"It is clear why 'consumer', as a description, is so popular, for while a large part of our economic activity is obviously devoted to supplying known needs, a considerable and increasing part of it goes to ensuring we consume what industry finds it convenient to produce. As this tendency strengthens, it becomes increasingly obvious that society is not controlling its economic life, but is in part being controlled by it. The weakening of purposeful social thinking is a direct consequence of this powerful experience, which seeks to reduce human activity to predictable patterns of demand. If we were not consumers, but users, we might look at society very differently, for the concept of use involves general human judgments -- whereas consumption, with its crude hand-to-mouth patterns, tends to cancel these questions, replacing them by the stimulated and controlled absorption of the products of an external and autonomous system."
That little gem is from The Long Revolution, laying special emphasis on the 'creative mind' in relation to social and cultural thinking. Funny how in the advertising and marketing industries today 'creative' is a term applied to roles in the company who substantiate the modern push marketing techniques through authoring of convincing scripts that play into cultural stereotypes.
Williams went on to pioneer the field of 'cultural studies' and continued to articulate still unresolved questions about how we form the self and social. According to the John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, Williams was:
"Confident that 'all kinds of writing produce meaning and value', he wrote in a multiplicity of modes and discourses (as critic, theorist, historian, journalist, political commentator, pamphleteer, dramatist, and novelist) and in a variety of styles (conversational, high academic, technically condensed, literary, and polemical). At his death in 1988, after a career of 40 years, he left behind more than 650 publications, including 27 academic books, 5 novels, 3 plays, 7 pamphlets, 60 columns on television in The Listener, and more than 500 articles and reviews, among them his regular book reviews for the Guardian and New Society."
Labels: sociology
