Page 88 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Cultural Studies 77

agency) while always bearing in mind that interpretation is, to a considerable
extent, class based.
Second, according to Williams, the superstructure in some ways has prior-
ity over the base. In Communications he remarked that “the struggle to learn,
to describe, to understand, to educate is . . . not begun, at second hand, after
reality has occurred; it is, in itself, a major way in which reality is continually
formed and changed.” 107
In place of the formula, base determines superstructure, therefore,
Williams recommended theorizing “the social totality,” which might be para-
phrased as theorizing society as a total system. A theory of the social totality,
he continued, must present culture as comprising “relations between elements
in a whole way of life.” 108 And that is precisely what he meant by cultural
studies! And that is why Williams’ work so seamlessly integrates culture and
the concerns of political economy.
His rejecting the base/superstructure model is not to suggest, therefore, that
in Williams’ mind economic factors can be safely disregarded when studying
culture, at least certainly not in contemporary, capitalist society. To the con-
trary, economic/financial considerations predominate. 109 Consistent with gen-
eral systems theory, he maintained that structures or nodes (what he referred
to as “elements”) wax and wane in influence. As the “totality” evolves, the
strength and direction of influence among the elements change. For Williams,
capitalism is the lived system giving inordinate importance to economic fac-
tors. 110 He decried, for instance, “the deepest cultural damage” that industrial
capitalism had wrought by fostering our tendency to think of economic affairs
as separate “from the whole network of activities, interests, and relation-
ships,” 111 thereby making us oblivious to the deep impact economic processes
have on our whole way of life. For economic elements to exert the influence
they now do, Williams insisted, is not merely an imbalance, it is an aberra-
tion, if not indeed a travesty. Referring approvingly to writings of Lukács and
Goldmann, he declared:

The dominance of economic activity over all other forms of human activity, the
dominance of its values over all other values, was given a precise historical ex-
planation. . . . This dominance, this deformation, was the specific characteristic
of capitalist society. 112
In addition to falsely insisting that economic relations and activities are
largely separate from other human activities, Williams declared that elite
groups reify (render falsely objective) dominant values and meanings. Previ-
ously we noted Williams’ objections to how elites encourage people to think
of themselves as part of the mass—a reification consistent with a strategy
of divide and conquer. 113 Elites also reify value, making value seem to be