Page 23 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

12 INTRODUCTION

of understanding must take account of the elements of ‘misrecognition’ which
are involved. They also had material and historical conditions which decentred
them from any full ‘authenticity’: men/women make history, but under conditions
which are not of their own making…. This more ‘structural’ approach had been
precisely the purchase offered by structural-functionalism. The problem was that
the latter secured its ‘structural’ view by evading the dialectic between agency
and conditions: it thought ‘structures’ as uncontradictory, integrative,
functionalist in an evolutionary and adaptive sense. Weber had rescued the
‘meaning’ dimension—but at the cost of a heuristic reduction of social action to
individual motivation: his ‘methodological individualism’. Schutz and the
phenomenologists tried to give Weber’s ‘meaning construction’ a more societal
dimension—but at the cost of absorbing everything, including the material
foundations of culture, into thought and language: the study of historical
societies, from this perspective, became a sort of ‘sociology of knowledge’. 45
Much of this emphasis derived from its Kantian or neo-Kantian basis in
German idealist thought. But reference to Weber, Simmel and the ‘Heidelberg
Circle’ reminds us of another seminal thinker formed in the same intellectual
space: George Lukács. Lukács’s name indexes an alternative working through of
many of the same problems, but on a ‘Hegelian’ rather than a Kantian foundation
and in the context not of an ‘empirical social science’ but of ‘Western
46
Marxism’. This term refers to that complex Marxism, consciously
counterposed to the vulgar reductionism of the Marxism of the Second and Third
Internationals, which was much preoccupied with questions of culture, ideology
47
and ‘the superstructures’, whose filiation Anderson has recently retraced. (It
was the absence of this brand of Marxism from the English intellectual scene in
the 1930s which made Williams remark, in Culture and Society, that against the
mechanical reductionism of what passed for ‘Marxism’ in England at that time,
Leavis and Scrutiny not only ‘won’ the argument but deserved to win.) It was
therefore of the utmost importance that at precisely this moment many of these
long-forgotten or unknown ‘Western Marxist’ texts began to appear in
translation, largely through the mediation of New Left Books and Merlin Press.
English Cultural Studies thus had to hand, for the first time, an alternative source
of theorizing within Marxism about its characteristic problems: in Lukács’s
literary historical work, Goldmann’s Hidden God, the first translations of Walter
Benjamin, the early texts of the ‘Frankfurt School’ (known previously only
because American ‘mass-society theorists’ were taken to have successfully
refuted Adorno’s pessimistic critique), Sartre’s Question of Method. 48
These texts marked a decisive second ‘break’ in Cultural Studies: the break
into a complex Marxism. They restored to the debate about culture a set of
theorizations around the classical problem of ideologies. They returned to the
agenda the key question of the determinate character of culture and ideologies—
their material, social and historical conditions of existence. They therefore
opened up a necessary reworking of the classical Marxist question of ‘base’ and
‘superstructures’—the decisive issue for a non-idealist or materialist theory of