Different Definitions and Analysis of Cultural Materialism

Cultural materialism in literary theory and cultural studies traces its origin to the work of the left-wing literary critic Raymond Williams. It emerged as a theoretical movement in the early 1980s along with new historicism, an American approach to early modern literature, with which it shares much common ground. The term was coined by Williams, who used it to describe a theoretical blending of leftist culturalism and Marxist analysis. Cultural materialists deal with specific historical documents and attempt to analyze and recreate a general idea and a reflection of a particular moment in history (Bressler, 187).

The two words in the term 'cultural materialism' are further defined: 'Culture' will include all forms of culture (forms like television and popular music and fiction). That is, this approach does not limit itself to 'high' cultural forms like Shakespeare plays. 'Materialism' signifies the opposite of 'idealism': An 'idealist' belief would be that high culture represents the free and independent play of the talented individual mind; on the contrary 'materialist' belief explains that culture cannot transcend the material forces and relations of production. Culture is not simply a reflection of the economic and political system, but nor can it be independent of it (Barry, 161).

Cultural materialism has been put forward by Raymond Williams at first and then it has been adopted by a number of other British scholars who were concerned with the literature of the Renaissance. They have used the term cultural materialism to indicate the Marxist orientation of their mode of new historicism. They have explained that regardless of the textuality of history, a culture and its literary products are always conditioned by the real material forces and relations of production in their historical era. Cultural materialists have focused on the political significance and subversive aspects and effects of a literary text, not only in its own time but also in later versions that have been revised for the theatre and the

cinema and in the changing interpretations of the text by later literary critics. (Abrams, 188). Its insistence on the importance of an engagement with issues of gender, sexuality, race and class, cultural materialism has had a significant impact on the field of literary studies, especially in Britain. Traditional humanist readings did not generally pay attention to the oppressed and marginalized in textual readings, whereas cultural materialists routinely consider such groups in their engagement with literary texts, thus opening new avenues of approach to issues of representation in the field of literary criticism.

Cultural materialists seek to draw attention to the processes being employed by contemporary power structures, such as the church, the state or the academy, to disseminate ideology. To do this they explore a texts historical context and its political implications, and then through close textual analysis note the dominant hegemonic position. They identify possibilities for the rejection and subversion of that position. The British critic Graham Holderness describes cultural materialism as a politicised form of historiography. This can be explained as the study of historical material (including literary texts) within a politicised framework. This framework includes the present which those literary texts have in some way helped to shape. In other words, cultural materialists analyze the processes by which hegemonic forces in society appropriate canonical and historically-important texts, such as Shakespeare and Austen, and utilize them in an attempt to validate or inscribe certain values on the cultural imaginary. The term cultural materialism was made current in 1985 when it was used by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield as the subtitle of their edited collection of essays Political Shakespeare. They have defined the term as a critical method which has four characteristics (Barry, 160). The first one is the historical context which undermines the transcendent significance traditionally accorded to the literary text. Here the word transcendent roughly means

timeless. The position taken needs to face the obvious objection that if today still Shakespeare is being read and studied then his plays have indeed proved themselves timeless since they are not limited by the historical circumstances in which they were produced. The second one is theoretical method which signifies a break with liberal humanism and absorbing the lessons of structuralism, post-structuralism and other approaches which have become prominent since 1970s. The third one is the political commitment which signifies the influence of Marxist and feminist perspectives and break from the conservative-Christian framework which dominated Shakespeare criticism. The last one is the textual analysis which locates the critique of traditional approaches where it cannot be ignored. In other words, there is a commitment not just to making theory of an abstract kind, but to practising it on canonical texts which continue to be the focus of massive amounts of academic and professional attention, and which are prominent and national icons (Barry,160-1).

Instead of Foucault's notion of 'discourse', Raymond Williams invented the term 'structures of feeling': These are concerned with meanings and values as they are lived and felt. Structures of feeling are often antagonistic both to explicit systems of values and beliefs, and to the dominant ideologies within a society. They are characteristically found in literature, and they oppose the status quo (as the values in Dickens, the Brontes, etc., represent human structures of feeling which are at variance with Victorian commercial and materialist values). The result is that cultural materialism is much more optimistic about the possibility of change and is willing at times to see literature as a source of oppositional values. Cultural materialism particularly involves using the past to 'read' the present, revealing the politics of our own society by what we choose to emphasise or suppress of the past. A great deal of the British work has been about undermining what it sees as the fetishistic role of Shakespeare as a conservative icon within British culture (Guerin, 130).

Points of departure for cultural materialism

1. Cultural materialists read the literary text (very often a Renaissance play) in such a way as to enable us to 'recover its histories', that is, the context of exploitation from which it emerged.

2. At the same time, they foreground those elements in the work's present transmission and contextualising which caused those histories to be lost in the first place, (for example, the 'heritage' industry's packaging of Shakespeare in terms of history as pageant, national bard, cultural icon, and so on).

3. They use a combination of Marxist and feminist approaches to the text (especially in order to do the first of these and in order to fracture the previous dominance of conservative social, political, and religious assumptions in Shakespeare criticism in particul).

4. They use the technique of close textual analysis, but often employ structuralist and post-structuralist techniques, especially to mark a break with the inherited tradition of close textual analysis within the framework of conservative cultural and social assumptions.

5. At the same time, they work mainly within traditional notions of the canon, on the grounds that writing about more obscure texts hardly ever constitutes an effective political intervention (for instance, in debates about the school curriculum or national identity).

6. They follow Foucault in their interest in the insane, the criminal, the exploited and all those who over the course of history have been marginalized. More than that, cultural materialists follow Raymond Williams in his adaptation of Gramscis view of hegemony. For Williams, the dominant culture is never the only player in the cultural field, although it is the most powerful. There are always residual and emergent strains within a culture that offer

alternatives to hegemony. In other words, the dominant culture is always under pressure from alternative views and beliefs.

7. So, the analyses of literary texts by cultural materialists bring to light how these texts while being the instruments of the dominant socio cultural order, also demonstrate how the apparent coherence of that order is threatened from the inside, by inner contradictions and by tensions that it seeks to hide.

8. Focusing on the cracks in the ideological faade that texts offer, cultural materialism offers readings of dissidence that allow us to hear the socially marginalized and expose the cultural machinery that is responsible for their marginalization and exclusion.

9. Cultural materialism not only tries to offer alternative understandings of the past, but also tries to effectuate political change in the present from a broadly socialist, and even feminist point of view. As Dollimore and Sinfield say, cultural materialism is committed to the transformation of the social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender and class.

10. Where new historicists would be satisfied to bring to light hidden power relations in a cluster of Renaissance texts, cultural materialists seek to find instances of dissidence, subversion and transgression that are relevant in the contemporary political struggles (Barry, 164).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Heinle &Heinle Thomson Learning, 1999.

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press,2009.

Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. Boston: Longman, 2011.

Guerin, L. Wilfred. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.