[Comrade Davidson's letter is useful contribution to a…]
Socialist Press1979 1979-10-31Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 8 →
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Comrade Davidson's letter is useful contribution to a debate which has been too much ignored by Marxists. But his points are for the most part misinterpretations of my article.
There is nothing particularly 'Althusserian' about the defition of culture I advanced.
As far as I know, Althusser has never proposed such a definition, and indeed has never written much on culture at all.
Perhaps comrade Davidson means that it is 'Althusserian' to use 'difficult language-in which case it is also 'Marxist'.
The sentence he quotes is fairly clumsy, as it tries to compress a complex issue into single formulation; but l can't see that it is 'meaningless' Nor do I think the language of the article in general any more difficult than, say, most articles on the history of the Fourth For 'pretty meaningless' perhaps, read 'unfamiliar"
The article rejected terms like "greatness' and 'genius when applied to art because they spring straight from bourgeois ideologies of the artist as an inspired, eccentric being whose 'creativity' is somehow mysterious.
The idea of the 'creative genius' is basically modelled on theology: the artist as the divine creator conjuring up his handiwork from nothing.
Art is not creation but production: the re-working of certain given materials into a
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