Assignment paper no : 8. British Cultural Materialism

Assignment 

Name:  Pina Gondaliya 

Enrollment No:2069108420200012

Paper No : 8, Cultural Studies 

Topic:  British Cultural Materialism 

Email ID: pinagondaliya09@gmail.com 

Roll No: 18

What is Cultural Studies? 

Cultural studies is now a movement or a network. It has its own degrees in several colleges and universities and its own journals and meetings. It exercises a large influence on academic disciplines, especially on English studies, sociology, media and communication studies, linguistics and history. As Patrick Brantlinger has pointed out, 

cultural studies is not "a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda," but a "loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues, and questions"

Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960s,  cultural studies is composed of elements of Marxism, post-structuralism and postmodernism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology, sociology, race and ethnic studies, film theory, urban studies, public policy, popular culture studies, and postcolonial studies : those fields that concentrate on social and cultural forces that either create community or cause division and alienation. 

• Five Types of Cultural Studies  

1. British Cultural Materialism 
2. New Historicism 
3. American Multiculturalism 

• African American writers 
• Latina/o Writers 
• American Indian literatures 

4. Postmodernism and popular culture 
5. Postcolonial Studies 

• Cultural Materialism 

Cultural materialism as a literary critical practice—this article will not address its anthropological namesake—is a Marxist-inspired and mostly British approach to in particular Shakespeare and early modern English literature that emerged and became prominent in the 1980s. Its emphasis on the historical and material conditions of the production and reception of texts has remained influential, even if its political commitment and interventionist purposes have largely been abandoned and increasingly ignored. While certain of its formulations would seem to echo Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, or other thinkers of the period, the main influence is the British literary and cultural critic Raymond Williams, and his re-theorization, following Antonio Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony, of the orthodox Marxist binary of base and superstructure. For Williams, who coined the term “cultural materialism,” culture is neither a mere reflection of that base nor wholly independent of it. This does not rule out intentional human practice, but rejects the idealist position in seeing that practice as inseparable from specific historical conditions. Still, with culture not wholly determined by an economic base, it plays its own role in the construction and/or reproduction of the social totality, and inevitably becomes the site of ideological struggle. Next to the dominant, hegemonic cultural formation we will thus find declining, residual formations and nascent, emergent ones. Cultural materialism focused on the ideological forces at work in Shakespeare, in Shakespeare studies, and in contemporary re-stagings and representations—in for instance secondary education and advertising—of Shakespeare and/or his work. Rejecting humanist beliefs in transcendent, ahistorical, truth and in an essential human nature, cultural materialists insisted on historicization and argued that Shakespeare—and the study of literature in general—had been hijacked by a conservative humanist ideology that presented itself as timeless and “natural” and perhaps unwittingly colluded with a profoundly unjust and rapacious social order. One of cultural materialism’s main interests was social stratification and the way in which the dominant social order sought to legitimize itself—for instance through the construction of socially marginalized groups as “other,” a practice that led to an early interest in issues of gender and race, and would substantially contribute to the rise of queer studies. Inspired by its belief that ideological hegemony is never absolute and that all ideology at some point contradicts itself, cultural materialism reads texts for signs of subversion and political dissidence, arriving at often provocative interpretations whose ulterior purpose was to serve as interventions in current political debate  

• British Cultural Materialism :

Cultural studies is referred to as "cultural materialism" in Britain, and it has a long tradition. In the later nineteenth century Matthew Arnold sought to redefine the "givens" of British culture. Edward Burnett Taylor's pioneering anthropological study Primitive Culture argued that "Culture or civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society".

Claude Levi-Strauss's influence moved British thinkers to assign "culture" to primitive peoples, and then, with the work of British scholars like Raymond Williams, to attribute culture to the working class as well as the elite. As William memorably states: "There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses".

To appreciate the importance of this revision of "culture" we must situate it within the controlling myth of social political reality of the British Empire upon which the sun never set, and ideology left over from the previous century. In modern Britain two trajectories for "culture" developed: one led back to the past and the feudal hierarchies that ordered community in the past; here, culture acted in its sacred function as preserver of the past. The other trajectory led toward a future, socialist utopia that would annul the distinction between labor and leisure classes and make transformation of status, not fixity, the norm. This cultural materialism furnished a leftist orientation "critical of the aestheticism, formalism, anti historicism, and apoliticism common among the dominant postwar methods of academic literary criticism"; such was the description in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. 

Cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F. R. Leavis, heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold's analysis of bourgeois culture. Leavis sought to use the education system to distribute literary knowledge and appreciation more widely; Leavisites promoted the "great tradition" of Shakespeare and Milton to improve the moral sensibilities of a wider range of readers than just the elite. 

Ironically the threat to their project was mass culture. Raymond William applaudend the richness of canonical texts such as Leavis promoted, but also found they could seem to erase certain communal forms of life. Inspired by Karl Marx, British theorists were also influenced by Gyorgy Lukacs,  Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Max Horkheimer, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Antonio Gramsci. They were especially interested in problems of cultural hegemony and in the many systems of domination related to literature. From Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, for example, they got the concept of cultural "hegemony", referring to relations of domination not always visible as such. Williams noted that hegemony was "a sense of reality for most people beyond which it is very difficult for most members of society to move ". But the people are not always Victims of hegemony; they sometimes possess the power to change it. 

Althusser insisted that ideology was ultimately in control of the people, that "the main function of ideology is to reproduce the Society's existing relations of production, and that function is even carried out in literary texts." Ideology must maintain this state of affairs if the state and capitalism can continue to reproduce themselves without fear of revolution. Althusser saw popular literature as merely "carrying the baggage of a culture's ideology," whereas "high" literature retained more autonomy and hence had more power. Walter Benjamin attacked fascism by questioning the value of what he called the "aura" of culture. Benjamin helps explain the frightening cultural context for a film such as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Lukacs developed what he called a "Reflection Theory," in which he stressed literature's reflection, conscious or unconscious, of the social reality surroundings it not just a flood of realistic detail but a reflection of the essence of a society. Fiction formed without a sense of such reflection can never fully show the meaning of a given society. 

Cultural materialists also turned to the more humanistic and even spiritual insights of the great student of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, Russian Formalism Bakhtin, especially his amplification of the dialogic form of meaning within narrative and class struggle, at once conflictual and communal materialists in recognizing how seemingly "disinterested" thought is shaped by power structures such as patriarchy. 

Citation :


Bertend, Hans. “Cultural Materialism .” Cultural Materialism - Literary and Critical Theory - Oxford Bibliographies, 26 Feb. 2020, www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0091.xml.

Johnson, Richard. "What is Cultural Studies Anyway?" Social Text, no. 16, 1986, pp.38-80. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/466285. Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

Pramod K. Narayan, An Introduction of Cultural Studies . Viva Books Private Limited (April 20, 2011), April 20, 2011.