Page 79 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MARXISM

Anderson’s own reassessment of the traditions of English socialism; 85
and by Nairn’s recognition that, in the period up to the Second World
War at least, pre-bourgeois “backwardness” was not so much a
peculiarity of the English as a more general property of European
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political culture. But its more general features have persisted. And,
insofar as Anderson has subsequently acknowledged the presence of
a relatively resilient intellectual radicalism within contemporary
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Britain, then this is explained precisely in terms of its cultural novelty,
thus in effect providing further testimony to the success of the New
Left Review’s own practical project rather than to any deficiencies in
its earlier analyses.
In the specific field of literary and cultural studies the most significant
of the New Left Review Althusserians was almost certainly Terry
Eagleton. Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology, published by New Left
Books in 1976, combined a full-blown Althusserianism with a trenchant
critique of Williams’s earlier culturalism. The Althusserianism consisted
in a highly formalist elaboration of “the major constituents of a Marxist
theory of literature”, centring around the twin concepts of “mode of
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production” and “ideology”; and in the proposal for a structuralist
“science of the text”, taking as its theoretical object the ways in which
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literature “produces”, in the sense of performs, ideology. The critique
of Williams found the latter guilty, by turn, of an “idealist epistemology,
organicist aesthetics and corporatist sociology”, all three of which
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have their roots in “Romantic populism”. The defining characteristic
of that Romanticism, as of the very notion of “culture” itself, is, for
Eagleton, a radical “over-subjectivizing” of the social formation, in
which structure is reduced to experience. For Eagleton, meanings
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are not culture, but ideology; and “structure of feeling” only an
essentially inadequate conceptualization of ideology, which actually
misreads structure as mere pattern. 92
We may perhaps concede something to the power of Eagleton’s
critique of Williams’s earlier culturalism. But it was surely his own
position, rather than Williams’s, that was the more “idealist and
academicist”. Eagleton’s quintessentially Althusserian insistence on
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the determining power of ideology over the human subject is, as
Thompson might say, “exactly what has commonly been designated,
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in the Marxist tradition, as idealism”. It led almost unavoidably to
an enormous condescension toward popular activity, whether political
or cultural. The equally Althusserian defence of the notion of aesthetic

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