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Tracy Kulba, Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Cheryl Suzack
Concrete Matters: Feminist Cultural Materialism
Historically rooted in 1970s socialist feminism, feminist cultural materialism
straddles the social sciences and humanities as a field of inquiry and methodology
committed to transformative, emancipatory politics. Initially elaborated as a
feminist encounter with Marxist theory, feminist materialism was theorized in the
late 1970s by feminists who attempted to explain women s specific forms of
oppression within capitalist and patriarchal structures. Early practitioners
interrogated contemporary Marxism for its lack of attention to women s work and
unpaid labour (Dalla Costa and James 1972), and embraced the term  materialist
feminism on the grounds that Marxism needed to be reconfigured before it could
be productively realigned with feminist concerns (Delphy 1975). As the field
developed, practitioners increasingly worked to interrogate the implicit white,
middle-class, heterosexual subject at the heart of much mainstream feminist
organizing (Bunch 1975; Carby 1982; Joseph 1981), to think across global borders
in order to recognize women s specific positioning in patriarchal and capitalist
systems (Alexander and Mohanty 1997), and to theorize the complexities of  global
sisterhood (Mohanty 2003).1 At stake, then, was a process of realignment that
involved not just a transformation of Marxist notions of value and work, productive
and unproductive labour, but also a transformation of whom feminism would
speak for, what forms of knowledge would be valued, and how those knowledges
would be produced. Feminists called for, as noted by Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie
Wolpe,  a transformation of traditional institutionalized modes of acquiring
knowledge (1978: 2). In these terms, feminist materialism was a project that
sought to theorize the systemic links between capitalism and patriarchy within
historically specific contexts, to interrogate the implicit subject of feminist
organizing, and to revalue collective organizing as a social practice intricately
connected with broader forms of social organization.
Significantly, in the same moment that Christine Delphy theorized  materialist
feminism to call for a transformation of existing Marxist paradigms, Raymond
Williams coined the term  cultural materialism as an extension of his long
engagement with Marxist cultural theory (Williams 1977: 5). Williams s intervention
was twofold. Against Marxist paradigms that posited culture as a reflection of class
relations or a tool of class oppression, Williams theorized culture as an active site
of hegemonic production, reinscription and resistance.2 Embracing Gramsci s work
on hegemony, Williams built on the key premises that culture is produced,
distributed and interpreted within specific conditions and that cultural texts are
sites of contested meaning. Simultaneously, to counter a dominant tradition of
Leavisite New Criticism that cultivated distinctions between high and low culture
and that elaborated the text as an aesthetically complex but apolitical object, Williams
borrowed from anthropological models of culture to posit culture as a whole way
of life in which signification functioned as a  practical material activity:
[Signification] is not, as formalism would make it, and as the idealist theory of
expression had from the beginning assumed, an operation of and within
 consciousness, which then becomes a state or a process separated, a priori, from
social material activity. It is, on the contrary, at once a distinctive material
process the making of signs and, in the central quality of its distinctiveness as
practical consciousness, is involved from the beginning in all other human social
and material activity. (Williams 1977: 38)3
In Williams s model, signification was a material practice and culture was
contradictory and contestatory: a complex of residual, hegemonic and emergent
institutions, organizations and ways of thinking informed by socio-historic
specificities and aesthetic traditions. With its insistence on the worldiness, historicity
and socio-economic relevance of the text, cultural materialism resonated as part of
a broader field of cultural studies and participated in the  rediscovery of ideology
identified by Stuart Hall as a series of intellectual developments in which meaning
20
and signification were theorized as social practices. Like Williams, Hall recognized
language as  the medium in which specific meanings are produced (Hall 1982:
1050), and he elaborated the embedded complexity of signification as a non-neutral
force in society:
The signification of events is part of what has to be struggled over, for it is the
means by which consent for particular outcomes can be effectively mobilized.
Ideology, according to this perspective, has not only a  material force, to use an
old expression real because it is  real in its effects. It has also become a site of
struggle (between competing definitions) and a stake a prize to be won in the
conduct of particular struggles. (1052)
Feminist cultural materialism engaged with and emerged out of these traditions,
seeking to consider women s specific positioning inside material social relations
and to intervene in  mainstream feminism s appeals to individual rights or to a
universalized notion of women s experience (Hennessy 1993: xii).
