Raymond Williams Cultural Theory 1

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OXFORD
UNIVER,Sl'n." :PRBSS
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Introduction 1
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@ Oxfbrd University Press 1977
3. Literature 45
published 1977
4. Ideology 55
issued as an Oxford University Press paperback 1977
U. Cultural Theory
1. Base and Superstructure 75
2. Determination 83
3. Productive Forces 90
4. From Reflection to Mediation 95
5. Typification and Homology 101
6. Hegemony 108
7. Traditions. Institutions. and Formations 115
Williams. Raymond.
8. Dominant, Residual. and Emergent 121
Marxism and literature.-(Marxist introductions)
1. Communications and literature. 9. Structures of Feeling 128

1. Title. 11. Series.
80,1 PN51 10. The Sociology of Culture 136
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-876061-0
25
m. Literary Theory
Printed in Great Britain by 1. The Multiplicity of Writing 145
Clays Ltd. StIves pic 2. Aesthetic and Other Situations 151
3. From Medium to Social Practh::e 158
4. Signs and Notations 165
5. Conventions 173
6. Genres 180
7. Forms 186
8. Authors 192
9. Alignment and Commitment 199
10. Creative Practice 206
Booklist and Abbreviations
213
Index
218
-

•
1. Base and Superstructure
Any modem approach to a Marxist theory of culture must begin

by considering the proposition of a determining base and a
determined superstructure. From a strictly theoretical point of
view this is not, in fact, where we might choose to begin. It
would be in many ways preferable if we could begin from a
proposition which originally was equally central. equally
authentic: namely the proposition that social being determines
consciousness. It is not that the two propositions necessarily
deny each other or are in contradiction. But the proposition of
base and superstructure, with its figurative element and with its
suggestion of a fixed and definite spatial relationship, consti
tutes, at least in certain hands, a very specialized and at times
'"
unacceptable version of the other proposition. Yet in the transi
tion from Marx to Marxism, and in the development of main
stream Marxism itself, the proposition of the determining base
and the determined superstructure has been commonly held to
be the key to Marxist cultural analysis.
The source of this proposition is commonly taken to be a
well-known passage in Marx's 1859 Preface toA Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy:
In the soc.ial production of their life, men enter into definite relations
that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of pro
duction which correspond to a definite stage of development of their
material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of produc
tion constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation,
on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which corres
pond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of
material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process
in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their
being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their
consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material
productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations
of production or-what is but a legal expression for the same
thing-with the property relations within which they have been at
work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces
these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social
revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire
immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In consid
ering such transformations a distinction should always be made
76 Marxism and Literature Base and Superstructure 77
between the material transformation of the economic conditions of expreSs existing real relations of production; (b) forms of con,.
production, which can be determined with the precision of natural sciousness which express a particular class view of the world;
science, and the legal, political, religious,aesthetic or philosophic-in
short, ideological-forms in which men become conscious of this con
(c) a process in which, over a whole range of activities, men
flict and fight it out. (SW 1. 362-4) become conscious of a fundamental economic conflict and fight
it out. These three senses would direct our attention, respective
This is hardly an obvious starting-point for any cultural theory. ly, to (a) institutions; (b) forms of consciousness; (c) political and
It is part of an exposition of historical materialist method in the cultural practices.
understanding of legal relations and forms of state. The first use It is clear that these three areas are related and must, in
of the te,rm 'superstructure' is explicitly qualified as 'legal and analysis, be interrelated. But on just this crucial question of
political'. (It should incidentally be noted that the English trans interrelation the term itself is of little assistance, just because it
lation in most common use has a plural-"legal and political is variably applied to each area in turn. Nor is this at all surpris
superstructures"-for Marx's singular "juristicher und poli ing, since the use is not primarily conceptual, in any precise
tischer Uberbau".) 'Definite fonns of social consciousness' are way, but metaphorical. What it primarily expresses is the impor
further said to 'correspond' to it (entsprechen). Transformation tant sense of a visible and formal 'superstructure' which might
of the 'entire immense superstructure', in the social revolution be analysed on its own but which cannot be understood without
which begins from the altered relations of productive forces and seeing that it rests on a 'foundation'. The same point must be
relations of production, is a process in which 'men become made of the corresponding metaphorical term. In the use of
..,
conscious of this conflict and fight it out' in 'ideological forms' 1851-2 it is absent, and the origins of a particular form of class
which now include the 'religious, aesthetic, or philosophic' .as consciousness are specified as 'forms of property' and 'social
well as the legal and political. Much has been deduced from this conditions of existence'. In the use of 1859 it appears in almost
formulation, but the real context is inevitably limited. Thus it conscious metaphor: 'the economic structure of society-:-the
would be possible, simply from this passage, to define 'cultural' real foundation (die reale Basis), on which rises (erhebt) a legal
('religious, aesthetic or philosophic') forms in which 'men and political superstructure (Uberbau)'. It is replaced, later in
become conscious of this conflict', without necessarily suppos the argument, by 'the economic foundation' (okonomische
ing that these specific forms are the whole of 'cultural' activity. Grundlage). The continuity of meaning is relatively clear$ but
There is at least one earlier use, by Marx, of the term 'super the variation of terms for one part of the relationship ('forms of
structure'. It is in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, property, social conditions of existence'; 'economic structure of
1851-2: society'; 'real basis'; 'real foundation'; Basis; Grundlage) is not
Upon the several forms of property, upon the social conditions of matched by explicit variation of the other term of the relation·
existence, a whole superstructure is reared of various and peculiarly ship, though the actual signification of this term (Uberbau;
shaped feelings (empfindungen), illusions, habits of thought and con superstructure) is, as we have seen, variable. It is part of the
ceptions of life. The whole class produces and shapes these out of its complexity of the subsequent argument that the term rendered
material foundation and out of the corresponding social conditions. in English explication (probably first by Engels) as 'base' is
The individual unit to whom they flow through tradition and education rendered in other languages in significant variations (in French
may fancy that they constitute the true reasons for and premises of his
conduct. (SW 1. 272-3) usually as infrastructure, in Italian as struttura, and so on, with
some complicating effects on the substance of the argument)..
This is an evidently different use. The 'superstructure' is here In the transition from Marx to Marxism, and 'then in the
the whole 'ideology' of the class: its 'form of consciousness'; its development of exposi tory and didactic formulations, the words
constitutive ways of seeing itself in the world. It would be used in the original arguments were projected, first, as if they
possible, from this and the later use, to see three senses of were precise concepts, and second, as if they were descriptive
'superstructure' emerging: (a) legal and political forms which terms for observable 'areas' of social life. The main sense of the
words in the original arguments had been relational, but the consciousness or altogether lost sight of, and how a legal system
popularity of the terms tended to indicate either (a) relatively could be projeCted as independent of its economic content, in
enclosed categories or (b) relatively enclosed areas of activity. the course of its professional development. Then:
These were then correlated either temporally (first material
production, then consciousness, then politics and culture) or in Still higher ideologies, that is, such as are still further removed from the
effect, forcing the metaphor, spatially (visible and distingUish material, economic basis, take the form of philosophy and religion.
Hence the interconnection between conceptions and their material
able 'levels' or 'layers'-politics and culture, then forms of con conditions of existence becomes more and more complicated, more and
sciousness, and so on down to 'the base'). The serious practical more obscured by intermediate links. But the interconnection exists.
problems of method, which the original words had indicated,
were then usually in effect bypassed by methods derived from a This relational emphasis, including not only complexity but.
confidence, rooted in the popularity of the terms, in the relative recognition of the ways in which some connections are lost to
enclosure of categories or areas expressed as 'the base', 'the consciousness, is of course very far from the abstract categories
superstructure' . (though it supports the implication of separate areas) of'super
It is then ironic to remember that the force of Marx's original structure' and 'base'.
criticism had been mainly directed against the separation of In all serious Marxist analysis the categories are of course not
'areas' of thought and activity (as in the separation of conscious used abstractly. But they may have their effect none the less. It is
ness from material production) and against the related evacua significant that the first phase of the recognition of practical
tion of specific content-real human activities-by the imposi complexities stressed what are really quantitative relations. By
tion of abstract categories. The common abstraction of 'the base' the end of the nineteenth century it was common to recognize
and 'the superstructure' is thus a radical persistence of the what can best be described as disturbances, or special difficul
modes of thought which he attacked. That in the course of other tiElS, of an otherwise regular relationship. This is true of the idea
iii> arguments he gave some warrant for this, within the intrinsic of 'lags' in time, which had been developed from Marx's obser
difficulties of any such formulation, is certainly true. But it is vation that some of the 'peaks' of art 'by no means correspond to
significant that when he came to any sustained analysis, or to a the general development of society'. This could be expressed
realization of the need for such analysis, he was at once specific (though Marx's own 'solution' to this problem had not been of
and flexible in his use of his own terms. He had already this kind) as a matter of temporal 'delay' or 'unevenness'. The
observed, in the formulation of 1859, a distinction between same basic model is evident in Engels's notion of the relative
analysing 'the economic conditions of production, which can be distance ('still further removed') of the 'higher ideologies'.
determined with the precision of natural science' and the Or consider E:p.gels's letter to Bloch of September 1890:
analysis.of 'ideological forms', for which methods were evi.;
dantly less precise. In 1857 he had noted: According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately
determining element in history is the production and reproduction of
As regards art, it is well known that some of its peaks by no meaDS real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if
correspond to the general development of society; nor do they therefore somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only
to the material substructure, the skeleton as it were of its organization. determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless,
abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the
His solution of the problem he then discusses, that of Greek art, various elements of the superstructure-:-political forms of the class
is hardly convincing, but the 'by no means correspond' is a struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victori
characteristic practical recognition of the complexity of real ous class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the
reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants,
relations. Engels, in his essay Feuerbach and the End of Classi political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their
cal German Philosophy, still argued specifically, showi:p.g how further development into systems of dogma-also exercise their influ
the 'economic basis' of a political struggle could be dulled in ence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases
preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all are attempting to speak. Orthodox analysts began to think of 'the
these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, base' and 'the superstructure' as if they were separable concrete
of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so entities. In doing so they lost sight of the very processes-not
impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), '
the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise abstract relations but constitutive processes-which it should
the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier have been the special function of historical materialism to
than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree. emphasize. I shall be discussing later the major theoretical
response to this loss: the attempt to reconstitute such processes
This is a vital acknowledgement of real and methodological by the idea of 'mediation'.
complexities. It is particularly relevant to the idea of'determina A persistent dissatisfaction, within Marxism, about the prop
tion', which will be separately discussed, and to the decisive" osition of 'base and superstructure', has been most often expres
problem of consciousness as 'reflexes' or 'reflection'. But within sed by an attempted refinement and revaluation of 'the super
the vigour of his contrast between real history and a 'meaning structure'. Apologists have emphasized its complexity, sub
less, abstract, senseless phrase'. and alongside his recogni stance, and 'autonomy' or autonomous value. Yet most of the
tion of a new (and theoretically significant) exception-'the difficulty still lies in the original extension of metaphorical
endless host of accidents'-Engels does not so much revise the terms for a relationship into abstract categories or concrete areas
enclosed categories-'the basis' ('the economic element', 'the between which connections are looked for and complexities or
economic situation' , 'the economic movement') and 'the various relative autonomies emphasized. It is actually more important to
elements' (political, juridical, theoretical) of 'the superstruc observe the character of this extension in the case of 'the base'
ture'-as reiterate the categories and instance certain excep than in the case of the always more varied and variable 'super
tions, indirectnesses, and irregularities which obscure their structure'. By extension and by habit, 'the base' has come to be
otherwise regular relation. What is fundamentally lacking, in considered virtually as an object (a particular and reductive
the theoretical formulations of this important period, is any version of 'material existence'). Or, in specification, 'the base' is
adequate recognition of the indissoluble connections between given very general and apparently uniform properties. 'The
material production, political and cultural institutions and base' is the real social existence of man. 'The base' is the real
activity, and consciousness. The classic summary of 'the rela relations of production corresponding to a stage of the develop
tionship between the base and the superstructure' is ment of material productive forces. 'The base' is a mode of
Plekhanov's distinction of 'five sequential elements: (i) the state production at a particular stage of its development. Of course
of productive forces; (ii) the economic conditions; (iii) the these are, in practice, different propositions. Yet each is also
socio-political regime; (iv) the psyche of social man; (v) various very different from Marx's central emphasis on productive
ideologies reflecting the properties of this psyche' (Fundamen activities. He had himself made the point against reduction of
" tal Problems of Marxism, Moscow, 1922, 76). This is better than 'the base' to a category:
the bare projection of 'a base' and 'a superstructure', which has
been so common. But what is wrong with it is its description of In order to study the connexion between intellectual and material
these 'elements' as 'sequential', when they are in practice indis production it is above all essential to conceive the latter in its deter
soluble: not in the sense that they cannot be distinguished for mined historical form and not as a general category. For example, there
purposes of analysis, but in the decisive sense that these are not corresponds to the capitalist mode of production a type of intellectual
separate 'areas' or 'elements' but the whole, specific activities production quite different from that which corresponded to the
and products of real men. That is to say, the analytic categories, medieval mode of production. Unless material production itself is
understood in its specific historical form. it is impossible to grasp the
as so often in idealist thought, have, almost unnoticed, become characteristics of the intellectual production which corresponds to it or
substantive descriptions, which then take habitual priority over the reciprocal action between the two. (Theorien tiber den Mehrwert,
the whole social process to which, as analytic categories, they cit. Bottomore and Rubel. 96-7.)
82 Marxism and Literature
. We can add that while a particular stage of 'real social existence', 2. Determination
or of 'relations of production', or of a 'mode of production', can

