of expression which
find tacit consent—are a vital part of this structure of feeling.
As the structure changes,
new means are perceived and realized, while old means come to
appear empty and
artificial. . . . Changes in the whole conception of a human
being and of his relations
with what is non-human bring, necessarily, changes of
convention in their wake.""
Put simply, conditions of modernity had encouraged new
understandings of hu-

18. man beings (for example, psychoanalysis had enabled a new
awareness of human
interiority) and of their place in the world (for example, social
theory increasingly
understood humans in a socially extensive context). Some
aesthetic forms were well
equipped to represent such shifts in the meaning of the human.
For instance, the novel
was an eminent genre for interiorization, since narrators could
tunnel inside charac-
ters' minds and announce their thoughts to the reader. But other
forms found that their
technical means limited their ability to keep up with changed
structures of feeling. For
instance (and to cite the example that Williams himself employs
throughout "Film and
the Dramatic Tradition"), stage drama could gesture only
clumsily toward interiority.
As Williams puts it, "While drama in the naturalist habit could
proceed without dif-
ficulty, reproducing its surface actions and feelings with an
added lifelikeness of detaü,
the drama of genuine 'emotional naturalism,' of 'inner realism,'
was confronted by its
own distinctive quality with an apparently insuperable technical
difficulty."'^ To take
just one case noted by Williams, when Stanislavsky, in his stage
notes for an adaptation
of Chekhov's The Seagull, writes parenthetically of one
character that a pause in her
actions at one point means "that she has evidently remembered
her own love-affair,"
it might well be that this is what the pause means, but there is
no way to ensure that
meaning on stage and to have it come across unambiguously to
the spectator.

19. Williams would argue, then, that the cinema possesses resources
that could over-
come this dramatic limitation. Most obviously, a voice-over
(whether by the character
or by an omniscient narrator) could express what on stage could
at best only be hinted
11 Williams, "Film and the Dramatic Tradition," in Williams
and Orrom, Preface to Film, 2 1 - 2 3 .
12 Ibid., 43.
Cinema Journal 52 I No. 3 í Spring 2013
at (unless—and this would seem a clumsy option—the stage
production itself used
some sort of voice-over). Indeed, just three years after the
publication of Preface to Film,
Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) would hone an extensive
utilization of voice-over
to tunnel inside the mind of its introspective protagonist.
WOliams would become so
enamored of the experiments with subjective expression in
Bergman's film that, when
in the 1960s he revised his mid-1950s volume Drama in
Performance (a volume essentially
about the ways plays are actually staged and performed across
the history of drama),
and, among other updates, added a chapter on cinema, it was
Wild Strawberries he
concentrated on, offering a close reading of the film as a sort of
performance of Berg-
man's script that used temporal shifts along with the voice-over

20. to capture expansive
notions of consciousness and memory.
If "Film and the Dramatic Tradition" concentrates on film's past
history (including
its place in the larger history of dramatic performance) and only
hints at future possi-
bilities in filmic experimentation, a shorter essay on the cinema
that WiUiams published
a year before Preface, "Film as a Tutorial Subject," helps us
understand why Williams
might emphasize current and concretely definable conditions
over unformed future
possibilities. Williams's first fuU-length critical engagement
with film, "Film as a Tutorial
Subject" is the summary of a cinema course that he had taught
at the beginning of the
decade for the Workers Education Association (WEA), a
program of adult education
for the working class. The essay offers instruction in the
practical criticism of film and is
rich in concrete suggestions for rigorous ways to approach the
study of the art form.'*
In passing, I should clarify that I refer to "Film as a Tutorial
Subject" as his first
"fuU-length" engagement with films, since the Swansea
archives include some earlier,
occasional pieces by Williams on cinema, primarily from his
time in the military dur-
ing World War II, when he wrote cultural commentary for an
armed services news-
paper, Twentyone. For instance, in the issue from October 13,
1945, writing under the
name Michael Pope, he offered a very brief (and generally
dismissive) notice on the

21. Hollywood films Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944) andyl Guest in
the House (John Brahm,
1944), which he saw as being little less aesthetically bankrupt
than American advertis-
ing (which, throughout his career, was the ultimate symbol of
creative-cultural sellout).
Even earlier, during his Cambridge-student days, Williams
wrote notices for a campus
newspaper, and these include a very short review of E. W.
Robson and M. M. Rob-
son's pamphlet, "In Defence of Moovie" [do], whose tide is a
play on Philip Sidney's
"Defence of Poesy" from circa 1579. For Williams, the
elaboration of a new aesthetics
of the art of film should look not back to the past but to an
open, experimental future:
"Although the cinema will undoubtedly have a great future, it
will not be because of
such an urge [to return to older myths of unified national
culture, as in Sidney], but
because with the cinema freed from its present restrictions, all
the scientific force and
frustrated art of this century will be turned to the making of
films for the people."'^
13 Williams, "Wild Strawberries by Ingmar Bergman," Drama
in Performance (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1968),
157-169.
14 Williams, "Film as a Tutorial Subject," in Border Country:
Raymond Williams in Adult Education, ed. John Mcilroy
and Sallie Westwood (Leicester, UK: National Institute of Adult
Continuing Education, 1993), 185-192.

22. 15 Williams, "In Defence of Moovie," Cambridge University
Journal'i, no. 5 (1940): 2.
8
Cinema Journal 52 I No. 3 I Spring 2013
These earliest pieces were quite occasional efforts indeed,
whereas "Film as a Tu-
torial Subject" offers an extended refiection on the ways film
could become a conse-
quential object for cultural analysis. The essay came about as
part of an experiment
in introducing film into adult education. Williams's efforts as a
WEA tutor consdtuted
his first major postwar employment, and he later would look
back with fondness on
the opportunity to teach students far from the confines of
Cambridge, students who
were often much more open to new subject areas than what he
regarded as the stuffy
elitists he often encountered in the university system. The WEA
tutors would travel
from town to town and teach a variety of subjects on a weekly
or biweekly basis, of-
ten mandating written assignments that would be mailed to them
for correction and
comments before the next on-site meeting. Already in the late
1940s and early 1950s,
Williams was including some attention to film in his general
WEA classes on cul-
ture—for instance, one topic in a 1949-1950 course titled "What
Is Culture?" dealing
with notions of hierarchies of values in the arts was "Is the

23. Cinema an Art?"—and it
seems that the WEA administration for one of the towns on his
regular route. Battle,
East Sussex, asked him to consider doing a full-semester's
course on cinema. Williams
agreed, and "Film as a Tutorial Subject," which was published
in a professional jour-
nal for WEA tutors, is his record of the experience.
As a report to colleagues on the experiment of teaching a new
subject area to
adults, "Film as a Tutorial Subject" is fuled with practical
consideradons in peda-
gogy and thereby reveals much about how Williams thought the
cinema should be
approached as an object of study. For instance, the inexorable
flow of filmic images
and the concomitant difficulty for a cinema viewer to go back
over a moment that has
already passed meant that students (and their tutor!) often had
to rely on imperfect
memory when discussing films and had to do so, at the same
time, with the disad-
vantage of an undeveloped and imprecise critical vocabulary (in
the essay, Williams
argues that the existing literature on film is weak in its
elaboration of concrete critical
concepts). Williams's solution was to screen clips and short
films in class and have stu-
dents work together on trying to come up with detailed (but also
ideologically neutral)
descriptions of what they had just seen on screen. While the
idea of an objective ac-
count of the visuals of a film has its problems (is not every
description tendendous and
ideological in some way?), Williams's idea was that these

