Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The term “cultural materialism” refers to twentieth-century attempts to apply the Marxist notion of materialism to the study of culture. It was first used by Raymond Williams more than a century after Marx's own adumbration of “historical” and later “dialectical” materialism. Williams's claim in Marxism and Literature ( 1977 ), where he explored the term in most detail and at most length, was not only that the concept was a Marxist concept, but that it rendered Marxism more fully “materialist” than it had hitherto been. Materialism lies at the root of all modern science. It defines the universe as consisting wholly of matter. The opposite of matter is simply its absence (as in a vacuum): on no account does the doctrine provide for positive “nonmaterial” entities such as deities or spirits or, in the human realm, mind or soul. In other words, it would have little truck with Hegelian idealism (which holds that history is driven by the resolution of confrontations between abstract ideals), for example. But in its scientific form, such a doctrine has little to offer social, political, or cultural theory. To speak of human agency, or abilities to conceptualize, or of aesthetic appreciation (none of which appears to be a “material” thing or event) in terms of firing neurons and synapses, for example, tells us nothing very much at all that we really want to know about those processes. ... log in or subscribe to read full text