be discovered and made precise by analysis, it is never, as a body
of activities, either uniform or static. It is one of the central
propositions of Marx's sense of history, for example, that in
actual development there are deep contradictions in the rela
tionships of production and in the consequent social relation No problem in Marxist cultural theory is more difficult than that
ships. There is therefore the continual possibility ofthe dynamic of 'determination'. According to its opponents, Marxism is a
variation of these forces. The 'variations' of the superstructure necessarily reductive and determinist kind of theory: no cultural
might be deduced from this fact alone, were it not that the activity is allowed to be real and significant in itself, but is
'objective' implications of 'the base' reduce all such variations to always reduced to a direct or indirect expression of some pre
secondary consequences. It is only when we re8Iize that 'the ceding and controlling economic content, or of a political con
base', to which it is habitual to refer variations, is' itself a tent determined by an economic position or situation. In the
dynamic and intemallycontradictory process-the specific perspective of mid-twentieth century developments of Marx
activities and modes of activity, over a range from association to ism, this description can be seen as a caricature. Certainly it is
antagonism, of real men and classes of men- that we can begin often asserted with a confidence as solid as it is out of date. Yet it
to free ourselves from the notion of an 'area' or a 'category' with can hardly be denied that it came, with all its difficulties, from a
certain fixed properties for deduction to the variable processes common form of Marxism. Of course within that form, and in
of a 'superstructure'. The physical fixity of the terms exerts a more recent Marxist thinking, there have been many qualifica
constant pressure against just this realization. tions of the idea of determination, of the kind noted in Engels's
Thus, contrary to a development in Marxism, it is not 'the letter to Bloch, or of an apparently more radical kind, such as the
base' and 'the superstructure' that need to be studied, but contemporary idea of 'overdetermination' (a difficult term in
specific and indissoluble real processes, within which the deci English, since its intended meaning is determination by multi
sive relationship, from a Marxist point of view, is that expressed ple factors). Some of these revisions have in effect dropped the
by the complex idea of 'determination'. original Marxist emphasis, in attempted syntheses with other
orders of determination in psychology (a revised Freudianism)
or in mental or formal structures (formalism, structuralism),
These qualifications and revisions certainly indicate the inher
ent difficulties of the proposition. But at the same time they are
welcomed by th9se opponents of Marxism who want to evade its
continued challenge or, more directly, dismiss it as irrelevant
dogma. It is then crucial to be certain what that challenge was
and is. A Marxism without some concept of determination is in
effect worthless. A Marxism with many of the concepts of deter
mination it now has is quite radically disabled.
We can begin with the apparent source ofth~ proposition, in
the well-known passage from the 1859 Preface. As we read this
in Marx's German, especially alongside the English translations,
we become aware, inevitably, of the linguistic complexities of
the word 'determine'. Marx's normal word is bestimmen; it
occurs four times in the passage quoted earlier in translation.
84 Marxism and Literature Determination 85
The English 'determine' occurs three times in the translation. The existing stage of material production, and the social rela
One of these uses is a formal repetition not present in the origi tions corresponding to it, are in that sense 'fixed'.
nal; another is a translation of a quite different word, kan
statieren. The point here is not so much the adequacy of the The mass of productive forces accessible to men determines the condi
translation as the extraordinary linguistic complexity of this tions of society ... (GI. 18)
group of words. This can best be illustrated by considering the From this sense of determined conditions it is easy to under
complexity of 'determine' in English. stand the development of a Marxism which stressed the 'iron
The root sense of 'determine' is ~setting bounds' or 'setting laws', the 'absolutely objective conditions', of an 'economy',
limits'. In its extraordinarily varied development, in application from which all else followed. In this influential interpretation,
to many specific processes, it is the sense of putting a limit and Marxism had discovered the 'laws' of an objective external sys
therefore an end to some action that is most problematical. The tem of economy, and everything then followed, sooner or later,
determination of a calculation, a course of study, or a lease is, as directly or indirectly. from these laws. But this is not the only
an idea, relatively simple. Determination by an authority is at way in which the sense can be developed. It is as reasonable,
first simple, but is the source of most of the special difficulties, remembering 'enter into' and 'accessible to', to stress the pre
in its implication of something beyond and even external to the dominance of objective conditions at any particular moment in
specific action which nevertheless decides or settles it. The the process. This turns out, in practice, to be a quite different
sense of externality is decisive in the development of the con claim. It is what Engels wrote, defensively, in his letter to Bloch:
cept of 'determinism', in which some power (God or Nature or 'We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place. under
History) controls or decides the outcome of an action or process, very definite assumptions and conditions'. What this restores. as
beyond orirrespective ofthe wills or desires of its agents. This is against the alternative development, is the idea of direct agency:
abstract determinism, to be distinguished from an often appar 'we make our history ourselves'. The 'definite' or 'objective'
ently similar inherent determinism, in which the essential assumptions and conditions are then the qualifying terms of this
character of a process or the properties of its components are agency: in fact 'determination' as 'the setting of limits'.
held to determine (control) its outcome: the character and prop- . The radical difference between 'determination' in this sense,
erties are then 'determinants'. What had been (abstractly) the and 'determination; in the sense ofthe 'laws' of a whole process,
'determinat Counsell and foreknowledge of God' (Tyndale) subject to inherent and predictable development, is not difficult
became, especially in the physical sciences, 'determinate coridi to grasp but can often slip away in the shifting senses of 'deter
tions' 'or 'determined laws', based on precise knowledge of the mine'. The key question is the degree to which the 'objective'
inherent characteristics of a process and its components. The
.., abstract idea presupposes a powerlessness (or unsurpassable
conditions are seen as external. Since, by definition, within
Marxism, the objective conditions are and can only be the result
limits to the power) of the participants in an action. The 'scien of human actions in the material world, the real distinction can
tific' idea presupposes unalterable or relatively fixed charac be only between historical objectivity-the conditions into
teristics; change is then a matter of altered (but discoverable and which, at any particular point in time, men find themselves
in that sense predictable) conditions and combinations. born, thus the 'accessible' conditions into which they
It seems clear that the Marxist version of determinism, at least 'enter'-and abstract objectivity, in which the 'determining'
in its first stage, corresponds to this 'scientific' idea. process is 'independent of their will' not in the historical sense
In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite that they have inherited it but in the absolute sense that they
relations that are indispensable and independent of their will ... a cannot control it; they can seek only to understand it and guide
definite stage of development ... (SW. i. 362) their actions accordingly.
This abstract objectivity is the basis of what became widely
The English 'definite' translates Marx's forms of bestimmen. known, in Marxism, as 'ecanomism'. As a philosophical and
86 Marxism and Literature Determination 87
political doctrine it is worthless, but it has then in turn to be wills', But this is a bourgeois version of society. A particular
understood historically. The strongest single reason for the form of this version was later specified in Freudianism, and is
development of abstract determinism is the historical experi the real ground for the Marxist-Freudian syntheses which, iron
ence of large-scale capitalist economy, in which many more ically, have been the main opposition to economism and
people than Marxists concluded that control of the process was economic determinism. Society, whether generalized as such or
beyond them, that it was at least in practice external to their wills as 'capitalist society' or as 'the social and cultural forms of the
and desires, and that it had therefore to be seen as governed by capitalist mode of production', is seen as the primarily negative
its own 'laws'. Thus, with bitter irony, a critical and revolution force which follows from any understanding ofdetermination as
ary doctrine was changed, not only in practice but at this level only the setting of limits. But 'society', or 'the historical event',
of principle, into the very forms of passivity and reification can never in such ways be categorically abstracted from 'indi
against which an alternative sense of 'determination' had set out viduals' and 'individual wills'. Such a separation leads straight
to operate. to an alienated, objectivist 'society', working 'unconsciously',
Abstract determinism, that is to say, has to be seen as in one and to comprehension of individuals as 'pre-social' or even
sense determined. It is aform of response and interpretation that anti-social. 'The individual' or 'the genotype' then become posi
is conditioned by its experience of real historical limits. The tive extra-social forces.
decisive difference between 'determinate' natural laws and This is where the full concept of determination is cruciaL For
'determinate' social processes was overlooked-in part by a in practice determination is never only the setting of limitS; it is
confusion of language, in part from specific historical experi-' also the exertion of pressures. As it happens this is also a sense of
ence. The description of both kinds of knowledge as 'scientific' 'determine' in English: to determine or be determined to do
compounded the confusion. But is it then possible to return to a something is an act of will and purpose. In a whole social
sense of 'determination' as the experience of 'objective limits'? process, these positive determinations, which may be experi
As a negative sense this is undoubtedly important, and Marx enced individually but which are always social acts, indeed
used it repeatedly. New social relations, and the new kinds of often specific social formations, have very complex relations
activity that are possible through them, may be imagined but with the negative determinations that are experienced as limits.
cannot be achieved unless the determining limits of a particular . For they are by no means only pressures against the limits,
mode of production are surpassed in practice, by actual social though these are crucially important. They are at least as often
change. This was the history, for example, of the Romantic pressures derived from the formation and momentum of a given
impulse to human liberation, in its actual interaction with a social mode: in effect a compulsion to act in ways that maintain
dominant capitalism. and renew it. They are also, and vitally, pressures exerted by
But to say only this is to be in danger of falling back into a new new formations, with their as yet unrealized intentions and
passive and objectivist model. This is what happened to Engels: demands. 'Society' is then never only the 'dead husk' which
"" limits social aq.d individual fulfilment. It is always also a con-.
The historical event ... may ... be viewed as the product of a power stitutive process with very powerful pressures which are both
which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what expressed in political, economic, and cultural formations and,
each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges
is something that no one willed. * to take the full weight of 'constitutive', are internalized and
become 'individual wills'. Determination of this whole kind-a
Here society is the objectified (unconscious and unwilled) gen complex and interrelated process of limits and pressures-is in
eral process, and the only alternative forces are 'individual the whole social process itself and nowhere else: not in an
abstracted 'mode of production' nor in an abstracted 'psycho
.. Letter to J. Bloch, 1890 (Marx and Engels: Selected Correspondence. New logy'. Any abstraction of determinism, based on the isolation of
York, 1935, 476). autonomous categories, which are seen as controlling or which
88 Marxism and Literature Detennination 89
can be used for predjction, is then a mystification of the specific

formative experience. One of the reasons for this error, whether
and always related determinants which are the real social pro
in economism or in an alternative structuralism, is a misunder
cess-an active and conscious as well as, by default. a passive
standing of the nature of 'productive forces'.
and objectified historical experience.
The concept of 'overdetemiination' is an attempt to avoid the
isolation of autonomous categories but at the same time to
emphasize relatively autonomous yet of course interactive prac
tices. In its most positive forms-th~t is, in its recognition of
multiple forces. rather than the isolated forces of modes or
techniques of production, and in its further recognition of these
forces as structured, in particular historical situations, rather
than elements of an ideal totality or, worse, merely adja
cent-the concept of 'overdetermination' is more useful than
any other as a way of understanding historically lived situations
and the authentic complexities of practice. It is especially useful
as a way of understanding 'contradictions' and the ordinary
version of 'the dialectic', which can so easily be abstracted as
features of a theoretically isolated (determining) situation or
movement, which is then expected to develop according to
certain (determinist) laws. In any whole society, both the rela
tive autonomy and the relative unevenness of different practices

