Example research essay topic: Historical Materialism Dominant Culture - 1,222 words

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Secondly, and related, Williams was keen to articulate the ways in which our lived experiences, in their richness of detail, are seldom recognised in what he called the official languages of modernity. He believed that the work of the long revolution was to give voice to, and make hegemonic, those human experiences which are altered, squeezed out and made silent in the official languages of modernity. Attending to these political tasks of our everyday life involves great honesty and great bravery. For Williams, the revolutionary spirit resides in daring to know that the things, which seem individual and particular and very difficult are, actually, shared by millions - and in giving these things a voice and a narrative in a creative way.

Modernity's words, its utilitarian languages of observable fact, do not do justice to a human order, which consists of more than this. While the intellectual and financial support of the Raymond Williams society has made dominance possible, this is not to say that the formation of the journal, in discussions over the past two years and more, has proceeded without varying degrees of Oedipal anxiety. Many argues that Raymond Williams time is not our time; a recent and substantial book on cultural materialism, reviewed in this number, suggests that Williams stands for a model of the intellectual, the cultural materialist pedagogue (Williams, 1985: 97), which is increasingly anachronistic in an age when political and technological shifts threaten to render obsolete the traditional image and functions of the university. Yet many in their different ways seem to acknowledge the extent to which Williams anticipated such changes, in a project impelled by the sense of that long revolution which would eventually make possible a socialist future. In the case of Key Words, such anxieties simply translate into a need to ensure that the journal does not become the repository of memorialist or hagiographic functions. Key Words will not be about Williams work, nor will every essay be obliged to make an obeisance, or even critically engage, with Williams.

It will, rather, seek to extend Williams project, recognizing that this process may well involve contestation as much as affirmation, and that the continuing reappraisal of cultural materialism is likely to extend the concept into areas unrecognisable to Williams in his own time. In Marxism and Literature (1977), Williams provisionally defined cultural materialism as a theory of the specificities of material cultural and literary production within historical materialism. A few brief moments of reflection are enough to indicate the complexity and multivalent possibilities of the term. First, cultural materialism instead of cultural idealism: cultural products do not transcend their conditions of production but are, in a strictly anti-essentialist way, materially of those conditions. While this position needs continually to be insisted upon, it can be difficult to know how best or on what grounds to fight for such inclusively. Moreover, the specificity of culture within historical materialism implies something about the nature of determination which initially appears to counter our first definition.

Here, cultural materialism means not the shaping necessity of material conditions on culture so much as the ability of culture to actively, materially re-shape its context. It is in this precise sense that the term most clearly differs... from what is most widely known as Marxist theory, and even from many of its variants. Cultural materialism was Williams way of questioning the reductive economism of base-and-superstructure theory, as that theory is popularly (mis? ) understood: culture is not to be explained away as the superstructural reflection of some determining economic base, but has its own autonomy and agency, its own role in the contestation and determination of the order of things. But what does dominant culture mean here anyway? Williams constructs and exploits ambivalence between analytic and evaluative senses of the term.

First, culture for Williams was ordinary, the range of expressions and representations produced by a whole society in its reflections upon itself or something, indeed, as baffling totemistic as a whole way of life (Williams, 1985: 86). But this inevitably encompasses a second, Arnoldian sense of culture as the best that is known and thought, incorporating a hierarchical sense of the heights of human achievement, primarily of course in the arts. The former sense was introduced by Williams to contest the latter, laying bare the bourgeois contours of Matthew Arnold's formulation and opening out the possibility of a concept of culture in which the creative achievements of the working class and other unrepresented / minority groups would be inherent. Some might argue that this ambivalence is just too problematic; if culture can signify the whole semiotic life of a community, and yet also retain at convenient moments that sense of high, value-laden expression, what then is not cultural? Do we not risk here a descent into that reductive cultural ism of which Victor Turner, in his writings of recent years, has been so consistently wary? Cultural materialism has, in fact, already trembled under Turners exacting gaze.

Turner maintained that Williams developed the concept out of a mistakenly-literalistic interpretation of Marxian superstructure: when Williams protests that he fails to see how art and thought can be consigned to some static or immaterial superstructure, implying thus that to label a phenomenon superstructural is somehow to assign it a lesser degree of effective reality than an element of material production, he does not see how far, for Marx, superstructure was always a relational term, that is, it identifies those particular aspects of a social practice or institution which act in particular conditions as supports of exploitation and oppression and invites us to contextualist that practice or institution in a specific way. For Turner, then, Williams throws the materialist baby out with the superstructural bathwater: denying that all cultural practice is purely superstructural should not be the same as dismissing altogether the category of superstructure and its relative explanatory force, and the upshot of doing the latter is to make the term material so inclusive as to be meaningless: for what, once you have demonstrated that language, culture or even consciousness is "material", do you then do? It seems to me that we are examining a long revolution, which our best descriptions only in part interpret. It is a genuine revolution, transforming men and institutions; continually extended and deepened by the actions of millions, continually and variously opposed by explicit reaction and by the pressure of habitual forms and ideas. Yet it is a difficult revolution to define, and its uneven action is taking place over so long a period that it is almost impossible not to get lost in its exceptionally complicated process. The magic mirror concept introduced by Victor Turner allows us to view and analyze the works of the dominant culture through the notions applicable to every moment of everyday life.

This is what attracts the scholars and cultural analysts to the views that are proposed by the author. Together with works of Raymond Williams the reasoning becomes even deeper, and with available conceptual insight to the fundamental framework of geo-social aspect of modern cultural performance. Reference: Turner, Victor (1982 a). From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. NY: PAJ Publications (Division of Performing Arts Journal, Inc. ). Turner, Victor Witter.

Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Columbia University Press, 1995. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford Press, 1985.

Research essay sample on Historical Materialism Dominant Culture