British Cultural Materialism

                         BRITISH CULTURAL MATERIALISM

 

What is Cultural studies

 

Cultural studies is the science of understanding modern society,with an emphasis on politics and power cultural studies is an umbrella term used to look at a number of different subject. Categories studied include media studies including film and Journalism, sociology, industrial culture, globalization and social theory. To pursue cultural studies is to try to decipher the world that we live in.

 

The definition of cultural studies can sometimes be misconstrued. It is not simply the study of different cultures but uses many other studies to analyze different cultures such as philosophy, theology, literature etc.…

   Five types of cultural studies:-

1.   British cultural Materialism

2.   New Historicism

3.   American Multiculturalism

·       African American Writers

·       Latina writers

·       American Indian literature

·       Asian American writers

  4. Postmodernism and popular cultural

  5. Post-colonial studies 

Here I define British cultural Materialism

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 cultural. Edward Burnett Tylor's pioneering anthropological study Primitive cultural (1871) argued that "culture or civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which includes knowledge belief, art, morals, low, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society" (1). 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 memorably states: "There are no message; there are only ways of seeing [other] people as masses" (300). 

 To appreciate the importance of this revision of "culture" we must situate it within the controlling myth of social and political reality of the British Empire upon which the sun never set, an ideology left over from 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 annual 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, ant historicism, and apoliticism common among the dominant postwar methods of academic literary criticism"; such was the description in the John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Groden and Krieswirth 180).

 Cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F.R.Leavis, heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold's analyses of bourgeois culture. Leavis sought to use the educational 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 Williams applauded 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 Gorgy Lukas, Theodor Adorns, Louis Althusser Max Horkheimer, Mikhail Bakhtin, 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" (Marxism and Literature 110). But the people are not always 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 relation 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 (233). 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 (1935). Lukas developed what he called a "reflection theory", in which he stressed literature's reflection conscious or unconscious, of the social reality surrounding 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 Formalist Bakhtin, especially his amplification of the dialogic form of meaning within narrative and class struggle, at once conflictual and communal, individual and social. Feminism was also important for cultural materialists in recognizing how seemingly "disinterested" thought is shaped by power structures as patriarchy.