24. exercises in pure descripdon
of a short and manageable corpus would help students hone
attendve viewing skills
that they could then apply producdvely to longer works of film.
Beyond practical advice, Williams also offered more general
reflections on the aes-
thedcs of film, on the medium's capacity for true art, and on the
nature of a film crid-
cism that would be adequate to the task of taking account of
such ardsdc potendal.
Williams at this point in his intellectual trajectory was still
strongly under the influence
of the brand of "pracdcal cridcism" associated with the
imposing Cambridge pres-
ence F. R. Leavis. For Leavis, cridcism, on the one hand, meant
reading texts (from aU
levels of a culture, high and low) very closely and very
immanently, with litde atten-
don to authorial idendty (the assumpdon was that works of
culture wore their values,
high and low, on their sleeves and that their evaluadon could be
derived from tex-
tual features direcdy), but on the other hand, it also meant
reading texts for purposes
of discriminadon (in other words, it was necessary that there be
evaluadon to clear
Cinema Journal 52 I No. 3 I Spring 2013
away the bad from the good). One classic expression of Leavis's
position was his 1933
manifesto. Culture and Environment, cowritten with Denys
Thompson, in which "Envi-

25. ronment" refers to aU the excrescences of modern hfe that are
threatening the rich
fiourishing of "culture." WilUams's first book, Reading and
Criticism (1950), is explicitiy
Leavisite in this respect, to the degree that it uses
"environment" in the same fearful
manner to indicate the engulfing dangers of contemporary media
and, importantiy
for our discussion at hand, includes cinema as one of these
menacing manifestations
of dismal modernity: "It is not only in reading that evidence of
such methods [of deg-
radation of sensibiUty and crudity in expression] can be found.
The cinema film has
gained its wide popularity by a related, and frequentiy more
powerful exploitation of
similar vulgarities."'
In this respect, "Film as a Tutorial Subject" comes off as a
Leavisite justification
of the mission of film criticism, and this mission essentially,
then, takes as its first pri-
ority a clearing away of environment—what Williams pointedly
calls "destructive"
criticism. Declaring that perhaps 97 to 98 percent of all films
are unworthy of being
considered art, Williams asserts that "a high percentage of aU
art in the twentieth
century is bad. That is why so much of the best contemporary
criticism is necessar-
ily destructive; the rubbish has to be cleared. The clearing
process is important, as a
practical testing-ground for values.""
In "Film as a Tutorial Subject," to be sure, Williams did cite
some cinematic ac-

26. complishments that he felt stood out from the morass of crass
environment, such as
Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Vesevolod
Pudovkin's Mother (1926),
a film on which Williams claimed to have written a fuU-length
study, although no such
work has come to light. But for the most part, the WEA essay is
not as concerned as
"Film and the Dramatic Tradition" with promoting a new art of
cinema (including
the sort of cinema that, at the time, Williams wanted to make
with Michael Orrom).
Instead, its focus is on existing film culture and includes, in
that respect, a caU for
pedagogical attention to film as a sociological fact (part of the
hegemonic mass-media
"environment," to invoke again that Leavisite term) rather than
just an aesthetic one.
In other words, WiUiams wants there to be study not only of
what cinema could be-
come but also of what current institutions are making it be at
the present time (here, he
recommends as a key text in the sociology of cinema,
Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler).
As noted eadier, biographical factors impeUed WiUiams to give
up on creative work
in film at this time, and for the rest of the decade his attention
was elsewhere (above
all to the retrospective inteUectual history that would culminate
in the breakthrough
Culture and Society and The Long Revolution). But, then, the
emergent culture of the 1960s
gave gUmpses of new possibilities for cinema—ones that were
increasingly framed
by WilHams in poUtical terms as much as aesthetic ones—and

27. the latter part of the
decade and up into the 1970s witnessed a burst of renewed
writing and lecturing by
Williams to come to grips with new cinematic potential.
16 Williams, Reading and Criticism llonóon-. Frederick Muiier,
1950), 18.
17 Williams, "Film as a Tutorial Subject," 186.
10
Cinema Journal 52 I No. 3 í Spring 2013
Williams's Reengagement with Film: The 1 9 6 0 s and Beyond.
Key to WilKams's
"rediscovery" of film was his experience as a Cambridge don
starting in 1961. As the
decade progressed, WiUiams came to find in his students an
intense investment of their
own in new cinema as the art of their social-cultural moment.
As someone who both
studied and attempted creative work, Williams began to sense
that, for his students,
film was their aesthetically expressive art of choice, not only to
analyze but also to
make: as he put it in a BBC radio talk, "Film and the Cultural
Tradition," which ap-
pears in print for the first time following this essay, "In the
universities, now, film is the
most important single interest among arts students, and in my
experience this has the
intensity of attention and, where possible, practice, which in
previous student genera-

28. tions belonged to poetry and to experimental prose."
Williams took the younger generation's investment in film (both
the study of it and
the production of it) quite seriously, and he did what he could
to encourage and cul-
tivate their engagement. For instance, when several junior
faculty and students, such
as Stephen Crofts, Noel Purdon, and Tony Rayns (some of
whom would soon go on
to offer important writings on film in cutting-edge Film Studies
journals such as Saem
and Afleñmage), decided to begin a new quarterly publication.
Cinema, they asked Wil-
liams to grant an interview about film for the first issue, as a
way of building publicity
for the publication, and he readily agreed. Purdon in particular
was moving in the
same political circles at Cambridge as Williams, and they
shared a particular interest
in Gramsci. In a sense, what the interaction with the Cinema
group offered was contact
not only with a new aesthetic culture but also with a new
political culture, and Noel
Purdon suggests that WiUiams particularly enjoyed learning
about the ways in which
continental theory, such as French semiology and structuraUsm,
which the students
were then gleefuUy discovering, could inflect the study of
popular culture.'^
In its concision. Cinema'?, interview with Williams offers a
veritable compendium of
Williams's thoughts on film at the time. For instance, he notes
film's special appeal to
students as the art most relevant to their times ("I've noticed the

29. extreme—sometimes
even exclusive—interest of undergraduates of what one used to
call a literary turn of
mind, in films"), and he expresses his concomitant conviction
that professors of En-
glish needed to come to grips with the new expressive potentials
of moving image cul-
ture ("an English faculty which didn't deal with that experience
[of the moving image]
would be deluding itself"—the last line of the interview). He
also conveys his belief
that work in this domain would have to be both theoretical and
practical (i.e., produc-
tion oriented, with the effort there coming perhaps from what he
called "independent
companies inside the university").
18 "Raymond Williams, 'Film and the University': A Cirjema
Interview," Cinema, no. 1 (1968): 2 4 - 2 5 .
19 In terms of the French theory inflections that were so key to
Cinema's intervention in UK film culture, Noel Purdon
notes that the inaugural issue, in which the interview with
Williams appeared, also included one iteration of Peter
Wollen's influential cine-structuralism, an essay titled "Notes
towards a Structural Analysis of the Films of Sam
Fuller," appearing a year before his groundbreaking book Signs
and Meaning in the Cinema (1959, rev. 1972i
London: British Film Institute, 2012). Through a series of e-
mails, Purdon graciously has helped me understand
some of Williams's engagement with Cambridge film culture at

30. the time.
20 All citations in this paragraph come from "Film and the
University," 25.
, 11
Cinema Journal 52 I No. 3 I Spring 2013
At the same time, it is noteworthy that these many years after
his exploratory WEA
courses in film, Williams still was adhering to many of the
basic pedagogical principles
he had experimented with in those earlier times (and had
summed up in the short
essay "Film as a Tutorial Subject," discussed above). For
instance, Williams begins
the Cinema interview by calling, as he had in the early 1950s,
for introductory cinema
classes to start with close reading of select film sequences so
that basic codes of cinema
and how they structure meanings are understood in rigorous
fashion: "I'm quite sure
that there's one kind of critical work on film, comparable in
method though not at all
in substance, to the basic work of textual analysis, where you're
simply dealing with
the substance in detail—just what a sequence of images related
to voices and sounds
is—something very like Practical Criticism in that older
sense."^' Now, Williams sug-
gests, as he had in his contribution to Preface to Film in the
1950s, any such analysis of
the basic conventions of a cultural form such as film cannot

