Page 111 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES AND MARXISM 99

events of 1989, any continuing claim to be considered a correct, or even a
useful, way of analysing the world. A full discussion of that topic would
take us well beyond the scope of this chapter. If one holds, as does the
present author, that the fall of stalinism provided an opportunity to free
marxism from a crippling distortion and to develop it anew, then clearly
the increasing distance between cultural studies and marxism is a
retrograde move.
The second question is more limited. It involves asking whether
abandoning the problem of determination, which formed the substantial
content of the move away from marxism, has strengthened cultural studies
or not. The concern with the ways in which material life and culture were
deeply interwoven was not unique and original to cultural studies. Quite
apart from marxism, it was also part of the theoretical programme, if not
necessarily the critical practice, of F.R.Leavis and his school. Leavis,
famously, had no time at all for any kind of marxism. Nevertheless, for him
and his associates, the kinds of literature and the kinds of life prevailing in
a particular epoch were necessarily connected. The problem of
understanding the determination of culture was the central concern of
cultural studies long before the decisive encounter with marxism.
In abandoning the effort to understand this very difficult problem,
cultural studies is changing the object of its enquiries in a fundamental way.
It is regressing beyond Hoggart and Williams, beyond the Leavises and the
British marxists, to an essentially textualist account of culture. The only
thing which now seems to distinguish cultural studies from literary studies
is that the former has a rather wider range of texts from which to choose.
This seems to me a fundamentally regressive step.
Fortunately, the above account need not be taken as the final and
definitive word upon marxism and cultural studies in general. It is, for
example, possible to tell a different story, with a very different ending,
by following through the intellectual development of Raymond Williams.
The development of his thought retains and even amplifies the materialist
inspiration of the first phase of cultural studies and certainly provides an
opening for a continuing engagement with marxism. A critical recovery of
that interpretation of cultural studies would mean a new lease of life for
the relationship between marxism and cultural studies.
The task of this recovery would be to complete the project of cultural
studies rather than to bury it. In the first issue of New Left Review, rightly
claimed by Stuart Hall as a key element in the formation of cultural
studies, there is a record of the first meeting between Richard Hoggart and
Raymond Williams. In the course of the discussion of the problems their
work raised, Williams remarked:

The most difficult bit of theory, that I think both of us have been
trying to get at, is what relation there is between kinds of community,