Page 84 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

THE NEW LEFT

to combine a broadly cultural materialist theoretical position with
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distinctly feminist politics. As for Eagleton, “the notion of cultural
materialism”, he would later write, “is…of considerable value…it
extends and completes Marx’s own struggle against idealism, carrying
it forcefully into that realm (‘culture’) always most ideologically resistant
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to materialist redefinition”. Sinfield’s later work certainly does take
issue with the alleged universalism of Williams’s “left-culturalism”,
but it does so, nonetheless, precisely on the grounds of a whole set of
cultural materialist categories: cultural production, the distinction
between dominant, residual and emergent practices, “middle class
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dissidence”, and so on. One could continue with other more recent
examples: Christopher Hampton’s The Ideology of the Text, for
example, or Sinfield’s own Faultlines. 122
Closer to Williams’s own later work, however, are the kind of
cultural and media studies associated with Nicholas Garnham, James
Curran, and the journal Media, Culture and Society. As its editors
have since explained, Media, Culture and Society “was in large measure
conceived as a counter-argument” to Althusserian and post-Althusserian
structural Marxism. Its distinctive contribution, they continue, was
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a stress, first, on the ways in which culture is produced, and secondly,
on media and communication policy viewed, not from a technical or
administrative vantage point, but from that of a “critical intelligentsia”,
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serving a “democratic public interest”. The Media, Culture and
Society approach has on occasion been represented as little more
than a return to economistic Marxism. But this is a misrepresentation
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of a developing position that owes at least as much to cultural
materialism as to historical materialism. It would be absurd to suggest
that every single article in every single issue of the journal is somehow
directly inspired by Williams. But its continuing project clearly derives
direct theoretical inspiration from that stress on cultural production
which distinguished Marxism and Literature and Culture; and its
substantive focus is very much that defined by Williams in his earlier
Communications and Television: Technology and Cultural Form. 126
It is in such studies of the institutional production of culture that the
central theoretical legacy of what was once “Marxism” still remains
powerfully present in British cultural studies.

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