/
(forms of practical consciousness) decisively affect actual
development, and affect it, in the sense of pre!'isures and limits,
as detemiinants. Yet there are also difficulties in the concept. It
was used by Freud to indicate the structured multiple causation
of a symptom: a crystallization very .similar to the Frankfurt
School's cpncept of a dialectical image (see p.l03). Some traces
of this origIn survive in some of its theoretical uses (e.g. in
Althusser, who introduced it in Marxism but who failed to apply
its mo~t positive elements to his own work on ideology). As with
~
'determination', so 'overdetermination' can be abstracted to a
structure (symptom), which then, ifin complex ways, 'develops'
(forms, holds, breaks down) by the laws of its internal structural
relations. As a form of analysis this is often effective, but in its
isolation of the structure it can shift attention from the real
location of all practice and practical consciousness: 'the prac
.tical activity ... the practical process of development of men'.
Any categorical objectification of determined or overdetermined
structures is a repetition of the basic error of 'economism' at a
more serious level, since it now offers to subsume (at times with
acertain arrogance) all lived. practical and unevenly formed and
Productive Forces 91
3. Productive Forces
economy) it can be separated from other categories such as
consumption, distribution, and exchange; and all these can be
separated both from the social relations, the form of society,
within which they are specifically and variably interrelating
Underlying any argument about 'base' and 'superstructure', or activities, and, further, from the personal activities which are
about the nature of 'determination', is a decisive concept: that of their only concrete modes of existence. But in capitalist society
'productive forces'. It is a very important concept in Marx, and in 'material production' is a specific form, determined and under
all subsequent Marxism. But it is also a variable concept, and the stood in the forms of capital, wage-labour, and the production of
variations have been exceptionally important for Marxist cul commodities. That this 'material production' has itself been
tural theory. produced, by the social development of particular forms of pro
The central difficulty is that all the key words-produce, duction, is then the first thing to realize if we are trying to
product, production,productive-went through a specialized understand the nature of even this production, in which,
development in the course of the development of capitalism. because of actual historical developments,
Thus to analyse capitalism was at once to see it as a distinct
process of 'production' and to refer it to a general process, of material life generally appears as the aim while the production of this
which it is a particular historical kind. The difficulty is that the material life, labour (which is now the only possible but ... negative
form of personal activity) appears as the means. (GI, 66)
general process is still most readily defined in the specific and
limiting terms of capitalist production. Marx was perfectly clear Moreover, in capitalist society
about the distinction between 'production in general' and
'capitalist production'. Indeed it was the claim of the latter, The productive forces appear to be completely independent and
through its political economy, to the universality of its own severed from the individuals and to constitute a self-subsistent world
alongside the individuals. (GI, 65)
specific and historical conditions, that he especially attacked.
But the history had happened, in the language as in so much What then is a 'productive force'? It is all and any of the means
else. What is then profoundly difficult is that Marx analysed of the production and reproduction of real life. It may be seen as
'capitalist production' in and through its own terms, and at the a particular kind of agricultural or industrial production, but
same time, whether looking to the past or the future, was in any such kind is already a certain mode of social co-operation
effect compelled to use many of the same terms for more general and the application and development of a certain body of social
or historically different processes. As he himself wrote: knowledge. The production of this specific social co-operation
or of this specific social knowledge is itself carried through by
'Production in general' is an abstraction, but it is a rational abstraction, productive forces. In all our activities in the world we produce
6, in so far as it singles out and fixes the common features, thereby saving
us repetition. Yet these general or common features discovered by not only the satisfaction of our needs but new needs and new
comparison constitute something very complex, whose constituent definitions of needs. Fundamentally, in this human historical
elements have different destinations .... All the stages of production process, we produce o~rselves and our societies, and it is within
have certain destinations in common, which we generalize in thought: these developing and variable forms that 'material production',
but the so-called general conditions of all production are nothing but then itself variable, both in mode and scope, is itself carried on.
abstract conceptions which do not go to make up any real stage in the But if this is really Marx's basic position, how did it happen
history of production. (Grundrisse. 85) that amore limited definition of 'productive forces', and with it a
separation and abstraction of 'material production' and the
It must be added that the concept of 'material production' is 'material' or 'economic' 'base', came not only to predominate in
similarly abstract, but also similarly rational for particular pur Marxism but to be taken, by almost everyone else, as defining it.
poses. As an abstraction (for example, in bourgeois political One reason is the course of a particular argument. It was not
iJi,;
92 Marxism and Literature Productive Forces 93
Marxism, but the systems with which it contended and con for a market, then different but misleading terms are found for
tinues to contend, which had separated and abstracted various every other kind of production and productive force. What is
parts of this whole social process. It was the assertion and most often suppressed is the direct material production of 'poli
explanation of political forms and philosophical and general tics'. Yet any ruling class devotes a significant part of material
ideas as independent of,· 'above', the material social process, that production to establishing a political order. The social and polit
produced a necessary kind of counter-assertion. In the flow of ical order which maintains a capitalist market, like the social
polemic this was often overstated, until it came to repeat, in a and political struggles which created it, is necessarily a material
simple reversal of terms, the kind of error it attacked. production. From castles and palaces and churches to prisons
But there are deeper reasons than this. If you live in a capitalist and workhouses and schools; from weapons of war to a control
society, it is capitalist forms that you must analyse. Marx lived, led press: any ruling class, in variable ways though always
and we live, in a society in which indeed 'the productive forces materially, produces a social and political order. These are never
appear to ... constitute a self-subsistent world'. Thus in analys superstructural activities. They are the necessary material pro
ing the operation of productive forces which are not only per duction within which an apparently self-subsistent mode of
ceived as, but in central ways really are, of this kind, it is easy, production can alone be carried on. The complexity of this
within the only available language, to slip into describing them process is especially remarkable in advanced capitalist
as if they were universal and general, and as if certain 'laws' of societies, where it is wholly beside the point to isolate 'produc
their relations to other activities were fundamental truths. Marx tion' and 'industry' from the comparably material production of
ism thus often took the colouring of a specifically bourgeois and 'defence', 'law and order', 'welfare', 'entertainment', and 'public
capitalist kind of materialism. It could isolate 'productive opinion'. In failing, to grasp the material character of the produc
forces' as 'industry' (even at times as 'heavy industry'), and here tion of a social and political order, this specialized (and
again the evidence of language is significant. It was in the bourgeois) materialism failed also, but even more conspicuous
'Industrial Revolution' that 'in1dustry' changed from being a ly, to understand the material character of the production of a
word which described the human activity of assiduous effort cultural order. The concept of the 'superstructure' was then not a
and application to a word which predominantly describes pro reduction but an evasion.
ductive institutions: a 'self-subsistent world'. Of course these Yet the difficulty is that if we reject the idea of a 'self
were capitalist institutions, and 'production' itself was eventu subsistent world' of productive (industrial) forces, and describe
ally .subordinated to the capitalist element, as now in descrip productive forces as all and any activities in the social process as
tions of the 'entertainment industry' or the 'holiday industry'. a whole, we have made a necessary critique but, at least in the
The practical subordination of all human activities (with a sav first instance, lost edge and specificity. To go beyond this diffi
ing clause for certain activities which were called 'personal' or culty will be a matter for later argument; we have first to specify
'aesthetic') to the modes imd norms of capitalist institutions the negative effects, in cultural analysis, of the specialized ver
became more and more effective. Marxists, insisting on this and sion of 'productive forces' and 'production'. We can best specify
protesting against it, were caught in a practical ambivalence. them in Marx himself, rather than in the many later examples.
The insistence, in effect, diluted the protest. It is then often said There is a footnote in the Grundrisse in which it is argued that a
that the insistence was 'too materialist', a 'vulgar materialism'. piano-maker is a productive worker, engaged in productive
But the truth is that it was never materialist enough. labour, but that a pianist is not, since his labour is not labour
What any notion of a 'self-subsistent order' suppresses is the which reproduces capital. The extraordinary inadequacy of this
material character of the productive forces which produce such distinction to advanced capitalism, in which the production of
a version of production. Indeed it is often a way of suppressing music (and not just its instruments) is an important branch of
full consciousness of the very nature of such a society. If 'pro capitalist production, may be only an occasion for updating. But
duction', in capitalist society, is the production of commodities the real error is more fundamental.
In his sustained and brilliant analysis of capitalist society, 4. From Reflection to Mediation
Marx was working both with and beyond the categories of
bourgeois political economy. His distinction of 'productive.
labour' was in fact developed, in this note, from Adam Smith. It
still makes sense (or can be revised to make sense) in those The usual consequence of the base-superstructure formula,
bourgeois terms. Production is then work on raw materials to with its specialized and limited interpretations of productive
make commodities, which enter the capitalist system of dis forces and of the process of determination, is a descrip
tribution and exchange. Thus a piano is a commodity; music is tion-even at times a theory-of art and thought as 'reflection'.
(or was) not. At this level, in an analysis ofcapitalism, there is no The metaphor of 'reflection' has a long history in the analysis of
great difficulty until we see that a necessary result is the projec art and ideas. Yet the physical process and relationship that it
tion (alienation) of a whole body of activities which have to be implies have proved compatible with several radically different
isolated as 'the realm of art and ideas', as 'aesthetics', as 'ideo theories. Thus art can be said to 'reflect the real world', holding
logy', or, less flatteringly, as 'the superstructure'. None of these 'the mirror up to nature', but every term of such a definition has
can then be grasped as they are; as real practices, elements of a been in protracted and necessary dispute. Art can be seen as
whole material social process; not a realm or a world or a super reflecting not 'mere appearances' but the 'reality' behind these:
structure, but many and variable productive practices; with the 'inner nature' of the world, or its 'constitutive forms'. Or art
specific conditions and intentions. To fail to see this is not only is seen as reflecting not the 'lifeless world', but the world as seen
to lose contact with the actuality of these practices, as has in the mind of the artist. The elaboration and sophistication of
repeatedly occurred in forms of analysis derived from the terms arguments of these kinds are remarkable.
of this specialized (industrial) materialism. It is to begin the Materialism appears to constitute a fundamental challenge to
whole difficult process of discovering and describing relations them. If the real world is material, it can indeed be seen in its
between all these practices, and between them and the other constitutive forms, but these will not be metaphysical, and
practices which have been isolated as 'production', as 'the l;>ase', reflection will be necessarily of a material reality. This can lead
or as the 'self-subsistent world', in an extremely awkward and to the concept of 'false' or 'distorted' reflection, in which some
disabling position. It is indeed to begin this most difficult kind thing (metaphysics, 'ideology') prevents true reflection. Simi
of work head down and standing on one foot. Such feats of larly, the 'mind of the artist' can be seen as itself materially
agility are not impossible, and have indeed been performed. But conditioned; its reflection is then not independent but itself a
it would be more reasonable to get back on both feet again, and to material function.
look at our actual productive activities without assuming in Two versions of this materialism became dominant in Marxist
advance that only some of them are material. thinking. First, there was the interpretation of consciousness as
mere 'reflexes, echoes, phantoms, and sublimates'; this was
discussed in relation to one of the concepts of ideology. But as a
necessary complement to this reductive account, an alternative
interpretation of consciousness as 'scientific truth', based on
real knowledge ofthe material world, was strongly emphasized.
This alternative could be extended relatively easily to include
accounts of 'knowledge' and 'thought', but for obvious reasons it
left 'art' relatively neglected and exposed. Within this version
the most common account of art was then a positivist theory, in
which the metaphor of 'reflection' played a central role. The true
function of art was defined in terms of 'realism' or less often
96 Marxism and Literature From Reflection to Mediation 91
'naturalism'-both nineteenth-century terms themselves much Yet it is quickly evident that this is radically incompatible
affected by related concepts of science. Art reflected reality; if it with any doctrine of 'reflection', except in one special and
did not it was false or unimportant. And what was reality? The influential adaptation. The movement from abstract objectivism
'production and reproduction of real life', now commonly to this sense of objectified process was decisive. But the sense of
described as 'the base', with art part of its 'superstructure'. The objectified process can be almost at once rendered back to its
ambiguity is then obvious. A doctrine about the real world original abstract and objectivist condition, by a definition of the
expressed in the materialism of objects leads to one kind of already known (scientifically discoverd and attested) 'laws' of
theory of art: showing the objects (including human actions as this process. Art can then be defined as 'reflecting' these laws.
objects) 'as they really are'. But this can be maintained, in its What is already and othenvise known as the basic reality of the
simplest form, only by knowing 'the base' as an object: the material social process is reflected, of course in its own ways, by
development already discussed. To know the 'base' as a process art. If it is not (and the test is available, by comparison of this
at once complicates the object-reflection model which had given knowledge of reality with any actual art produced), then
appeared so powerful. it is a case of distortion, falsification, or superficiality: not
This complication was fought out in rival definitions of art but ideology. Rash extensions were then possible to new
'realism' and 'naturalism'. Each term had begun as a secular and categorical distinctions: not progressive art but reactionary art;
radical emphasis on human social knowledge. Naturalism was not socialist art but bourgeois or capitalist art; not art but mass
an alternative to supernaturalism; realism to a deliberately fal culture; and so on almost indefinitely. The decisive theory of art
sifying ('romanticizing', 'mythmaking', 'prettifying') art. Yet the as reflection, not now of objects but of real and verifiable social
enclosure of each concept within a special doctrine of 'the object and historical processes, was thus extensively maintained and
as it really is' reduced their radical challenge. The making of art elaborated. The theory became at once a cultural programme
was incorporated into a static, objectivist doctrine, within and a critical school.
which 'reality', 'the real world', 'the base', could be separately It has of course been heavily attacked from older and often
known, by the criteria of scientific truth, and their 'refleytions' more substantial positions. It has been widely identified as a
in art then judged by their conformity or lack of conformitY with damaging consequence of a materialist outlook. But once again,
them: in fact with their positivist versions. what is wrong with the theory is that it is not materialist enough.
It was at this point that a different materialist theory became The most damaging consequence of any theory of art as reflec
necessary. For it was only in· very simple cases that the tion is that, through its persuasive physical metaphor (in which
object-reflection model could be actually illustrated or verified. a reflection simply occurs, within the physical properties of
Moreover, there was already a crucial distinction between light, when an object or movement is brought into relation with
'mechanical materialism'-seeing the world as objects and ex a reflective surface-the mirror and then the mind), it succeeds
cludingactivity-and'historicalmaterialism'-seeingthemater~ in suppressing the actual work on material-in a final sense, the
ial life process as human activity. The simplest theories of material social process-which is the making of any art work. By
'reflection' were based on a mechanical materialism. But a dif projecting and alienating this material process to 'reflection',
ferent account appeared possible if 'the real world', instead of the social and material character of artistic activity-of that
being isolated as an object, was grasped as a material social art-work which is at once 'material' and 'imaginative'-was
process, with certain inherent qualities and tendencies. As ear suppressed. It was at this point that the idea of reflection was
lier in idealism, but now with altered specification, art could be challenged by the idea of 'mediation'.
seen as reflecting not separated objects and superfIcial events 'Mediation' was intended to describe an active process. Its
but the essential forces and movements underlying them. This predominant general sense had been an act of intercession, re
was in turn made the basis for distinction between 'realism' conciliation, or interpretation between adversaries or strangers.
(dynamic) and 'naturalism' (static). In idealist philosophy it had been a concept of reconciliation
98 Marxism and Literature From Reflection to Mediation 99
between opposites, within a totality. A more neutral sense had process added to it by way of projection, disguise, or interpreta
also developed. for interaction between separate forces. The tion.
distinction between 'mediate' and 'immediate' had been It is difficult to be sure how much is gained by substituting the
developed to emphasize 'mediation' as an indirect connection metaphor of 'mediation' for the metaphor of 'reflection'. On the
or agency between separate kinds of act. one hand it goes beyond the passivity of reflection theory; it
It is then easy to see the attraction of 'mediation' as a term to indicates an active process, of some kind. On the other hand, in
describe the process of relationship between 'society' and 'art', almost all cases, it perpetuates a basic dualism. Art does not
or between 'the base' and 'the superstructure'. We should not reflect social reality, the superstructure does not refleclthe base,
expect to find (or always to find) directly 'reflected' social directly; culture is a mediation of society. But it is virtually
realities in art, since these (often or always) pass through a impossible to sustain the metaphor of 'mediation' (Vermittlung)
process of 'mediation' in which their original content is without some sense of separate and pre-existent areas or orders
changed. This general proposition, however, can be understood of reality, between which the mediating process occurs whether
in several different ways. The change involved in mediation can independently or as determined by their prior natures. Within
be simply a matter of indirect expression: the social realities are the inheritance of idealist philosophy the process is usually, in
'projected' or 'disguised', and to recover them is a process of practiCe, seen as a mediation between categories, which have
working back through the mediation to their original forms. been assumed to be distinct. Mediation, in this range of use, then
Relying mainly on the concept of 'ideology' as (class-based) seeD;ls little more than a sophistication of reflection.
distortion, this kind of reductive analysis, and of 'stripping', Yet the underlying problem is obvious. If 'reality' and 'speak
'laying bare' or 'unmasking', has been common in Marxist work. ing about reality' (the 'material social process' and 'language')
If we remove the elements of mediation, an area of reality, and are taken as categorically distinct, concepts such as 'reflection'
then also of the ideological elements which distorted its percep and 'mediation' are inevitable. The same pressure can be
tion or which determined its presentation, will become clear. (In observed in attempts to interpret the Marxist phrase 'the produc
our own time this sense of mediation has been especially tion and reproduction of real life' as if production were the
applied to 'the media', which are assumed to distort and present primary social (economic) process and 'reproduction' its 'sym
'reality' in ideological ways.) bolic' or 'signifying' or 'cultural' counterpart. Such attempts are
Yet this negative sense of 'mediation', which has been heavily either alternatives to the Marxist emphasis on an inherent and
supported by psychoanalytical concepts such as 'repression' constitutive 'practical consciousness', or, at their best, ways of
and 'sublimation', and by 'rationalization' in a sense close to the specifying its actual operations. The problem is different, from
negative sense of 'ideology', has coexisted with a sense which the beginning, if we see language and signification as indissolu
offers to be positive. This is especially the contribution of the ble elements of the material social process itself, involved all the
Frankfurt School. Here the change involved in 'mediation' is not time both in production and reproduction. The forms of actual
necessarily seen as distortion or disguise. Rather, all active displacement and alienation experienced in class societies have
relations between different kinds ofbeing and consciousness are led to recurrent concepts of isolated relations between 'separate'
inevitably mediated, and this process is not a separable orders: 'reflection' from idealist thought through naturalism to a
agency-a 'medium'-but intrinsic to the properties of the positivist kind of Marxism; 'mediation' from religious thought
related kinds. "Mediation is in the object itself, not something through idealist philosophy to Hegelian variants of Marxism. To
between the object and that to which it is brought. "* Thus the extent that it indicates an active and substantial process,
mediation is a positive process in social reality, rather than a 'mediation' is always the less alienated concept. In its modern
development it approaches the sense of inherent constitutive
* T. W. Adorno, 'Thesen zur Kunstsoziologie' ,Kainer Zeitschrift fur Soziologie consciousness, and is in any case important as an alternative
und SozioJpsychoJogie, xix, 1 (March 1967). to simple reductionism, in which every real act or work is
methodically rendered back to an assumed primary category,
5. Typification and Homology
usually specified (self-specified) as 'concrete reality'. But when
the process of mediation is seen as positive and substantial, as a
necessary process of the making of meanings and values, in the One important way of restating the idea of 'reflection', and of
necessary form of the general social process of signification and giving particular substance to,the idea of 'mediation, is to be
communication, it is really only a hindrance to describe it as found in the concept of 'typicality'. This was already important
'mediation' at all. For the metaphor takes us back to the very in nineteenth~century thought, in two general forms. First, there
concept of the 'intermediary' which, at its'best, this constitutive was the concept, as in Taine, of the 'ideal' type: a definition
and constituting sense rejects. normally attached to 'heroes' in literature, who were seen as
"the important characters, the elementary forces, the deepest
layers of human nature". This is a very traditional definition,
with obvious reference back to Aristotle, in which the notion of
typicality is in effect a rendering of 'universals': the permanently
important elements of human nature and the human condition.
While it seems natural to associate 'universals' with religious,
metaphysical, or idealist forms of thought, it can also be argued
that permanent elements of the human social situation, always
of course modified by specific historical situations, are 'typical'
or 'universal' in a more secular sense. The social, historical, and
evolutionary dimensions of human nature can be expressed, in
secular terms, as distinct both from idealism and from a non~
historical or non-evolutionary 'sociologism'. Lukacs's (trans
formed-Hegelian) concept of 'world-historical individuals' is an
example of 'type' in this sense.
A different emphasis, specifically associated with new doc
trines of realism, was made by Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and
Dobrolyubov, and became influential in Marxism. Here the 'typ
ical' is the fully 'characteristic' or fully 'representative' character
or situation: the specific figure from which we can reasonably
extrapolate; or, to put it the other way round, the specific figure
which concentrates and intensifies a much more general reality.
It is then easy to see how the notion of 'reflection' can be rede
fined in ways that appear to overcome its most obvious limita
tions. It is not the 'mere surface', or 'appearances only', which
are reflected in art, butthe 'essential' or 'underlying' or 'general'
reality, and this as an intrinsic process, rather than as a separated
process in time. It must then of course be observed that 'reflec
tion' is an extremely odd way of describing the processes of
intrinsic concentration which this new sense indicates. But the
