Page 62 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

CULTURAL MATERIALISM

Links Capitalism, globalization, hybridity, ideology, modernity, postcolonial theory

Cultural materialism The concept of cultural materialism draws our attention to the
idea that the meanings and representations that we designate as ‘culture’ are 39
generated through material processes under particular physical and social
circumstances. Thus cultural materialism is concerned to explore the questions of
how and why meanings are inscribed at the moment of production. That is, cultural
materialism explores signifying practices in the context of the means and
conditions of their construction. Traditionally, this has focused on the
connections between cultural practices and political economy, though strictly
speaking this is a rather narrow definition of cultural materialism. Thus Williams
understands cultural materialism to involve the analysis of all forms of signification
within the actual means and conditions of their production.
The debates about the place of culture in social formations and its relationship
to other practices, notably economics and politics, has its roots in cultural studies’
Marxist legacy. Marxism, or historical materialism, is a philosophy that attempts to
relate the production and re-production of culture to the organization of the
material conditions of life. Here culture is a corporeal force tied into the socially
organized production of the material conditions of existence and refers to the forms
assumed by social existence under determinate historical conditions. In particular,
the material ‘base’ is said to shape the parameters of the cultural ‘superstructure’ of
ideas, politics, arts and so forth. Expressed in this way, the relationship between the
economic base and the cultural superstructure is a rather mechanical and
economically deterministic one.
The influence of such a mechanistic and reductionist model has waned in
cultural studies. Indeed, the narrative of cultural studies from the 1960s onwards
involves a moving away from economic reductionism towards an analysis of the
autonomous logic of language, culture, representation and consumption. This in
part reflects the influence of structuralism within cultural studies during the 1970s
wherein the emphasis is on the irreducible character of the cultural as a set of
distinct practices with their own internal organization or structuration.
The analysis of economic determinants may be necessary to any understanding
of culture but it is not, and cannot be, self-sufficient. Nevertheless, culture remains
the consequence of a range of material activities embedded within material
circumstances. Thus, what we require is a multi-dimensional and multi-perspectival
approach to the understanding of culture that would grasp the connections
between economic, political, social and cultural dimensions without reducing social
phenomena to any one level. Hence the metaphor of ‘circuit of culture’ involves the
articulation of moments of production and consumption. In this model, cultural
meaning is produced and embedded at each level of the circuit – production,
representation, identity, consumption and regulation – and articulated, linked to,
the next moment without determining what meanings will be taken up or
produced at that level.

Links Articulation, base and superstructure, circuit of culture, Marxism, reductionism,
structuralism