Page 46 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

LEFT CULTURALISM

decisively shifted emphasis away from “literature” and towards
“culture”. Hoggart combined an ethnographic account of Yorkshire
working-class culture with a Leavisite practical criticism of mass media
texts. His central theme was that of the damage done to the older,
inter-war working-class culture by the newer mass arts, newspapers,
books, magazines, and so on: “The old forms of class culture are in
danger of being replaced by a poorer kind of classless…culture…and
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this is to be regretted”. Much like Leavis, Hoggart was in effect
arguing a theory of cultural decline. But for Hoggart it was working-
class culture, rather than that of the “sensitive minority”, which needed
to be valorized, if only so as, in turn, to be elegized. Hoggart’s
achievement was thus to divest Leavisism of much of its cultural élitism,
if not perhaps of its nostalgia, Thompson’s to divest British socialism
of its Marxian economic determinism, and to make explicit what had
previously only ever been an implicit, and barely acknowledged,
Romanticism.
Whatever their respective achievements, the full analytical range
of this left culturalism would only become apparent in the work of
Raymond Williams. Williams had been a student of Leavis at Cambridge
and would himself eventually become professor of drama at the same
university. I have already observed that Williams’s work can most
profitably be examined as part of the Anglo-culturalist tradition. Much
available commentary on Williams chooses to regard him rather
differently, however, that is very much as a Marxist writer. There can
be no doubt that, in the 1970s, Williams did indeed effect some sort
of an accommodation between his own left culturalism and a neo-
Gramscian version of Western Marxism: he coined the term “cultural
materialism” to describe the resultant synthesis. But this is a relatively
late development in his career, and one, moreover, which still needs to
be situated in relation to the more conventionally culturalist writings
of the 1950s and 1960s. This is not to suggest that even the early
work of Williams remains in any sense unaffected by Marxism. Quite
the contrary: it is best understood, it seems to me, in terms of a doubly
ambivalent relationship, to Leavisism on the one hand, and to orthodox
communist Marxism on the other, a relationship which entailed a
simultaneous partial acceptance and rejection of each. From Scrutiny,
Williams inherited Leavis’s organicism—his stress on the importance
both of the text and of “life”, and on the importance of culture itself—
but rejected its cultural élitism. From communist Marxism, he accepted

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