Page 24 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

UTILITARIAN CULTURE AND CAPITALIST CIVILIZATION

a culturalist sense of the antithesis between culture and civilization
with a utilitarian sense of the importance of interests. This led Marx,
centrally, to the notion of ideology, which he used to explore the
articulation of systems of belief with systems of material—and especially
class—interest. The intellectual tradition thus established has an obvious
affinity to, but is nonetheless not entirely coextensive with, the politics
of Marxian socialism. I use the term structuralism to refer to an
intellectual tradition characterized, in general, by the search for
underlying and constraining, patterns and structures, and more
particularly for patterns analogous to those which occur in language.
On this view cultural artefacts are best understood as elements within
systems of signification.
Finally, I mean by feminism an approach which seeks to uncover
the various ways in which human culture has been gendered as either
masculine or feminine, and in which that gendering has been connected
to the wider social structures of sexual inequality The key concept in
the feminist tradition is that of patriarchy, by which feminists describe
the systematic oppression of women by men. Culture, ideology and
signification are, as it were, rival terms, each indicating a different
way of theorizing the same phenomena (in short, our symbolic universe).
Utility is a much more portable concept, which refers to all forms of
consumption, whether symbolic or not. Patriarchy, by contrast, refers
to the unequal distribution of social power between men and women
as it affects the whole of human society. Because feminists see patriarchal
society as producing a gendered culture, the concept nonetheless
becomes centrally relevant to contemporary cultural studies. Theories
of patriarchy are thus compatible with notions of utility, culture,
ideology and signification, but require of each a radical reformulation
in terms of the categories of sexual inequality and sexual difference.
If utilitarianism is almost certainly the normal cultural corollary
of capitalist civilization, just as liberal democracy is its normal political
form, our four other types of theory are nonetheless themselves
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equally symptomatic products of that selfsame capitalist civilization.
They each develop as the theoretical accompaniment to some deep
structural resistance to that commodification of culture which
utilitarianism enjoins, a resistance firmly located somewhere within
the political, cultural and even economic institutions of capitalism
itself. Marxism is an obvious case in point. Whatever its subsequent
history as a legitimating ideology for Soviet-style state capitalism, its

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