Page 29 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

Chapter 2
CULTURALISM

The second of our six main kinds of cultural theory is that which I
have chosen to describe by the term culturalism. This term is of only
recent origin, and it is one which has typically been defined only by
way of an antithesis between itself and structuralism. Moreover, it
has often been accorded a quite distinctly Marxist inflection. Thus
Richard Johnson, for example, sees the new discipline of cultural
studies as founded upon a theoretical terrain demarcated between,
on the one hand, a kind of Anglo-Marxist culturalism best represented
by the work of the historian E.P.Thompson and the literary critic
Raymond Williams, and on the other, that type of Francophone
structuralist Marxism established by the philosopher, Louis Althusser. 1
Johnson’s usage seems to me far too preoccupied with these
comparatively recent culturalist and structuralist Marxisms, to the
extent that it clearly underestimates the significance for each of their
respective non-Marxist precursors. I propose, then, to use the term
rather differently: to denote that type of anti-utilitarianism which
became incorporated within a largely “literary” tradition of
speculation about the relationship between culture and society,
variants of which recur within both British and German intellectual
life. In both German and British versions, the concept of culture is
understood as incorporating a specifically “literary” sense of culture
as “art” with an “anthropological” sense of culture as a “way of
life”. And in each case, the claims of culture are counterposed to
those of material civilization. Hence Shelley’s famous dictum that:
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. 2
My main theoretical concerns here will be with British, rather than
German, culturalism, if only because of its much greater influence
over the largely British tradition of “contemporary cultural studies”.
The classic account of the historical evolution of this British culturalist
tradition is still Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society 1780–1950.

20