레이먼드 윌리엄스의 비평이론과 문화유물론

Raymond Williams" Critical Theory and Cultural Materialism

  The purpose of this study is to discuss Raymond Williams" critical achievements and theoretical assumptions by focusing on the conception of "cultural materialism‘. Williams, who has influenced many with his historical and cultural criticism, investigates crucial areas of modern culture in the promotion of capitalist ideology.   With the publication of Culture and Society, Williams changed the image of Marxist literary criticism from simplistic notions of culture as economically determined and rigid demands for political orthodoxy to a subtle and complex understanding of all writers and all writing as embedded in specific, concrete relations, all writing as responses to real situations. His critical works have continued to demonstrate the ways in which Marxist understanding of social practice, combined with sensitivity to the significance and meaning of literature and culture, can enrich our awareness of culture and society. He seeks always to convince us of the power of social and economic practices and institutions, and of the significant function and effects of cultural practice within the larger social context. In his influential essay "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" in Problems in Materialism and Culture (1973), for example, Williams is grappling with the central issue for Marxist theory of the determination of culture by human social existence. He refutes the vulgar Marxist economic determinism in which culture is seen as some simple, direct "reflection" of economic forces. He broke with an older Marxism by positing the potential productive effect of cultural developments on dimensions of the economic "base" that was previously thought to dictate all aspects of culture.   Williams embarked on a radical theoretical construction of the whole domain of social meaning: culture as "a whole way of life". This perspective was developed in particular studies of culture. Williams"s critical project is always historical and materialist; that is, referring to "cultural materialism." According to his critical assumption, Williams insisted that "culture is ordinary" and forced the first important shift into a new way of thinking about the symbolic dimensions of our lives. Thus, Williams" culture is wrestled from that privileged space of artistic production and specialist knowledge, into the lived experience of the everyday.