Page 173 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

NOTES

63. cf. W.Benjamin, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, in
Illuminations, tr. H.Zohn (Glasgow, Fontana, 1973).
64. T.Adorno, Letters to Walter Benjamin, tr. J.Zohn, in E.Bloch et al., Aesthetics
and politics (London, Verso, 1980), pp. 122–3.
65. T.Adorno, Reconciliation under duress, tr. R.Livingstone, in Bloch, Aesthetics
and politics, pp. 151–76.
66. The alliance between Trotskyism and surrealism was of Trotsky’s making as well
as Breton’s, cf. Trotsky, On literature and art, pp. 122–4.
67. Anderson, Considerations, pp. 92, 88.
68. L.Goldmann, The hidden God, tr. P.Thody (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1964); L.Goldmann, Towards a sociology of the novel, tr. A.Sheridan (London,
Tavistock, 1975).
69. J-P.Sartre, Critique of dialectical reason, tr. A.Sheridan-Smith (London, New
Left Books, 1976), pp. 43–7; J-P.Sartre, Socialism in one country, New Left
Review, 100, 1976/1977, p. 162.
70. A.Gramsci, Selections from prison notebooks, tr. Q.Hoare & G.Nowell Smith
(London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 263.
71. Ibid., p. 12.
72. Ibid., p. 5.
73. Ibid., p. 7.
74. R.Williams, Marxism and literature (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977), p.
108.
75. L.Althusser, For Marx, tr. B.Brewster (London, New Left Books, 1977), pp. 32–
7.
76. Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 186.
77. L.Althusser, Lenin and philosophy and other essays, tr. B.Brewster (London,
New Left Books, 1971), pp. 143–71.
78. Ibid., p. 122.
79. Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, pp. 30–4.
80. P.Macherey, A theory of literary production, tr. G.Wall (London, Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1978).
81. P.Sedgwick, The two New Lefts, in The Left In Britain 1956–1968, ed. D.Widgery
(London, Penguin, 1976).
82. In his Arguments Within English Marxism, Perry Anderson explicitly denies the
charge that the New Left Review adopted an essentially Althusserian stance—
P.Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London, Verso, 1980), p. 133.
No doubt the Review and New Left Books did indeed devote resources to the
(more or less) critical appraisal of each of the major schools of Western Marxism.
But they also exercised a very real discrimination in the ways in which those
resources were allocated. For much of the late 1960s and the 1970s the Review’s
theoretical interests and sympathies were in fact defined primarily in relation to
Althusserianism. Sufficiently so at least for the North American “Hegelian Marxist”
journal Telos to complain of the Review’s “inability to come to terms with its
own culture, opting instead for the most sterile version of post-Althusserian
word games”—Toronto Telos Group, Short journal reviews, Telos, 27, 1976, p.
258.
83. P.Anderson, English questions (London, Verso, 1992), pp. 15–47, 48–104; T.Nairn,
The British political elite, New Left Review, 23, 1964; T.Nairn, The english
working class, New Left Review, 24, 1964; T.Nairn, The anatomy of the Labour
Party, New Left Review, 27 and 28, 1964.
84. T.Nairn, The break-up of Britain (London, New Left Books, 1977).
85. Anderson, Arguments, pp. 138–9.

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