Page 26 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 15

examined) the active subordination of alternatives—their marginalization and
incorporation into a dominant structure: hence, also, the resistances, antagonisms
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and struggles which result from regulation. Strikingly, these concepts were
altogether absent: they had been ‘naturalized’ out of existence. Making culture
problematic meant therefore raising these absences to visibility. What were the
processes by means of which a dominant cultural order came to be ‘preferred’? 56
Who preferred this order rather than that? What were the effects of a particular
ordering of the cultures of a social formation on the other hierarchized social
arrangements? How did the preferred cultural order help to sustain ‘definite forms
of life’ in particular social formations? How and why did societies come to be
culturally ‘structured in dominance’? Broadly speaking, two steps were involved
here: First, the move (to give it a too condensed specification) to an
‘anthropological’ definition of culture—as cultural practices; second, the move
to a more historical definition of cultural practices: questioning the
anthropological meaning and interrogating its universality by means of the
concepts of social formation, cultural power, domination and regulation,
resistance and struggle. These moves did not exclude the analysis of texts, but it
treated them as archives, decentring their assumed privileged status —one kind of
evidence, among others.
Second, the question of the relation between cultural practices and other
practices in definite social formations. Here we posed the issue of the relation of
the ‘cultural’ to what we may call—again, for shorthand purposes—the
economic, political and ideological instances. This was part of the project to
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develop a materialist definition of culture. It referenced, immediately, the
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problems of ‘base’/‘superstructure’ and the question of determination. But the
classical terms of that metaphor were now clearly inadequate. The work of
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revision had indeed already commenced.
Thompson had called attention to the

dialectical interaction between culture and something that is not culture. We
must suppose the raw material of life experience to be at one pole, and all
the infinitely complex human disciplines and systems, articulate and
inarticulate, formalized in institutions or dispersed in the least formal
ways, which ‘handle’, transmit or distort this raw material to be at the
other. It is the active process—which is at the same time the process
through which men make their history—that I am insisting upon. 60

In the effort to give culture its own specificity, place and determinate effect, The
Long Revolution had also proposed a radical revision to the ‘base/superstructure’
metaphor. It said, in effect, all the practices—economic, political, ideological,
cultural—interact with effect on each other. This rescued culture from its
residual status as the mere expression of other forces: but at the expense of a
radical relativism, skirting the problem of determination. Other related traditions
(Williams at this stage noted the convergences between his own work and that of