While the critical paradigms of cultural studies have vastly expanded, renewed
interest in feminist and cultural materialism and new engagements with those
traditions in locales outside of Britain and the U.S. have also emerged. Recent
major collaborative initiatives and special journal issues reflect those developments
in Canada. In 1999, for instance, Essays on Canadian Writing published a special
issue on materialist criticism in the context of Canadian cultural studies. In 2000,
the History of the Book in Canada project was awarded a grant of 2.3 million
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dollars over five years to produce a three-volume interdisciplinary history of book
production, circulation and reception in Canada (to be translated also into French
and complemented with online resources), and in 2002, Resources for Feminist
Research/Documentation sur la recherche féministe published a double issue entitled
 Feminist Cultural Production: Critical Debates and Practices, exploring the
intersections between feminist cultural production and feminist dilemmas arising
from cultural practices. The resurgence of interest in cultural materiality in Canada
has manifested itself both as research into cultural objects as objects that are produced
and distributed within specific institutional arrangements and as texts that are
made meaningful inside and in relation to particular communities, institutions,
traditions and practices.4
For feminist Marxists in the U.S., however, feminist cultural materialism has come
to represent a type of analysis that is significantly distinguished from historical
materialism. Rosemary Hennessy s 1993 book, Materialism Feminism and the Politics
of Discourse, notably attempted to synthesize the insights of postmodern, Marxist,
liberal, humanist, anti-colonialist, and anti-racist discourses (xiii). By 1997, however,
Hennessy had shifted away from materialist feminism to a stronger Marxist
identification and remarked how, since 1975, systemic analyses had been gradually
 displaced or recast as cultural feminism and reshaped into a post-Marxist cultural
materialism (Hennessy and Ingraham 1997: 6). In contrast to Williams s theorization
and valorization of the term, Hennessy and Ingraham expressed skepticism about
the post-Marxist cultural materialism described here:
Post-marxist feminism rejects historical materialism s systemic view of social life,
the premise that human survival is based on the existence of real living
21
individuals who must produce the means to survive and do so under historically
variant conditions. Instead, they focus almost exclusively on ideological, state, or
cultural practices, anchor meaning in the body and its pleasures, or understand
social change primarily in terms of the struggle over representation. While many
post-marxist feminists insist that their analyses are materialist and may even
present themselves as materialist feminists, post-marxist feminism is in fact
cultural materialism. (5)
For Hennessy and Ingraham, cultural materialism is distinguished by its rejection
of systemic anti-capitalist analysis. Teresa L. Ebert makes a similar move in her
attempts to differentiate  matterism from  materialism (Ebert 1995: 114); and
 delectable materialism from  dialectical materialism (Ebert 2001: 280), she uses
the former paired terms to describe analyses that take the matter of the body and
its cultural signification as their focus and reserves the latter paired terms for
analyses that participate in a tradition of historical materialism. Where Williams
theorized cultural materialism to recognize the complex role of culture in the
reproduction and contestation of hegemonic relations, cultural materialism here
represents the failure of feminism to critique patriarchal capitalism as a system.
This special issue, entitled  Concrete Matters: Feminist Cultural Materialism,
participates in this renewed field of interest and in debates about feminist cultural
materialism as a practice. Whereas the History of the Book project and the special
issue in Essays on Canadian Writing have promoted materialist criticism in Canadian
contexts, this issue will complement that work and build on the efforts of Resources
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for Feminist Research/Documentation sur la recherche féministe by emphasizing feminist
concerns in processes of cultural production, reception and subject formation.
However, rather than foreclosing feminist cultural materialism as only ever valuable
as a form of class analysis, this special issue means to revalue both the complexity
of cultural texts as sites of signification and contested meaning-making and the
specificity of cultural objects as objects, produced and made meaningful in social,
historical and institutional formations. As the essays in this collection demonstrate,
feminist cultural materialism provides a two-fold method of analysis: on one hand,
it theorizes the ongoing cultural production and reproduction of relations of power,
in which gender plays an integral yet unstable role; on the other hand, it emphasizes
the social and institutional specificity of cultural practices and calls for historical
analyses. We have thus decided to organize this issue around theoretical debates
and historical practices, with a special contribution by the Cultural Memory Group,
a collection of academics and front-line activists working on feminist memorializing
in Canada. Linked by a shared commitment to conjoining the social and the
symbolic in practices of production and interpretation, the essays represented in
this special issue take up the challenges and possibilities of feminist cultural
materialist work, both in their objects of analysis and in their methodological
strategies. They engage in broadly theoretical and historical debates about the
political stakes of feminism, and they argue for practices of feminist cultural
materialism that produce knowledge integral to our current social climate: that is,
knowledges about shifting and inherited processes of subjectification, struggles to
define the terms and meanings of feminist discourse, and the ethics of feminist
cultural studies in practices of public intellectualism. In these analyses, the essays
in this special issue implicitly revalue and interrogate the limits and possibilities of
22
feminist collectivity both as a political project and as a methodological commitment.
