Analysis of the material basis of society, culture, economics, etc., and the resulting ideologies, state forms, cultural forms, etc. that result, with a particular interest in how differentials of power (social, economic, cultural) affect individuals.  

The primary period of focus for materialistic analysis is modernity, 

• generally defined as emerging during the Enlightenment—beginning in the 1600s and continuing today. One singular feature of modernity is the belief in positive progress of society towards better states, achieved through economic and social reform. Another is the centrality of the  individual, who is understood to be free-willed and self-determining, and hence sovereign. Individuals choose their social relations, forms of governance, etc., by freely giving their informed/rational consent

Materialist theories often critique this view of the individual as ideologically based.

Cultural Materialism focuses particularly on the role of culture productions in maintaining (or contesting) power.

Most forms of materialistic critiques 

are interested in 

promoting social change; 

thus, the analysis of social relations is 

intended to reveal and address 

social, cultural, economic injustices. 

Karl Marx & Frederick Engels

Base & Superstructure

• Intended as a metaphor for defining the relationship between the material foundations of a society and the resulting social forms. 

• The base is the material foundation of an economic system and of social relations—the “mode of production”: how production is organized, how labor is harnessed 

• Superstructure refers to the social organizations (classes, state, governance theories, religions, moral systems, art, science) and social consciousnesses that emerge in relation to the base. 

Division of Labor

bourgeoisie                  the capitalist class

proletariat                    the working class

• The Proletariat takes the raw materials provided by the capitalist and produces through labor a product or commodity. The commidity has a value that exceeds the value of the raw materials—surplus value; laborer is paid in terms of “reproduction”—the basis for seeing that the laborer’s needs are met in order to ensure the laborer can return to work. 

• The capitalist in turns sells the commodity for a profit that will exceed the costs of production (raw materials plus wages). Though that surplus was created by the laborer, the capitalist owns the surplus. 

Alienation of Labor

• consumers divided from the producers (labor); producers often work on only part of the process of commodity production (particularly in factories); what one produces is not what one labors for—the laborer does not “own” the surplus he/she produces; the worker is also reduced to a commodity—labor—that is “sold” to the capitalist for a price. 

Use v. Exchange Value

• Use value indicates the value of the commodity’s intrinsic usefulness; labor has a use value, too 

• Exchange value indicates the market value of the commodity; exchange is the basis of all capitalist social relations; labor, too, has an exchange value (I give you labor, you give me X) 

• The greater the distance between use and exchange value, the more the product has been fetishized (commodity fetish), abstracted—symbols of status, power, wealth. Art has a high tendency of becoming a commodity fetish.

Dialectic

• The process of historical transformation, derived from Hegel; thesis & antithesis clash to produce synthesis; thus the capitalists and the proletariat struggle, history being the result

Ideology

• The “science of ideas,” coined by Destutt de Tracy, 1796; those who empirically study ideas where called ideologists. An ideology reflects the ways that a society things about itself—what can be believed, what can be done, how it can be done.  

• There can be multiple ideologies functioning in any given society (religious, political, economic, etc.), but most will be organized around an overarching ideology. Ideologies ultimately determine how individuals think about, understand, conceptualize “reality” by providing the assumptions and frameworks for understanding 

• The political ideas of the dominant socio-economic class (particularly in terms of the bourgeoisie) are used to justify the structure of the economic base

• Proletariats suffer from false consciousnesses (or slave mentality) because they have accepted the ideologies of the ruling class—and hence the ruling class’ dominance & power—as true and natural 

Antonio Gramsci

Hegemony

• dominance by a group, nation-state, culture, etc. Gramsci was particularly interested in how the capitalists established and maintained hegemony over the working class

Ideologies often reflect dominant class interests. Hegemony is most effectively maintained when the dominant class’s economic and cultural ideologies are perceived as “common sense,” “natural” by the non-dominant class. The non-dominant class then gives consent to the social order created by the dominant class, believing they have exercised autonomy in choosing and creating a social order when in fact they have not. The ideological basis of hegemony is thus invisible

Gramsci understood hegemony to be changeable—thus imagined ways in which the working classes could achieve hegemony.

Louis Althusser

Althusser, Louis (1971). "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses". Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays. pp. 121–176. ISBN 0-902308-89-0. Translated from the French by Ben Brewster.

Ideology

Big-I Ideology is structural—a form that is transhistorical, transtemporal; its content can vary across time, culture, etc. Ideology works unconsciously on the individual to produce an understanding of “reality”...borrowing from Jacques Lacan’s concept of the imaginary: “a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Ideology and the State Apparatus)

We only know the “real” through the imaginary, the ideologies we have taken on; these imaginary representations mediate our relations to the real

The big question: How are individual subjects constituted by ideology? How do individual subjects constitute themselves through ideology?

Repressive State Apparatus (Gramsci’s “The State”)

the coercive means for creating ideological conformity (coercive means of maintaining hegemony)—the law, courts, police, military

Ideological State Apparatus (Gramsci’s “Civil Society,” Culture): non-coercive means for creating ideological conformity (noncoercive means of maintaining hegemony)—public and private socio-cultural/economic institutions (public schools, media, organized religions, family structures). “Literary” Texts can often function as an ISA

Interpellation the process whereby ideology constitutes the individual as a social subject with an “identity” determined by that ideology; RSAs and ISAs interpellate—or “hail”—the individual. The individual answers the “hail” (or call—“Hey, you there!”) and thus is said to conform the self to the social identity offered by the ideology. That is, the individual “recognizes” the self as defined by ideology. 

The Absolute Subject is the model of identity presented by the ideology; the individual is presented with the model and “subjects” the self to it, internalizes this model as being “true,” “natural.”  Thus the ideology maintains hegemony.

New Historicism

A.k.a. post-structuralist cultural studies; a form of historical-based criticism, strategies for reading and interpreting texts. 

Heavily influenced by concepts of social construction: the self, identity as a social construct rather than an essential (naturally existing), self-determining agent

History is understood to be socially constructed, rather than merely objective,  factual, and reflective of a totality of a society’s past; it is, then, a story-telling text like any other text. Examining how texts are constructed reveals relations of power, how knowledges (of a past, of a person) are created, deployed, used, etc.

History is not simply the background context of a literary text; it is a text.

Kinds of Literary Questions (for New Historicism):

·         How is history within a text narrated, produced as narrative?

·         To what ends is the history narrated?

·         Point of view from which the text is narrated

·         Author’s social position, motivations, influences

·         Rhetorical devices, discourses used to construct a history

·         Audience—what is the audience supposed to understand? Why?

·         What kinds of knowledges are produced by these narratives (scientific, religious, political, ethnographic, geographical, social)? What ends do these knowledges serve?

Michel Foucault

Intense interest in how the subject is socially constructed—the process of subjectification and the discourses that are used to construct social subjects. How societies/cultures produce, organize, distribute knowledge and power