Page 77 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MARXISM

termed them; that its central social function is that of the reproduction
of structured social inequality, or more specifically the “relations of
production”; that it functions by constituting biological individuals
as social “subjects”; and that it thereby represents the imaginary relation
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of individuals to their real conditions of existence. This is very
obviously a reworking of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, but one
which represses the notion of agency in favour of a kind quasi-
structuralism. And since art, though not itself ideology according to
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Althusser, nonetheless alludes to ideology, it becomes possible to
read culture “ideologically”. Althusser himself had developed a theory
of symptomatic reading which sought to reconstruct the “problematic”
of the text, that is, the structure of determinate absences and presences
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which occasion it. For Althusser the object of this symptomatic reading
had been Marx’s “scientific” discoveries. But for Althusserian cultural
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criticism, as represented most importantly by Pierre Macherey, such
readings were to be directed at the texts of ideology. Althusserianism
thus aspired to demystify the artistic or literary text by exposing ideology
itself as its real object. It was an approach which would exercise a
considerable fascination not only for socialists, but also for very many
feminists throughout much of the 1970s and early 1980s.

The New Left: from structural Marxism to
cultural materialism

Just as Zhdanovism was imported into Britain by the Communist
Party, so Western Marxism crossed the English Channel largely at the
behest of the British New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. Peter Sedgwick
has distinguished between an “Old New Left”, which formed from
the political crises of 1956, and a “New New Left”, whose central
political experience became the May ’68 Events in Paris, the Vietnam
Solidarity Campaign, the Prague Spring and the revolt on the
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campuses. Raymond Williams and E.P.Thompson had belonged to
the earlier formation, Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn and Terry Eagleton
to the later. The shift between the two formations had been marked
by a distinctly acrimonious transfer of the editorship of the New Left
Review from Stuart Hall to Anderson during 1962. Where the Old
New Left had attempted to preserve the particularities of the British
national experience from Communist “internationalism”, the New

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