Page 80 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

THE NEW LEFT

value, coupled as it was with both a substantive acceptance of the
content of the literary canon and a passing sneer at the “abstract
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egalitarianism” of cultural studies, is similarly academicist. As Howard
Felperin would later unkindly observe: “you can take the boy out of
Cambridge, but you cannot take Cambridge out of the boy”. 96
For many on the Old New Left, this new generation remained
incorrigibly alien. For E.P.Thompson, settling old and not so old scores
in the “Foreword” to his The Poverty of Theory, the ten years after
1968 had been “a time for reason to sulk in its tent”, a time when:
“Every pharisee was being more revolutionary than the next; some of
them have made such hideous faces that they are likely to be stuck
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like that for life”. The Poverty of Theory was itself an anti-Althusserian
polemic and Eagleton one of its more incidental targets. But whilst
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Thompson continued to beat “the bounds of ‘1956’”, Williams
followed a rather different route. That Williams’s political and
intellectual sympathies, from 1968 on, lay with the second generation
of New Left intellectuals became increasingly apparent. He shared
much of the New Left Review’s interest in Western Marxism. Indeed,
in the “Introduction” to Marxism and Literature he would recall that
“I felt the excitement of contact with…new Marxist work… As all
this came in, during the sixties and early seventies…an argument that
had drifted into deadlock…in the late thirties and forties, was being
vigorously and significantly reopened”. The end result would be a
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shift in Williams’s own position, away from the earlier “left culturalism”
and toward what he would himself term “cultural materialism”.
Cultural materialism, Williams explained in a short essay itself
first published in the New Left Review, “is a theory of culture as a
(social and material) productive process and of specific practices, of
‘arts’, as social uses of material means of production”. The theory
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is elaborated upon at some length in Marxism and Literature, and in
more accessible fashion in the slightly later Culture. Marxism and
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Literature has been hailed by Graeme Turner as an “extraordinary
theoretical ‘coming out’”, in which “Williams finally admits the
usefulness of Marxism”. But this seems to me to overestimate radically
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the extent of Williams’s conversion to “Marxism”. Much more
appropriate is Alan O’ Connor’s emphasis on “a fundamental
theoretical continuity” with Williams’s earlier work, “although there
were shifts and changes”. 104
In Williams’s earlier, left culturalist writings, the “deep community”

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