Theorizing Matters: Feminist Cultural Materialism
Section One maps and theorizes key debates within feminist cultural materialism
and examines the relevance of these debates for feminism s continued role as a
critical and transformative praxis. In this section, Barbara L. Marshall interrogates
some of the debates surrounding foundational binaries of second-wave feminism
such as sex and gender, or the material and the cultural in order to make a case
for the continuing relevance of gender as a politically cogent category of analysis in
the face of renewed anti-feminist rhetoric; Julia Emberley addresses one of the
central tensions in current feminist theorizing, the opposition between labour and
desire, to examine the political limits of libidinal politics; and Jennifer Henderson
interrogates anti-capitalist systemic analysis for its a priori model of explanation,
exposing through the example of Emily F. Murphy s courtroom how micro-analyses
reveal complex implications and imbrications for feminists. For these writers,
critical oppositions within feminism serve not as simple binaries which must be
overcome in order to achieve a theoretical consensus that would attempt to refuse
or solve the oppositions altogether. Rather, critical oppositions are employed in
order to better understand the stakes and the substance of feminist materialism as
a historic, heuristic and culturally transformative set of theories and practices.
In  (Dis)locating Gender: Ontological Crises and Political Strategies, Marshall
contends that the current instability of the category  gender is at the heart of
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critical oppositions within feminism. She maps the main objections to  gender
and the  sex/gender distinction as unifying concepts for feminism s political
interests. She then turns to anti-feminist attacks on  gender as  contexts for
demonstrating [gender s] continuing relevance as both a theoretical category and
political identity. But the debates within feminism over the category gender,
Marshall holds, are not simply concerns for the strategic use of gender within
feminist political mobilizing, nor are they reducible to a feminist backlash against
 gender feminism for its reliance on social constructionism; rather, they reflect a
more pervasive concern within public discourse for claims to identity and difference
and for competing definitions of what constitutes  permissible public identities
and political rights. At the core of these debates, then, is a struggle for control
over the legitimacy of political identities and for a redefinition of the public sphere.
Marshall argues that as feminist critics we cannot resist talking about  gender as
a politically constituted and politically relevant identity, for to ignore it is to enable
its recontainment.
The project of mapping and theorizing the overdetermined inheritances that shape
feminist discourse and that become sites of struggle is extended in  Economies
of Dissimulation: The Western Bourgeois Woman and the Limits of Libidinal
Power. Julia Emberley examines the multiple and shifting discursive registers that
produce the figure of the bourgeois woman. In so doing, she calls for a feminist
critical practice that attends to feminism s conscious and unconscious political
investments in formulating an emancipatory politics. Disavowed as an object of
analysis and disparaged as a sign of class and racial inequality, the figure of the
bourgeois woman, Emberley suggests,  represents an imaginary and antagonistic
other against which to construct a unified front of labouring women. And yet, as
23
Emberley demonstrates, the figure of the idle woman intersects the imbricated
histories of colonialism, the commodity form, and the  structure of an economy
of difference between femininity and labour. Emberley thus advocates a re-
examination of this figure s complexity as a site of ideological conflict and political
investment that both masks and produces larger social contradictions surrounding
the appropriation of feminine libidinal and labour power. To illustrate how the
figure of the bourgeois woman circulates as an object of desire and exchange in
philosophical discourse, Emberley turns to a discussion of the labour/desire
opposition in the work of Marx and Foucault and, in particular, focuses on Marx s
notion of labour power and Foucault s attempts to disable Marx s truth claims with
the  body-politics of biopower. In exposing how the figure of the bourgeois woman
straddles the distance between desiring bodies and labouring bodies, Emberley
reminds feminist materialists that our theorizations of desire and labour reflect
particular economic and political formations. Making explicit these connections
is thus central to feminism s power as a political project.