amendment permitted the continuation of general statements to
-
102 Marxism and Literature Typification and Homology 103
the effect that 'art reflects social reality', while specifying its (in a normal process in 'Marxist criticism') verified. This pre
detailed processes in more figurative (selective or intensifying) supposition repeats, if in more complex and at times very
ways. sophisticated forms, the basic dualism of all theories centred on
Indeed only one element needed to be added to make this an the concept of 'reflection' or, in its ordinary sense, 'mediation',
influential Marxist theory of art: the insistence that 'social reali or, we can now add, the ordinary sense of 'typification'.
ty' is a dynamic process, and that it is this movement that is In the later work of the Frankfurt School, and in a different
reflected by 'typification'. Art, by figurative means, typifies "the way in the work of Marxist structuralists, other concepts were
elements and tendencies of reality that recUr according to regu developed: notably that of 'correspondences', which has some
lar laws, although changing with the changing circumstances" interesting relations with one variation of 'type'; and the radi
(Lukacs). The description of social reality as a dynamic process cally new concept of 'homology'.
is then a major advance, but this is qualified, and in one sense The strict notion of 'correspondences' is at the opposite pole
nullified, by the familiar and ominous reference to 'laws'. There from 'typicality'. Walter Benjamin, taking the term from
is an obvious danger of reducing this theory to art as the typifica Baudelaire, used it to describe 'an experience which seeks to
tion (representation, illustration) not ofthe dynamic process but establish itself in crisis-proof form. This is possible only within
of its ('known') laws. In metaphysical and idealist thought a the realm of the ritual.' * The actual process of the making of art
comparable theory had included not only recognition of the is then the crystallization of such experiences, by such methods.
essential but through this recognition an indication of its Its presence and its authenticity can be recognized by what
desirability or inevitability, according to the basic laws of reali Benjamin called its 'aura'. Such a definition can be held at a
ty. Similarly, one common form of this Marxist theory indicated simple subjectivist level, or it can be moved towards the familiar
not only recognition of (social and historical) reality but also a abstractions of 'myth', of the 'collective unconscious' or of 'the
demonstration of its inevitable (and desirable) movements, creative imagination'. Benjamin moved it in these ways, but he
according to the (scientific) laws of history and society. Indeed, extended it also, and crucially, to 'the historical process', in
in one tendency, that of 'socialist realism', the concept of the particular relation to his awareness of the changing social and
'ideal type' took on connotations of the 'future man'. Any of material conditions of different kinds of actual art-work. Mean
these positions can be defended, but the concept of 'typicality' is while, more generally, the Frankfurt School was developing the
intolerably confused by their variety. idea of 'dialectical images' as crystallizations of the historical
In general terms the sense of 'typicality' most consonant with process. This concept is very near one sense of 'type', giving a
Marxism is that based on recognition of a constitutive and con new social and historical sense of'emblematic' or ~ symbolic' art.
stituting process of social and historical reality, which is then The idea of 'dialectical images' obviously needs definition.
specifically expressed in some particular 'type'. This related Adorno complained that, in Benjamin's hands, they were often
movement, of recognition and means of specific expression, is in effect 'reflections of social reality', reduced to 'simple fac
one of the most common serious senses of 'mediation', in spite of ticity'. 'Dialectical images', he went on to argue, 'are models not
~ the basic disadvantages of that term. But 'type' can still be of social products, but rather objective constellations in which
understood in two radically different ways: as an 'emblem' or the social condition represents itself'. They can 'never be
'symbol', or as the representative example of a significant clas expected to be an ideological or in general a social "product"'.
sification. It is the latter sense that has been predominant in This argument depends on a distinction between 'the real social
Marxist thinking (even where qualified by recognitions of 'em process' and the various fixed forms, in 'ideology' or 'social
blematic' or 'symbolic' art as authentic in terms of a broadened products', which merely appear to represent or express it. The
sense of 'representation' and 'significance'). There is a persistent real social process is always mediated, and one of the positive
presupposition of a knowable (often wholly knowable) reality in forms of such mediation is the genuine 'dialectical image'.
terms of which the typification will be recognized and indeed • Zeitschrift fur Soziulforschung, v, I, Frankfort, 1936.
I
Marxism and Literature Typification and Homology 105
104
There is of course still a problem in the description of all inher sense of resemblance to one of analogy, in directly observable
ent and constitutive consciousness as 'mediated', even when terms, but it includes also, and more influentially, a sense of
this mediation is recognized as itself inherent. Yet in other corresponding forms or structures, which are necessarily the
respects this is a crucial step towards the recognition of art as a results of different kinds of analysis. The concept of 'homology'
primary process. Yet this also was what Benjamin wished to was developed in the life sciences, where it included a radical
argue, except that, relying less on the categorical priority of distinction from 'analogy'. 'Homology' is correspondence in
'mediation', he sought to lay one kind of process beside another, origin and development, 'analogy' in appearance and function.
and to explore their relations, in what has really to be seen as the The related distinction between 'structure' and 'function' is
exploration of 'correspondences' (connections) in a much more directly relevant. There is then a range from 'general homology'
literal and familiar sense. (the relation of an organ to a general type) through 'serial
What then, theoretically, are such correspondences, and what homology' (related orders of connection) to 'special homology'
is their relation to the apparently more rigorous concept of (the correspondence of a part of one organism to another part of
'homology'? At one level correspondences are resemblances, in another organism). Extension of these senses to soCial or cultural
seemingly very different specific practices, which may be analysis is suggestive but usually itself analogical.
shown by analysis to be both direct and directly related expres The radical distinction between variants of 'correspondence'
sions of and responses to a general social process. There is an and 'homology', in cultural analysis, must be related to the
example in Benjamin's surprising but convincing configuration fundamental theoretical distinctions that have already been
of the ragpickers, the 'bohemians', and the new poetic methods examined. Thus 'correspondence' and 'homology' can be
of Paris under the Second Empire. Characteristically all the sophisticated variants of a theory of reflection, or of 'mediation'
evidence adduced for these resemblances is highly specific. It is in its dualist sense. A cultural phenomenon acquires its full
centred in Baudelaire's poem The Ragpickers' Wine, but extends significance only when it is seen as a form of (known or knowa
to a wide range of new kinds of activity in the extraordinary ble) general social process or structure. The distinction between
commercial expansion of the city. Then at another level corres process and structure is then crucial. Resemblances and
pondences are not so much resemblances as analogies, as in the analogies between different specific practices are usually rela
case of the figure of the city stroller and the corresponding forms tions within a process, working inwards from partiCular forms to
of mobile and detached observation in panoramic journalism, in a general form. Displaced connections, and the important idea of
the detective story, and in the poetry of isolation within the city homologous structures, depend less on an immediately observ
crowd. This evidence is agahi direct and specific, but what it able process than on an effectively completed historical and
supports is a correspondence of observational perspective, and social structural analysis, in which a general form has become
thence of literary stance, in different social and literary forms. At apparent, and specific instances of this form can be discovered,
another level again, correspondences are neither resemblances not so much or even at all in content, but in specific and
nor analogies but displaced connections, as in Adorno's exam autonomous but finally related forms.
.. pIe of the (negative) relation between Viennese 'number games' These distinctions have considerable practical importance.
(from a new tonal system in music to logical positivism) and the Both 'correspondence' and 'homology', in certain senses, can be
(backward) state of Austrian material development, given its modes of exploration and analysis of a social process which is
intellectual and technical capacities. Here, while the immediate grasped from the beginning as a complex of specific but related
evidence is direct, the plausibility of the relation depends not activities. Selection is evidently involved, but as a matter of
only on a formal analysis of the historical social process but on principle there is no a priori distinction between the necessary
the consequent deduction ofa displacement or even an absence. and the contingent, the 'social' and the 'cultural', the 'base'
Any of these levels may be loosely described as 'homology', and the 'superstructure'. Correspondence and homology are
but this concept itself has a significant range. It extends from a then not formal but specific relations: examples of real social
106 Marxism and Literature Typification and Homology 107
relationships, in their variable practice, which have common known products. Analytic relations can be handled in this way;
forms of origin. Or again, 'correspondence' and 'homology' can practical relations hardly at all.
be seen as forms of the 'typical': crystallizations, in superficially An alternative approach to the same problems, but one which
unrelated fields, of a social process which is nowhere fully is more directly oriented to cultural process and to practical
represented but which is specifically present, in determinate relations, can be found in the developing concept of
forms, in a range of different works and activities. 'hegemony' .
On the other hand, 'correspondence' and 'homology' can be in
effect restatements of the base-superstructure model and of the
'determinist' sense of determination. Analysis begins from a
known structure of society, or a known movement of history.
Specific analysis then discovers examples of this movement or
structure in cultural works. Or, where 'correspondence' seems
to indicate too simple an idea of reflection, analysis is directed
towards instances of formal or structural homology between a
social order, its ideology, and its cultural forms. Very important
work (that of Goldmann, for example) has been done in this last
mode. But the practical and theoretical problems it raises are
severe. The most evident practical effect is an extreme selec
tivity. Only the cultural evidence which fits the homology is
directly introduced. Other evidence is neglected, often with the
explanation that the homologous is the significant evidence,
and indeed is a way of distinguishing 'great works' from others.
Theoretically the problem is that the 'social oider'-here a for
mal term for social and historical process-has to be given an
initially structured form, and the most available form is 'ideo
logy' or 'world-view', which is already evidently but abstractly
structured. This procedure is repeated in the cultural analysis
itself, for the homological analysis is now not of 'content' but of
'form', and the cultural process is not its active practices but its
formal products or objects. The 'fit' or homology between
'ideology' and 'cultural object', thus formally conceived, is often
striking and important. But a heavy price is paid. First, empiri
.... cally, in the procedural selectivity of historical and cultural
evidence. The substitution of epochal for connected historical
analysis is especially characteristic of this method. Second,
practically, in the understanding of contemporary cultural pro
cess. None of the dualist theories, expressed as reflection or
mediation, and none of the formalist and structuralist theories,
expressed in variants of correspondence or homology, can be
fully carried through to contemporary practice, since in differ
ent ways they all depend on a known history, a known structure,
Hegemony 109
6. Hegemony
the concept of 'hegemony' goes beyond 'ideology'. What is ded
sive is not only the conscious system of ideas and beliefs, but the
whole lived social process as practically organized by specific
and dominant meanings and values. Ideology, in its normal
The traditional definition of 'hegemony' is political rule or senses, is a relatively formal and articulated system of meanings,
domination, especially in relations between states. Marxism values, and beliefs, of a kind that can be abstracted as a 'world
extended the definition of rule or domination to relations be view' or a 'class outlook'. This explains its popularity as a
tween social classes, and especially to definitions of a ruling concept in retrospective analysis (in base-superstructure mod
class. 'Hegemony' then acquired a further significant sense in els or in homology), since a system of ideas can be abstracted
the work of Antonio Gramsci, carried out under great difficulties from that once living social process and represented, usually by
in a Fascist prison between 1927 and 1935. Much is still uncer the selection of 'leading' or typical 'ideologists' or 'ideological
tain in Gramsci's use of the concept, but his work is one of the features', as the decisive form in which consciousness was at
major turning-points in Marxist cultural theory. once expressed and controlled (or, as in Althusser, was in effect
Gramsci made a distinction between 'rule' (dominio) and unconscious, as an imposed structure). The relatively mixed,
'hegemony'. 'Rule' is expressed in directly political forms and in confused, incomplete, or inarticulate consciousness of actual
times of crisis by direct or effective coercion. But the more men in that period and society is thus overridden in the name of
normal situation is a complex interlocking of political, social, this decisive generalized system, and indeed in structural
and cultural forces, and 'hegemony', according to different homology is procedurally excluded as peripheral or ephemeral.
interpretations. is either this or the active social and cultural It is the fully articulate and systematic forms which are recog
forces which are its necessary elements. Whatever the implica nizable as ideology, and there is a corresponding tendency in
tions of the concept for Marxist political theory (which has still the analysis of art to look only for similarly fully articulate
to recognize many kinds of direct political control, social class and systematic expressions of this ideology in the content
control, and economic control, as well as this more general (base-superstructure) or form (homology) of actual works. In
formation), the effects on cultural theory are immediate. For less selective procedures, less dependent on the inherent classi
'hegemony' is a concept which at once includes and goes cism of the definition of form as fully articulate and systematic.
beyond two powerful earlier concepts: that of 'culture' as a the tendency is to consider works as variants of, or as variably
'whole social process', in which men define and shape their affected by, the decisive abstracted ideology.
whole lives; and that of 'ideology', in any ofits MarXist senses, in More generally, this sense of 'an ideology' is applied in
which a system of meanings and values is the expression or abstract ways to the actual consciousness of both dominant and
projection of a particular class interest. subordinated classes. A dominant class 'has' this ideology in
'Hegemony' goes beyond 'culture', as previously defined, in relatively pure and simple forms. A subordinate class has, in one
its insistence on relating the 'whole social process' to specific version, nothing but this ideology as its consciousness (since the
-distributions of power and influence. To say that 'men' define production of all ideas is, by axiomatic definition, in the hands
and shape their whole lives is true only in abstraction. In any of those who control the primary means of production) or, in
actual society there are specific inequalities in means and there another version, has this ideology imposed on its otherwise
fore in capacity to realize this process. In a class society these are different consciousness, which it must struggle to sustain or
primarily inequalities between classes. Gramsci therefore intro develop against 'ruling-class ideology'.
duced the necessary recognition of dominance and subordina The concept of hegemony often, in practice, resembles these
tion in what has still, however, to be recognized as a whole definitions, but it is distinct in its refusal to equate conscious
process. ness with the articulate formal system which can be and ordinar
It is in just this recognition ofthe wholeness ofthe process that ily is abstracted as 'ideology'. It of corn;se does not exclude the
110 Marxism and Literature Hegemony 111
articulate and formal meanings, values and beliefs which a of many different forms of ~truggle, including those not easily
dominant class develops and propagates. But it does not equate recognizable as and indeed not primarily 'political' and
these with consciousness, or rather it does not reduce con 'economic', thus leads to a much more profound and more active
sciousness to them. Instead it sees the relations of domination sense of revolutionary activity in a highly developed society
and subordination, in their forms as practical consciousness, as than the persistently abstract models derived from very different
in "effect a saturation of the whole process of living-not only of historical situations. The sources of any alternative hegemony
political and economic activity, nor only of manifest social are indeed difficult to define. For Gramsci they spring from the
activity, but of the whole substance of lived identities and rela working class, but not this class as an ideal or abstract construc
tionships, to such a depth that the pressures and limits of what tion. What he sees, rather, is a working people which has, pre
can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political, and cisely, to become a class, and a potentially hegemonic class,
cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of against the pressures and limits of an existing and powerful
simple experience and common sense. Hegemony is then not hegemony.
only the articulate upper level of 'ideology', nor are its forms of Second, and more immediately.in this context, there is a
control only those ordinarily seen as 'manipulation' or 'indoc whole different way of seeing cultural activity, both as tradition
trination'. It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over and as practice. Cultural work and activity are not now, in any
the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our ordinary sense, a superstructure: not only because of the depth
shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived and thoroughness at which any cultural hegemony is lived, but
system of meanings and values-constitutive and constitut "because cultural tradition and practice are seen as much more
ing-which as they are experi~nced as practices appear as recip than superstructural expressions-reflections, mediations, or
rocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most typifications-of a formed social and economic structure. On
people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced the contrary, they are among the basic processes of the formation
reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the itself and, further, related to a much wider area of reality than the
society to move, in most areas of their lives. ltis, that is to say, in abstractions of 'social' and 'economic' experience. People
the strongest sense a 'culture', but a culture which has also to be seeing themselves and each other in directly personal relation
seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular ships; people seeing the natural world and themselves in it;
classes. people using their physical and material resources for what one
There are two immediate advantages in this concept of kind of society speCializes to 'leisure' and 'entertainment' and
hegemony. First, its forms of domination and subordination 'art': all these active experiences and practices, which make up
correspond much more closely to the normal processes of social so much of the reality of a culture and its cultural production can
organization and control in developed societies than the more be seen as they are, without reduction to other categories of
familiar projections from the idea of a ruling class, which are content, and without the characteristic straining to fit them
usually based on much earlier and simpler historical phases. It (directly as reflection, indirectly as mediation or typification or
can speak, for example, to the realities of electoral democracy, analogy) to other and determining manifest economic and polit
and to the significant modern areas of 'leisure' and 'private life', ical relationships. Yet they can still be seen as elements of a
more specifically and more actively than older ideas of domina hegemony: an inclusive social and cultural formation which
tion, with their trivializing explanations of simple 'manipula indeed to be effective has to extend to and include, indeed to
tion', 'corruption', and 'betrayal'. If the pressures and limits of a form and be formed from, this whole area of lived experience.
given form of domination are to this extent experienced and in Many difficulties then arise, both theoretically and practi
practice internalized, the whole question of class rule, and of cally, but it is important to recognize how many blind alleys we
opposition to it, is transformed. Gramsci's emphasis on the may now be saved from entering. If any lived culture is necessar
creation of an alternative hegemony, by the practical connection ily so extensive, the problems of domination and subordination
112 Marxism and Literature Hegemony 113
on the one hand, and of the extraordinary complexity of any hegemony the concepts of counter-hegemony and alterna
actual cultural tradition and practice on the other, can at last be tive hegemony, which are real and persistent elements of prac
directly approached. tice.
There is of course the difficulty that domination and subordi One way of expressing the necessary distinction between
nation, as effective descriptions of cultural formation, will, by practical and abstract senses within the concept is to speak of
many, be refused; that the alternative language of co-operative 'the hegemonic' rather than the 'hegemony', and of 'the domin
shaping, of common contribution, which the traditional concept ant' rather than simple 'domination'. The reality of any
of 'culture' so notably expressed, will be found preferable. In hegemony, in the extended political and cultural sense, is that,
this fundamental choice there is no alternative, from any while by definition it is always dominant, it is never either total
socialist position, to recognition and emphasis of the massive or exclusive. At any time, forms of alternative or directly opposi
historical and immediate experience of class domination and tional politics and culture exist as significant elements in the
subordination, in all their different forms. This becomes, very society. We shall need to explore their conditions and their
quickly, a matter of specific experience and argument. But there limits, but their active presence is decisive, not only because
is a closely related problem within the concept of 'hegemony' they have to be included in any historical (as distinct from
itself. In some uses, though not I think in Gramsci, the totalizing epochal) analysis, but as forms which have had significant effect
tendency of the concept, which is significant and indeed cru on the hegemonic process itself. That is to say, alternative politi
cial, is converted into an abstract totalization, and in this form it cal and cultural emphases, and the many forms of opposition
is readily compatible with sophisticated senses of 'the super and struggle, are important not only in themselves but as indica
structure' or even 'ideology'. The hegemony, that is, can be seen tive features of what the hegemonic process has in practice had
as more uniform, more static, and more abstract than in practice, to work to control. A static hegemony, of the kind which is
if it is really understood, it can ever actually be. Like any other indicated by abstract totalizing definitions of a dominant 'ideol
Marxist concept it is particularly susceptible to epochal as dis ogy' or 'world--view', can ignore or isolate such alternatives and
tinct from historical definition, and to categorical as distinct opposition, but to the extent that they are significant the deci
from substantial description. Any isolation of its 'organizing sive hegemonic function is to control or transform or even
principles', or of its 'determining features', which have indeed incorporate them. In this active process the hegemonic has to be
to be grasped in experience and by analysis, can lead very seen as more than the simple transmission of an (unchanging)
quickly to a totalizing abstraction. And then the problems of the dominance. On the contrary, any hegemonic process must be
reality of domination and subordination, and of their relations to especially alert and responsive to the alternatives and opposi
co-operative shaping and common contribution, can be quite tion which question or threaten its dominance. The reality of
falsely posed. cultural process must then always include the efforts and con
A lived hegemony is always a process. It is not, except analyti tributions of those who are in one way or another outside or at
cally, a system or a structure. It is a realized complex of experi the edge of the terms of the specific hegemony.
ences, relationships, and activities, with specific and changing Thus it is misleading, as a general method, to reduce all
pressures and limits. In practice, that is, hegemony can never be political and cultural initiatives and contributions to the terms
.-, singular. Its internal structures are highly complex, as can read of the hegemony. That is the reductive consequence of the radi
ily be seen in any concrete analysis. Moreover (and this is cru cally different concept of 'superstructure'. The specific func
cial, reminding us of the necessary thrust of the concept), it does tions of 'the hegemonic', 'the dominant', have always to be
not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continu stressed, but not in ways which suggest any a priori totality. The
ally to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. Itis also most interesting and difficult part of any cultural analysis, in
continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures complex societies, is that which seeks to grasp the hegemonic in
not at all its own. We have then to add to the concept of its active and formative but also its transformational processes.
I
Works of art, by their substantial and general character, are often 7. Traditions, Institutions, and Formations
especially important as sources of this complex evidence.

