Cultural Materialism On Raymond Williams - Monoskop

News from Somewhere 83
mation, it might not be too much to say that Williams's "invention"
of cultural materialism is one instance of his endeavor to think
Marxism in all its discursive, interrogative power without falling
prey to the fascism of the patronym, the onanism of the One, and
the fetishism of the Same. Though one might think—in fact, many
"good" Marxists have thought—that the "desire for revolution" and
the "good society" ("understood as the advent of communism") will
free us from the "imaginary figures that haunt democracy," there is
no escape, as the work of Claude Lefort continually reminds us,
from (pre-)History: "Whoever dreams of an abolition of power secretly
cherishes the reference to the One and the reference to the
Same." 24 To continue to dream such a dream is to invite the kind of
historical nightmares with which we are only too familiar.
Hegemony as (Social) Complexity: Emotion, Experience,
and "Structure of Feeling"
/ learned the experience of incorporation, I learned the reality of
hegemony, I learned the saturating power of the structures of feeling
of a given society, as much from my own mind and my own experience
as from observing the lives of others. All through our lives, if we
make the effort, we uncover layers of this kind of alien formation in
ourselves, and deep in ourselves.
—Raymond Williams, "You're a Marxist, Aren't You?"
/ have been pulled all my life . . . between simplicity and complexity,
and I can still feel the pull both ways. But every argument of experience
and of history now makes my decision—and what I hope will be
a general decision—clear. It is only in very complex ways, and by
moving confidently towards very complex societies, that we can defeat
imperialism and capitalism and begin that construction of
many socialisms which will liberate and draw upon our real and
now threatened energies.
—Raymond Williams, "Two Roads to Change,"
Politics and Letters (1979)
For all their specificity (and Murphy and Eagleton are admirably
specific about, respectively, the institutionalization of English studies
and the necessity of thinking the asymmetricality of social relations),
both Murphy's account of the determinations of cultural materialism
and Eagleton's countercritique of Williams's revision of the