Page 83 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MARXISM

productive activities without assuming in advance that only some of
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them are material”. If Williams retains a concept of determination,
then, it is a concept of multiple determination, more akin to the
culturalist sense of a whole way of life than to the Marxist notion of
a determining base and a determined superstructure. But that whole
way of life is now both thoroughly material and thoroughly marked
by the impress of power and domination, in all its particular aspects.
What for Leavis had been a “literature”, a canon of exemplary creative
works expressive of the national tradition, and what for Marxism
had been an ideological superstructure of the economic system, becomes
in Williams’s cultural materialism a distinctive subset of socially specific,
materially determinate, forms and practices.
Comparison between Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology and
Williams’s Marxism and Literature shows nicely how structural
Marxism and cultural materialism offered alternative, and in some
ways opposed, ways out of the theoretical deadlock between culturalism
and Marxism. The analytical logic of Althusserianism pointed towards
a perennial search for the impress of ideology concealed within the
deep structures of the text. Though the enabling rhetoric was both
radical and contextual, the substantive focus remained the business
as usual of literary-critical canonical exegesis. By contrast, the analytical
logic of cultural materialism pointed towards a necessary decentring
both of texts into the contexts of their production, reproduction and
consumption, and of Literature into culture, literary studies into cultural
studies. If Williams’s rhetoric was a great deal less “revolutionary”
than Althusser’s, the substantive case at issue was surely very much
more so. Certainly, this was to prove Eagleton’s own eventual
assessment: “Williams…refused to be distracted by the wilder flights
of Althusserian…theory and was still there, ready and waiting for us,
when some of us younger theorists, sadder and wiser, finally re-emerged
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from one or two cul-de-sacs to rejoin him where we had left off” .
From the early to mid 1980s onwards, cultural materialism seems
to have attracted an increasing audience both amongst erstwhile
Althusserian recidivists, including Eagleton himself, and amongst
younger scholars such as those associated with the journal News From
Nowhere and “Oxford English Limited”. The introduction to a 1985
collection of New Essays in Cultural Materialism cites as instances of
such work: Terry Lovell, Janet Wolff, Alan Sinfield and the Terry
Eagleton of Literary Theory. Both Lovell and Wolff have continued
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