Page 285 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

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42 See for example, R.Johnson, ‘Histories of culture/theories of ideology’, in Barrett,
Corrigan, Kuhn and Wolfe (eds.), Ideology and Cultural Production (Croom Helm
1979), and ‘Thompson, Genovese and socialist/humanist history’, in History
Workshop, no. 6 (Autumn 1978).
43 One thinks here of the work in ‘ethnosemantics’ and ‘ethnolinguistics’
comprehensively reviewed by Dell Hymes, for example in Hymes (ed.), Language
in Culture and Society (Harper and Row 1966), and Directions in EthnoLinguistics
(Holt, Rinehart 1972); Mary Douglas’s Rules and Meanings (Penguin 1973), Purity
and Danger (Penguin 1970) and Natural Symbols (Barry and Rockliff 1970).
44 These historical traditions will be more fully discussed in History and Theory
currently being prepared for publication in the CCCS/Hutchinson series. The
‘culturalistic’ problematic in which they are situated is critically reviewed by
R.Johnson, ‘Three problematics’, in J.Clarke, C.Critcher and R.Johnson (eds.),
Working Class Culture (CCCS/Hutchinson 1979).
45 This is made explicit in Berger and Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality.
See the discussion in Hall, ‘The sociology of knowledge’.
46 These connections are skilfully reviewed in Lichtheim’s Lukács (Fontana 1970)—
despite its polemical character—and in the essay by Gareth Stedman-Jones, ‘The
Marxism of the early Lukács’, New Left Review, no. 70.
47 Perry Anderson, Considerations of Western Marxism (New Left Books 1976); also,
Western Marxism—A Reader (New Left Books 1977).
48 The Merlin Press enterprise of reprinting Lukács’s work began at this time with the
translation of The Historical Novel (1962). See also Goldmann’s Hidden God
(Routledge and Kegan Paul 1964) and his influential essay on ‘The sociology of
literature’, in International Social Science Journal, vol. 19, no. 4 (1967).
Heinemann’s translations of Adorno and Habermas also date from this period.
Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason was still untranslated, though its arguments
were familiar through their use in New Left Review and in Cooper and Laing’s
work: see Reason and Revolution (Tavistock 1964). But the methodological
chapter, written earlier but incorporated in The Critique, was already a familiar and
important text, The Problem of Method (Methuen 1963).
49 The concept of ‘epistemological rupture’, appropriated from Bachelard and
Canguilhelm, was introduced in Althusser, For Marx (Allen Lane 1969) and
substantially developed, in a more absolutist direction, in Althusser and Balibar,
Reading Capital (New Left Books 1970), alongside the theory of ‘symptomatic
reading’. Both have had to be radically modified in application to be of value.
Althusser himself modifies the position in Essays in Self-Criticism (New Left
Books 1976). See the general critique of this privileging of the ‘theoretical’ level in
E.P.Thompson’s blistering anti-Althusser polemic, The Poverty of Theory (Merlin
Press 1979). The Centre has found it useful to read texts for their underlying
‘problematics’ but has never succumbed to the method of reducing texts to their
epistemes and has actively criticized the stigmatization of texts on the sole ground
that their problematics can be declared ‘historicist’, ‘empiricist’, ‘Lukacsean’, etc.,
etc.
50 Althusser, For Marx.
51 The first appearance of the Nicolaus translation of Marx’s Grundrisse
(Penguin 1973), with Nicolaus’s seminal introduction, was an important event:
above all for the highly significant 1857 Introduction, Marx’s most extensive