31. merely be formalistic:
there needs to be an historically attuned critical approach that
examines conventions
in their contexts (social and political as well as aesthetic) to
determine the forces that
either maintain the conventions or push them to change. This,
again, invokes the ar-
gument that precinematic cultural forms, such as stage drama,
can go only so far in
representing new structures and feelings of modernity and that
film steps in to offer
new representational possibilities. As he puts it in the
interview, declaring that film is
particularly adept at figuring mobility, "This is something
which the whole of modern
literature had been moving towards, and which is the basic
importance of film. This
was the point that drama round the turn of the century got to. In
a sense Strindberg,
in some of the later works like Damascus or the Dream Play,
had invented the cinema
before the technical invention of it."^^
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Cinema interview with
Williams comes
in a prefatory note in which interviewer Noel Purdon notes that
Williams is about to
begin a lecture course on film within the English faculty at
Cambridge. Indeed, Wil-
liams's sense of the new importance of film—or at least of its
importance to the new
student generation—had become so strong that he offered
several years of instruction
on the topic, and his teaching on the topic merits some
comment.

32. Unfortunately, the historical background is too sketchy for us to
know as much as
we'd like about Williams's Cambridge courses on cinema. In his
biography of Wil-
liams, Fred Inglis provides some tantalizing hints (but in
follow-up e-mails with me was
unable to offer any elaboration; as he noted, the research for his
biography happened
almost twenty years ago). Inglis states, "In the academic year of
1968-69 his lecture
course on dramatic forms and tragedy included Eisenstein,
Bergman, Pudovkin, Lang,
D. W Griffith. . . . In the spring term of the next year he gave
four lectures with a
following hour of discussion, much along the lines of his and
Michael Orrom's old
textbook Preface to Film and the [Bath] evening class which
went with it. By 1971 and
1972 he had run drama into film, and lectured on 'Strindberg to
Godard' . . . with
plenty of time for watching cUps."^^
21 Ibid, 24.
22 Ibid, 25.
23 Fred Inglis, Raymond Williams (New York: Routledge,
1995), 222.
12
Cinema Journal 52 I No. 3 I Spring 2013
The Williams archives at Swansea hold Williams's own

33. notebook jottings for a
number of the film lectures, and these obviously are of use to
the historian, although
they are sketchy in their own fashion: famous for being able to
speak extemporane-
ously, with minimal notes of any sort to accompany his
disquisitions, Williams wrote
lecture plans of a brevity that is often unhelpful to the archival
researcher.^* Reveal-
ingly, where, in the Cinema interview, Williams had suggested
that a first course on
film might proceed in either of two directions—a basic formal
training in that sort
of close textual analysis which, ever since his WEA film course,
he clearly believed
was the necessary first step in the rigorous study of film or a
more culturally ex-
pansive pedagogy that might examine directors or national
cinema or genres (an
option which, as he says in the interview, "doesn't involve the
close analysis that the
other would, [but] would get on to certain questions which
perhaps in the end are
even more interesting")—Williams's lecture notes show him
trying to do both in the
same course.^^ On the one hand, he focused much of the first
lectures for the course,
which appears to have had the title 'Approaches to Film" in at
least one iteration,
to quite close analysis of select scenes from canonical films, in
particular Macbeth
(Orson Welles, 1948), Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950), Ivan
the Terrible, parts 1 and
2 (Sergei Eisenstein, 1944, 1958), and Billy Budd (Peter
Ustinov, 1962). Invoking his
contribution to Preface to Film, Williams defined the goal here

34. as the study of cinematic
specificity: film picked up on and extended the dramatic
tradition, but through its
employment of codes specific to it as an integral art form in its
own right. As he puts
it in the lecture notes, film's tradition "is not outside that of
drama, just new means
and methods of achieving the accepted aims."
At the same time, on the other hand, Williams appears to have
devoted several lec-
tures (or parts thereof—the notes are unclear on this point) to an
ideological analysis of
the Western and its transformations over time. For instance,
modern Westerns like The
Man from Laramie (Anthony Mann, 1955) and Little Big Man
(Arthur Penn, 1970) were
compared and contrasted by Williams to a more classic Western
like Stagecoach (John
Ford, 1939). Both modern films maintained certain conventions
of the classic form,
such as an individualized hero whose recourse to violence is
given virtually mythic and
premodern justifieation, and then extended the conventions to
account for new expe-
riences (for instance, an increasingly critical stance in which
Yankee soldiers, rather
than the Indians, were often the bad guys). In other words,
Williams's pedagogy was
both formalist, using close reading to pinpoint fundamental,
medium-specific codes of
cinema, and contextualist, using ideological analysis to clarify
generic conventions and
how these changed over time in response to changed structures
of feeling.

35. For instance, Williams notes that by the 1960s the Western had
begun to subvert its
own conventions ("Italian Westerns play on this," he says), and
his lecture notes con-
nect what is happening specifically to a genre like the Western
to broader, modernist
challenges to classical forms by which artistic codes are
systematically and self-reflex-
ively dismantled: as WdHams puts it, "Uncertainty in 60s of
possibility of any art to be
24 The notebooks are filed In folder WWE/2/1/12/14, Williams
Papers.
25 Williams, "Film and the University," 25.
13
Cinema Journal 52 i No. 3 I Spring 2013
medium of truth eats at it from inside. Also in novel & theatre
in last 15 or
Here, then, textual and contextual analysis merged, as Williams
moved in his lectures
through a series of modernist films and modernist directors who
were rethinking the
basic convendons of cinema to expand its representadonal
possibilities. In this analy-
sis, Williams gave pride of place to Fellini and Godard as
experimenters who were
extending film's expressive capacity: in pardcular, he returned
repeatedly in his lecture
notes to Godard's Une femme mariée (1964), in which edidng
patterns led to a rethinking

36. of bodies—and of the social and sexual reladonships these
bodies entered into ("nega-
dve definidon of reladonship defined by technique," as he puts
it in his notes).
For Williams, Godard's film exhibited a self-reflexivity that
enabled it to explore the
reladons between everyday life and cinemadcally constructed
realides, and thereby
to raise quesdons about the medium of cinema and its
representational possibilides
(as well as limitadons). Williams was emphadc regarding the
new cinema's origins in
earlier modernist experimentation in other narrative arts: as he
puts it in his notes,
"Work of art where issues directed raised is Femme mariée. Self
conscious creators.
In Novel from Joyce. In Poetry earlier. In Drama Pirandello
1920s (Strindberg)." But it
is clear, too, that he was capaciously and generously trying to
deal with a specific and
irreducible new mode of experimentadon that he knew spoke in
special fashion to the
new generadon. Cinema then possessed a perdnence and
relevance that was unique to
this historical conjuncture.
Symptomadc in this respect is the new version of his influential
Drama from Ibsen
to Eliot (published in 1952) that Williams fashioned at this dme.
While Williams con-
served many of the original chapters—each of which was
dedicated to a different
phase in the evoludon of drama and looked at how each moment
involved openness
to, or blockage of, the new social values that were trying to be

37. expressed in emergent
structures of feeling—the 1960s version of the book added some
new chapters and
sported a new due that captures some of what was going on in
Williams's think-
ing at the dme. The newer version, published in 1968, was
called Drama fiom Ibsen
to Brecht, and Brechdan nodons of cridcal distanciadon and
rupture would indeed
come to be cridcal to Williams's thinking in that period,
encouraging him to think
again of cinema (and, now, television) as the arts in the most
advanced posidon in
the historical moment to employ expressive potendals to
socially critical ends. In fact,
despite the book dde's suggcsdon that the drama of Brecht is the
end point of cridcal
experimentadon in this domain, it is really Brechdan-inspired
television and cinema
that Williams devotes the last pages of his conclusion to and
that he sees as offering
the relevant cultural practices for the present context. As he
puts it just several pages
before the end:
It is also necessary to realize that drama is no longer coexistent
with theatre,
in the narrow sense. . . . The largest audience for drama, in our
own world,
is in the cinema and on television. . . . It is then very important
that many
of the developments we have observed, in dramadc forms and
conventions
have been, in a deep way, towards these new media. . . . In
method, film and

