Page 33 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

22 INTRODUCTION

determination’ and uneven relations and relative autonomy): he also challenged
the expressive notion of a simple correspondence between class formations
(mainly determined by economic relations) and cultural formations. He did not
deny mutual and reciprocal effects between them within the structured
complexity of social formations, but he refused any simple transparencies and
correspondences. Two related steps were involved here. First, the argument that
classes were not simple ‘economic’ structures but formations constituted by all
the different practices—economic, political and ideological— and their effects
on each other. (‘Contradiction’ and ‘over-determination’ were, indeed,
Althusser’s attempt to ‘think’ this proposition, which he derived from Engels’s
letters, against a reductionist Marxist economism, on what he conceived as a
more theoretically adequate basis.) Secondly, classes were not integral formations
and did not, as Poulantzas put it, carry their ideologies already prescribed and
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prearranged like number plates on their backs. The The manner in which
Althusser tried to reformulate this relationship has been the subject of extended
critiques. But as a general protocol for the field of study, the force with which it
posed the cultures/classes question cannot be overestimated. He asked, to put it
simply, how the relationship of cultures/ideologies to classes could be
conceived, if one were to avoid reducing the former to the latter.
In sum, one might say that structuralism posed, rather than answered
satisfactorily, certain absolutely critical questions for Cultural Studies. This
summary proposition could, of course, be divided into many more subdivisions
than we have space for here. It offered the challenge of further work on the
problem of a materialist, non-reductionist theory of culture.
We have noted the importance of Althusser’s ‘Ideological state apparatuses’
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essay. This influential paper was important because its definition of ideologies
embraced many of the wider ways in which we had come to define culture—also,
because of its stress on ‘practices’ rather than merely on ‘ideas’. It was influential,
too, because it retained a classical Marxist emphasis on the ‘function’ which
ideology performed in reproducing the conditions and relations necessary to the
mode of production of class societies. This third emphasis was important because
it initiated ways of thinking about the relationship of ideologies to class-
structured social formations (that is, through reproduction), without reducing the
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former to classes. It related the production of ideologies to ‘dominant ideologies’
and to all those apparatuses which produce and reproduce the ideological
structures of society, located in the state and in the institutions of civil society
(churches, trade unions, the family, the social, cultural apparatuses and so on). 87
But it tended to conceptualize these relations as ‘functional supports’ for a given
system of dominant social arrangements. Thus it consistently down-played the
notion of cultural contradiction and struggle. For all practical purposes, the domain
of ideology was, for Althusser, the domain of the ‘dominant ideologies’. 88
Althusser attempted to redress the functionalist balance of this essay in a
footnote on ideology as ‘struggle’—but, so far as the theoretical structure of his
argument was concerned, this eleventh-hour revision was merely ‘gestural’. 89