Jennifer Henderson, in  How Janey Canuck Became a Person, similarly confronts
 the materiality of feminist discourse itself, to offer a defence of Foucauldian
micropolitics. Engaging Rosemary Hennessy s call for systemic anti-capitalist
analysis, Henderson critiques this methodology as an a priori interpretive frame
that is already inscribed within the dominant  curves of visibility characterizing
its ideological moment. To produce feminist knowledges that  [do] not simply
reinscribe the given in the guise of the new, Henderson asserts that feminists
TOPIA 13
need to attend to the multiple, microscopic power negotiations in which neoliberal
feminist discourse is implicated. Only then, she argues, can feminists begin to
historicize their epistemological frames and move beyond those inherited discursive
structures toward a more attenuated mode of analysis. To illustrate this point,
Henderson turns to a discussion of Emily F. Murphy ( Janey Canuck ) and her
work to have Canadian women legally recognized as persons, arguing that Murphy
effected her own legal subjectivity by subjecting other women. In Henderson s
words,  The norm [of personhood] thus becomes both the condition and the limit
of feminist challenge to the established order, converting the challenge into a demand
to belong. Reading this process against the figure of the woman-manager in late
capitalism, Henderson ultimately advocates theorizing the complex  tight spot
from which feminist politics proceed in the present. Attention to the materiality
of feminism s discursive inheritances, suggests Henderson, extends the potential
of feminism s critical project and its capacity to recognize its own complicities.
In contrast with a field that has become increasingly polarized in its definition of
materiality and determinism, Marshall maps a struggle to define and delimit gender
as a category and, by extension, to define and delimit the political effects of feminism
in the public sphere. Marshall contends that the task for feminism in the current
moment is not one of deciding between signification and concrete social realities,
but of understanding the  practical enactment (and exclusion) of particular,
politically necessary categories such as gender and race within the political realm.
Emberley similarly points to the multiple structural determinants that produce
divided subjectivities under capitalism, claiming that  any attempt to argue that
one must be for or against labour or desire & serves to mask a desire for a single
unified truth that will remain unquestioned. Emberley challenges a field in which
24
labour and bio-power have been largely polarized and undertakes, instead, a partial
and preliminary deconstruction of labouring and desiring relations of power in
transnational contexts. Henderson, by contrast, makes connections across historical
moments. Examining the materiality of feminist discourse itself  a set of rules
and procedures for making sense which derive from some other time and place,
and nevertheless come to represent, even define, feminist interests  Henderson
interrogates the limits of systemic analytical models. She employs Foucauldian
micro-analysis to connect early 20th-century maternal authority to the late 20th-
century figure of the neoliberal feminist manager as feminist subjects and agents
of subjectification in order  to make visible the tight spot from which our feminist
politics proceed. Attention to gender, for these authors, means not only attention
to the lived experiences of women in history, but also to the processes of
feminization that inform historical institutions and the tools of critical feminist
praxis.
Making Histories: Strategies and Ethics
The papers in Section Two offer historical case studies and simultaneously
interrogate history as a site of contested meaning-making to investigate the
politicization and depoliticization of women s writing. Against a critical feminist
tradition that has dismissed the writings of Frances Power Cobbe and Amelia
Opie as alternately conservative, popular, sensational and romantic, Susan Hamilton
TOPIA 13
and Lisa Robson reconsider these early women writers to highlight their publication
venues and interventions into specific debates. By focusing not just on what these
early writers said, but also on the contexts in which those writings circulated and
the debates in which they participated, Hamilton and Robson elaborate the strategic
interventions of Cobbe and Opie. Hamilton and Robson also consider how these
early women writers have been dismissed by later feminist critics to evaluate the
critical assumptions and aporias at work. These papers are complemented by a
contribution from the Cultural Memory Group a collection of academics and
social justice workers which describes efforts to memorialize Theresa Vince, a
Chatham Ontario woman who was murdered by a male colleague in 1996. This
paper examines the ethics of public intellectualism and the challenges of feminist
collectivity through the case study of a specific project of feminist memorializing.
