Marxism, Modernity and the Dynamics of Culture

Chapter 3 Marxism, Modernity and the Dynamics of Culture In his 1938 work entitled The Age of the World Picture, Heidegger posits— alongside machine technology, science, the aestheticisation of art, and the subjectivation of religious experience—“the fact that human action is con- ceived and consummated as culture” as one of the metaphysical grounds of modernity.1 Although Márkus is often quick to downplay the grandiosity of Heidegger’s claim, he does recognise something illuminating therein. The idea of culture is one of the fundamental vehicles through which modern human beings have not only sought to understand themselves but also to articulate the values and hopes of the historical epoch in which they live. Much of what we call ‘culture,’ even in the narrow, value-marked sense, significantly pre-dates the onset of modernity proper; however, it is only in modernity that we have come to refer to these aspects of human life as culture. Modernity, in Márkus’ words, is a society of culture, a society which regards its form of life, including its interpretations of both itself and the world at large, not as ‘natural’ or preor- dained, but as something made by prior generations and as something which can be remade in the future. Yet, the modern consciousness of culture is one which is, Márkus argues, rent with antinomies, and plagued by ambiguities. On this score he is not alone. “Culture,” writes Williams, “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.”2 However, it is one of the guiding threads of Márkus’ writings on the problem of cultural modernity that such ambiguities that have accrued to the concept of culture—among them its antithetic relation to nature, and its internal fragmentation into broad, descrip- tive, and narrow, normative, meaning dimensions—are not simply semantic tensions, but, rather, in the course of modernity have been transformed into active, practical and lived, contradictions. Throughout his voluminous writings, Márkus has traced these tensions and contradictions not only indirectly—that is, through the works of a number of representative modernist thinkers—but also directly, in the form of his account of the ‘paradoxical unity’ of modern culture and the conflicting cultural programs which have crystallised around this paradoxical structuration. Whilst the former group includes studies of 1 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper Collins, 1977), 116. 2 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana Press, 1988), 87. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004395985_005 70 Chapter 3 such ‘classically’ modern figures as Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Condorcet, it is the texts which take up and reflect upon the ways in which culture has been theorised, defended, and, at times, condemned, by those aforementioned rep- resentatives of the Marxist tradition, which signify the most important entry point to Márkus’ post-Budapest thinking. As such, it is to these texts that we now turn, before more fully evaluating those of the latter. 1 Marxism and Culture (I)—the Base/Superstructure Metaphor “Any modern approach to a Marxist theory of culture must begin by consider- ing the proposition of a determining base and a determined superstructure.”3 So begins Raymond Williams’ seminal 1973 essay on the role of the base/superstructure metaphor in contemporary cultural theory. In the transition from Marx to Marxism and with the expansion of Marxist discourse throughout the 20th century, the notion of a determining base and a determined superstructure emerged as the predominant framework, within which orthodox Marxist cultural analysis was undertaken. However, in the process of its rise to promi- nence the base/superstructure metaphor had, Williams argues, devolved into an overly abstract and, in the end, deterministic and reductive schema.4 Only through the rigorous redefinition of both the two key terms—base and superstructure—as well as the notion of ‘determination’ which links them, could, he maintained, the base/superstructure framework be rendered serviceable to a contemporary understanding of cultural practices, their constitution, their emancipatory potential and, crucially, the processes of their change. It is pre- cisely such a redefinition that Williams undertakes in the opening passages of his essay, arguing for a definitively processual conceptualisation of what are not homogeneous, immutable states of social being, but dynamic and inter- nally differentiated spheres of collective practice. These points of qualification aside, it is, as a number of commentators, including Márkus, have argued, a curious feature of Williams’s essay that it ends with a seeming revocation of the very theory which he had set out to mobilise. For having charted the course to be taken, Williams almost immediately turns to an elaboration and defence, not of the base/superstructure framework itself, but, rather, of the originally Gramscian conception of cultural hegemony. According to Williams, the great power of the concept of hegemony is its ability 3 Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays (London and New York: Verso Books, 2005), 35. 4 Ibid., 36..

Load more