Page 239 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

228 ENGLISH STUDIES

consciousness of the concept’ (the most obvious example being Keywords),
attempting both an historical clarification of shifts in the meaning of words such
as culture and base/superstructure and a redefinition of such words/concepts for
his own argument. This search for adequate concepts has produced such hybrids
as ‘cultural materialism’ and ‘structure of feeling’, to name two of the central
ones. The acid test of the usefulness of the concepts, to Williams, lies in their
confrontation with the ‘experiential’, an attitude which Eagleton, half-admiringly,
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describes as ‘this passionate premium placed upon the “lived”’. This constant
movement between the concept and ‘the experience’ produces its own
contradictions, as when Williams insists that ‘it is not “the base” and “the
superstructure” that need to be studied, but specific and indissoluble real
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processes’, from which point he moves to a discussion of the concept of
‘determination’.
Whereas in Williams we find a recurrent emphasis on the critical idiom as in
some way partaking of the reality it signifies, in Eagleton critical practice
involves the construction of a discourse consciously at a distance from the object
of inquiry. Criticism, according to Eagleton, must ‘situate itself outside the space
of the text on the alternative terrain of scientific knowledge’. ‘Its task is not to
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redouble the text’s self-understanding, to collude with its object in a conspiracy
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of eloquence.’ Agreeing with Williams on the insistence on art as ‘material
practice’, he proceeds to ‘set out in schematic form the major constituents of a
Marxist theory of practice’; a hierarchy of concepts, beginning with ‘the
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general mode of production’ and ending with ‘the text’. The function of criticism,
for Eagleton, is ‘to refuse the spontaneous presence of the work—to deny that
“naturalness” in order to make the real determinants appear’. He is concerned
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with ‘the destruction of corporate and organicist ideologies’. Much of
Williams’s work has been in areas of cultural practice hitherto marginalized or
unconnected, whereas most of Eagleton’s critical practice aims at subversion
within the traditional definition of literary criticism.

Literature: production, institution or formation?
In the 1859 Preface Marx included art among those ‘definite forms of social
consciousness’ that rise as a ‘superstructure’ upon the ‘real foundation’ of the
productive relations. The notion of art as a ‘form of consciousness’—whose
relation to the productive basis might be variously conceived as correspondence,
reflection, representation, homology, relative autonomy—dominated the
classical period of Marxist aesthetics. But in the Grundrisse, while retaining the

* This chapter is based on work and comments by Janet Batsleer, Rob Burkitt, Hazel
Carby, Tony Davies, Michael Denning, Michael Green, Rebecca O’Rourke, Michael
O’Shaughnessey, Roger Shannon, Stephen Shortus and Michael Skovmand.