In   A whole series of frightful cases : Domestic Violence, the Periodical Press and
Victorian Feminist Writing, Susan Hamilton describes Frances Power Cobbe s
writing as strategic, but misrecognized, in its political challenges. Asserting that
Cobbe is frequently dismissed as the  least satisfying  significant sister of Victorian
feminism because she chose mainstream venues to discuss feminist concerns,
Hamilton argues that, although these venues restricted Cobbe, they also allowed
her to introduce a feminist agenda to a large and influential audience. Focusing
specifically on Cobbe s 1878 essay,  Wife Torture in England, Hamilton
contextualizes Cobbe s writing and publishing to demonstrate how Cobbe used a
 popular culture narrative mode the narrative of sensation to specific political
ends. Hamilton reveals Cobbe s representation of  specific class-marked women s
bodies to  strategically locali[ze] a critique of marital violence. This strategy,
argues Hamilton, allows Cobbe to figure domestic violence as  a scene of
25
intervention and a scene that is not imitable in any way. Hamilton concludes that
critics dismiss Cobbe not because she lacked a political strategy, but because they
desire to separate feminist culture and writing from mainstream cultural
productions. Hamilton extends this analysis to consider how dismissing Cobbe s
writing as unsatisfying feminism affects  the ways in which feminist history as
practice formulates its questions. Ultimately, she argues, feminist critique must
locate feminist work in its historical context and explore what that location means
for  feminisms circulation in the world.
In   so alluring in theory, so pernicious in practice : Amelia Opie s Feminist
Materialist Critique of Radical Philosophy, Lisa Robson similarly disputes the
substantial critical tradition that reads Opie as a depoliticized, conservative, anti-
revolutionary writer to assert that Opie s Adeline Mowbray has  disruptive
undercurrents. Unlike other critics who recognize these undercurrents, however,
Robson does not prioritize the novel s treatment of free love and marriage. Instead,
her essay foregrounds the novel s treatment of pedagogy, arguing that Opie does
not dismiss radical philosophy in general, but criticizes it specifically  for failing
to take into account [women s] material conditions of existence. This failure
becomes most dangerous for free-thinking women, who are placed in actual physical
and sexual danger by radical politics. In Opie s engagement with radical philosophy,
Robson thus identifies a feminist materialist critique that exposes the gender-
blindness of radical philosophy s abstract intellectualism. In effect, Robson claims
that Opie accomplished a materialist intervention accomplished through a strategy
TOPIA 13
of  strategic complicity. This strategy allows Opie to use  a conventionally
acceptable critique of free love to rewrite radical masculine rationality and, through
it, rational education for women. Opie s alternate rationality is radical, Robson
suggests, in part because it asserts the need to ground intellectual work in material
and historical contexts.
The collaboratively written essay entitled   In Memory of Theresa Vince : Research,
Activism, and Feminist Memorializing asks the reader to contemplate gendered
social violence, the complexities of feminist memorializing and the challenges of
feminist solidarity and activism across institutional and social communities. By
examining the memorialization of Theresa Vince a Chatham, Ontario woman
who was murdered at the hands of her male supervisor on the eve of her retirement
from Sears in 1996 the paper maps the challenges of feminist memorializing and
organizing, and the challenges of feminist solidarity, in order to advocate for
responsible activist research. Collaboratively authored by the Cultural Memory
Group, the article describes the murder of Theresa Vince as an extension of a
gendered workplace dynamic; it explores the organizing undertaken by family,
friends, and a diverse community that  cut across stereotypical communities of
difference to confront that violence; and it describes the desire on the part of
Vince s workplace, Sears, to distance itself both from Vince s murder and its
commemoration. By contrast, the Cultural Memory Group interrogates how
through acts of cultural production and conscious solidarity academics might
practice a public intellectualism that both critiques and opposes violence against
women and supports organizing at a community level. With an overarching
commitment to confronting violence against women, this article explores the
challenges of collaboration and feminist solidarity across communities, the
26
importance of public intellectualism as a worldly practice, and the dangers of
replicating social violence through cultural appropriation or erasure. Focusing
specifically on the limits and possibilities of collective solidarity and public
intellectualism, the Cultural Memory Group asks the reader to consider how cultural
memorials function as sites of memory and erasure, sites that reveal the ongoing
cultural production and contestation of gendered social violences.