The major theoretical problem, with immediate effect on
methods of analysis, is to distinguish between alternative and
oppositional initiatives and contributions which are made Hegemony is always an active process, but this does not mean
within or against a specific hegemony (which then sets certain that it is simply a complex of dominant features and elements.
limits to them or which can succeed in neutralizing, changing or On the contrary, it is always a more or less adequate organization
actually incorporating them) and other kinas of initiative and and interconnection of otherwise separated and even disparate
contribution which are irreducible to the terms of the original or meanings, values, and practices, which it specifically incor
the adaptive hegemony, and are in that sense independent. It porates in a significant culture and an effective social order.
can be persuasively argued that all or nearly all initiatives and These are themselves living resolutions-in the broadest sense,
contributions, even when they take on manifestly alternative or political resolutions-of specific economic realities. This pro
oppositional forms. are in practice tied to the hegemonic: that cess of incorporation is of major cultural importance. To under
the dominant culture, so to say, at once produces and limits its stand it, but also to understand the material on which it must
own forms of counter-culture. There is more evidence for this work, we need to distinguish three aspects of any cultural pro
view (for example in the case of the Romantic critique of indus cess, which we can call traditions, institutions, and formations.
trial civilization) than we usually admit. But there is evident The concept oftradition has been radically neglected in Marx
variation in specific kinds of social order and in the character of ist cultural thought. It is usually seen as at best a secondary
the consequent alternative and oppositional formations. It factor, which may at most modify other and more decisive his
would be wrong to overlook the importance of works and ideas torical processes. This is not only because it is ordinarily diag
which, while clearly affected by hegemonic limits and pres nosed as superstructure, but also because 'tradition' has been
sures, are at least in part significant breaks beyond them, which commonly understood as a relatively inert, historicized segment
may again in part be neutralized, reduced, or incorporated, but of a social structure: tradition as the surviving past. But this
which in their most active elements nevertheless come through, version of tradition is weak at the very point where the incor
as independent and originaL ' porating sense of tradition is strong: where it is seen, in fact, as
Thus cultural process must not be assumed to be merely an actively shaping force. For tradition is in practice the most
adaptive, extensive, and incorporative. Authentic breaks within evident expression of the dominant and hegemonic pressures
and beyond it, in specific social conditions which can vary from and limits. It is always more than an inert historicized segment;
extreme isolation to pre-revolutionary breakdowns and actual indeed it is the most powerful practical means of incorporation.
revolutionary activity, have often in fact occurred. And we are What we have to see is not just 'a tradition' but a selective
better able to see this, alongside more general recognition of the tradition: an intentionally selective version of a shaping past
insistent pressures and limits of the hegemonic, if we develop and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in
modes of analysis which instead of reducing works to finished the process of social and cultural definition and identification.
products, and activities to fixed positions, are capable of dis It is usually not difficult to show this empirically. Most ver
cerning, in good faith, the finite but significant openness of sions of 'tradition' can be quickly shown to be radically selec
'" many actual initiatives and contributions. The finite but sig tive. From a whole possible area of past and present, in a particu
nificant openness of many works of art. as signifying forms lar culture, certain meanings and practices are selected for
making possible but also requiring persistent and variable sig emphasis and certain other meanings and practices are neg
nifying responses, is then especially relevant. lected or excluded. Yet, within a particular hegemony, and as
one of its decisive processes, this selection is presented and
usually successfully passed off as 'the tradition', 'the significant
116 Marxism and Literature Traditions, Institutions, and Formations 117
past'. What has then to be said about any tradition is that it is in the selective version of 'a living tradition' is always tied, though
this sense an aspect of contempormy social and cultural organi often in complex and hidden ways, to explicit contemporary
zation, in the interest of the dominance of a specific class. It is a pressures and limits. Its practical inclusions and exclusions are
version of the past which is intended to connect with and ratify selectively encouraged or discouraged, often so effectively that
the present. What it offers in practice is a sense of predisposed the deliberate selection is made to verify itself in practice. Yet its
continuity . selective privileges and interests, material in substance but
There are, it is true, weaker senses of 'tradition', in explicit often ideal in form, including complex elements of style and
contrast to 'innovation' and 'the contemporary'. These are often tone and of basic method, can still be recognized, demonstrated,
points of retreat for groups in the society which have been left and broken. This struggle for and against selective traditions is
stranded by some particular hegemonic development. All that is understandably a major part of all contemporary cultural
now left to them is the retrospective affirmation of 'traditional activity.
values'. Or, from an opposite position, 'traditional habits' are It is true that the effective establishment of a selective tradi
isolated, by some current hegemonic development, as elements tion can be said to depend on identifiable institutions. But it is
of the past which have now to be discarded. Much of the overt an underestimate of the process to suppose that it depends on
argument about tradition is conducted between representatives institutions alone. The relations between cultural, political, and
of these two positions. But at a deeper level the hegemonic sense economic institutions are themselves very complex, and the
of tradition is always the most active: a deliberately selective substance of these relations is a direct indication of the character
and co:pnecting process which offers a historical and cultural of the culture in the wider sense. Butitis never only a question of
ratification of a contemporary order. formally identifiable institutions. It is also a question offorma
It is a very powerful process, since it is tied to many practical tions; those effective movements and tendencies, in intellectual
continuities-families, places, institutions, a language-which and artistic life, which have significant and sometimes decisive
are indeed directly experienced. It is also, at any time, a vulnera influence on the active development of a culture, and which
ble process, since it has in practice to discard whole areas of have a variable and often oblique relation to formal institutions.
significance, or reinterpret or dilute them, or convert them into Formal institutions, evidently, have a profound influence on
forms which support or at least do not contradict the really the active social process. What is abstracted in orthodox sociol
important elements of the current hegemony. It is significant ogy as 'socialization' is in practice, in any actual society, a
that much of the most accessible and influential work of the specific kind of incorporation. Its description as 'socialization',
counter-hegemony is historical: the recovery of discarded areas, the universal abstract process on which all human beings can be
or the redress of selective and reductive interpretations. But this said to depend, is a way of avoiding or hiding this specific
in turn has little effect unless the lines to the present, in the content and intention. Any process of socialization of course
actual process of the selective tradition, are clearly and actively includes things that all human beings have to learn, but any
traced. Otherwise any recovery can be simply residual or margi specific process ties this necessary learning to a selected range
nal. It is at the vital points of connection, where a version of the of meanings, values, and practices which, in the very closeness
past is used to ratify the present and to indicate directions for the of their association with necessary learning, constitute the real
future, that a selective tradition is at once powerful and vulnera foundations of the hegemonic. In a family children are cared for
ble. Powerful because it is so skilled in making active selective and taught to care for themselves, but within this necessary
4Iconnections, dismissing those it does not want as 'out of date' or process fundamental and selective attitudes to self, to others, to
'nostalgic', attacking those it cannot incorporate as 'unpre a social order, and to the material world are both consciously
cedented' or 'alien.' Vulnerable because the real record is effec ,and unconsciously taught. Education transmits necessary
tively recoverable, and many of the alternative or opposing knowledge and skills, but always by a particular selection from
practical continuities are still available. Vulnerable also because the whole available range, and with intrinsic attitudes, both to
118 Marxism and Literature Traditions, Institutions, and Formations 119
learning and social relations, which are in practice virtually tions. These are most recognizable as conscious movements and
inextricable. Institutions such as churches are explicitly incor tendencies (literary, artistic, philosophical or scientific) which
porative. Specific communities and specific places of work, can usually be readily discerned after their formative produc
exerting powerful and immediate pressures on the conditions of tions. Often, when we look further, we find that these are articu
living and of making a living, teach, confirm, and in most cases lations of much wider effective formations. which can by no
finally enforce selected meanings, values, and activities. To means be wholly identified with formal institutions, or their
describe the effect of all institutions of these kinds is to arrive at formal meanings and values, and which can sometimes even be
an important but still incomplete understruiding of incorpora positively contrasted with them. This factor is of the greatest
tion. In modern societies we have to add the major communica importance for the understanding of what is habitually
tions systems. These materialize selected news and opinion, and specialized as intellectual and artistic life. In this fundamental
a wide range of selected perceptions and attitudes. relation between the institutions and formations of a culture
Yet it can still not be supposed that the sum of all these there is great historical variability, butitis generally characteris
institutions is an organic hegemony. On the contrary, just tic of developed complex societies that formations, as distinct
because it is not 'socialization' but a specific and complex from institutions, play an increasingly important role.
hegemonic process, it is in practice full of contradictions and of Moreover, since such formations relate, inevitably, to real social
unresolved conflicts. This is why it must not be reduced to the structures, and yet have highly variable and often oblique rela
activities of an 'ideological state apparatus'. Such apparatus tions with formally discernible social institutions, any social
exists, although variably, but the whole process is much wider, and cultural analysis of them requires procedures radically dif
and is in some important respects self-generating. By selection it ferent from those developed for institutions. What is really being
is possible to identify common features in family, school, com analysed, in each case, is a mode of specialized practice.
munity, work, and communications, and these are important. Moreover, within an apparent hegemony, which can be readily
But just because they are specific processes, with variable par described in generalizing ways, there are not only alternative
ticular purposes, and with variable but always effective rela and oppositional formations (some of them, at certain historical
tions with what must in any case, in the short term, be done, the stages, having become or in the process of becoming alternative
practical consequence is as often confusion and conflict be and oppositional institutions) but, within what can be recog
tween what are experienced as different purposes and different nized as the dominant, effectively varying formations which
values, as it is crude incorporation of a theoretical kind. An resist any simple reduction to some generalized hegemonic
effective incorporation is usually in practice achieved; indeed to function..
establish and maintain a class society it must be achieved. But It is.at this point, normally, that many of those in real contact
no mere training or pressure is truly hegemonjc. The true condi with such formations and their work retreat to an .indifferent .
tion of hegemony is effective self-identification with the emphasis on the complexity of cultural activity. Others
hegemonic forms: a specific and internalized 'socialization' altogether deny (even theoretically) the relation of such forma
which is expected to be positive but which, if that is not possi tions and such work to the social process and especially the
ble, will rest on a (resigned) recognition of the inevitable and the material social process. Others again, when the historical reality
necessary. An effective culture, in this sense, is always more of the formations is grasped, render this back to ideal construc
than the sum of its institutions: not only because these can be tions-national traditions, literary and artistic traditions, his
Mlen, in analysis, to derive much of their character from it, but tories of ideas, psychological types, spiritual archetypes-
mainly because it is at the level of a whole culture that the which indeed acknowledge and define formations, often much
crucial interrelations, including confusions and conflicts, are more substantially than the usual generalizing accounts of ex
really negotiated. . plicit social derivation or superstructural function, but only by
This is why, in any analysis, we have also to include forma- radically displacing them from the immediate cultural process.
~
.
J, .
As a result of this displacement, the formations and their work 8. Dominant, Residual, and Emergent
are not seen as the active social and cultural substance that they
quite invariably are. In our own culture, this form of displace
ment, made temporarily or comparatively convincing by the
failures of derivative and superstructural interpretation, is itself. The complexity of a culture is to be found not only in its variable
and quite centrally, hegemonic. processes and their social definitions-traditions, institutions,
and formations- but also in the dynamic interrelations, at every
point in the process, of historically varied and variable ele
ments. In what I have called 'epochal' analysis, a cultural pro
cess is seized as a cultural system, with determinate dominant
features: feudal culture or bourgeois culture or a transition from
one to the other. This emphasis on dominant and definitive
lineaments and features is important and often, in practice,
effective. But it then often happens that its methodology is
preserved for the very different function of historical analysis, in
which a sense of movement within what is ordinarily abstracted
as a system is crucially necessary, especially if it is to connect
with the future as well as with the past. In authentic historical
analysis it is necessary at every point to recognize the complex
interrelations between movements and tendencies both within
and beyond a specific and effective dominance. It is necessary to
examine how these relate to the whole cultural process rather
than only to the selected and abstracted dominant system. Thus
'bourgeois culture' is a significant generalizing description and
hypothesis, expressed within epochal analysis by fundamental
comparisons with 'feudal culture' or 'socialist culture'. How
ever, as a description of cultural process, over four or five cen
turies and in scores of different societies, it requires immediate
historical and internally comparative differentiation. Moreover,
even if this is acknowledged or practically carried out, the
'epochal' definition can exert its pressure as a static type against
which all real cultural process is measured, either to show
'stages' or 'variations' of the type (which is still historical
analysis) or, at its worst, to select supporting and exclude 'mar
ginal' or 'incidental' or 'secondary' evidence.
Such errors are avoidable if, while retaining the epochal
hypothesis, we can find terms which recognize not only 'stages'
• and 'variations' but the internal dynamic relations of any actual
process. We have certainly still to speak of the 'dominant'
and the 'effective', and in these senses of the hegemonic. But
we find that we have also to speak, and indeed with further
122 Marxism and Literature Dominant, Residual, and Emergent 123
differentiation of each, of the 'residual' and the 'emergent', been wholly incorporated as a specific political and cultural
which in any real process, and at any moment in the process, function-marking the limits as well as the methods-of a form
are significant both in themselves and in what they reveal of the of capitalist democracy.
characteristics of the 'dominant'. A residual cultural element is usually at some distance from
By 'residual' t mean something different from the 'archaic', the effective dominant culture, but some part of it, some version
though in practice these are often very difficult to distinguish. of it -and especially if the residue is from some major area of the .
Any culture includes available elements of its past, but their past-will in most cases have had to be incorporated if the
place in the contemporary cultural process is profoundly vari effective dominant culture is to make sense in these areas.
able. I would call the 'archaic' that which is wholly recognized Moreover, at certain points the dominant culture cannot allow
as an element of the past, to be observed, to be examined, or even too much residual experience and practice outside itself, at least
on occasion to be consciously 'revived', in a deliberately without risk. It is in the inco_rporation of the actively residual
specializing way. What I mean by the 'residual' is very different. -by reinterpretation, dilution, projection, discriminating in
The residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the clusion and exclusion-that the work of the selective tradition
past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and is especially evident. This is very notable in the case of verslons
often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective of 'the literary tradition', passing through selective versiorts of
element of the present. Thus certain experiences, meanings, and the character of literature to connecting and incorporated defini
values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in tions of what literature now is and should be. This is one among
terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and prac several crucial areas, since it is in some alternative or even
tised on the basis of the residue-cultural as well as social-of oppositional versions of what literature is (has been) and what
some previous social and cultural institution or formation. It is literary experience (and in one common derivation, other sig
crucial to distinguish this aspect of the residual, which may nificant experience) is and must be, that, against the pressures of
have an alternative or even oppositional relation to the domin incorporation, actively residual meanings and values are sus
ant culture, from that active manifestation of the residual (this tained.
being its distinction from the archaic) which has been wholly or By 'emergent' I mean, first, that new meanings and values,
largely incorporated into the dominant culture. In three charac new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship are
teristic cases in contemporary English culture this distinction continually being created. But it is exceptionally difficult to
can become a precise term of analysis. Thus organized religion distinguish between those which are really elements of some
is predominantly residual, but within this there is a significant new phase of the dominant culture (and in this sense 'species
difference between some practically alternative and opposi specific') and those which are substantially alternative or oppos
tional meanings and values (absolute brotherhood, service to itional to it: emergent in the strict sense, rather than merely
others without reward) and a larger body of incorporated mean novel. Since we are always considering relations within a cul
ings and values (official morality, or the social order of which tural process, definitions of the emergent, as of the residual, can
the other-worldly is a separated neutralizing or ratifying com be made only in relation to a full sense of the dominant. Yet the
ponent). Again, the idea of rural community is predominantly social location of the residual is always easier to understand,
residual, but is in some limited respects alternative or opposi since a large part of it (though not .all) relates to earlier social
tional to urban industrial capitalism, though for the most part it formations and phases of the cultural process, in which certain
isincorporated, as idealization or fantasy, or as an exotic-resi real meanings and values were generated. In the subsequent
dential or escape-leisure function of the dominant order itself. default of a particular phase of a dominant culture there is then a
Again, in monarchy, there is virtually nothing that is actively reaching back to those meanings and values which were created
residual (alternative or oppositional), but, with a heavy and .in actual societies and actual situations in the past, and which
deliberate additional use of the archaic, a residual function has still seem to have significance because they represent areas of
124 Marxism and literature Dominant, Residual, and Emergent 125
human experience, aspiration, and achievement which the that much incorporation looks like recognition, acknowledge- '
dominant culture neglects, undervalues, opposes, represses, or ment, and thus a form of acceptance. In this complex process
even cannot recognize. there is indeed regular confusion between the locally residual
The case of the emergent is radically different. It is true that in (as a form of resistance to incorporation) and the generally
the structure of any actual society, and especially in its class emergent.
structure, there is always a social basis for elements of the Cultural emergence in relation to the emergence and growing ,
cultural process that are alternative or oppositional to the strength of a class is then always of major importance, and
dominant elements. One kind of basis has been valuably always complex. But we have also to see that it is not the only
described in the central body of Marxist theory: the formation of kind of emergence. This recognition is very difficult, theoreti
a new class, the coming to consciousness of a new class, and cally, though the practical evidence is abundant. What has
within this, in actual process, the (often uneven) emergence of really to be said, as a way of defining important elements of both
elements of a new cultural formation. Thus the emergence of the the residual and the emergent, and as a way of understanding
working class as a class was immediately evident (for example, the character of the dominant, is that no mode of production and
