Page 30 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Literature and society: from culturalism

to cultural materialism

The term ‘culturalism’ is of relatively recent origin and has
typically been defined in opposition to structuralism. Moreover,
it has sometimes been accorded a quite distinctly Marxist inflec-
tion. Writing in the 1970s, Richard Johnson saw the new
discipline of cultural studies as founded upon a theoretical terrain
demarcated between, on the one hand, a kind of Anglo-Marxist
culturalism best represented by the work of historian
E.P. Thompson and literary critic Raymond Williams and, on the
other, the type of Francophone structuralist Marxism established
by the philosopher Louis Althusser (Johnson, R., 1979, pp. 51–2).
We propose to use the term rather differently: to denote that type
of anti-utilitarianism that became incorporated within a largely
‘literary-humanist’ tradition of speculation about the relationship
between culture and society, variants of which recur within both
German and British intellectual life. In both versions, the
concept of culture is understood as combining a specifically
‘literary’ sense of culture as ‘art’ with an ‘anthropological’ sense
of culture as a ‘way of life’. In each case, the claims of culture are
counterposed to those of material civilisation. Hence Shelley’s
famous dictum that: ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators
of the world’ (Shelley, 1931, p. 109). The most sophisticated
‘culturalist’ theorisations tend to derive from Germany, however,
rather than from England, and it is with this German tradition,
then, that we begin.

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