38. 26 All subsequent quotations from lecture notes are found in the
WWE/2/1/12/14 folder.
14
Cinema Journal 52 ! No. 3 I Spring 2013
television offer real solutions to many of the problems of
modern dramatic
form. . . . I see in film and television the evidence and the
promise of new
kinds of action, of complex seeing made actual in a directly
composed per-
formance, of new kinds of relation between action and speech,
of changes in
the fundamental concept of dramatic imagery, which open up
not simply as
techniques . . . but as responses to an altering structure of
feeling, and as new
and important relations with audiences.
Williams's valorization of new moving-image culture in
Brechtian terms receives its
most concrete and extended application in a talk, "A Lecture on
ReaUsm," centered on
Ken Loach's BBC telefilm The Big Flame (1969), which he gave
to the Society for Edu-
cation in Film and Television in the mid-1970s and that was
soon after published in
Screen. Admittedly, since it is an analysis of a telefilm, 'A
Lecture on Realism" might
not really appear to fit directiy within the corpus of WiUiams's
writings on the cinema
per se. But The Big Flame was shot on film, and some Loach

39. BBC productions from
the time did get theatrical release. WiUiams frequently
mentions fiilm and television
together and treats their most political accomplishments in
theoretically shared terms,
and he clearly didn't see them as inevitably fully distinct media.
In Television: Technology
and Cultural Form, for instance, Williams includes movies
shown on television as a genre
of television. For these reasons, it is illuminating to include
discussion of 'A Lecture
on Realism" in a discussion of Williams's writings on film.
Given Screen's status in the period as the key EngUsh-language
journal for a rethink-
ing of cinema in theoretical terms (generally derived from
French structural, semio-
logical, and poststructural models), 'A Lecture on Realism" is
one of the rare pieces of
WiUiams on moving-image culture to receive regular citation in
the critical literature.
No doubt, the fact that WiUiams was publishing on realism (and
even defending it,
according to one iteration of the essay's title) in a journal that
notably tended to ex-
coriate realist cinema gave his intervention into the debate on
the poUtics of reaUsm
a polemical tone. Screen stood famously (or infamously,
depending on one's point of
view) for an ultra-leftist formalism inspired by French theory's
invocation of a freeing
of the signifier from any representational project. And there's
no doubt that the fact
that some of the defenders of the Screen position, such as
Stephen Heath and Colin

40. 27 Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (London: Oxford
University Press, 1958), 3 4 5 - 3 4 5 . Mention might also be
made here ot Williams's 1974 inaugural lecture "Drama in a
Dramatised Society," delivered when he took up an
endowed professorship in Drama, the first of its kind at
Cambridge. Despite the august context and the seeming
respectability of subject matter perhaps hinted at in the lecture's
title, Wiiiiams's speech is reaily about hov» the
newest mass forms of moving-image culture are challenging and
changing older performative culture. Williams con-
centrates primariiy on television (which must have been more
than a bit scandalous in the context of Cambridge),
but he does make passing reference to fiim. For instance, in the
very last moments of his speech he recounts how
at the beginning of the twentieth century, filmmakers "were
discovering means of making images move; finding the
technical basis for the motion picture: the new mobility and
with it the fade, the dissolve, the cut, the flashback, the
voice over, the montage, that are technical forms but also, in
new ways, modes of perceiving, of relating, of compos-
ing and of finding our way." See Williams, Drama in a
Dramatised Soc/eiy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1975), 20.
28 Williams, "A Lecture on Realism," Screen 18, no. 1 (1977):

41. 5 1 - 7 4 , reprinted as "A Defence of Reaiism," in Wil-
liams, What I Came to Say, eu. Neil Belton, Francis Muihern,
and Jenny Tayior (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989),
2 2 6 - 2 3 9 . References in my text are to this later edition of
the essay.
15
Cinema Journal 52 ! No. 3 i Spring 2013
MacCabe, were former students of Williams added to the
complex resonances of his
essay's appearance in Screen.
Yet Screen's attempt to enlist Brecht in the cause of a formalist
politics of the free
play of the signifier was itself overly polemical, and the
journal's denunciatory con-
fladon of a socially cognitive content in art (which can in fact
enlist all sorts of tech-
niques, experimental or not, realist or not, to achieve its critical
goals) with a naive
notion of realism as a specific and singular technique was
certainly overstated. Against
this, Williams's intervention traces changing conceptions of
realism to argue that a
politically progressive culture may well need to enlist some
notion of realism in its
desire to say something cognizant of social realities but that this
implies no endorse-
ment of a simple-minded photographic notion of realism as
mere reproduction of the

42. surface look of things, a mere "naturalism." Brecht, he argues
firmly (and to my mind,
correctly), was a realist; he wanted art to offer critical
statements on social reality, but
he felt precisely that mere photographic reproduction couldn't
entail such criticism.
Progressive art necessitated breaks from, fissures within,
dominant (photographic and
uncritical) ways of seeing. Getting away from the mere surface
of the world was not a
formalist rejection of the real but a way of getting at it.
For Williams, indeed, it is the fissures and fractures within
Loach's film that give
it much of its interest and make it Breehtian: in Williams's
words, "The intention of
interpreting an event, which Brecht made so intrinsic a part of
his dramadc form, disdn-
guishing it from the form which offered an event for mere
empathy, seems quite clearly
evident in The Big Flame, and is probably even consciously
derived from something of
the influence of Brecht." In pardcular, by recounting a dockers'
strike that veers into
the attempt to socialize ownership of the docks away from
private control. The Big
Flame turns, in WiUiams's reading, into a work of polidcal
hypothesis—of ficdonaHzing
possibilides that haven't (yet) been realized. In other words,
even though it has a lot
of surface naturalism in it (it was inspired by a strike that
actually had happened, and
made use of on-locadon shoodng and nonprofessional actors
who were real dockers),
the fact that The Big Flame begins to imagine something that
hasn't yet happened—so-

43. cializadon of the means of producdon—means that the film
moves beyond the givens
of the real into the openness of the not-yet, the hypothedcal.
This break into the
imagining of a new world is then matched by a break of the
film's style into new rep-
resentadonal modes. As Williams puts it:
What then happens [when the workers in the film decide to do
more than
strike and set out to seize control of the docks] is perhaps
inconsistent with
the narrower definidons of realism in that, having taken the
acdon to that
point in this recognizable place, a certain dramadc, but also
polidcal, hy-
pothesis is established. What would happen if we went beyond
the terms of
this pardcular struggle against exisdng conditions and exisdng
attempts to
define or alter them? What would happen if we moved towards
taking power
for ourselves? . . . Thus if we are establishing the character of
realism in The
Big Fkcme, we have to nodce the interesdng combinadon, fusion
perhaps, and
29 Williams, "Defence," 233, original emphasis.
16
Cinenna Journal 52 ! No. 3 i Spring 2013
within this fusion a certain fracture between the methods of

