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The Materialist Critique of Culture 85

in their estimation, from the mainstream of Marxist critical discourse. They sought to replace the earlier historical determinist tendencies of Marxism with a reaffirmation of the individual h u m a n responsibility actively to intervene in end- ing the alienation of modern human beings in exploitative social structures and to develop new political and cultural forms which would support the free expres- sion and development of its participants in nonmanipulative environments.

Especially in France, Marxist humanism was a result of attempts to graft cer- tain Marxist economic and political views onto a foundation provided by the de- velopment of Husserl's phenomenology, known as existentialism, the best-known proponent of which was Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). Sartre's significance for materialist critical discourse has been mainly as an example or warning against attempts to ground materialist analysis on an essentially subjectivist and idealist theory of consciousness and freedom. Earlier in his career, Sartre had vehemently opposed dialectical materialism on the grounds that it treated human existence, the essence of which was the radical freedom of individual consciousness to de- termine its own meaning, as if it were a mere cipher or placeholder in history and society. After World War II, however, he seemed to modify his views, holding that material scarcity was the most deadly threat to the concrete realization of h u m a n freedom. He even went so far as to claim both that existentialism was the privi- leged vehicle by which Marxism could be recovered from its deterministic ossifi- cation and that, conversely, Marxism was "the ultimate philosophy of our age." Most readers of Sartre were quick to point out that the "subjectivism" and "radical freedom" on which existentialism was based were logically incompatible with ma- terialist assumptions and that Sartre had ultimately failed to show how they might be squared with one another, Sartre's Marxist humanism was a blind alley for materialist critical discourse, but it undoubtedly played a historical role in warning later critical discourse away from seeking its grounds in any phenomeno- logical notion of subjectivity or consciousness.

Antonio Gramsci: Power, Hegemony, and the Engaged Critic

The writings of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), one of the founders of the Italian Communist party and later a prisoner of the Italian Fascists, provide a crucial link between the earlier materialist views of Marx and Engels, their development into an explicit revolutionary program by Lenin, and the discourse of contemporary cultural studies. Having influenced both Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, two of the latter's prominent spokespersons, Gramsci continues to be cited with regu- larity in the literature of cultural studies. More than any other figure, Gramsci brought the distinctive problems posed by modern culture to the forefront of the agenda of materialist critical discourse.

Gramsci saw the historical events of his time, especially the rise of European fascism, as posing two major problems for Marxist-influenced materialist dis-

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86 The Materialist Critique of Culture

course. First, he was struck by the resilience of the modern state in commanding the allegiance of its populace in the face of severe economic dislocations and crises. What kept the people from revolting against the dominance of the privi- leged classes, when according to classical Marxist theory, all the necessary condi- tions for revolution were present? Second, as a committed communist, he could not help wondering why fascism had been able to defeat its communist resistance in many of the developed countries of Europe. What could be done in order to as- sure that this did not occur again?

Gramsci's attempt to answer the first question involved challenging what he re- garded as the overly simplistic schema that traditional Marxism had employed in describing the relation between the economic base and the political and cultural superstructure. In particular, Gramsci doubted that their relationship was a "one- way street," with economy determining superstructure, and that the latter was a mere reflection of the former, as Marxism-Leninism asserted. Rather, he argued that the relationship between economy on the one hand and culture and politics on the other was that of reciprocity, involving mutual influence. Further, Gramsci held that at the interface of economics and culture stood the continually con- tested question of which groups would exercise power in a given society. Marxism had failed to confront this more complex question of power, which could be an- swered neither solely from the economic nor exclusively from the cultural sphere.

In analyzing the way in which power functioned in the modern state, Gramsci gradually developed elements of a new conceptual framework for materialist dis- course. He first observed that power in modern societies was based on two distin- guishable functions. On the one hand, the state could coerce its members through direct domination, the threat and actual use of physical force, to which it often had to resort especially in times of crisis. However, in a less overt but usually more ef- fective manner, an entire ensemble of cultural formations, including education, the organization of family life, associations in the workplace, religion, and popular culture, worked together to infiltrate the daily private lives of individual members of civil society, producing a texture of beliefs and relationships that guaranteed the allegiance of the individual to the state. This Gratnsci called hegemony, the cul- tural dominance of civil society over the individual even in the absence of the threat of overt force by the state. Employing a vivid military metaphor, Gramsci described hegemony in this way: "The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare. In war it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the outer perimeter; and at the moment of their advance and attack the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defence which was still effective. The same thing happens in politics, during the great economic crises." Of course, this could also serve as a description of the problem faced by the European communist movements in the face of entrenched cultural attitudes that the fascists had proved more effective at exploiting.

