Page 46 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

interested in ‘western Marxism’, that is, the tradition of ‘critical’
Marxism that developed in Germany, Italy and France, as distinct
from official Communist Marxism. Initially, this meant little more
than the discovery of theoretical preoccupations similar to his
own in the work of individual western Marxist writers. But in
the work of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian theorist of ‘hegemony’,
he found occasion for a much more positive redefinition of his
own theoretical stance. Two chapters of the first part of Marxism
and Literature are devoted to two key concepts, and two
keywords, deriving respectively from Leavisism and Marxism:
‘Culture’ (the first chapter) and ‘Ideology’ (the last chapter). In
a subsequent chapter, Williams argues for the theoretical superi-
ority of the Gramscian notion of hegemony over each of these:
‘“Hegemony” goes beyond “culture”...in its insistence on
relating the “whole social process” to specific distributions of
power and influence’ (pp. 108–9). For Williams, Gramsci’s central
achievement consisted of the articulation of a culturalist sense
of the wholeness of culture with a more typically Marxist sense of
the interestedness of ideology. Culture is therefore neither
‘superstructural’ nor ‘ideological’, but rather ‘among the basic
processes of the formation’ (p. 111). Tradition now becomes not
only selective, but also decisively important in the effective
operation of hegemony, and dependent on identifiably material
institutions and ‘formations’ (pp. 115, 117–20).
Like Gramsci, Williams was concerned with the problem of
counter-hegemony. The alternatives to hegemony include both
the ‘emergent’ and the ‘residual’, he observed, but it was the
former that most interested him. By ‘emergent’, he meant those
genuinely new meanings and values, practices, relationships and
kinds of relationship that are substantially alternative or oppo-
sitional to the dominant culture; by ‘residual’ he meant those
cultural elements, external to the dominant culture, that none-
theless 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 or formation’ (pp. 122–3). An
emergent culture, he argues, will require not only distinct kinds
of immediate cultural practice, but also—and crucially—‘new
forms or adaptations of forms’. Such innovation at the level of

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