44. establishing rec-
ognition and the alternative method of a hypothesis within that
recognition,
a hypothesis which is played out in realistic terms, but within a
politically
imagined possibility.^" ,, sn •-
Importantly, Williams tracks such fractures of
conventional(ized) ways of seeing
given reality not only at the broadest level of narrative structure
(the film's shift from a
present to a hypothesized, fantasized, desired future) but also at
the more local level of
shot-to-shot styhstic effects. For instance, during a
confrontation by the dockers with
the police, the very position of the camera becomes significant
for its differences from
the expected. WiUiams observes:
It is quite remarkable, and of course, the reasons are obvious,
how regular
and how naturalized the position of the camera behind the
police is in either
newsreel or in fictionalized reports of that kind of
disturbance.... It is signifi-
cant that in The Big Flame, in contrast with the normaUty of the
convention,
the viewpoint is with the people being attacked. This is a useful
reminder,
both for an analysis of this film and for analysis of the many
hundreds of
examples which must be seen as working the other way round,
of the way in
which the convention of showing things as they actually happen
is inherently
determined by viewpoint in the precise technical sense of the

45. position of the
31
camera.
Once again, we see how established conventions naturalize
dominant ways of seeing
and how these seemingly formal choices actually reinforce
dominant structures of
feeling. And, in Brechtian terms, we see how a shift in formal
means entails new feel-
ings, new structures, new seeing. WiUiams's essay on The Big
Flame shows the values of
close reading—and in this respect, it shows continuity with his
film writing from the
1950s, concerned as it was with "practical criticism"—and it
once again reiterates how
formal analysis is a necessary base for informed ideological
analysis.
In the 1980s, just before the end of his Ufe, WiUiams devoted
two pieces to alter-
natives in film history—alternatives as to how film could have
developed and how it
actually did develop (reductively, the alternative between a
truly open popular and
experimental art and a set of practices caught up by dominant
institutions with com-
mercial objectives) and alternatives also in the historical
writing that would set out
to judge those divergent paths: "Film History," originally
presented as the preface
to James Curran and Vincent Porter's anthology British Cinema
History, and "Cinema
and Socialism," a 1985 lecture at the National FUm Theatre.

46. "Cinema and Social-
ism" is somewhat in continuity with WiUiams's newfound
interest in the 1960s in the
3 0 I b i d . " • • ' ' , _ • :
3 1 Ibid., 2 3 6 (original emphasis). • • - "
32 Williams, "Film History," in British Cinema History, ed.
James Curran and Vincent Porter (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1983), 9 - 2 3 , and reprinted posthumously in
Williams, What I Came to Say, 132-146,- Williams,
"Cinema and Socialism," printed posthumously in Williams, The
Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989),
107-118.
17
Cinema Journal 52 I No. 3 f Spring 2013
promise and potential of an art of political cinema, but the
optimism of that earlier
period is tempered by sober assessment (this, after all, was the
moment of Margaret
Thatcher) of the daunting realities of political struggle in the
cultural realm. Starting
with the question as to whether (as common conception often
has it) cinema is an in-
herently radical art in the twentieth century, Williams cautions
against any imputation
of inherent eflect (such as progressive enlightenment) to an art
form: any new cultural
practice emerges into an historical field where diverse agents
can direct it in myriad

47. directions (including reactionary ones) and where any
connections to social move-
ments (or away from them) have to be built and fought over
rather than automatically
assumed. Bluntly, as Williams puts it, cinema could have gone
in a socialist direction
(and Williams notes that Soviet cinema did for a moment "make
that kind of use of the
opportunities of early film"), but, as he concludes, "it isn't
really surprising . . . to find a
symmetry between this new popular form [i.e., cinema] and
typically capitalist forms
of economic development. Nor is it surprising, given the basic
factor of centralized
production and rapid multiple distribution [of mass-produced
prints of a film] . . .
to see the development of relatively monopolist—more strictly,
corporate—forms of
economic organization. . . . The road to Hollywood was then in
one sense inscribed."'^
"Film History" is a broader metareflection on modes of writing
film history and on
the ways, as Williams sees it, that standard histories separate
off this or that part of the
story and reify it (typically, for instance, by a technological
determinism that sees the
technical inventions of the medium as entailing its uses). For
Williams, a more expan-
sive history is needed—one that situates technical possibilities
within larger sociocul-
tural struggles as to how the medium should be used and by
whom and for whom. As
he says, "No account of the technical inventions, or even of the
systematic technolo-
gies, can function as a prehistory to some unitary version of the

48. history of cinema. . . .
Rather, these provided certain new possibilities, at times
themselves entailing further
technical developments, within the general pressures and limits
of a wider social and
cultural history," and it is clear that Williams feels that no film
history that doesn't
address this wider history will ever be acceptable.^* He
proposes that any effective
historical study of film would minimally have to deal not only
with its technical history
but also with the history of its relation to other forms of
popiilar culture; the history of
the attempt to commercialize it in the name of dominant
institutions of ideology; and,
conversely but also concomitantly, the history of its interactions
with the most cutting-
edge modernisms of the day.
No doubt, the writings published a short time before a major
thinker passes away
take on unexpected symbolic weight. But Williams's last pieces
on film from the 1980s
do seem a fitting final demonstration of his commitment to
serious engagement with
the art and politics of film. For more than thirty years, Williams
addressed the cin-
ema, and he did so with rigor, sense of purpose, and the deepest
aesthetic and moral
commitment. , / *
33 Wiliiams, "Cinema and Socialism," 109-110.
34 Williams, "Film History," 136-137.
18

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50. Copyright © 1999. All rights reserved.
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Copyright © 1999. All rights reserved.
Muzak as the Sonic Potential of Capital
Alec Hall
March 2009

51. Supervised by Jerry Balzano
Introduction
The occurrence of programmed music1 in quotidian spaces has
become so typical today
that when one enters music-free environment, its absence is
noticeably evident.2 The
explanation behind its widespread presence is indeed complex,
but making sense out of
Muzak as a phenomenon requires a high degree of
interpretational specificity.
It is often bemoaned that the contemporary listening public is
no longer interested
in the possibilities of the sublime in the work, and that the
“general public’s apathy to any
aspect of music other than its power to soothe the nerves after a
hard day in the office, is
a symptom of the decline of the sense of music as intellectual
adventure,” bringing us
ever further along “the dangerous path into the abyss of
muzak.”3 This institutional trope
of the contemporary music world is too often regarded as fact,

52. rather than opinion,
however, and as the sentence referring to Muzak demonstrates,
a secondary narrative is
covertly advanced inside the polemic where Muzak’s existence
is to be read as a fall from
grace from the Great Musical Tradition; Muzak is a dangerous
perversion of the
wondrous and mystical qualities of art where they have become
instead a “powerful
source of cultural corruption.”4 What this reading of Muzak qua
perversion of sacred
traditions implies, however, is in effect, a grand un-reified
edifice of a pure (western)
culture that has remained untouched and isolated from any of
the mediating effects of
capital. Of course, given the role of capitalization in assisting
the production and
dissemination of these works throughout history (and indeed the
publication mechanisms
1 Usage of the term ‘programmed music’ is freely
interchangeable in this essay with other nomenclatures,
such as ‘Muzak’ and ‘elevator music’.
2 For a more exhaustive article on the statistics of the use of
programmed music see: Sterne, 1997.

