ABSTRACT
Radical theory in the last thirty years in Britain can be seen from two different points of view. From one point of view it has provided the most sophisticated development of Marxist cultural theory that the world has ever seen, casting doubt on the very existence of literature as a Marxist category of analysis, drawing upon an extraordinary variety of philosophies to extend the Marxist model, and in the end transcending the limitations of Marxism itself, 1 From another point of view one would say that the last thirty years have seen the final apotheosis and evaporation of Marxism, as it cut loose completely from its economic and even its historical base: literary and cultural theory have offered a fine vantage point to watch this process of phosphorescent decay, 2 and post-structuralist and postmodernist philosophy have provided a rationale for accepting it.
It is in these years that there has been the most thoroughgoing replacement of economic politics by cultural politics, and of a materialist notion — that the world has a brute material existence and can be changed only by physical labour — by an idealist notion — that the world is constructed by discursive, meaning-giving processes which form human subjectivity, and can be changed by changing these processes, and therefore changing human subjectivity. It is in these years that it has been explicitly denied that the actual content of history has either theoretical or political importance; that we have had a movement called 'cultural materialism' where the chief theoretical concern has been to get away from 'the base-superstructure metaphor' (i.e. from materialism); and that a theory of the subject-positions offered by texts has attracted more interest 207than studies of class-relations and economic forces. It is in this period that we have had a replacement of the politics of class by that of ethnicity, gender, etc.; a replacement of putative working-class mass movements by the micro-politics of local opposition-to-power in various forms, and by a putative rainbow alliance of disparate oppositional groups.
It is natural that such a politics should culminate in bold proposals to seize the commanding heights of the English Departments and to make a revolutionary change in the syllabuses. In the new departments of cultural studies or political rhetoric both classical (economistic) Marxism and classic literature will disappear; probably finding their true Hegelian sublation in courses in media studies without significant political content.