Making Change
Together, the essays in this special issue interrogate feminist cultural materialism
as both methodology and practice and point to its imbrication in larger debates
that continue to structure the field of progressive political struggle. The essays
represent a range of research interests, yet each of them foregrounds a struggle
over meaning and resources and sees gender as a contested category within these
struggles. They explore the role of the public intellectual; they interrogate the
challenges of collectivity and solidarity; and they examine the frames of intelligibility
that make those struggles meaningful. They are suggestive of the debates within
feminist cultural materialism because they stake different claims to feminist
materialism s objects of analysis and its political project; however, rather than
offering up a unified field, these essays examine the conditions of being and the
fissures between practitioners in order to better understand the stakes and the
substance of feminist cultural materialism as a historic, heuristic, and socially
TOPIA 13
transformative praxis. As Jo-Ann Wallace suggests in her attempt to delimit and
extend Raymond Williams s concept of a  structure of feeling, the articles in this
volume reach toward something that has not yet fully materialized: a project of
theorizing the conditions and limits of contemporary academic labour, feminist
subjectivity and collective re-imagining. In this spirit, we understand these essays
to be participating within and contributing to a broader tradition rather than
redefining the parameters of feminist cultural materialism. They interrogate the
knowledges that we produce about the world, the conditions within which we
produce them, and the stakes that are represented through this process. Attending
to such minutiae to register the broader reproduction and contestation of hegemonic
relations marks an important commitment of feminist cultural materialism: its
belief in the necessity of critique, even if those critiques are partial and provisional,
and the possibility of producing transformative social practices and knowledges.
Notes
These essays represent both new work solicited specifically for this special issue and
contributions that were presented initially as conference papers at  (The) Concrete
Matters: Feminist Materialism Across the Disciplines (University of Alberta, March
1998). The editors would particularly like to thank Jo-Ann Wallace and Len Findlay for
their many years of intellectual support and encouragement. We would also like to
recognize the work of Janice Schroeder and Lisa Ward Mather, who contributed
significantly to the early evolution and development of this issue. We are indebted to
Jody Berland for her critical engagement with and support of this project.
27
1. Other foundational texts include Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham s
anthology, Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women s Lives
(1997), which maps the development of feminist materialism in the U.S. and Britain
and argues for a reconfiguration of the relationship between materialism and feminism
to suggest its viability as a historicized field of study. Monographs such as Hennessy s
Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (1993), Donna Landry and Gerald
MacLean s Materialist Feminisms (1993), and Teresa L. Ebert s Ludic Feminism and After:
Postmodernism, Desire and Labor in Late Capitalism (1996) also represent timely
contributions insofar as they have redirected attention to the question of how material
conditions inform feminist analysis.
2. For an earlier position in which Williams begins to sketch his twofold intervention
into Marxist cultural theory and Leavisite New Criticism, see his essay  Culture is
Ordinary (Williams 1958).
3. While Williams notes that he valued Leavisite New Criticism for its attention to the
text as a text (1958: 16), his work moves toward a  sociology of culture (1981: 9-32)
and is informed by cultural anthropology and archeology in theorizing the materiality
of culture:
It is especially interesting that in archaeology and in cultural anthropology
the reference to culture or a culture is primarily to material production,
while in history and cultural studies the reference is primarily to signifying
or symbolic systems. This often confuses but even more often conceals the
central question of the relation between  material and  symbolic
production, which in some recent argument cf. my own Culture have
always to be related rather than contrasted. (1983: 91)
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For examples of how Williams historicizes  culture as a concept, see his chapter
 Culture in Marxism and Literature (1977), his entry in Keywords: A Vocabulary of
Culture and Society (1983), and his book, Culture (1981).
4. It is important to note intersecting developments in English and Communications
studies that facilitated this resurgence of interest in cultural materiality. Edited
collections such John Moss s Future Indicative: Literary Theory in Canadian Literature
(1987) and Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli s A Mazing Space: Writing
Canadian Women Writing (1986) signaled key developments in post-structuralist
theorizing in Canadian literary studies that developed cultural materialist practices
through the study of canon formation and institutional pedagogy. Jody Berland s work
on cultural studies and state formation in Canada (1995) exemplified efforts in
Communications Studies to theorize the imbrication of communications paradigms
with socio-economic formations. These developments underpin the materialist cultural
criticism that Imre Szeman distinguishes from other forms of cultural criticism because
of its focus on the imbrication of politics and epistemology with socioeconomic
determination. He writes:
When we look at the politics of other critical discourses those infused with
discussions of seemingly political concepts such as  agency,  identity,
 subjectivity,  resistance, and so forth it is clear that few of them operate
with any real, determinate sense of the relationship between specific cultural
objects,  culture more generally, and the operations of politics and
economics. For the most part, these connections are simply intuited, and
descriptions of the mechanisms by which texts  influence contexts (and
vice versa) are left comfortably vague and imprecise. Only materialist
criticism thinks about these relationships and connections all at once: culture is
never a sphere imagined as operating autonomously, outside the
determinations and influences of all other practices and forces involved in the
28
production and reproduction of human life. (Szeman 1999: 5, emphasis
added)
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