53. 3 “Music or Muzak?” The Musical Times. Vol. 141, No. 1870
(Spring, 2000)
4 Ibid
that allow such tropes to gain traction in the first place), this
reading of Muzak is
problematic at best. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the
materials of programmed
music are entirely derived from this mystified cultural order,
programmed music is
exogenous to it and threatens to destabilize its integrity.
Furthermore, because Muzak as
a genre has no restrictions on the source of its musical
materials, the traditional notion of
‘high’ art that Muzak is accused of corrupting has to be
transposed, as it were, onto a
common hierarchical ground with exactly the type of art that a
gradational model of
hierarchical culture would consider to be ‘low’. In other words,
if Muzak can draw upon
any style of music for its content, then perhaps its greatest
accomplishment is not the
successful real-world application its creators had imagined, but
instead it demonstrates

54. that in spite of the perceived chasm between ‘high’ and ‘low’
musical art forms, it
manages to flatten these categories into a single unified space
by highlighting the
essential musical quality in every putative level of aesthetic
hierarchy. This critique
makes it thus quite apparent that the model of Muzak as force of
cultural corruption
contains serious structural flaws, compelling one to seek a more
consistent reading
elsewhere. What this paper proposes instead is that programmed
music does not represent
a debasement of any established cultural norms, whether elite or
vulgar, but instead that it
represents an evolutionary progression. Muzak as an entity is
neither a reactionary force
nor a cultural force; rather it represents the natural evolution of
the artificial management
of sounds in late capitalist economies.
Initial distinctions between programmed and non-programmed

55. music
Jonathan Sterne states, “If all music is ethnic music then the
ethnicity of programmed
music is capitalism”.5 Pursuing this ontological trajectory
further, if all systems have
ideologies, than the ideology of capitalism is the subjugation of
all other concerns to the
reproduction of capital. If this is our model then, one can infer
that the pursuit of artistic
endeavors in modes of capitalist exchange is contained within a
purely functional
structure; if cultivating the aesthetic value of a product results
in increased profitability,
there is no reason not to engage such a development (indeed
such an action might
potentially even be an imperative). However, the development
of art for art’s sake is
typically dependant on philanthropy and/or public arts council
support and to view the
epistimelogico-metaphysical advances that new artworks
provide as ‘profitable’ would
require a radical re-orientation in the justice matrix of late
capitalism. Thus if the

56. ethnicity of programmed music is capitalism then its existence
as an aesthetic object is
ultimately predicated upon it functioning in such a way that it
augments the flow of
capital to whatever it is associated with.
With Sterne’s point in mind, Muzak has (at least) three
qualities that, despite the
indivisible aspect of its relationship to other musics qua
aesthetic moment/object,
determine its essence to be a functional one and setting it apart
other forms of art as such.
The first essential distinction is that Muzak is fashioned
through a stringently
reproducible formula of production. While many artists
systematize their technique in
many respects, Muzak is not so much created as it is assembled.
Indeed the Muzak
headquarters (or any other similar production facility) should be
thought of as a music
5 Sterne, Jonathan. Sounds Like the Mall of America.
Ethnomusicology. Vol. 41, No. 1 (Winter, 1997)
factory. The second difference between programmed and non-

57. programmed music is that
programmed music is heard exclusively in spaces mediated,
either directly or indirectly,
by the exchange of capital. Music not inspired by capital strives
for a physical context of
reproduction that will provide a meaningful and spiritually
fulfilling experience for the
audience.6 The diffusion of programmed music, on the other
hand, is not destined for the
concert hall, but for the awkward and uncomfortable spaces like
doctor’s waiting rooms,
elevators and airport terminals. Lastly, the third distinctive
aspect of programmed music
is that it serves an agenda that is specifically officiated by its
creators—the intentionality
of such an aesthetic object is essentially simple in its
dimensionality. The multiplicities
implicit to both the construction of the ‘genuine’ artwork and in
the qualities of
subjective interpretation of the work create a sharp divide
between the respective ethos of
programmed music and art music.
What does this mean in the broader context; however, taking
Sterne’s point into

58. account that programmed music represents the natural evolution
of the organization of
sounds in capitalist modes of social organization? To begin
with, it is important to take
stock of the places where programmed music is employed and
what the possible goals of
its use might be. While it is true that anyone could buy a
recording of Muzak and simply
play it at home, the crucial aspect of Muzak’s existence is that
by and large, its
occurrence as a sonic phenomenon happens independently of
one’s volition. Entering into
a hotel lobby or a shopping mall, the precisely selected and
subsequently arranged
melodies are always already there. For example, the concept of
a shopping mall without
6 One might argue against this point by referring to bands like
Throbbing Gristle, whose performances are
motivated by a desire to always ‘disappoint’ the audience. On
the contrary, however, when actively
expecting disappointment, the outcome is so complex that a
degree of satisfaction will always be present.
Tom Johnson’s piece Failing is an excellent example of
regarding disappointment in a positive light.

59. an accompanying soundtrack would be inconceivable—the
architectonics of the post-war
consumption exercise called ‘shopping’ is incomplete without a
musical backdrop.
Nevertheless, because the individual is powerless to stop, or
even change the
programmed music in the slightest way, the “music becomes a
form of architecture.
Rather than simply filling up an empty space, the music
becomes part of the consistency
of that space. The sound becomes a presence, and as that
presence it becomes an essential
part of the building's infrastructure.”7 Indeed programmed
music strives not to call
attention to itself but rather to become merely one architectural
element among others.
This feat of perceptual anonymity is attained because at the
very core of its
aesthetic essence, Muzak is monophonic. Through a methodical
process of fabrication,
familiar tunes are taken from their original context and undergo
profound rearrangement
in timbre, texture and structure. Despite any subtle timbral

60. variations in the arrangement
or interesting and unexpected twists in the form a Muzak-ified
song might take, there is
never anything greater than the semblance of polyphony in the
writing. The elemental
aspect of western music since the beginnings of organum until
certain composers of the
20th century is discarded and instead there is an aesthetic entity
that borrows material
implying polyphony, yet these themes are presented in an
isolated and monophonic
fashion. By doing this, the melody itself, and its lack of
traditional developmental paths
and structures, becomes through its refreshed staticicity, as it
were, a kind of architectural
element. The objective when arranging programmed music then
is finding the right
balance between a type of music which “sounds like music” to
the inattentive passer-by,
but stays firmly enough in the background so as not to attract
attention to its bizarre
aesthetic form. In Ronald Radano’s excellent essay on
programmed music, he explains

61. 7 Sterne, Jonathan. Sounds Like the Mall of America.
Ethnomusicology. Vol. 41, No. 1 (Winter, 1997)
how if an original song contains a vocal element, it will always
be omitted
Muzak's arrangers omit the vocal parts and lyrics that might call
attention to
themselves. ‘The minute you use words,’ explains Muzak's Jane
Jarvis, ‘you
call up contemplative thinking and people begin to have
opinions.’ Vocal
parts, she also suggests, would introduce a humanizing element
that might
attract public notice.8
Radano also explains how the original instrumentation is
scrapped for more non-intrusive
timbres, such as strings and quiet woodwinds, or sometimes as a
polite jazz quartet in
more contemporary Muzak releases. Most important to note,
however, is his discussion
of the new arrangements given to existing songs. In a
description of the Muzak re-
production of the Barry Manilow version of Bruce Johnston’s I
Write the Songs, Radano
concludes his analysis by stating that

62. The transparency and obviousness of the arrangement reveals,
paradoxically,
complexity in intent. Through conventional means, the arranger
reproduces
literally both the melody and form of a highly familiar popular
song, thereby
minimizing the introduction of new-and potentially interesting-
musical
stimuli. Yet the arranger also varies the texture by changing
instrumentation
and by employing typical arranging conventions that, while
innocuous and
banal, help to reduce monotony and keep forward motion
steady.
Accordingly, the programmed arrangement maintains a delicate
balance
between interest and convention, preserving the work's
anonymity even as it
exists so centrally within the everyday sonic landscape.9
What Radano has described here in other words, and ostensibly
what all successful
programmed music must be, is essentially the Deleuze-
Guattarian concept of the Refrain.
8 Radano, Ronald M. Interpreting Muzak. American Music. Vol.
7, No. 4 (Winter, 1989), p. 450
9 Ibid

63. Muzak as Refrain
Developed in A Thousand Plateaus, the refrain is outlined
primarily as a territorializing
device, which according to Ian Buchanan serves three functions.
“It comforts us by providing a rough sketch of a calming and
stabilizing, calm
and stable, centre in the heart of chaos. It is the song the lost
child, scared of
the dark, sings to find his or her way home. The tune also
creates the very
home we return to when our foray into the world grows
wearisome.”10
Central to the idea of the refrain is the notion of a home—the
refuge of the individual
within the schizophrenic reality of late capitalism. The home is
territorial by nature, it is a
space created to keep out the forces of chaos that is delimited
and encircled by
“landmarks and marks of all kinds,” of which “Sonorous or
vocal components are very
important: a wall of sound, or at least a wall with some sonic
bricks in it.”11 For Deleuze

