Page 27 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

16 INTRODUCTION

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Goldmann and Lukács) retained the old ‘base’/‘superstructure’ distinction but
expanded the complexity and ‘reciprocal effect’ of the latter (in which culture-
ideology was firmly located) on the former. This retained the determinacy—but
in an elongated, ‘last instance only’ fashion. Did it go far enough? Sartre
attempted to go behind this formulation by isolating the aspect of signification as
the specifically cultural element:
Because we are men and because we live in the world of men, of work and
of conflicts, all the objects which surround us are signs. By themselves
they scarcely mask the real project of those who have made them thus for
us and who address us through them. Thus significations come from man
and his project but they are inscribed everywhere in things and in the order
of things…. 62

These reworkings all tended to bring together again things which had been
dispersed into the binary poles of the ‘base’/‘superstructure’ metaphor, on the
ground of a common, general praxis: human activity, ‘the process through which
men made history’, with none of that false abstraction which their assignment to
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different levels of effective determinacy seemed to imply. This was close to the
position taken by Marx in The German Ideology, with its ‘consciousness/being’
dialectic, and its affirmation that all abstractions could be resolved into the
general historical process itself—‘which is nothing but the activity of men’. This
had a radically historicized philosophical anthropology as its basis. It entailed a
very specific way of conceptualizing the totality: a ‘whole’, in which each social
practice mediated every other practice, or, to adopt Williams’s distinctive gloss,
conceiving praxis as the essential forms of human energy. It also entailed
thinking of society as an ‘expressive totality’.
The major phase of theoretical development which followed must therefore be
broadly identified with all those influences which interrupted this search for
unities and underlying ‘totalities’. These were linked with a different conception
of a social totality—as a necessarily ‘complex structure’, which does not express
a unity but is ‘structured in dominance’. Here, as Marx argued in the 1857
Introduction, unity is the ‘result of many determinations’, the product of a
particular articulation of distinctions and differences rather than of similarity and
correspondence. Determinacy had to be thought not as emanating from one
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level of the social totality— for example, ‘the base’—in a unilinear fashion but
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as an ‘over-determination’. The problematic of Cultural Studies thus became
closely identified with the problem of the ‘relative autonomy’ of cultural
practices. This was a radical break. It goes far beyond the impact of the
‘structuralisms’—though they were instrumental in a major way in bringing this
question to the fore. But, actually, the strongest thrust in ‘structuralism’ as a
mode of thought is towards a radical diversity—the heterogeneity of discourses,
the autonomization of instances, the effective dispersal of any unity or ensemble,
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even that of a ‘relatively autonomous’ one. So the problematic of ‘relative