It is no surprise that Williams engages in more detail with Lukács than with the other thinkers discussed in this book because Williams and Lukács were both not just general critical theorists, but also literary critics, for whom aesthetics was very important. Williams’ reading of literature is indeed considerably diferent from Lukács often socialist-realist position. But for example also Adorno strongly disagreed with Lukács’ theory of art, as I discuss in detail in section 3.3 (chapter 3) of this book. Lukács’ oeuvre is quite heterogeneous and therefore involves manifold, often contradictory strands of theory. His concept of reification had a positive influence on all Frankfurt School thinkers. Therefore Lukács’ (1923/1971) History and Class Consciousness is often seen as one of the Frankfurt School’s intellectual starting points. It is ‘the founding text of the entire tradition of Western Hegelian Marxism’ (Žižek 2000, 152)
In Marxism and Literature, Williams discusses various concepts that Marxist theories have used for conceptualising the relationship of the economy and culture: determination, reflection, reproduction, mediation, and homology. He argues that these concepts all assume a relationship between the economy and culture that to a varying degree is shaped by causal determination or mutual causality. But all of them would share the assumption of ‘the separation of “culture” from material social life’ (Williams 1977, 19) that Williams (1977, 59) considers to be ‘idealist’. In Williams’ view, the problem of these approaches is not that they are too economistic and materialist, but quite on the contrary that they are not ‘materialist enough’ (Williams 1977, 92). For Williams, culture is not a superstructure independent from an economic base, but rather culture understood as ‘language, ideas, values, beliefs, stories, discourses and so on’ is for him ‘itself material’ (McGuigan and Moran 2014, 176).
Williams (1977) criticises the ‘idealist separation of “ideas” and “material reality”’ (59). The reflex against ‘idealist dualism’ would often be a ‘mechanical materialism’ that ‘leads directly to simple reductionism: “consciousness” and “its” products can be nothing but “reflections” of what has already occurred in the material social process’ (61). But consciousness and its products would always be ‘parts of the material social process itself’(61).
The basic insight of Williams’ Cultural Materialism is that the economy and culture are identical and non-identical at the same time (Fuchs 2015a, chapters 2 and 3). Culture is part of the economy and at the same time goes beyond it. There is an economy that produces culture, but neither can we reduce the economy to culture nor culture to the economy. Williams’ approach is a dialectical Cultural Materialism.
Williams considered the Frankfurt School’s focus on mediation as too dualist and not dialectical and not materialist enough. But his knowledge of the Frankfurt School’s works was certainly limited and for certain reasons had to remain limited. I argue in this book that there are certain works in the Frankfurt School tradition that, just like Williams, take a dialectical cultural materialist position on the question of how the economy and culture as well as work and communication are related to each other. I focus in this respect especially on Georg
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Critical Theory of Communication