Page 81 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MARXISM

that is culture simultaneously transcends class and is yet irredeemably
marked by it. For all the eloquence with which this position is argued,
it remains quite fundamentally incoherent: the competing claims of
commonality and difference, culturalism and Marxism, form a circle
which stubbornly refuses to be squared. But in the later, cultural
materialist phase of his work, it finally became possible for Williams
to explain, to his own satisfaction at least, how it could be that structures
of feeling are common to different classes, and yet nonetheless represent
the interests of some particular class. It was Gramsci’s theory of
hegemony which finally delivered to Williams that resolution of
culturalist and Marxist thematics hitherto denied him. For Williams,
Gramsci’s central achievement is contained in the articulation of a
culturalist sense of the wholeness of culture with a more typically
Marxist sense of the interestedness of ideology. Thus hegemony is “in
the strongest sense a ‘culture’, but a culture which has to be seen as
the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes”. 105
Understood thus, culture is neither “superstructural”, as the term
had normally been defined in the Marxist tradition, nor “ideological”,
in the more generally Marxist or more specifically Althusserian
definition. On the contrary, “cultural tradition and practice…are among
the basic processes”, which need to be seen “as they are…without the
characteristic straining to fit them…to other and determining
…economic and political relationships”. 106
For Williams, as for Gramsci, the counter-hegemonic moment
remains especially significant. Dissenting from the implied
consensualism of Althusserian theories of ideology, Williams is insistent
that: “no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all
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human practice, human energy, and human intention”. Hence, his
attempt to expand upon Gramsci’s initial distinction between organic
and traditional intellectuals, so as to identify “dominant”, “residual”
and “emergent” cultural elements. By “residual” Williams means
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those elements, external to the dominant culture, which nonetheless
continue to be lived and practised as an active part of the present “on
the basis of the residue …of some previous social and cultural institution
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or formation”. Unlike the merely archaic, the residual may be
oppositional or, at least, alternative in character. Thus Williams
distinguishes organized religion and the idea of rural community,
which are each predominantly residual, from monarchy, which is
simply archaic. But it is the properly “emergent”, that is, those genuinely

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