in nineteenth-century England) in the cultural process. But therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant
there was extreme unevenness of contribution in different parts culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice,
of the process. The making of new social values and institutions human energy, and human intention. This is not merely a nega
far outpaced the making of strictly cultural institutions, while tive proposition, allowing us to account for significant things
specific cultural contributions, though significant, were less which happen outside or against the dominant mode. On the
vigorous and autonomous than either general or institutional contrary it is a fact about the modes of domination, that they
innovation. A new class is always a source of emergent cultural select from and consequently exclude the full range of human
practice, but while it is still, as a class, relatively subordinate, practice. What they exclude may often be seen as the personal or
this is always likely to be uneven and is certain to be incomplete. the private, or as the natural or even the metaphysicaL Indeed it
For new practice is not, of course, an isolated process. To the is usually in one or other of these terms that the excluded area is
degree that it emerges, and especially to the degree that it is expressed, since what the dominant has effectively seized is
oppositional rather than alternative, the process of attempted indeed the ruling definition of the social.
incorporation significantly begins. This can be seen, in the same It is this seizure that has especially to be resisted. For there is
period in England, in the emergence and. then the effective always, though in varying degrees, practical consciousness, in
incorporation of a radical popular press. It can be seen in the specific relationships, specific skills, specific perceptions, that
emergence and incorporf;ltion of working-class writing, where is unquestionably social and that a specifically dominant social
the fundamental problem of emergence is ,clearly revealed, since order neglects, excludes, represses, or simply fails to recognize.
the basis of incorporation, in such cases, is the effective pre A distinctive and comparative feature of any dominant social
dominance of received literary forms-an incorporation, so to order is how far it reaches into the whole range of practices and
say, which already conditions and limits theemergence. But the experiences in an attempt at incorporation. There can be areas of
development is always uneven. Straight incorporation is most experience it is willing to ignore or dispense with: to assign as
directly attempted against the visibly alternative and opposi private or to specialize as aesthetic or to generalize as natural.
tional class elements: trade unions, working-class political par Moreover, as a social order changes, in terms of its own develop
ties, working-class life styles (as incorporated into 'popular' ing needs, these relations are variable. Thus in advanced
journalism, advertising, and commercial entertainment). The capitalism, because of changes in the social character of labour,
process of emergence, in such conditions, is then a constantly in the social character of communications, and in the social
19peated, an always renewable, move beyond a phase of practi character of decision-making, the dominant culture reaches
cal incorporation: usually made much more difficult by the fact much further than ever before in capitalist society into hitherto
Dominant, Residual, and Emergent 127
'reserved' or 'resigned' areas of experience and practice and as well as the more evident forms of the emergent, the residual,
meaning. The area of effective penetration of the dominant order and the dominant, that we need to explore the concept of struc
into the whole social and cultural process is thus now signific tures of feeling.
antly greater. This in tum makes the problem of emergence
especially acute, and narrows the gap between alternative and
oppositional elements. The alternative, especially in areas that
impinge on significant areas of the dominant, is often seen as
oppositional and, by pressure, often converted into it. Yet even
here there can be spheres of practice and meaning which, almost
by definition from its own limited character, or in its profound
deformation, the dominant culture is unable in any real terms to
recognize. Elements of emergence may indeed be incorporated,
but just as often the incorporated forms are merely facsimiles of
the genuinely emergent cultural practice. Any significant
emergence, beyond or against a dominant mode, is very difficult
under these conditions; in itself and in its repeated confusion
with the facsimiles and novelties of the incorporated phase. Yet,
in our own period as in others, the fact of emergent cultural
practice is still undeniable, and together with the fact of actively
residual practice is a necessary complication of the would-be
dominant culture.
This complex process can still in part be described in class
terms. But there is always other social being and consciousness
which is neglected and excluded: alternative perceptions of
others, in immediate relationships: new perceptions and prac
tices of the material world. In practice these are different in
quality from the developing and articulated interests of a rising
class. The relations between these two sources of the
emergent-the class and the excluded social (human) area-are
by no means necessarily contradictory. At times they can be very
close and on the relations between them much in political prac
tice depends. But culturally and as a matter of theory the areas
can be seen as distinct.
What matters, finally, in understanding emergent culture, as
distinct from both the dominant and the residual, is that it is
never only a matter of immediate practice; indeed it depends
crucially on finding new forms or adaptations of form. Again
and again what we have to observe is in effect a pre-emergence,
active and pressing but not yet fully articulated, rather than the
evident emergence which could be more confidently named. It
iSlto understand more closely this condition of pre-emergence,
Structures of Feeling 129
9. Structures of Feeling fixed, finite, receding forms. The point is especially relevant to
works of art, which really are, in one sense, explicit and finished
forms-actual objects in the visual arts, obj~ctified conventions
and notations (semantic figures) in literature. But it is not only
In most description and analysis, culture and society are expres that, to complete their inherent process, we have to make them
sed in an habitual pasttense. The strongest barrier to the recog present, in specifically active 'readings', It is also that the making
nition of human cultural activity is this immediate and regular of art is never itself in the past tense. It is always a formative
conversion of experience into finished products. What is defen process, within a specific present. At different moments in his
sible as a procedure in conscious history, where on certain tory, and in significantly different ways, the reality and even the
assumptions many actions can be definitively taken as having primacy of such presences and such processes, such diverse and
ended, is habitually projected, not only into the always moving yet specific actualities, have been powerfully asserted and
substance of the past, but into' contemporary life, in which reclaimed, as in practice of course they are all the time lived. But
relationships, institutions and formations in which we are still they are then often asserted as forms themselves, in contention
actively involved are converted, by this procedural mode, into with other known forms: the subjective as distinct from the
formed wholes rather than forming and formative processes. objective; experience from belief; feeling from thought; the
Analysis is then centred on relations between these produced immediate from the general; the personal from the social. The
institutions, formations, and experiences, so that now, as in that undeniable power of two great modem ideological sys
produced past, only the fixed explicit forms exist, and living tems-the 'aesthetic' and the 'psychological'-is, ironically,
presence is always, by definition, receding. ' systematically derived from these senses of instance and pro
When we begin to grasp the dominance of this procedure, to cess, where experience, immediate feeling, and then subjectiv
look into its centre and if possible past its edges, we can under ity and personality are newly generalized and assembled.
stand, in new ways, that separation of the social from the per Against these 'personal' forms, the ideological systems of fixed
sonal which is so powerful and directive a cultural mode. If the social generality, of categorical products, of absolute forma
social is always past, in the sense that it is always formed, we tions, are relatively powerless, within their specific dimension.
have indeed to find other terms for the und~niable experience of Of one dominant strain in Marxism, with its habitual abuse of
the present: not only the tem poral present, the realization of this the 'subjective' and the 'personal', this is especially true.
and this instant, but the specificity of present being, the inalien Yet it is the reduction of the social to fixed forms that remains
ably physical, within which we may indeed discern and the basic error. Marx often said this, and some Marxists quote
acknowledge institutions, formations, positions, but not always him, in fixed ways, before returning to fixed forms. The mistake,
as fixed products, defining products. And then if the social is the as so often, is in taking terms of analysis as terms of substance.
fixed and explicit-the known relationships, institutions, for Thus we speak of a world-view or of a prevailing ideology or of a
mations, positions-all that is present and moving, all that class outlook, often with adequate evidence, but in this regular
escapes or seems to escape from the fixed and the explicit and slide towards a past tense and a fixed fonn suppose, or even do
the known, is grasped and defined as the personal: this, hete, not know that we have to suppose, that these exist and are lived
now, alive, active, 'subjective', specifically and definitively, in singular and developing forms.
There is another related distinction. As thought is described, Perhaps the dead can be reduced to fixed forms, thougli their
in the same habitllal past tense, it is indeed so different, in its surviving records are against it. But the living will not be
explicit and finished forms, from much or even anything that we reduced. at least in the first person; living third persons may be
can presently recognize as thinking, that we set against it more different. All the known complexities. the experienced tensions,
active, more flexible, less singular terms-consciousness, shifts, and uncertainties, the intricate forms of unevenness and
~perience, feeling-and then watch even these drawn towards confusion, are against the terms of the reduction and soon, by
130 Marxism and Literature Structures of Feeling 131
extension, against social analysis itself. Social forms are then consciousness is what is actually being lived, and not only what
often admitted for generalities but debarred, contemptuously, it is thought is being lived. Yet the actual alternative to the
from any possible relevance to this imm~diate and actual sig received and produced fixed forms is not silence: not the
nificance of being. And from the abstractions formed in their absence, the unconscious, which bourgeois culture has mythi
turn by this act of debarring-the 'human imagination', the cized. It is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social
'human psyche', the 'unconscious', with their 'functions' in art and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can
and in myth and in dream-new and displaced forms of social become fully articulate and defined exchange. Its relations with
analysis and categorization, overriding all specific social condi the already articulate and defined are then exceptionally com
tions, are then more or less rapidly developed. plex.
Social forms are evidently more recognizable when they are This process can be directly observed in the history of a
articulate and explicit. We have seen this in the range from language. ill spite of substantial and at some levels decisive
institutions to formations and traditions. We can see it again in continuities in grammar and vocabulary, no generation speaks
the range from dominant systems of belief and education to quite the same language as its predecessors. The difference can
influential systems of explanation and argument. All these have be defined in terms of additions, deletions, and modifications,
effective presence. Many are formed and deliberate, and some but these do not exhaust it. What really changes is something
are quite fixed. But when they have alrbeen identified they are quite general, over a wide range, and the description that often
not a whole inventory even of social consciousness in its sim fits the change best is the literary term 'style'. It is a general
plest sense. For they become social consciousness only when change, rather than a set of deliberate choices, yet choices can be
they are lived, actively, in real relationships, and moreover in deduced from it, as well as effects; Similar kinds of change can
relationships which are more than systematic exchanges be be observed in manners, dress, building, and other similar forms
tween fixed units. illdeed justbecause all consciousness is soCial, of social life. It is an open question-that is to say, a set of
its processes occur not only between but within the relationship specific historical questions-whether in any of these changes
and the related. And this practical consciousness is always more this or that group has been dominant or influential, or whether
than a handling of fixed forms and units. There is frequent they are the result of much more general interaction. For what
tension between the received interpretation and practical we are defining is a particular quality of social experience and
experience. Where this tension can be made direct and explicit, relationship, historically distinct from other particular qual
or where some alternative interpretation is available, we are still ities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period. The
within a dimension of relatively fixed forms. But the tension is relations between this quality and the other specifying historical
as often an unease, a stress, a displacement, a latency: the marks of changing institutions, formations, and beliefs, and
moment of conscious comparison not yet come, often not even beyond these the changing social and economic relations be
coming. And comparison is by no means the only process, tween and within classes, are again an open question: that is to'
though it is powerful and important. There are the experiences' say. a set of specific historical questions. The methodological
to which the fixed forms do not speak at all, which indeed they consequence of such a definition, however, is that the specific
do not recognize. There are important mixed experiences, where qualitative changes are not assumed to be epiphenomena of
the available meaning would convert part to all, or all to part. changed institutions, formations, and beliefs, or merely secon
And even where form and response can be found to agree, dary evidence of changed social and economic relations be
without apparent difficulty, there can be qualifications, reserva tween and within classes. At the same time. they are from the
tions, indications elsewhere: what the agreement seemed to begin:lling taken as social experience, rather than as 'personal'
settle but still sounding elsewhere. Practical consciousness is experience or as the merely superficial or incidental 'small
almost always different from official consciousness, and this is change' of society. They are social in two ways that distmguish
not only a matter of relative freedom or control. For practical
-
them from reduced senses of the social as the institutional and
132 Marxism and Literatur,e Structures of Feeling 133
the formal: first, in that they are changes of presence (while they elements and their connections in a generation or period, and
are being lived this is obvious; when they have been lived it is needing always to be returned, interactively, to such evidence. It
still their substantial characteristic): second, in that although is initially less simple than more formally structured hypotheses
they are emergent or pre-emergent, they do not have to await of the social, btlt it is more adequate to the actual range of
definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert cultural evidence: historically certainly, but even more (where it
palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on matters more) in our present cultural process. The hypothesis
action. has a special relevance to art and literature, where the true social
Such changes can be defined as changes in structures of feel content is in a significant number of cases of this present and
ing. The term is difficult, but 'feeling' is chosen to emphasize a affective kind, which cannot without loss be reduced to belief
distinction from more formal concepts of 'world-view' or 'ideol systems, institutions, or explicit general relationships, though it
ogy'. It is not only that we must go beyond formally held and may include all these as lived and experienced, with or without
systematic beliefs, though of course we have always to include tension, as it also evidently includes elements of social and
them. It is that we are concerned with meanings and values as material (physical or natural) experience which may lie beyond,
they are actively lived and felt, and 'Ole relations between these or be uncovered or imperfectly covered 1:iy, the elsewhere recog
and formal or systematic beliefs are in practice variable (includ nizable systematic elements. The unmistakable presence of
ing historically variable), over a range from formal assent with certain elements in art which are not covered by (though in
private dissent to the more nuanced interaction between one mode they may be reduced to) other formal systems is
selected and interpreted beliefs and acted and justified experi the true source of the specializing categories of 'the aesthetic',
ences. An alternative definition would be structures of experi 'the arts', and 'imaginative literature'. We need, on the one
ence: in one sense the better and wider word, but with the hand, to acknowledge (and welcome) the specificity of these
difficulty that one of its senses has that past tense which is the elements-specific feelings, specific rhythms-and yet to find
most important obstacle to recognition of the area of social ways of recognizing their specific kinds of sociality, thus pte
experience which is being defined. We are talking about charac venting that extractio.n from social experience which is conceiv
teristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically able only when social experience itself has been categorically
affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feel (and at root historically) reduced. We are then not only con
ing against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: cerned with the restoration of social content in its full sense, that
practical cQnsciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter of a generative immediacy. The idea of a structure of feeling can
relating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a be specifically related to the evidence of forms and conven
'structure'; as a set, with specific internal relations, at once tions-semantic figures-which, in art and literature, are often
interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social among the very first indications that such a new structure is
experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recog forming. These relations will be discussed in more detail in
nized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even subsequent chapters, but as a matter of cultural theory this is a
isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its way of defining forms and conventions in art and literature as
emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its inalienable elements of a social material process: not by deriva
specific hierarchies. These are often more recognizable at a later tion from other social forms and pre-forms, but as social forma
stage, when they have been (as often happens) formalized, clas tion of a specific kind which may in tum be seen as the articula
sified, and in many cases built into institutions and formations. tion (often the only fully available articulation) of structures of
By that time the case is different; a new structure of feeling will feeling which as living processes are much more widely experi
usually already have begun to form, in the true social present. enced.
Methodologically, then, a 'structure of feeling' is a cultural For structures of feeling can be defined as social experiences
hr0thesis, actually derived from attempts to understand such in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations
structures of Feeling 135
which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more substantial affiliation, and the tension is at once lived and
immediately available. Not all art, by any means, relates to a articulated in radically new semantic figures. Any of these
contemporary structure of feeling. The effective formations of examples requires detailed substantiation, but what is now in
most actual art relate to already manifest social formations, question, theoretically, is the hypothesis of a mode of social
dominant or residual, and it is primarily to emergent formations formation, explicit and recognizable in specific kinds of art,
(though often in the form of modification or disturbance in older which is distinguishable from other social and semantic forma
forms) that the structure offeeling, as solution, relates. Yet this tions by its articulation of presence.
specific solution is never mere flux. It is.a. structured formation
which, because it is at the very edge of semantic availability, has
many of the characteristics of a pre-formation, until specific
articulations-new semantic figures-are discovered in mater
ial practice: often, as it happens, in relatively isolated ways,
which are only later seen to compose a significant (often in fact
minority) generation; this often, in turn, the generation that
substantially connects to its successors. It is thus a specific
structure of particular linkages, particular emphases and sup
pressions, and, in what Me often its most recognizable forms,
particular deep starting-points and conclusions. Early Victorian
ideology, for example, specified the eXPQsure caused by poverty
or by debt or by illegitimacy as social failure or deviation; the
contemporary structure of feeling, meanwhile, in the new
semantic figures of Dickens, of Emily Bronte, and others,
specified exposure and isolation as a general condition, and
poverty, debt, or illegitimacy as its connecting instances. An
alternative ideology, relating such exposure to the nature of the
social order, was only later generally formed: offering explana
tions but now at a reduced tension: the social explanation fully
admitted, the intensity of experienced fear and shame now dis
persed and generalized.
The example reminds us, finally, of the complex relation of
differentiated structures of feeling to differentiated classes. This
is historically very variable. In England between 1660 and 1690,
for example, two structures of feeling (among the defeated Puri
tans and in the restored Court) can be readily distinguished,
though neither, in its literature and elsewhere, is reducible to
the ideologies of these groups or to theirformal (in fact complex)
class relations. At times the emergence of a new structure of
feeling is best related to the rise of a class (England, 1700-60); at
other times to contradiction, fracture, or mutation within a
class (England, 1780-1830 or 1890-1930), when a formation
..
appears to break away from its class norms, though it retains its
The Sociology of Culture 137
10. The Sociology of Culture

