Page 288 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

NOTES TO PAGES 17–22 277

68 This surprising convergence—by no means the only one—can be deduced from a
careful comparison between Althusser’s ‘Contradiction and over-determination’
and Thompson’s anti-Althusserean polemic in The Poverty of Theory.
69 In, for example, Totemism, The Savage Mind and the volumes on Mythologies. The
roots of structuralism in structural linguistics are well exemplified in the chapters
on language in Structural Anthropology (Basic Books 1963).
70 In, for example, The Elements of Semiology (Cape 1967); Système de la Mode
(Paris: Editions du Seuil 1967); Mythologies (Cape 1972); see also the important
but little-known essay, ‘Sociology and socio-logic’, in Social Science Information
(CCCS translation 1970).
71 One of the clearest and most exemplary discussions of this change of focus in
structuralism is to be found in Roger Poole’s introductory essay to the Penguin
edition of Totemism (1969).
72 Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method (1938) was, nevertheless,
appropriated as a founding text of sociological positivism.
73 See Althusser, ‘Marxism and Humanism’, in For Marx: ‘it is within this ideological
unconsciousness that men succeed in altering the “lived” relation between them and
their conditions of existence and acquiring that new form of specific
unconsciousness called “consciousness”’ (p. 233).
74 In his inaugural lecture, The Scope of Anthropology (Cape 1967).
75 The rapid displacement of Lukács, Goldmann and the ‘Frankfurt School’ by the
French structuralists is one of the most intriguing episodes in recent English
intellectual history. Althusser’s critique of ‘Hegelianism’ and his rehabilitation of
the Marx of Capital as opposed to the Marx of ‘alienation’ and the 1844
Manuscripts were two of the most important factors. One effect is to have
established a major displacement between English Marxist theory and the
Marxisms of American, German and Scandinavian Left intellectuals. As has so
often been the case, the ghosts of Hegel and Kant continued to play an alternating
shadow role in these ruptures. See Gareth Stedman-Jones’s ‘The Marxism of the
early Lukács’.
76 The Savage Mind (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1966), is the locus classicus of this
cognitive universalism.
77 This emphasis on the ‘reciprocity of exchange’ in the definition of the social, as
expounded by Durkheim and his ‘School’—see M.Mauss, The Gift (Routledge and
Kegan Paul 1970)—continues to mark much subsequent work—for example, that of
some feminist anthropologists and the Lacanians.
78 Though most fully developed in the ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’
essay in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New Left Books 1971), the
seminal formulations first occur in the ‘Marxism and humanism’ essay in For
Marx.
79 For an extensive discussion of the relations between the terms ‘culture’ and
‘ideology’ and their problematics, see Richard Johnson, ‘Histories of culture/
theories of ideology’ in Ideology and Cultural Production, and
‘Three problematics’ in Johnson, Clarke, Critcher (eds.), Working Class Culture.
80 The identification of these sites as ‘ideological state apparatuses’ was always a
contentious and problematic point: but the focus on the sites and practices of
ideologies, and their practico-social effects have a direct derivation from Gramsci,
whose formulations, though less thoroughly elaborated, are in this particular