Materialism, Marxism and Structuralism

Week 3 of the Critical Debates in Cultural Theory course. This week is the historical view on cultural studies.

Williams, R. (1991) Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory. Rethinking popular culture: Contemporary perspectives in cultural studies, 407-423.

The notion of base (production, social activity…) and superstructure (culture, politics…) in a more traditional sense would seems to be anathema to cultural studies. If it is always determined by economic and sociological practice then it will always play second fiddle (or piano). Which seems ironic given the firm marxist basis cultural studies has.

Williams tries to qualify the idea that the base determines the superstructure, by saying that it is a lot more complex and inter-related. Not just one determining the other. He seems unwilling to give it up, even though he seems to want to in the article. Moving to either a more complex construction, or more nuanced understanding seems the way forward. I’m reminded of Bourdieu’s fields or Stiegler’s technicity as better places to start. Though each of these brings their own problems.

His other three arguments in the piece seem non-controversial and straightforward.

• Cultural Hegemony is complex and not a conscious conspiracy
• Culture is historical and political. In the wider cultural picture there are residual, emergent, alternative and oppositional cultures
• That culture studies should be focusing on practices of culture, not the cultural artifacts themselves, ie objects or texts.

Hall, S. (1996) Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies. Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies, 262–275.

Less a history, than a personal narrative or reminiscence on the relationship between cultural studies (I’ll probably refer to it as CS for short) and theory, basically marxism, over the last 60 years. His description of the circling between marxism and CS in the early days is enlightening, and as he says, they had all the same problems that I’ve also spotted. But in the end reinterpreted Marx did good theoretical work for them, though mostly through the writings of Gramsci.

So it seems that the long marriage of the two had a very bumpy start. The other two collisions he quickly describes is the arrival of the feminists and questions of race, which lead to some deep reinterpretations of power (the personal is political). He only deals ever so briefly with the arrival of textuality and deconstructionism.

It is interesting that he also reflects on the value of culture studies. Why do we need it? That in the light of global catastrophies (AIDS is contemporary for him) CS seems to be marginal and ephemeral. It is only through keeping CS truly political that it can be valid as a discipline, though keeping modest about this.

I do think there is all the difference in the world between understanding the politics of intellectual work and substituting intellectual work for politics.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1997) The culinary triangle. Food and culture: a reader, 28-35.

The analysis and methods do some good work to begin with, but on the last page he goes a bit mental and tries to fit all cooking into his triangle. Apart from other issues with where he ends up, I think this is a good (bad) example of ignoring the practice and focusing purely on the symbolism.