has at some time...virtually forced itself on my attention, because the
problems of its meanings seemed to me inextricably bound up with the
problems it was being used to discuss.’^23 And in order to understand these
formations of meaning, it is necessary to go beyond the usual practice of
dictionaries, even when they are historical dictionaries. Ranging beyond
‘”proper meaning” ’,
We find a history and complexity of meanings; conscious changes, or
consciously different uses; innovation, obsolescence, specialization, extension,
overlap, transfer; or changes which are masked by a nominal continuity so
that words which seem to have been there for centuries, with continuous
general meanings, have come in fact to express radically different or radically
variable, yet sometimes hardly noticed, meanings and implications of
meaning.^24The words that figure in Keywordsare obviously not the concrete words
referring to the objects of everyday life, are not the names of natural kinds
like the word ‘cat’ or the word ‘gold’ (i.e. the words on which analytical
philosophy, from Kripke to Putnam, builds its theory of naming). It is the
words that enable us to live our social existence – words like ‘family’, ‘culture’,
‘industry’, ‘class’, or ‘subject’:
The kind of semantics to which these notes and essays belong is one of the
tendencies within historical semantics, where the theoretical problems are
acute indeed but where even more fundamental theoretical problems must
be seen as at issue. The emphasis on history, as a way of understanding
contemporary problems of meaning, is a basic choice from a position of
historical materialism rather than from the now more powerful positions
of objective idealism or non-historical (synchronic) structuralism.^25The term ‘objective idealism’ refers to the critique of Saussure conducted by
Voloshinov, whereas the implicit possibility of a ‘historical structuralism’ is
doubtless an acknowledgement of Lucien Goldmann. As for the historical
semantics thus announced, it has not really seen the light of day beyond the
dictionary entries that make up Keywords: the task is still before us.
160 • Chapter Six
(^23) Williams 1976, p. 13.
(^24) Williams 1976, p. 17.
(^25) Williams 1976, pp. 20–1.