Page 70 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 61

Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

cultural creativity and the commodity fetishism of capitalist civil-
isation. Both insisted that culture was also always ideology; that
is, that it is conditioned by material reality. The first laid much
greater stress on the significance of class, as distinct from that of
economy. But this was partly a matter of semantics: the ‘relations
of production’ referred to in the 1859 ‘Preface’ were, for Marx,
invariably relations of class. The second made use of a peculiar
analogy with construction (foundation/superstructure), com-
bined with a powerfully evocative reference to the precision of
natural science, so as to suggest a process of mechanical causa-
tion, where the economy is the cause, culture the effect. But much
of that suggestion is denied both by the carefully qualifying
verbs—’rises/correspond/conditions’, but not ‘causes’, nor
even ‘determines’, in the sense of causation—and by the clear
implication that cultural transformation, unlike material trans-
formation, cannot be determined (that is, known) with the
precision of natural science. There has been a clear incompatibility
between the rival systems of interpretation subsequently attached
to each. In general, supposedly ‘scientific’ Marxisms opted for
strongly determinist versions of the base/superstructure model,
‘critical’ Marxisms for versions of the ruling ideas thesis in which
economy and culture were theorised as different aspects of the
‘totality’, rather than as cause and effect. The difference has been
described as that between ‘mechanical’ and ‘expressive’ causal-
ity (Althusser & Balibar, 1970, pp. 186–7).
This difference between scientific and critical Marxisms
raises the interesting question of the epistemological status
of Marx’s work, as either science or ideology. There is no doubt
that Marx imagined it to be in some significant sense scientific.
On the other hand, he understood it also as political, as a means
by which the socialist movement would become conscious of
itself in the class struggle. As such it is a superstructure, and
presumably, therefore, subject to the same processes of material
conditioning that operate on all other superstructures, processes
that might be interpreted as denying to Marxism the extra-social
objectivity implied by the term ‘science’. In short, Marxism’s
pretensions to scientificity might run contrary to its claims to
political efficacy. For Marx himself this does not appear to have

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