ABSTRACT
The most interesting aspect of studying culture is the most difficult to achieve: a “felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place and time: a sense of the ways in which the particular activities combined into a way of thinking and living.” Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism, which never departed from the Marxist tradition, is partially responsible for the drift of cultural studies away from class analysis. Williams, more than any other Marxist theorist, has a sense of the contradictory legacy of Karl Marx. The relationship between cultural texts and social reality is always mediated by processes and structures of signification. The idea that cultural forms serve to reconcile contradictions is a classic Levi-Straussian insight. The structuralist turn sees culture as the categories and frameworks in which a society classifies its conditions of existence, especially the relations between the human and natural worlds.
