Page 12 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

THE RISE OF CULTURAL THEORY

6
constructs “experience” itself as the “authenticating test”. By contrast,
structuralism recognizes the presence of constraining relations of
structure; it thus acknowledges the importance of different levels of
theoretical abstraction and successfully replaces the category of
7
experience with that of ideology. But insofar as the stress here falls
upon the supposedly atheoretical nature of British culturalism, it seems
to me that Hall misconstrues the situation. Indeed, he himself has
elsewhere observed of Raymond Williams’s The Long Revolution,
one of the seminal culturalist texts, that: “It attempted to graft on to
an idiom and mode of discourse irredeemably particular, empirical
and moral in emphasis, its own…kind of ‘theorizing’… The difficult,
somewhat abstract quality of the writing…can largely be ascribed to
its status as a ‘text of the break’”. 8
Even then, Hall seriously underestimates the properly “theoretical”
content of the culturalist tradition as it had evolved before Williams.
If the mode of exposition of, for example, Leavisite literary criticism
(perhaps, the single most important instance of culturalist thought) is
indeed irredeemably particular, its intellectual content—as for example
in the debate about industrialization and cultural decline or in that
over the “dissociation of sensibility”—remains highly theoretical. There
is nothing especially particular nor even especially empirical about
Leavis’s own insistence that the disintegration of the pre-industrial
organic community is “the most important fact of recent history”. 9
The discourse about culture, or better perhaps the various discourses
about culture, which developed in Britain and Germany, France and
Italy, Russia and the United States, essentially as a series of sustained
reflections on the nature of cultural modernization, have all been
irretrievably “theoretical” in nature, no matter how apparently
“empirical” their particular reference points. Hence the invariable
accompaniment of courses in cultural studies by parallel courses in
cultural theory. Hence, too, the subject matter of this book.
Discourses become self-consciously theoretical, which is another
way of saying that they become self-reflexive, as a general rule only
when their subject matters become in some significant sense
problematic. And it is only in the modern period itself that “culture”,
however defined, does indeed become such. The available definitions
of this term are many and various, and we shall have cause to consider
some of them in detail in what follows. For the moment, let me offer
a rough working “non-definition” of “culture” as referring to thatentire

3