Originals, Remakes, Assemblages: A Retrospect on New Keywords

In his introduction to Keywords, Raymond Williams is at some pains to place his project in relation to that of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), seeking to register both a distance from and an affiliation to it. On the one hand, he stresses the social and political values that can be detected beneath the OED's appearance of impersonal authority in the selections of usage that are made and those that are avoided, and sees its strengths as being philological and etymological rather than—as a central concern of Keywords—with the connections and interactions that define current usage. On the other hand, Williams recognizes that his project is entirely dependent on the OED, which he prizes not just for the scholarship of its editors but as "the record of an extraordinary collaborative enterprise, from the original work of the Philological Society to the hundreds of later correspondents."¹ He returns to this theme toward the end of the introduction, offering his work to the public as an open inquiry that can be taken forward only through collaborative work. His publishers, he tells us, "have been good enough to include some blank pages, not only for the convenience of making notes, but as a sign that the inquiry remains open, and that the author will welcome all amendments, corrections and additions as developments (which will be acknowledged) towards the revised edition which it is hoped will be necessary."² Yet in an early review of Keywords, R. W. Birchfield—the managing editor of the OED at that time—was, to say the least, distinctly reluctant to grant Williams the affiliation he sought. Arguing—and, indeed, showing in some detail—that in some cases little reliance could be placed on Williams's accounts of changing usage, seeing these as somewhat homespun when compared with the systematic procedures of the OED, he contended that Keywords had been misleadingly classified as a work of original scholarship (he viewed it as little more than a crib of the OED), suggesting that it would be more accurately classified in the Dewey system as Education 374; that is, as Adult Education.³

It's useful to recall this expert but not, of course, disinterested assessment of Williams's work and its relationship to the OED, since the question of Williams's position vis-à-vis the OED is one that both Susan Hegeman and David Shumway comment on. Indeed, more than that, their positions on this question have a significant bearing on their contrasting assessments of New Keywords. Contrasting but not entirely different; to the contrary, both are agreed that if nothing else, New Keywords provides a useful register of some of the more evident changes in the keywords that now shape our understanding of, and engagement with, the relationships between culture and society in the attention it pays to the vocabularies of race, ethnicity, colonialism, sexuality, and gender—none of which made a significant showing in Keywords. They also both think that the book more or less accurately reflects the changing intellectual orientations of a vocabulary that has been shaped by the "discursive turn" of post-structuralist tendencies and the weakened hold—in the academy as in public life—of Marxist-centered categories.

For Shumway, though, pretty well all of the other respects in which New Keywords differs from Keywords count against it. This is especially true of his sense that New Keywords lacks the anchorage of a shared tradition in which to limit the terms of debate. Williams, drawing on the OED but supplementing its resources "from his own extensive reading," is, Shumway argues, able to bring a historical depth to his accounts of changing usage that New Keywords lacks. Also, by taking as his reference point the known horizons of political debate in postwar Britain, Williams, "in assuming a political landscape that had long existed . . . gave himself a frame in which the relativity of his terms could be limited." It is possible, Shumway continues with more than a nod in the direction of Leavis, to disagree with Williams "but still find his discriminations useful because one...