consciousness which correspond to real social situations and
relations.
This neutralizing element has been particularly evident in the
study of 'effects' which has preoccupied empirical bourgeois
Many of the procedures of sociology have been limited or dis sociology. Here the analysis and even the recognition of 'effects'
torted by reduced and reductive concepts of society and the are predetermined by the assumption of norms which are either,
social. This is particularly evident in the sociology of culture. like 'socialization', abstract and mystifying (since it is precisely
Within the radical empiricist tradition, often practically the historical and class variations of 'socialization' which need
associated with Marxism, there has been important work on to be studied) or, as in the studies of effects on politics or on
institutions. The major modern communications systems are 'violence', are themselves 'effects' of a whole active social order,
now so evidently key institutions in advanced capitalist which is not analysed but simply taken as background or as an
societies that they require the same kind of attention, at least empirical 'control'. The complex sociology of actual audiences,
initially, that is given to the institutions of indus.trial production and of the real conditions of reception and response in these
and distribution. Studies of the ownership and control of the highly variable systems (the cinema audience, the newspaper
capitalist press, the capitalist cinema, and capitalist and state readership, and the television audience being highly distinct
capitalist radio and television interlock, historically and social structures); is overlaid by bourgeois norms of 'cultural
theoretically, with wider analyses of capitalist society, capitalist producers' and 'the mass public', with the additional effect that
economy, and the neo-capitalist state. Further, many of the same the complex sociology of these producers, as managers and
institutions require analysis in the context of modern agents within capitalist systems, is itself not developed.
imperialism and neo-colonialism. to which they are crucially A further effect of this kind of concentration on 'mass com
relevant (see Schiller (1969)). munications' is that analysis is not normally extended to institu
Over and above their empirical results, these analyses force tions where these norms appear to be absent: for example, book
theoretical revision of the formula of base and superstrucwre publishing, which is now undergoing a critical phase of
and of the definition of productive forces, in a social area in capitalist reorganization with cultural effects which are often
which large-scale capitalist economic activity and cultural pro not seen as a problem because they are not a 'mass' problem.
duction are now inseparable. Unless this theoretical revision is There has been frequent and often justified complaint against
made, even the best work of the radical and anti-capitalist 'vulgar Marxism', but the increasing penetration of small-scale
empiricists is in the end overlaid or absorbed by the specific capitalist institutions-which had carried the liberal ideology of
theoretical structures of bourgeois cultural sociology. The 'true' cultural production (as distinct from 'mass culture')-by
bourgeois concept of 'mass communications' and the tied radi large-scale international investment and integration with many
cal concept of 'mass manipulation' are alike inadequate to the other forms of production is at once an economic and a cultural
true sociology of these central and varying institutions. Even at fact.
an early stage of analysis these undifferentiated and blocking Cultural effects n~ed not always be indirect. It is in practice
concepts need to be replaced by the motivating and specifying impossible to separate the development of the novel as a literary .
terms of hegemony. What both bourgeois and radical-empiricist form from the highly specific economics of fiction publication.
cultural theory have achieved is the social neutralization of This has been true, with many negative effects, (often isolated
such institutions: the concept of the 'mass' replacing and and projected as simple changes of sensibility or technique)
neutralizing specific class str,uctures; the concept of 'mani since at latest the 1890s, though directly negative effects are now
pulation' (an operative strategy in capitalist advertising and much more evident. Analysis of the sociology of the novel has to
politics) replacing and neutralizing the complex interactions include many factors, but always this directly economic factor
..
of control, selection, incorporation, and the phases of social which, for ideological 'reasons, is ordinarily excluded. The
138 Marxism and Literature The Sociology of Culture 139
insertion of economic determinations into cultural studies is of tion of the sociology of consciousness to the 'sociology ofknow
course the special contribution of Marxism, and there are times ledge'. Within the empirical tradition there has been a further
when its simple insertion is an evident advance. But in the end it reduction to a sociology of the institutions of 'organized know
can never be a simple insertion, since what is really required, ledge', such as education and religion, where a familiar kind of
beyond the limiting formulas, is restoration of the whole social evidence, in consciously organized ideas and relationships, is
material process, and speCifically of cultural production as more available. Within some Marxist tendencies. even, the
social and material. This is where analysis of institutions has to understanding of 'consciousness' as 'knowledge'-perhaps
be extended to analysis of formations. The complex and variable primarily determined by positivism-has been especially weak
sociology of those cultural formations which have no direct or in relation to important kinds of art and literature. For con
exclusive or manifest institutional realization-literary and sciousness is not only knowledge, just as language is not only
intellectual 'movements', for example-is especially important. indication and naming. It is also what is elsewhere, and in this
Gramsci's work on intellectuals and Benjamin's work on context necessarily, specialized as 'imagination'. In cultural
'bohemians' are encouraging models of an experimental Marxist production (and all consciousness is in this sense produced) the
kind. true range is from information and description, or naming and
A Marxist cultural sociology is then recognizable, in its sim indication, to embodiment and performance. While the sociol
plest outlines, in studies of different types of institution and ogy of consciousness is limited to knowledge, all other real
formation in cultural production and distribution, and in the cultural processes are displaced from the social dimension in
linking of these within whole social material processes. Thus which, quite as evidently, they belong.
distribution, for example, is not limited to its technical defini Thus a sociology of drama, already concerned with institu
tion and function within a capitalist market, but connected, tions (theatres and their predecessors and successors), with for
specifically, to modes of production and then interpreted as the mations (groups of dramatists, dramatic and theatrical move
active formation of readerships and audiences, and of the ments), with formed relationships (audiences, including the
characteristic social relations, including economic relations, formation of audiences within theatres and their wider social
within which particular forms of cultural activity are in practice formation), would go on to include forms, not only in the sense
carried out. . of their relations to world-views or structures of feeling but also
So much remains to be done. within this general outline, that in the more active sense of their whole performance (social
it is tempting to rest on it. But we have seen, theoretically, as we methods of speaking, moving, representing, and so on). Indeed
learn again and again to see practically, that the reduction of in many arts, while the manifest social content is evident in one
social relations and social content to these explicit and manifest way in institutions, formations, and communicative relation
general forms is disabling. To these Marxist or other studies of ships, and in another way in forms which relate to specific
institutions and formations it is crucially necessary to add selections of issues, specific kinds of interpretation and of
studies offorms: not by way of illustration but, in many cases, as course specifically reproduced content, an equally important
the most specific point of entry to certain kinds of formation. and sometimes more fundamental social content can be found in
Here another and very different sociological tradition is the basic social means-historically variable and always active
relevant. social forms of language and movement and representation-on
The sociology of consciousness, which was a seminal element which, ultimately, the more manifest social elements can be
in the period of classical sociology, and which led to a pro seen to depend.
grammatic distinction of the 'cultural sciences', has remained Specific studies must often temporarily isolate this or that
influential and is well represented within the Marxist tradition element. But the fundamental principle of a sociology of culture
by Lukacs and Goldmann, and by the Frankfurt School. The is the complex unity of the elements thus listed or separated.
general tendency, within bourgeois sociology, has been a reduc Indeed the most basic task of the sociology of culture is analysis
...
The Sociology of Culture 141
photograph, on the film, on the book, on painting and its repro
of the interrelationships within this complex unity: a task dis duction, and on the 'framed flow' of television, to take only the
tirict from the reduced sociology of institutions, formations, and most immediate examples, is a sociology of culture in this new
communicative relationships and yet, as a sociology, radically dimension, from which no aspect of a process is excluded and in
distinct also from the analysis of isolated forms. As so often, the which the active and formative relationships of a process, right
two dominant tendencies of bourgeois cultural studies-the through to its still active 'products', are specifically and struc
sociology of the reduced but explicit'society' and the aesthetics turally connected: at once a 'sociology' and an 'aesthetics'.
ofthe excluded social remade as a specialized 'art':-,supportand
ratify each other in a significant division of labour. Everything
can be known about a reading public, back to the economics of
printing and publishing and the effects of an educational sys
tem, but what is read by that public is the neutralized abstraction
'books', or at best its catalogued categories. Meanwhile, but
elsewhere, everything can be known about the books, back to
their authors, to traditions and influences, and to periods, but
these are finished ohjects before they go out into the dimension
where 'sociology' is thought to be relevant: the reading public,
the history of publishing. It is this division, now ratified by
confident disciplines, which a sociology of culture has to over
come and supersede, insisting on what is always a whole and
connected social material process. This is of course difficult, but
great energy is now expended, and is often in effect trapped, in
maintaining the abstract divisions and separations. Meanwhile
in cultural practice and among cultural producers, before these
received abstractions get to work, the process is inevitably
known, if often indistinctly and unevenly, as whole and con
nected. .
Specific methods of analysis will vary, in different areas of
cultural activity. But one new method is now emerging, which
can be felt as original in a number of fields. For if we have
learned to see the relation of any cultural work to what we have
learned to call a 'sign-system' (and this has been the important
contribution of cultural semiotics), we can also come to see that
a sign-system is itself a specific structure of social relationships:
'internally', in that the signs depend on, were formed in, rela
tionships; 'externally', in that the system depends on, is formed
in, the institutions which activate it (and which are then at once
cultural and social and economic institutions); integrally, in
that a 'sign-system', properly understood, is at once a specific
cultural technology and a specific form of practical c()nscious
ness: those apparently diverse elements which are in fact
. unified in the material social process. CUrrent work on the