Although hegemony, as Gramsci developed the concept, was still an element of the superstructure, it was nevertheless broader than the traditional Marxist con-

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The Materialist Critique of Culture 87

cept of ideology in two respects. First, an ideology, while it has a tendency to ob- scure or conceal itself, can be articulated in fairly conscious terms, while hegem- ony so interpenetrates all dimensions of social and cultural practice that its oper- ation is largely unconscious, definitive of what is at any given time taken to be natural, and consequently quite resistant to any intellectual critical analysis. Sec- ond, the operation of hegemony is such that it can even accommodate conflict between opposite ideological positions (such as the unending polemics between the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States), while preventing such conflict from greatly affecting the everyday lives of individuals.

However, according to Gramsci, the nature of modern society is such that he- gemony can never be absolute. For one thing, various more traditional communi- ties in modern states tend to compete with or disrupt the hegemonic culture. The Pennsylvania Amish, pockets of traditional culture in the American South, and immigrant groups that retain strong ethnic allegiances are examples. For another, new groups continually emerge whose interests are opposed to those of the hegemonic culture and marginalized by it. As a result, there will inevitably be counter hegemonic movements that will resist assimilation into the hegemonic culture, making culture a site of struggle among competing interests and their ex- pressions. Anyone familiar with the current "culture wars" over curricular diver- sity at universities in the United States will understand the practical force of this phenomenon. In fact, it was Gramsci, more than any other thinker, who first as- serted within the materialist tradition the idea that cultural criticism was an es- sential and indispensable element of any broader political or economic struggle and that materialist critique must pay special attention to the operation of he- gemony at the level at which popular culture affects everyday life.

Despite its unconscious and ubiquitous character, hegemony does not come about simply as a result of impersonal historical forces. Rather, Gramsci held that both hegemonic and counterhegemonic movements involved not only sets of cul- tural practices and institutions but specific ways of feeling and thinking about them and seeing how they cohere or fail to cohere. Gramsci used the term intellectual in referring to those who performed the specific social function of formulating and institutionalizing frameworks in which the practices of everyday life could be understood and interpreted. Being an intellectual had little to do with native intelligence and was not an "essentialist" feature of any individual. Rather, in the case of "hegemonic intellectuals," it was a matter of functioning ef- fectively in one of the social roles that supported the prevailing culture; in the case of "counterhegemonic intellectuals," it had to do with the leadership involved in articulating forms of resistance to hegemonic culture.

Gramsci described both hegemonic and counterhegemonic intellectuals within capitalist systems as necessarily organic, that is, concerned with making sense of the full range of cultural phenomena as they appear in everyday practices. The social function of the former is to maintain cultural hegemony by establishing both what is to count as socially valuable knowledge and to certify the self-guaranteeing meth-

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88 The Materialist Critique of Culture

ods by which it can be established. For Gramsci, earlier scholastic religious authori- ties and later academic philosophers and party ideologists preeminently served this function. Today, perhaps, the role is filled by journalists of the mass media, editors of scholarly journals, university department chairs, and members of professional societies. But Gramsci emphasized the particular need for counterhegemonic, or- ganic intellectuals, who would avoid flights into theoretical abstraction and resist professional cooptation, remaining in continuous engagement with the struggle against hegemonic marginalization while articulating the need for new forms of knowledge and experience deemed irrational by hegemonic culture.

In line with this general theory of cultural hegemony, Gramsci was led to con- test the monolithic notion of social classes presupposed by Marxism-Leninism. Since the notion of hegemony implied the possibility of a shifting set of strategic political allegiances among both dominant and marginalized cultural groups, he came to reject the need for cultivating a universal proletarian consciousness un- der strict party control. Instead, he favored a pluralistic development of more lo- cal interests that would recognize the hegemony of capitalist culture as their com- mon opponent and thus would join together in a broadly socialist cause.

Louis Althnsser: Structural Marxism The work of Louis Althusser (1918-1990), a lifelong member of the French Com- munist party and a major figure in the discussions following the French student revolt of 1968, is quite different from that of Gramsci in critical orientation and approach, although it clearly shows the latter's influence. Throughout, his career, Althusser functioned as an agent provocateur, contesting not only humanist vari- ants of Marxism but challenging their emergent poststructuralist critics as well. While many of his views, especially those regarding the interpretation of Marx and the significance of Lenin for materialist critique, remain controversial even within the materialist tradition, several others, especially those presented in his essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1969), have had considerable impact on contemporary critical discourse.

Althusser's general critical orientation, which changed somewhat over time, may be summarized under four general headings.

First, vehemently opposed to the "humanist" tendencies of such existentialists as Sartre and of others who preferred the early, Hegelian-influenced version of Marx, Althusser insisted that only the Marx of Das Kapital deserved serious atten- tion. A self-professed antihumanist, Althusser argued that. Marxism should be re- garded exclusively as a scientific theory, based on Marx's "objective" critique of classical political economy; to link it to any general theory of consciousness or of an autonomous subject would spell its immediate fall into idealism and mystifica- tion. On this point, he cited Lenin as a reliable guide.

Second, instead of seeking an underpinning for Marxism in the "subjectivity" explored by phenomenology and existentialism, Althusser looked toward the

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