Page 49 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

reduced to experience (p. 26). In short, Williams had failed to
understand how working-class subjectivity is determined by
bourgeois ideology; structure of feeling was thus an essentially
inadequate conceptualisation of ideology, misreading structure
as pattern (pp. 33–4); and even Williams’ use of the Gramscian
notion of hegemony was wrongly predicated on its experiential
primacy and was, therefore, necessarily ‘structurally undiffer-
entiated’ (p. 42). We can concede something to the power of
Eagleton’s critique of Williams’ earlier culturalism, while still
insisting on its markedly retrospective quality: Williams’ later
cultural materialism, which was substantially formed by 1976,
was much less susceptible to these charges. Moreover, insofar as
real differences did indeed persist, it was Eagleton’s position,
rather than Williams’, which was the more ‘idealist and acade-
micist’ (p. 25). Eagleton’s Althusserian insistence on the
determining power of ideology over the human subject led almost
unavoidably to an enormous condescension towards popular
activity, whether political or cultural. His defence of the notion
of aesthetic value, coupled as it was with a substantive accept-
ance of the content of the literary canon and a passing sneer at
the ‘abstract egalitarianism’ of cultural studies (pp. 162–3), seem
similarly academicist.
The intent of these remarks is not to take Eagleton to task for
views he would in any case soon abandon, but to emphasise the
extent to which structuralism and cultural materialism offered
alternative, very different and, in some ways, opposed ways
out of the theoretical deadlock between idealist humanism and
determinist Marxism. These differences revolved around their
respective concepts of structure, agency and subjectivity: for struc-
turalism, as we shall see, structure was all-determining, agency
an illusion and subjectivity the ideological effect of structure; for
cultural materialism, structure sets limits and exerts pressures,
agency takes place within those limits and pressures, though
taking the form of an unavoidably material production, and
subjectivity, though socially produced and shared, is both real and
active. The analytical logic of structuralism pointed towards a
perennial search for the ideology concealed within the deep
structures of the text. Thus the substantive focus remained the

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