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00

It ftlrthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship,

and education by publishing worldwide in

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi

Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi

New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

Austria Brazil Chile France Greece I. Basic Concepts

1. Communications and literature. 9. Structures of Feeling 128

Any modem approach to a Marxist theory of culture must begin

or of 'relations of production', or of a 'mode of production', can

can be used for predjction, is then a mystification of the specific

The concept of 'overdetemiination' is an attempt to avoid the

isolation of autonomous categories but at the same time to

emphasize relatively autonomous yet of course interactive prac­

tices. In its most positive forms-th~t is, in its recognition of

multiple forces. rather than the isolated forces of modes or

techniques of production, and in its further recognition of these

forces as structured, in particular historical situations, rather

than elements of an ideal totality or, worse, merely adja­

cent-the concept of 'overdetermination' is more useful than

any other as a way of understanding historically lived situations

and the authentic complexities of practice. It is especially useful

as a way of understanding 'contradictions' and the ordinary

version of 'the dialectic', which can so easily be abstracted as

features of a theoretically isolated (determining) situation or

movement, which is then expected to develop according to

certain (determinist) laws. In any whole society, both the rela­

tive autonomy and the relative unevenness of different practices

development, and affect it, in the sense of pre!'isures and limits,

as detemiinants. Yet there are also difficulties in the concept. It

was used by Freud to indicate the structured multiple causation

of a symptom: a crystallization very .similar to the Frankfurt

School's cpncept of a dialectical image (see p.l03). Some traces

of this origIn survive in some of its theoretical uses (e.g. in

Althusser, who introduced it in Marxism but who failed to apply

its mo~t positive elements to his own work on ideology). As with

structure (symptom), which then, ifin complex ways, 'develops'

(forms, holds, breaks down) by the laws of its internal structural

relations. As a form of analysis this is often effective, but in its

isolation of the structure it can shift attention from the real

location of all practice and practical consciousness: 'the prac­

.tical activity ... the practical process of development of men'.

Any categorical objectification of determined or overdetermined

structures is a repetition of the basic error of 'economism' at a

acertain arrogance) all lived. practical and unevenly formed and

114 Marxism and Literature

especially important as sources of this complex evidence.

10. The Sociology of Culture

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emphasize relatively autonomous yet of course interactive prac

than elements of an ideal totality or, worse, merely adja

certain (determinist) laws. In any whole society, both the rela

location of all practice and practical consciousness: 'the prac