The Theory of Cultural Fields

Abstract

One of the fundamental theoretical problems of Marxist theories of culture lay in their failure to grasp the specifics of cultural production — the principle of autonomy and the dependent relations with other elements of the social context. Williams’s cultural materialism, while addressing these issues, fails to elucidate those specific components which distinguish culture from other elements of the social formation. The principle of the autonomy of culture is made problematic through collapsing culture into the social, ‘a way of life’. There is, too, the tendency to reduce texts either to an abstractly rendered notion of social context (and the assumption that social background translates itself unproblematically into the foreground) or to the expression of particular cultural groups. And while acknowledging that struggle and conflict play a role in the formation of culture, Williams fails to specify precisely the nature of such forces. Thus, while claiming its basis in humanism, cultural materialism significantly raises no question of the making of culture, of who, how and why. The historical or genetic is subsumed under terms such as communication, while hegemony is drained of all living historical forces.