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Abstract: This article's prime aim is to provide an exegesis of Raymond Williams's neglected "mature" theorization of means of communication. Much of this aspect of his cultural materialism is articulated as a critique of Marshall McLuhan. Williams attempts to recover and develop what he saw as the lost early promise of McLuhan's work. The article thus takes the form of an account of the complex relationship between the two authors' projects from their common origins in English literary criticism through to Williams's rejection of McLuhan's proto-postmodern avant-gardism. The normative sociological typologization of means of communication offered by Williams is argued to be directly relevant to contemporary research.
Resume: Le but principal de cet article est de donner une exeges e des theories matures negligees de Raymond Williams sur les moyens de communications. Williams articule une bonne partie de cet aspect de son materialisme culturel sous forme d'une critique de Marshall McLuhan. Il essaie de recuperer et de developper ce qu'il percoit comme la prome sse inaccomplie des premiers ouvrages de McLuhan. Cet article prend ainsi la forme d'un compte-rendu du rapport complexe entre les projets des deux auteurs,--partir de leurs origines communes dans la critique litteraire anglaise jusqu'au rejet par Williams de l'avant-gardisme postmoderne avant la lettre de McLuhan. L'article soutient en outre que la typologie sociologique normative des moyens de communications offerte par Williams est directement pertinente--la recherche contemporaine.
The immediate intellectual influence of the projects of Raymond Williams and Marshall McLuhan has long passed but their major works remain in print and each still warrants inclusion in textbooks of "media theory" (e.g., Stevenson 1995). More than this, each has figured prominently in recent influential literatures. There is now a well-established case that McLuhan's work prefigured many of the concerns made prominent by postmodernists in the 1980s (Ferguson 1991) and in some influential texts of that period at least, direct influence was acknowledged (e.g., Eco 1987). The still-current wave of work on "globalization" has also renewed interest in McLuhan, often by naively reproducing the very features of his work which Williams most heavily criticized (cf. Ferguson 1992).
Williams's own work has continued to be regarded as foundational for many in the field of cultural studies (e.g., Turner 1996). Similarly, the recent debate about cultural...