From Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice

From Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice

Cultural Materialism

From Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice.

Scott Wilson. Blackwell Publishers, 1995.

Discussion Questions:

  1. What is culture? For Raymond Williams, L. Althusser, and for you?
  2. What does materialism mean? What is a materialist approach to culture or literature?
  3. How are popular cultures different from literature and other forms of ‘high arts’? What do their differences mean? Does it mean that one is to be consumed or read quickly, while the other, studied with care?

Two quotes from Introduction:

p. 19 Sinfield’s attack of reading textual skills of ‘Englit’:

“’Studying ‘formal properties’ in detachment tends to efface differences between readers and hence makes it easy to absolutize the reading position of the teacher. This has facilitated the assumption, in Englit., of an essential humanity, supposedly informing both text and critic, and hence contributed to the oppression of out-groups. If a lower-class person, woman, student, person of colour, lesbian or gay man did not ‘respond’ in an ‘appropriate’ way to ‘the text’, it was because they were reading without insight, sensitivity, perceptiveness—i.e. not from the privileged academic position’” (Dollimore and Sinfield 1990: 100)

p. 21 ethico-sociological approach

The problem is not that instead of being asked to ‘respond’ to the text in an appropriately insightful, sensitive and spontaneous way, students are now being asked to read with their genitals, argue with their background, or theorize with their skin colour; the problem is rather that an ethico-polical law, every bit as unforgiving as Leavis’ morality, now sets the agenda and the limits for thought by setting no limit on the gap that students and future academics must fill. The law sets a limit on thought by making an impossible demand for absolute inclusivity of the oppressed.

p. 25 “In fact there should be no project that is not accompanied by a force that continually un-works it and prevents it forming a ‘head’, some governing idea, essence or paternal metaphor. What follows in the next chapter is an attempt to un-work the limits of culture and materialism; and what follows in the rest of the book is an attempt to put cultural materialist theory into the ‘positive virulence’(敵意) of a practice that maintains it, but also takes it elsewhere.

Cultural Materialism

Whole Ways of Life

  1. Definitions of Culture
  1. Two senses of culture –evaluative and analytic; the analytic is not neutral
  2. According to Williams, culture is separated from society only in the late 18th century and 19th century p. 27
  3. cultural materialism – the commitment to inclusivity p. 27
  4. Benjamin: “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

II. Raymond William’s critique of Edmund Burke (for his discrimination against working class culture), which, in turn, in critiqued by Easthrope (for William’s being apologetic) p. 28

III. Dick Hebdidge on Punk

1) first to study counter-cultures from semiological and marxist perspectives;

2) he is wrong about the impossibility of mixing punk and reggae;

3) his opposing himself to the objects of his studies pp. 29 – 31

IV. Punk as the limits of culture –in its being both productive and destructive. Pp. 32-33

Materialism and the real

I. Raymond Williams turn to Althusser – a whole way of life (Culture and Society) to “specific and different ways of life” (Marxism and Literature) p. 34

II. Culture materialism – the influence of Althusser
1. ”Culture materialism insists that culture is not simply a reflection of the economic and political system, but nor can it be independent of it.

2. materialism – It was precisely through cultural institutions like the Church, schools, universities, the media and so on, that capitalism reproduces the conditions and individual subjects, required for its continuaing vigour. (35)

  1. Critique of Althusser – no space for dissidence. P. 35
  2. The contribution of Lacan – split subjectivity, ‘ideological capture’ by the symbolic; * Lacan’s notion of the Real as that which resists symbolic capture, . . .

“It is in the relation to the real that the political subject . . . is driven beyond the fixity of symbolic frames, beyond considerations of economic calculation or need, beyond the reality and pleasure principles, and thereby precisely beyond material conditions, disturbing and displacing those symbolic frames and thereby the whole scope –the meaning and reasons—for dissidence which is necessarily restricted within them.