ABSTRACT
Cultural materialism There are many valuable accounts of aspects of lesbian and gay culture, but there is no lesbian and/ or gay theory of cultural production as such. The two theories of culture in Western societies are the idealist or formalist, and the materialist. The idealist supposes high culture – culture ‘with a big C’ – to derive from the human spirit, and hence to transcend historical conditions, constituting a reservoir of ultimate truth and wisdom and belonging thereby to all people indi»erently. Cultural materialists argue that the notion of an unchanging human reality inhibits thoughts of progressive change by perceiving oppression and injustice as ‘the human condition’ – tragic but inevitable. They declare that cultures are produced by people in history, and regard high culture with some suspicion, since it is almost certainly promoting particular interests behind the claim of universal relevance. For the terms ‘art’ and ‘literature’ are neither spontaneous nor innocent. They are bestowed by the gatekeepers of the cultural apparatus, and should be understood as tactics for conferring authority upon certain works. Art and literature are involved in the circulation of representations through which cultural norms come to seem plausible, even necessary, and hence in authorising or calling into question the prevailing power arrangements. They do not – cannot – transcend the material forces and relations of production. This does not mean that they have to be conservative. How far high culture is complicit with the dominant ideology, or available to a critique of it, depends on the instance and on what we do with it. Until 1945, it was fairly apparent that big-C culture, though it claimed universality, was in fact predominantly a subculture of the middle and upper classes. After World War II, governments thought they could control the economic cycle of boom and slump, and hence produce a fairer society without having to interfere much with capital. As with access to housing, education, healthcare and social security, in all of which public funding was to redress the most extreme inequities of capitalism, the State would facilitate access to high culture for everyone. However, the end of the postwar boom showed that these goals were not to be so conveniently attained. On the right, it was objected that the economy prospers better when the deprived are left to fend for themselves, that subsidy for the arts had been sheltering a left-liberal interest group, and that the proper way to organise culture, like everything else, is the market. On the left, it was objected that notions of quality and universality had been, in practice, pushing to the margins already subordinated groups – the lower classes, women, racial and sexual minorities.
