Page 76 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

WESTERN MARXISM

each major social class creates for itself so as to “give it homogeneity
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and an awareness of its own function”; and “traditional” intellectuals
on the other, that is, “categories of intellectuals already in existence…
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which seem to represent…historical continuity”. Intellectuals of the
latter type, most importantly the clergy but also administrators, scholars
and scientists, theorists and philosophers, affect a certain autonomy
from the dominant social classes, but it is an autonomy which proves
ultimately illusory. For Gramsci himself, the central political problem
was that of the creation of a layer of organic working-class intellectuals
capable of leading their class in the battle for counter-hegemony. But
in his own work, and even more so in that of subsequent Gramscians,
the substantive focus very easily slides towards the explanation of an
apparently impregnable bourgeois hegemony. If hegemony is never
in principle either uncontested or indefinite, it can quite often come
to appear both.
It was this Gramscian theory of hegemony which seemed to the
later Raymond Williams “one of the major turning points in Marxist
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cultural theory”. And it may very well be that Williams’s reading of
Gramsci (as one organic working-class intellectual reading another?)
has been by far the more successful in reconstructing the original
authorial intention. But for all that, by far the most influential reading,
in the 1970s at least, became that proposed by Althusserianism.
Althusser’s distinctive contribution was to reread Marx’s Marxism
as if it were a structuralism. For Althusser, Marxism was a science,
sharply distinguished from, and counterposed to, ideology, both by
its own defining “knowledge function” and by the “epistemological
break” with which it had been founded. This science is characterized
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above all, according to Althusser, by a new mode of explanation, in
which structural causality is substituted for both mechanical and
expressive models of causation. Here, culture is neither superstructural
effect nor an expression of the truth of the social whole. It is, rather,
a relatively autonomous structure, with its own specific effectivity,
situated within a structure of structures, each level of which is subject
to “determination of the elements of a structure…by the effectivity of
that structure …[and] determination of a subordinate structure by
adominant structure”. 76
In a much quoted essay on “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses”, Althusser proceeded to argue: that ideology is necessarily
embedded in institutions, or “ideological state apparatuses” as he

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