Williams & Bérubé

Both of the texts for this week, although written decades apart, move us toward a forging of culture with art. While Williams' text accomplishes this through a series of chapters which take up Marxist concepts in service of a materialist critique, Bérubé's text contextualizes the place of aesthetics within the contemporary academy (English departments in particular) to demonstrate the the rifts between cultural studies and "the beautiful" are created due to a misinterpretation of the role of cultural studies. Essentially, ideology and art/the beautiful, although they have developed varying academic traditions, are quite compatible if we shift our focus to begin to look at what Bérubé calls "cultural forms".

Speaking of forms, I'm interested in the shape that Williams' writing took. Although I appreciated the detailed and often seemingly painstaking tracing of terms, I found it interesting that these terms were written about in ways that relied upon neatly-bound splits in chapter or section (something Williams claimed to theoretically be working against). Anyway, moving on from my grumbling, I specifically appreciated the following passage in the "Ideology" section:

....'thinking' and 'imagining' are from the beginning social processes...and (they) become accessible only through unarguably physical and material ways: in voices, in sounds made by instruments, in penned and printed writing, in arranged pigments on canvas or plaster, in worked marble or stone. To exclude these material social processes from the material social process is the same error as to reduce all material social processes to mere technical means for some other abstracted 'life'. The 'practical process' of the 'development of men' necessarily includes them from the beginning, and as more than some technical means for some quite separate 'thinking' and 'imagining' (62).

For me, this spot in the text was one of the most explicit places that clearly speaks to not only a critique of Marxist aesthetic theory but also affords a critique of the early aesthetic canon which heavily relied upon abstract notions of the aesthetic and beauty as being at odds with everyday process and practice (which Williams argues are a part of one another to begin with). I appreciate the moment, then, when Bérubé makes an argument for breathing as having an aesthetics and this section begins to address my concerns at the beginning of the semester a to how we see the mundane as being divorced from the aesthetic.

What was most surprising to me, though, given Williams' critique, is that it seems as though Bérubé is writing about a split within academia between cultural studies and aesthetics that, at its root, stems from the issue that Williams is first writing about in the late 70s. That is to say, it is interesting how the social and cultural trajectories of the two fields Bérubé writes about often see themselves as incompatible despite the work that has insisted upon a connection between the two.

Anyway, in terms of our class discussion tonight, I'd like to talk more about Bérubé's use of the terms instrumentality/noninstrumentality of art. I feel like these are key to the main arguments in the texts today as well as key concepts for addressing how the concepts of art (materiality) and the social and cultural are being explicitly brought back together.