Culture and Materialism

University of Southern Queensland The Halls of Angst: Culture and Materialism A Dissertation submitted by Mark Russell Dew, BA Hon. (English Literature) For the Award of Doctor of Philosophy 2013 Abstract This dissertation is dedicated to problematising Raymond Williams’s seminal work on Cultural Materialism and the institution that emerged from it. The first chapter proper makes various claims: while Culturalism became institutionalised in the academy it has never been popularly assimilated and idealism remains the common currency; the concept of “whole culture” belies the reality that elitism is entrenched; while culturalism touted a “slow revolution,” capitalism has gone from strength to strength; the latter-day institutions of Culturalism generally are apolitical or devoted, merely, to identity politics within capitalist culture; the sociological and philosophical premises of Culturalism are dubious and dogmatic. The next chapter, then, analyses the underpinnings of Marxist materialism and the problems with it from Continental and Analytical philosophical perspectives—apropos the latter, this section focuses also on the Body-Mind problem. The final chapter considers several alternatives to reductive materialism before calling for the provisional acceptance of a “post-materialism.” Several hypotheses are also identified that might be subjects of future research. The primary material consulted is diverse, including Williams as well as Marx, Hegel, and German idealism, though mainly their modern expositors, including: Slavoj Žižek, Terry Eagleton, Ernesto Laclau, Catherine Belsey, Jacques Derrida, the Frankfurt School, as well as several Philosophers of “Mind” from the Analytic tradition. i Certification Page I certify that the ideas, analysis, results and conclusions reported in this dissertation are entirely my own effort, except where otherwise acknowledged. I also certify that this work is original and has not been previously submitted for any other award, except where otherwise acknowledged. __________________________________ __________________ Signature of Candidate Date ENDORSEMENT __________________________________ __________________ Signature of Supervisor Date ii Acknowledgements I owe a debt of gratitude first and foremost to my supervisor, mentor and friend, Associate Professor Laurie Johnson, who has guided, advised, encouraged and facilitated my progress not just on this assignment, but throughout my tertiary career. His influence, by way of example, continues to inspire me, as does his broad learning. I’m also indebted to Professor Chris Lee for his similar influence during my formative years in academe, and for his depth of experience—and the canny advice which often proceeds therefrom. My experience at USQ has been a real learning curve, sometimes in humility, and all the faculty of Arts and library staff and research students, and student body I’ve been fortunate enough to know a little have, probably unbeknownst to them, been inspirational in one way and another. My wife and partner and my six wonderful children—who deserve the accolade—are also entitled to my sincere thanks and gratitude for their love, support and forbearance during this prosaic process. Thanks to my mother too for her unflagging encouragement. Finally, a word of gratitude for my first wife, who died tragically, for her own unselfish contribution towards my literary and intellectual aspirations, which have been long and sometimes remiss. iii Table of Contents The Halls of Angst: Culture and Materialism .......................................................... i Abstract .................................................................................................................... i Certification Page ............................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements........................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................... iv Chapter One: Introduction .................................................................................. 1 1.1 Cultural Materialism .......................................................................................... 1 1.2 Basic Critique of Materialist Premises .............................................................. 4 1.3 The Self and Materialism ................................................................................ 11 Chapter Two: Culture ....................................................................................... 19 2.1 Culture and Politics ......................................................................................... 19 2.2 The Path to a Programmatic Materialism ........................................................ 42 2.3 Masses and Elites ............................................................................................ 54 2.4 Laclau and Populist Reason ............................................................................ 70 2.5 On the Institutionalisation of Capitalism ......................................................... 80 2.6 Champions of Capital ...................................................................................... 87 Chapter Three: Marxism qua Materialism ...................................................... 100 3.1 Marx’s Materialism ....................................................................................... 100 3.2 Problems of Materialism: Marx to Raymond Williams ................................ 111 3.3 Interlude: The Empirical and Epistemological Problems of Materialism? ... 129 iv 3.4 Lacan, Žižek, and Poststructuralism .............................................................. 146 3.5 Ent Scheidung ................................................................................................ 160 3.6 Materialism as Idealism ................................................................................. 169 3.7 Transcendental Materialism .......................................................................... 187 Chapter Four: By Way of Conclusion: Dark Aesthetics, Dialectics, Specters, and Spirit .................................................................................................................. 195 4.1 “Identity Anxiety” ......................................................................................... 195 4.2 Predestination Versus the Enlightenment Dialectic ...................................... 210 4.3 Specters, Spirit, and Discourse ...................................................................... 220 4.4 Ethical Foundations ....................................................................................... 236 4.5 Terminal Thoughts ........................................................................................ 255 4.6 A Concluding Pamphlet ................................................................................ 257 Works Cited .................................................................................................... 262 v Chapter One: Introduction 1.1 Cultural Materialism This dissertation began with the critique of the New Historicism that was developed in the narrow parameters of my Honours thesis. Within the confines of that project, I concluded that New Historicism was an apolitical form of criticism whose more apt title was indeed “Cultural Poetics,” as Stephen Greenblatt, its founder, has long insisted. My critique was largely culled from the Anglo-political version of this cultural turn in literary criticism, the roots of which were initiated theoretically by Raymond Williams’s Cultural Materialism, or Culturalism. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism have a great deal in common as modes of literary criticism, methodologically and theoretically; each ignores aesthetics in favour of analysing the discursive power formations in which subject texts are composed, yet the former is passive and the latter aggressive, politically. This form of analysis certainly remains valid and useful as a way of understanding texts and their historical conjunctures, and as a mode via which to reflect critically upon power-structures generally, including those which still prevail. A reformist agenda is thus implied in New Historicist/Cultural Materialist literary criticism which, in fact, is not a new idea at all. As Terry Eagleton has written, literary criticism began in Britain as a “bourgeois ‘public sphere’ … a reformative apparatus, scourging deviation and repressing the transgressive; yet this juridical technology [was] deployed in the name of a certain historical emancipation” (Function of Criticism 12). The agenda, according to Eagleton, was to establish the 1 hegemony of bourgeois culture and morality in the wake of absolutism and a licentious aristocracy. The complementary agenda of Cultural Materialism was to democratise that hegemony further and to undermine the inequalities of bourgeois culture. It was this political agenda of the modern reforming cultural criticism that I sympathised with and was interested in assessing in regards to its credentials and efficacy as post-Marxism. I concluded my Honours dissertation by condemning New Historicism for being both aesthetically and politically neutral, or academic, though I was naggingly conscious that Cultural Materialism was also either ingenuous or disingenuous in its political pretentions; after about four decades of Cultural Materialism, capitalism is more entrenched

Load more