Raymond Williams developed the approach which he named 'cultural materialism' in a series of influential books - Culture and Society (1958), the Long Revolution (1961), Marxism and Literature (1977). I came to cultural materialism by another route. I'd just read Williams' Drama in performance - a survey of the conditions under which plays have been put on over the years, and how changes in staging practice parallelled developments in society. One night, I had a dream. I dreamed I saw a series of scenes, each showing a group of people in their usual surroundings; I remember a group of cardinals, standing outside St Peter's in Rome. The relationships between the elements in each scene - the architecture, the clothing, the rituals, the social roles - were luminously clear. I woke up with a clear, unshakeable sense of the validity and power of the cultural materialist approach. --Phil Edwards, July 1999, "Culture is ordinary: Raymond Williams and cultural materialism", http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/amroth/scritti/williams.htm [accessed Mar 2004]
The use of architecture to figure for bourgeois society as a whole, the willingness to see it completely destroyed and the conviction that the same forces which destroyed it could create something better: in all these respects Durruti's words were close to the mood and concerns of the "Project for rational embellishments of the city of Paris" proposed by the Lettrist International (LI) in 1955. "G-E Debord declares himself for the total destruction of religious buildings of all denominations. (Not a trace should be left, and the space should be re-used)." Michèle Bernstein, then Debord's wife, went further, proposing that churches be "partially destroyed, in such a way that the ruins remaining would no longer evince their original purpose"; ideally this would be done by "rasing the church completely and rebuilding the ruins". With this bizarre image Bernstein outdid Durruti: even the relics of the old world were to be remade. Like Bernstein, Debord set his face against aesthetic arguments for conservation. "Beauty, when it is not a promise of happiness, must be destroyed." -- Phil Edwards, The Hacienda must be destroyed, 1996 http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/amroth/scritti/debord5.htm [accessed Mar 2004]