Despite the fact that the great promise of Marx’s historical-materialist analysis lies in his claim that his theory can grasp society as a whole, with all its layers and complexity, it’s a widely recognized fact that the writings he left behind lack an adequate exploration of the realm of “culture.” Since “culture,” both in the sense of artistic and literary production, and in its broader sense of what the Marxist critic and theorist Raymond Williams has called a given epoch or society’s “structure of feeling,” is the area of human life where we take “consciousness” to express itself most directly, this poses a serious problem for a theory that purports to ground so-called “consciousness” in concrete historical or material conditions (Buchanan 454).
Nevertheless, the powerful method of critical social and historical analysis laid out in The German Ideology, and embodied in its most masterful and complete expression, Das Kapital, has provided generations of subsequent thinkers with the basic tools for their own attempts to develop a Marxist cultural theory. Moreover, the moments in The German Ideology where Marx deals with the subjects of culture, consciousness, and language most directly are, though brief, both insightful and highly suggestive.
However, the elliptical nature of these comments has also given rise to a variety of misreadings of Marx’s analysis of the role of culture and consciousness in human life, the most famous of which is expressed in the discourse of “base and superstructure.” As Raymond Williams has pointed out, this metaphor, which, significantly, never actually appears in Marx’s writings, implies a more or less fixed or static “base” of “material relations” with similarly fixed, mechanistic relationship to the “superstructure” of culture. By subordinating consciousness to practice, this view also implicitly reproduces precisely the quasi-metaphysical separation of these two realms of human life that Marx strenuously critiques both in The German Ideology and throughout his work (Williams 75-78).
However, Williams, along with many other Marxist theorists, recognizes that this down-grading of culture and consciousness to second-order phenomena, so to speak, has its roots in certain moments of imprecision within Marx’s work itself. Scholars Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank note that, in his 1845-1846 manuscripts, Marx appears to, rather derisively, deny any role for the “political and religious nonsense” of ideology in determining human history: “[Marx and Engels] wrote about a “materialistic coherence” (materialistischer Zusammenhang) between human beings, which presents a “history.” Finally, they argued that this “materialistic coherence” exists without any kind of “political and religious nonsense” (168). But Carver and Blank ultimately concur with the scholar Michael Koltan when he writes, “Is it even possible to produce without consciousness, could there be any development of needs without consciousness, can humans live together without having a notion of it? Of course not!” (65-6).
Marx and Engels’ derision is directed not at consciousness as a whole, but at the kind of idealist ideology that is the target of their critique throughout The German Ideology. It is a rejection, in the words of the scholar Ernie Thompson, of the notion of “knowledge of consciousness and its products apart from the material conditions that produce them,” which “leads only to abstract and speculative illusions about social relations” (186).
At the prompting of Marx himself, the more nuanced, generative Marxist theories of culture and consciousness take as their point of departure a materialist analysis of language itself. In one of his most evocative passages on the subject, Marx writes in The German Ideology:
Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; for language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men (158).
As this passage demonstrates, consciousness itself, in its most basic form as language and thought, is constituted in the process of “intercourse with other men” that is a fundamental element of the “productive forces” Marx analyzes, not a simple outgrowth of them. Just as much as their economic interdependence, the dependence of consciousness on language, which is inconceivable outside the context of interrelations between people, is central to Marx’s theory of humans as essentially social beings who produce themselves collectively in and through their activity. Extended Marxist investigation of language itself, in its material, historical aspects is still, as has Williams noted, as yet relatively underdeveloped, despite the groundbreaking work of scholars such as V.N. Volosinov in his Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. However, it remains one of the most exciting avenues of inquiry made available by the brilliant, though incomplete, body of work Karl Marx left behind (Williams 75).
