Cultural Materialism

Cultural Materialism
Cultural

Materialism was first used in a book titled Political

Shakespeare by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield,

published in 1985.
It

emphasizes the importance of history as a shaping force

of literary texts, and the importance of literary texts in

shaping history.
It

is a politicised form of historiography: the study of

historical material (including literature) within the politicised

framework, including the present which those literary texts
have in some way helped to shape.

Raymond Williams
The

term cultural materialism consists of two terms that can

be further defined.
When

defining the term culture, it is essential we refer to

Raymond Williams, whose ideas and contributions were the

source for cultural materialist thought.
Raymond

Williams was a British left-wing thinker, who was

critical of the liberal humanist approach to literature and

culture.
For

him, literature was not the highest expression of human

nature, but, rather, was a changing social practice which

produced language in a specialised, seemingly privileged way.

Raymond Williams
He

says: The ways in which we can draw on

other experience are more various than

literature alone. For experience that is
formally recorded we go, not only to the rich
source of literature, but also to history,
building, painting, music, philosophy, theology,
political and social theory, the physical and
natural sciences, anthropology, and indeed
the whole body of learning.

Raymond Williams
Although

Williams recognised that culture referred to

intellectual development and to the arts in general, in his own

practice it tended to have the more anthropological sense of the
way of life of a people.
It

involved their collective practices, beliefs, social customs,

political values and forms of expression, and is akin to the

cultural system which new historicists took as their project of
study.
A

cultural materialist study examines how culture was produced

technologically, practically and ideologically.

Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams
Williams

then sees literature not as the highest

form of human expression but as one of many

forms of expression, and as part of a system of
culture which is constantly shifting, rather than
a self-perpetuating great tradition.
He

assigns responsibility for shifts and changes

in literature not to the insight or wisdom of an

individual genius but to shifting economic,
political, social and cultural conditions in general.

Raymond Williams
Williams

invented the term structures of feeling

which are concerned with meanings and values as

they are lived and felt.
These
They

are often antagonistic to dominant ideologies.

are found in literature and oppose the status

quo (values in Dickens represent human structures

of feeling that are at variance with Victorian
commercial and materialist values).

Materialism
Materialism,

the second term in cultural involves emphasising

the practical and concrete, such as labour, physical life, and

human practice as opposed to emphasising ideas, mental life,
and human culture. It examines how cultural forms are used
and deployed in everyday human practice.
Materialists

accuse humanist critics of essentialism, which

roughly means the mode of thought which assumes the prior

essence or existence of an unchanging, knowable human
nature.

Cultural Materialism

In the forward to Political Shakespeare, Dollimore and Sinfield set out the
key principles of cultural materialism:
Our belief is that a combination of historical context, theoretical
method, political commitment and textual analysis offers the strongest
challenge and has already contributed substantial work. Historical context
undermines the transcendent significance traditionally accorded to the
literary text and allows us to recover its histories; theoretical method
detaches the text from immanent criticism which seeks only to reproduce
it in its own terms; socialist and feminist commitment confronts the
conservative categories in which most criticism has hitherto been
conducted; textual analysis locates the critique of traditional approaches
where it cannot be ignored. We call this cultural materialism.

Cultural Materialism

Historical Context: transcendence means timelessness. The

text is allowed to recover its histories which would involve
relating the plays to various issues and phenomena such as
enclosures and the oppression of the rural poor, state
power and the resistance to it witchcraft, the challenge
and containment of the carnivalesque.

Theoretical method: break with liberal humanism and

absorbing the lessons of structuralism and post-structuralism.

Political commitment: influence of Marxism and feminism.

Textual Analysis: practicing theory on canonical texts which

are prominent national and cultural icons.

Cultural Materialism
Cultural

materialists are committed to interpretations and investigations which

have overt political ends in the contemporary world.

They

are interested in history as a way of dislodging conservative ideologies

of the present.
Dollimore

gives a good example of how this is done through his explanation of

feminist cultural materialism.

Cultural

materialism does not seek to dislodge a patriarchal Shakespeare in

order to impose a feminist Shakespeare.

Rather,

cultural materialists are engaged in a struggle to contest the idea that

Shakespeares texts have one, and only one, meaning and significance, and they
do this by producing through interpretation and historical investigation a
multiplicity of alternative Shakespeares.

Cultural Materialism
The

purpose of this project is dual:

1. it emphasises the fact that texts can be mobilised and

used for political and ideological ends, and that the
traditional views of Shakespeare are in themselves
ideological constructs.
2. it seeks to contest the conservative adoptions of
Shakespeares texts by demonstrating ways in which
Shakespeare can be appropriated subversively in the
present by more radical subcultures and oppositional groups.

Cultural Materialism
Cultural

materialism takes the form of an investigation of

the material circumstances in which conservative

ideologies function and are perpetuated.
One

of Sinfields essays in Political Shakespeare explores

the role of Shakespeare in contemporary British

education, and details the ideological functions of
teaching Shakespeare to secondary-level students, and
indeed researching and studying Shakespeare at
university level.

Sinfield

Cultural Materialism

says: In education Shakespeare has been

made to speak mainly for the right; that is the

tendency which this book seeks to alter. His
construction in English culture generally as the great
National Poet whose plays embody universal truths
has led to his being used to underwrite established
practices in literary criticism and, consequently, in
examinations. For literary criticism, Shakespeare is
the keystone which guarantees the ultimate stability
and rightness of the category Literature.

Cultural Materialism
Sinfield

argues that Shakespeares plays are not deeply expressive of

English cultural identity per se, not hugely popular, not bestsellers.
They are not easily read or easily equated with modern life in England.
It

is therefore difficult to see the reason for insisting that

Shakespeare ought to be a compulsory part of English education.

Sinfield

argues that what is at stake in this argument are the values

and norms which the education system is geared towards producing

in the hearts and minds of young English people, and indeed which
the education system uses to test the suitability of students for
mental or manual labour.

Cultural Materialism
By

systematising interpretation, English education

eradicates difference and diversity, allowing

examiners to discriminate between those who can
reproduce the ideological assumptions and values
offered to them, and therefore suitable for positions
of intellectual and moral responsibility, and those
who cannot, more likely to fail the system with all the
attendant implications which failure carries.

Cultural Materialism

Shakespeare in the Present:

hologram for a credit card

Charles Dickens now:

10 note

Some important characteristics

of cultural materialism
1.

The focus on the possibilities of subversion

(dissidence)

2.

The bifocal perspective on both the past and the

present.

3.

The belief that both the objects of their study and

the methods by which they study are forms of
dissidence.

4.

The view that all forms of representation are

engaged in political struggle.

Cultural Materialism

1.
1.

They tend to concentrate on the

New Historicism
1.

constraining circumstances in which

interventions whereby men and women

men and women make their own

make their own history: dissidence.

history: power. (political pessimism)

(political optimism)
2.
2.

The co-texts they use may be programme

They tend to focus on the

2.

The co-texts used here are

notes for a current Royal Shakespeare

documents contemporary with

Company production, quotation of

Shakespeare, thus situating the

Shakespeare by a Gulf War pilotetc,

thus situating the literary text within the
political situation of our own time.

literary text in the political

situation of its own day.

How is Cultural Materialism different from

?New Historicism