Page 96 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

84 COLIN SPARKS

the products of particular ways of life organization. In practice, whatever
the rhetorical commitment to completing a similar project, Althusserian
marxism prioritized an exploration of the immanent structures of
particular discourses. Directly from this followed the strong emphasis on
ideology which was such an important element in marxist cultural studies.
The final major consequence of the adoption of marxism in its
Althusserian form was that the apparent unity of cultural studies began to
break up. Hoggart himself had departed the field of battle in 1968, and
ceased to be an important original creative force in the field. The other two
Founding Fathers remained active but took quite different intellectual
routes. Edward Thompson’s lack of enthusiasm for Althusser’s
interpretation of Marx is famously expressed in The Poverty of Theory.
Williams announced, in the early 1970s that he too had become a marxist,
but this was part of an increasingly ‘materialist’ bent in his thinking which
pointed in a radically different direction, both intellectually and politically,
from that traced by Hall and the main current of CCCS. In terms of their
public intellectual positions, and increasingly of their organized political
commitments, the adoption of Althusserian marxism by Stuart Hall and
the majority of his younger followers moved them further away from the
other major figures of the first phase of cultural studies. Both intellectually
and organizationally, the second encounter with marxism resulted in a
cultural studies which rejoined the very same ‘official’ current of marxism
against which the earlier attempts at definition had been directed.
It was this structuralist marxism which formed the intellectual basis of
what we may term the ‘heroic age’ of cultural studies. During the decade of
the 1970s a new and unified perspective on a range of disparate topics was
generated either by Stuart Hall directly or by groups of people in which he
was a prominent, perhaps dominant, personality. This new marxist
cultural studies involved a direct break with several of the central
theoretical propositions of the earlier phase of cultural studies. The
rejection of socialist humanism implied a fundamental shift in the
perceptions of the importance of experience and agency in the
understanding of culture. Closely allied to this was the replacement of the
expressive notion of culture by an account which stressed its relative
autonomy and in which the centrality of the explanatory power of material
determination was under siege. Third, the new stress upon ideology gave a
far greater importance to the formative power of the dominant discourse
which contrasted sharply with the stress upon the independent making of
working-class culture.
Such a major reformulation would be bound to produce problems under
any circumstances, and one would not expect a new synthesis to emerge at
once. In the case of cultural studies, these problems were compounded by
the fact that the novelty of approach was not matched by a radical change