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Contemporary Cultural Theory

effect of these diverse lines of inquiry finally registered in Marxism
and Literature, where the theoretical contours of Williams’ later
‘cultural materialism’ are elaborated at length. Despite its title,
this book is not the ‘extraordinary theoretical “coming out”’,
where ‘Williams finally admits the usefulness of Marxism’
(Turner, 1996, p. 60) that Graeme Turner takes it to be. To the
contrary, Williams’ argument displays a theoretical novelty and
originality best represented not as a kind of Marxism, but rather
as a quite distinctive ‘post-culturalism’ (Milner, 2002, p. 170).

Williams’ cultural materialism
Williams coined the term ‘cultural materialism’ to describe the
theoretical synthesis he effected between what we have been
terming ‘left culturalism’ and ‘western Marxism’. Cultural
materialism, he explained, ‘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 (from language as
material “practical consciousness” to the specific technologies of
writing and forms of writing, through to mechanical and elec-
tronic communications systems)’ (Williams, 1980, p. 243). He then
sought to circumvent what he saw as the false opposition between
‘idealist’ accounts of culture as consciousness and ‘materialist’
accounts of culture as the ‘superstructural’ effect of an economic
base, by insisting that culture is itself both real and material. ‘From
castles and palaces and churches to prisons and workhouses and
schools . . .’, he wrote, ‘from weapons of war to a controlled
press... These are never superstructural activities. They are
necessarily material production’ (Williams, 1977, p. 93). Williams’
cultural materialism was thus part of a wider movement, begun
in the 1960s and 1970s, towards new theoretical paradigms that
acknowledged the necessary materiality of cultural texts and
institutions.
Though Williams’ later work was less Marxist than is some-
times claimed, its emergence was significantly conditioned,
nonetheless, by the encounter with Marxism. A detailed consid-
eration of Marxist cultural theory can be found in the chapter that
follows. For the moment, note only that Williams was primarily

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