64. and Guattari music represents a de-territorializing force, it
moves toward the eradication
of codes, to the interfacing of the individual with the world in
such a way as to “join with
the forces of the future, cosmic forces… to join with the World,
or meld with it.”12 While
on the other hand, the refrain “recodes, or overcodes, which
does not mean it restores
order, as though music were chaos, but rather means it attempts
to constrain variation by
regulating it.”13 This idea of variation represents precisely that
which Muzak is employed
to regulate. The ambient noises that a building’s infrastructure
creates, or the rowdy
exhortations of unsupervised teenagers in a mall all pose
survival level threats to the
established order of consumer capitalism. The subtle micro-
tonalities of the naturally
10 Buchanan, Ian. Deleuze and Pop Music. Australian
Humanities Review. Issue 7 (August 1997)
11 Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus,
Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. 311
12 Ibid
13 Buchanan, Ian. Deleuze and Pop Music. Australian

65. Humanities Review. Issue 7 (August 1997)
occurring sound world in capitalized spaces represent an
unwanted byproduct of the
required edifices used to sustain the flow of capital. The result
is that programmed music
comes into existence as an attempt to smooth over the
unavoidable flaws in the
environment of consumption. Muzak is in one manner of
thought an acoustical
wallpaper; it is a tool with which one can conceal and disguise
the aleatoric noise content
of the built environment of capitalism. Uncontrollable elements,
whether the minutiae of
everyday physical mechanics, or the unpredictable macro-level
disturbances of events
like car crashes, accidents resulting in the (often noisy)
destruction of property, or
emotional outbursts between individuals represent at the very
least the silhouette of
chaos, where in the streamlined purchasing environments of late
capitalism, this cannot
be tolerated. Confronted with any such possibilities, the
consumer would be forced to

66. interface with these elements in a way that might provoke
thoughts and emotions
orienting the subject towards the unrealized space the larger,
future world without such
hegemonic suppression of variation. Obviously such an
engagement is a hindrance to the
exchange of capital, but at the crucial psychological moment of
recognizing such a state,
there is a latent post-capitalist ideological framework waiting to
be explored.
If, as Frederic Jameson posits, the cultural logic of late
capitalism is post-
modernism, then his perspicuous analysis of the Westin
Bonaventure Hotel in Los
Angeles, one of the preeminent examples of post-modern
architecture, provides an
excellent example in which to apply the refrain to programmed
music. The physical
layout of the building itself is so labyrinthine and anti-modern
in functionality leading
Jameson to claim that it represents
“a mutation in built space itself… we ourselves, the human
subjects who happen
into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution;

67. there has been a
mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent
mutation in the
subject. We do not yet posses the perceptual equipment to
match this new
hyperspace…”14
Given the tendencies that chaotic elements happen to produce in
systems of capitalist
exchange as just described previously, it would seem that the
inability of a person to
navigate the post-modern architectural space of the Westin
Bonaventure could pose
potentially devastating effects on its ability to generate profits.
The building,
however, could never be complete without the constant presence
of programmed
music. Going back to the refrain, in spite of the aggressively
non-functional built
environment of the hotel atrium, the usage of Muzak provides
for (at least most) who
enter the “means of erecting, hastily if needs be, a portable
territory that can secure us
in troubled situations.”15 As Ian Buchanan paraphrases Deleuze

68. and Guattari,
A housewife might sing to herself as she washes the dishes, or
else have the
radio playing in the background, and by so doing build a wall of
sound around
her to shelter a precious interiority, her self-created reserve of
inner strength. A
song also enables us to launch forth from the home it helped us
to build. One
ventures from home on the thread of a tune. With a song in our
hearts we are
able to extend indefinitely the secure interiority of the home; it
is as though we
take home with us wherever we go. The song is our future, a
future of our own
dreaming. To put it differently, we need not venture into the
dark, chaotic world
of the unhomely again so long as we have a song. The refrain is
these three
things at once, not in succession: it is a block of sound that is at
once a way
home, the very source of home, and the home in our hearts.16
The programmed music of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los
Angeles follows patterns
of use typical to that of most programmed music. In the large
open expanse of the
lobby/atrium, music is always playing in the background.
During the mornings and early
afternoon typical small jazz group arrangements are played,
never with vocals, and as the

69. 14 Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University
Press, 1997, p. 38
15 Buchanan, Ian and Swiboda, Marcel (Eds.). Deleuze and
Music. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Ltd., 2004, p. 16
16 Buchanan, Ian. Deleuze and Pop Music. Australian
Humanities Review. Issue 7 (August 1997)
day progresses and the bar opens for the evening the music
slowly shifts towards a more
upbeat genre, signaling to the guests that the objectified content
of the contemporary
nightlife experience is beginning. Speaking to the maître d’ at
the reception desk,
however, he informed me that the neither the amplitude of the
music nor its aesthetic
intensity ever crosses above a consciousness level threshold
where any guest would be
forced to acknowledge its presence.17
Returning to the monophonic character of programmed music
with the notion of the
refrain well established, one could now observe some of the
reasons why the

70. orchestrations and arrangements of Muzak function as they do.
In order to navigate the
alienating and disorientating physical spaces of late capitalism,
one must carry with one’s
self the ability, as Buchanan puts it, to erect portable territories
in the face of debilitating
conditions. If music represents a force to engage the world, then
any such genuine
musical moment would only serve to aggravate the sense of
disconnect. Only the refrain
presents the possibility to move through these spaces unfazed
and unharmed. Muzak’s
purely melodious aesthetic represents the refrain in a perfect
real-world instantiation: “A
tune that sticks in your head and can be easily whistled or
hummed is a refrain; a tune
that requires more than one set of lips to whistle or hum is, by
virtue of this inherent
poly-vocality, becoming-musical”18

71. 17 This information was obtained via an informal telephone
interview with the Maître d’ of the Westin
Bonaventure Hotel on April 14th, 2009.
18 Buchanan, Ian. Deleuze and Pop Music. Australian
Humanities Review. Issue 7 (August 1997)
How to stifle dissent and subversion
To rearticulate once more the base level ideological component
of capitalist systems is to
say that these economies place the reproduction of capital above
all other concerns.
Implicit to this critique is the notion that any such system must
also contain elements that
promote the reproduction of itself, whether in periods of
relative stability or in the face of
socio-political change. Programmed music is one such element
of many in the vast
arsenal of late capitalism’s defenses. While this music of the
refrain is ostensibly a
functional tool that can provide for stronger corporate brand
identification or to better
facilitate the navigation of a building,19 it also acts as a kind of
authority figure, policing
the sonic space and mediating emotional responses to physical

72. environments.
Entertaining the notion that Muzak represents the evolutionary
arrival point of
sound organization in capitalist economies, it then becomes
possible to interpret its
location in the global system of production as a commodity
itself. The sheer existence of
such uncritical music according to Adorno, represents “an
affirmation of the situation as
it is,” fostering a sense of total identification with “the
established order” and “the total
exclusion of all that does not fit conveniently into that
order.”20 As my conversation with
the Maître d’ of the Westin Bonaventure established, the music
diffused into the atrium
just prior to the opening of the evening bar represents a proto-
fascistic attempt to not only
encourage patrons of the hotel to engage in the evening
activities either within or without
the hotel, but more importantly, reproduces a particular idea of
what ‘nightlife’ means.
The upbeat, club-like music establishes specific aesthetic and
semantic coordinates,

