Page 94 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

82 COLIN SPARKS

Modern marxism has posed in new ways the relations of base and
superstructure, consciousness and being, the ways in which social
structure and their modes of production of culture and its realization
in the world, the complex and mediated link between an historical
epoch and its conceptions of the world.
(Anon, 1971:5, sic)
There are here echoes of Althusser, in the focus on base and
superstructure, but also of Sartre in the mention of ‘consciousness and
being’, and of Lukács in the use of the idea of ‘the complex and mediated
link between an historical epoch and its conceptions of the world’. We may
also note the absence from this discussion of the term ‘ideology’, which
would come to dominate much of theoretical work of the Birmingham
Centre, and would come to be more or less the central concern of marxist
cultural studies.
The very first phase of the encounter with marxism was thus an open
one, in which there was no predominant ‘structuralist’ influence. The
above passage reviews some of the problems of the different approaches
and claims: ‘No single orthodoxy prevails here.’ The same heterodoxy is
observable in the papers of the symposium ‘Situating Marx’ held at the
Birmingham Centre in June 1971 (Walton and Hall, n.d.: 1–6).
A definite ‘orthodoxy’ did, however, soon come to prevail. Out of the
range of possible versions of marxism, including some like those of Sartre
and Lukács which were much closer to the humanist project of the early
cultural studies, the one which was preferred, and which came to stand for
‘marxism’ in its entirety, was Althusserian marxism. This was the version of
marxism which borrowed most heavily from structuralism. It was in fact
generally known simply as ‘structuralist marxism’. This version of marxism
became the orthodoxy of the Birmingham Centre from around 1973. The
editorial, and most of the contents, of Working Papers in Cultural Studies
6 are clearly dominated by the new orthodoxy (Chambers et al., 1974). It
must be admitted that it was a very tolerant orthodoxy, which permitted
various unbelievers, including even the very odd Lukácsian, to eke out a
marginal existence. Nevertheless, it is demonstrably the case that a prior
engagement with structuralism overdetermined the appropriation of
marxism by the Birmingham Centre.
The third point concerns the consequences of adopting such a
structuralist marxism for the relationship of the Birmingham Centre to its
own immediate history. It is true that in its adoption of the Althusserian
version of marxism the Birmingham Centre was part of the dominant
mood of left intellectual culture during the period, which was
overwhelmingly attracted to such a position in the wake of 1968. Not least
of the attractions of Althusserianism to left intellectuals was that it offered,
in the idea of theoretical practice, an excellent legitimation for occupying