Page 76 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 67

Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

played the major role in securing the necessary renunciation of
instinctual desires. Though religious beliefs can be examined
rationally, they are not themselves rational, but rather reflect ‘illu-
sions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes
of mankind’ (p. 212); that is, they are a symbolic representation
of the protection offered by the father after the Oedipal phase
(p. 226).
Unlike Marx, Freud could imagine no utopian exit from this
state of affairs. Hence his dismissal of investment in radical social
change as merely a search for ‘consolation’: ‘at bottom that is what
they are all demanding—the wildest revolutionaries no less
passionately than most virtuous believers’ (p. 339). Freud’s legacy
remains highly controversial, but even his harshest critics tend
to admit to the reality of both the unconscious and psychic repres-
sion. The precise degree to which these influence our thoughts
and actions or underpin the edifice of civilisation remains in
dispute. The Frankfurt School saw Freud’s work as pointing
towards an emancipatory politics, despite his own pessimistic
appraisal of the possibilities for radical social change, and made
use of this account of rational and irrational individual behav-
iour in their studies of repressive domination. Before we proceed
to their work, however, we also need to consider the more obvi-
ously cognate theorisations of cultural modernity developed in
the western Marxism of Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci.

LUKÁCS, GRAMSCI AND THE ORIGINS OF WESTERN MARXISM

The Frankfurt School was part of the much larger intellectual
movement Merleau-Ponty and others have dubbed western
Marxism. This was itself a radically culturalist version of the
Marxian tradition, which, in Anderson’s phrase, ‘came to
concentrate overwhelmingly on study of superstructures... It was
culture that held the central focus of its attention’ (Anderson,
1976, pp. 75–6). The characteristic thematics were human
agency, subjective consciousness, and hence also culture. This
was true of Georg Lukács (1885–1917), the Hungarian-born
but German-speaking and German-educated philosopher; of his

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