73. 19 Sterne, Jonathan. Sounds Like the Mall of America.
Ethnomusicology. Vol. 41, No. 1 (Winter, 1997)
20 Paddison, Max. Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture.
London: Kahn and Averill, 1996, p. 87
ostensibly dictating to all in the range of audibility not only
what the style of subjective
experience will be inside the hotel, but also outlining an
objectified form of nightlife
possibilities at the total exclusion of any potential experience
that is incompatible with
such a soundtrack.
Programmed music doesn’t only have the power to denote
objective forms with
standardized content it also has an incredible ability to suppress
potential instances of
subversive behavior. As I have outlined before, Muzak exists,
rather generally, to smooth
out flaws in the built form of the physical capitalist
environment. It directs consumers to
the appropriate locations of consumption (stores, etc.) and
keeps out the unwanted noises
of infrastructure, but it also works to keep consumers monadic.
Elevator music, stricto

74. sensu, really only exists for one reason: elevators themselves
are bizarre spaces that
would rarely exist if not for their employment in the service of
capital. They only serve
buildings with too many stories to traverse easily by foot (or
conversely, in underground
mines—one of the first great spaces of exchange—where they
are used to descend).
Moreover, these tall buildings themselves are the early
outgrowths of capitalist modes of
physical organization.21 As such, elevators represent a space
that is entirely a product of,
and indeed still mediated by capitalism. It cannot hurt that the
devices themselves are
routinely small, cramped and generally awkward for their
occupants and that the time
required to traverse a number of floors with one’s colleagues in
ascent is large enough to
engage in meaningless chit-chat. It could be imagined then that
there might arise
occasions where a more subversive member of the traveling
group could make a
comment potentially hostile to the broader enterprise and thus,
Muzak, or in this instance

75. 21 See Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York for an exhaustive
study on the relationship between market
capitalism and the development of the skycraper.
elevator music, forms an effective safeguard against any such
talk. The always-already
presence of sounds in the air allows the bunker mentality to
persist and the monadic state
of the individual continues, clinging to the last remains of the
bourgeois ego and safe
from any possible inter-subjective revelations that a new or
disgruntled colleague might
inspire. As Ronald Radano says,
Muzak takes a place alongside other familiar objects of our
private worlds. It
functions as a special blanket of security that has through
transference of complex
personal perceptions come to represent symbolically a public
trans-position of
domestic bourgeois life.22
One of the more intriguing possibilities that has been raised
though the ongoing
advancements in contemporary neuroscience, is the idea that

76. Muzak, as an aesthetic
object in and of itself, is a cognitive tool that works to ensure
rigidity in our neural
functionality, effectively closing off the possibility for one to
recognize, as Deleuze and
Guattari put it, music-becoming, and instead misinterpreting it
for noise. Jonah Leher, in
his well-researched book Proust Was a Neuroscientist, arrives at
the conclusion that
music, as we know it essentially consists in the apprehension of
sonic patterns, pieced
together by our short-term memory functions. He argues that
although the premiere of
The Rite of Spring may have sounded like nothing more than
cacophony and noise to the
ears of those first attendees, over time our brains learn to make
sense of such patterns, as
the structures become physically engrained into our neural
pathways. The premiere of
The Rite may have caused a riot in 1913, but by 1940, with its
inclusion in the soundtrack
of Fantasia, the music had become staid enough for a children’s
cartoon. Leher describes
the physical mechanism of pattern apprehension, attributing to a

77. part of the brain known
as the cortigofugal network
22 Radano, Ronald M. Interpreting Muzak. American Music.
Vol. 7, No. 4 (Winter, 1989)
One of the central functions of the cortigofugal network is what
neuroscience
calls egocentric selection. When a pattern of noises is heard
repeatedly, the brain
memorizes that pattern. Feedback from higher-up brain regions
reorganizes the
auditory cortex, which makes it easier to hear the pattern in the
future.23
While this may seem promising for the possibilities of acquiring
and assimilating new
paradigms of thought, it also carries with it a hidden danger—
the possibility of limiting
our aesthetic experiences. The cortigofugal system,
“is a positive-feedback loop, a system whose output causes its
input to recur…
Over time… we become better able to hear those sounds that we
have heard
before. This only encourages us to listen to the golden oldies we
already know
(since they sounds better) and to ignore the difficult songs that
we don’t know.

78. We are built to abhor to uncertainty of newness.”24
As an effectively pure representation of the refrain, Muzak
serves the dark side of the
cortigofugal system, as it were. It reinforces all of the
components that we perceive to
represent music, and worse yet it shuts out the possibilities of
ever overcoming these
acquired prejudices by literally closing our mind off to their
potential. In this respect,
programmed music serves the forces of ignorance and
complacency, two pillars in
late-capitalism’s efforts to sustain the frameworks of its
reproduction.
Conclusion
While programmed music still waits for truly detailed and
thoroughgoing
philosophical and metaphysical studies, it can still be
recognized that its existence is a
complex and challenging topic. While the common narrative of
how Muzak
represents a corruption of higher forms of music is far-reaching
and prevalent, this

79. 23 Lehrer, Jonah. Proust Was a Neuroscientist. New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007, p. 140
24 Ibid, p. 142
explanation ultimately provides no positive solutions; it only
describes a fin-de-
millennium despondency, caused perhaps by the failure of every
attempted form of
emancipatory politics and the seemingly inevitable triumph of
global capitalism. The
proposition that Muzak represents the evolutionary potential of
sound in capitalist
systems is a compelling one, however, that can be supported by
both contemporary
aesthetic theories that deal very specifically with the notion of
late-capitalism and
also by new developments in the cognitive and neurological
sciences. As I have
attempted to demonstrate, programmed music does not signify a
fall from grace or a
perversion of artistic and intellectual culture, but rather that its
existence in general

80. represents just one of the ways in which capitalism succeeds in
commodifying
previously non-capitalized public domains. It does this to
ensure the ongoing
augmentation of the reproduction of capital flows, and also to
ensure its survivability
as a system of exchange. Capitalism is not a system of ethics—
it has no overarching
principle other than the ongoing accumulation of wealth.
Similarly, programmed
music has no ethical core, only the mandate to function in the
employ of capital. This
manifests in its dual authoritarian aspects, both in its
characteristic of the refrain and
in the way it suppresses dissent and new forms of experience.
It is not a bleak situation, however, because merely listening to
it attentively, by
giving the kind of attention it intentionally avoids garnering,
represents in itself a
subversive gesture. “Music doesn’t awaken a death instinct… it
confronts death,
stares it in the face.”25 The structures of global capitalism are
all-pervasive in
contemporary life, but as the sonic realization of those

81. structures is nearly as
25 Buchanan, Ian and Swiboda, Marcel (Eds.). Deleuze and
Music. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Ltd., 2004, p.15
omnipresent as the invisible structures of capital exchange
itself, perhaps Muzak
represents one of the most immediately accessible ways to draw
attention to these
shadowy and elusive ideologies, and a possible first step
towards genuinely engaging
the possibilities of a post-capitalist world.

82. Works Consulted
Buchanan, Ian. Deleuze and Pop Music. Australian Humanities
Review. Issue 7 (August
1997).
Buchanan, Ian and Swiboda, Marcel (Eds.). Deleuze and Music.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press Ltd., 2004.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus.
Trans. Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1997.
Lehrer, Jonah. Proust Was a Neuroscientist. New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company,
2007.
Paddison, Max. Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture. London:
Kahn and Averill, 1996.
Radano, Ronald M. Interpreting Muzak. American Music. Vol.
7, No. 4 (Winter, 1989),
pp. 448-460.

83. Sterne, Jonathan. Sounds Like the Mall of America.
Ethnomusicology. Vol. 41, No. 1
(Winter, 1997). Pp. 22-50.
“Music or Muzak?” The Musical Times. Vol. 141, No. 1870
(Spring, 2000), pp.2-3.