Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism

Francis Mulhern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317899082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Marxism has had an enormous impact on literary and cultural studies, and all those interested in the field need to be aware of its achievements. This collection presents the very best of recent Marxist literary criticism in one single volume. An international group of contributors provide an introduction to the development, current trends and evolution of the subject. They include such notable Marxist critics as Tony Bennett, Terry Eagleton, Edward W. Said, Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson. A diverse range of subjects are analysed such as James Bond, Brecht, Jane Austen and the modern history of the aesthetic.

1

On Literature as an Ideological Form*

(1974)

ETIENNE BALIBAR AND PIERRE MACHEREY

Etienne Balibar (b. 1942) and Pierre Macherey teach philosophy at the University of Paris. Balibar is the co-author, with Louis Althusser, of Reading Capital (1971), a selection from the larger Lire le Capital (1965), to which Macherey and others also contributed. Macherey is the author of A Theory of Literary Production (1966; trans. 1978).

Balibar and Macherey here return to the classic question ‘What is literature?’ in order to displace it as an illegitimate intrusion into Marxist theory. Drawing upon Althusser’s later theory of ideology, they propose instead a view of literature as a specific mode of ideological practice, whose material effects derive from its role in the reproduction of the ‘national’ (common and class-divided) language and in the bourgeois educational apparatuses whose basic practice this is. The ‘literary effect’ dramatizes ideological antagonisms in such a way that their resolution is already given. As a norm, ‘literature’ sustains inequality and domination within linguistic practice itself, staging but also confirming the contradiction between ‘writing’ – ‘reading’ and merely ‘knowing how to read and write’. The mythic liberties of the literary – authorship, appreciation and so on – are the deceptive signs of its institutionalized conservative ideological function.

Is there a Marxist theory of literature? In what could it consist? This is a classic question, and often purely academic. We intend to reformulate it in two stages and suggest new propositions.

Marxist theses on literature and the category of ‘reflection’

Can there be a ‘Marxist aesthetic’?

It is not our intention to give an account of the attempts which have been made to substantiate this idea or of the controversies which have surrounded it. We will merely point out that to constitute an aesthetic (and particularly a literary aesthetic) has always presented Marxism with two kinds of problem, which can be combined or held separate: (i) How to explain the specific ideological mode for ‘art’ and the ‘aesthetic’ effect. (ii) How to analyse and explain the class position (or the class positions, which may be contradictory in themselves) of the author and more materially the ‘literary text’, within the ideological class struggle.

The first problem is obviously brought in, imposed on Marxism by the dominant ideology so as to force the Marxist critic to produce his own aesthetic and to ‘settle accounts’ with art, the work of art, the aesthetic effect, just like Lessing, or Hegel, or Taine, or Valéry et al. Since the problem is imposed on Marxism from outside, it offers two alternatives: to reject the problem and so be ‘proved’ unable to explain, not so much a ‘reality’ as an absolute ‘value’ of our time, which is now supreme since it has replaced religious value; or to recognise the problem and therefore be forced to acknowledge aesthetic ‘values’, i.e. to submit to them. This is an even better result for the dominant ideology since it thereby makes Marxism yield to the ‘values’ of the dominant class within its own problematic – a result which has great political significance in a period when Marxism becomes the ideology of the working class.

The second problem meanwhile is induced from within the theory and practice of Marxism, on its own terrain, but in such a way that it can remain a formal and mechanical presentation. In this case the necessary criterion is that of practice. In the first place, of scientific practice: the question for Marxism should be, does the act of confronting literary texts with their class positions result in the opening of new fields of knowledge and in the first place simply in the siting of new problems? The proof of the right formulation would be whether it makes objectively clear within historical materialism itself whole sets of unsolved and sometimes as yet unrecognised problems.¹

In the second place, the criterion of political practice itself, in so far as it is operative within literature. The least one should therefore ask of a Marxist theory is that it should bring about real transformation, new practice, whether in the production of texts and ‘works of art’ or in their social ‘consumption’. But is this a real transformation, even if at times it does have an immediate political effect – the simple fact of endowing the practitioners of art (writers and artists, but also teachers and students) with a Marxist ideology of the form and social function of art (even if this operation may sometimes have a certain immediate political interest)? Is it enough simply to give Marxism and its adherents their turn to taste and consume works of art in their own way? In effect experience proves that it is perfectly possible to substitute new ‘Marxist’ themes, i.e. formulated in the language of Marxism, for the ideological notions dominant in ‘cultural life’, notions that are bourgeois or petit-bourgeois in origin, and yet not alter at all the place of art and literature within social practice, nor therefore the practical relationship of individuals and classes to the works of art they produce and consume. The category of art in general dominates production and consumption, which are conceived and practised within this mode – whether ‘committed’, ‘socialist’, ‘proletarian’, or whatever.

Yet in the Marxist classics there were elements which can open a path (frayer la voie). Of course they do not constitute an ‘aesthetic’ or a ‘theory of literature’, any more than a ‘theory of knowledge’. Yet through their mode of practising literature and the implications of a theoretical position based ultimately on revolutionary class practice, they pose certain theses about literary effects, which, worked within the problematic of historical materialism, can contribute to a scientific and therefore historical analysis of literary effects.²

These very general premises are enough to show at once that the two types of problem between which Marxist attempts are divided are really one and the same. To be able to analyse the nature and expression of class positions in literature and its output (the ‘texts’, ‘works’ perceived as literature) is simultaneously to be able to define and know the ideological mode of literature. But this means that the problem must be posed in terms of a theory of the history of literary effects, clearly showing the primary elements of their relation to their material base, their progressions (for they are not eternal) and their tendential transformations (for they are not immutable).

The materialist category of reflection

Let us be clear. The classic Marxist theses on literature and art set out from the essential philosophical category of reflection. To understand this category fully is therefore the key to the Marxist conception of literature.

In the Marxist texts on this materialist concept, Marx and Engels on Balzac, Lenin on Tolstoy, it is qua material reflection, reflection of objective reality, that literature is conceived as an historic reality – in its very form, which scientific analysis seeks to grasp.

In the Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art’, Mao Tse-Tung writes, ‘Works of literature and art, as ideological forms, are the product of the reflection in the human brain of the life of a given society.’³ So the first implication of the category of reflection for Marxist theoreticians is to provide an index of reality of literature. It does not ‘fall from the heavens’, the product of mysterious ‘creation’, but is the product of social practice (rather, a particular social practice); it is not an ‘imaginary’ activity, although producing imaginary effects, but inescapably part of a material process, ‘the product of the reflection ... of the life of a given society’.

The Marxist conception thus inscribes literature in its place in the unevenly determined system of real social practices: one of several ideological forms within the ideological superstructures, corresponding to a base of social relations of production which are historically determined and transformed, and historically linked to other ideological forms. Be sure that in using the term ideological forms no reference to formalism is intended – the historical materialist concept does not refer to ‘form’ in opposition to ‘content’, but to the objective coherence of an ideological formation – we shall come back to this point. Let us note too that this first, very general but absolutely essential premise, has no truck with queries about what ideological form is taken by literature within the ideological instance. There is no ‘reduction’ of literature to morality, religion, politics, etc.

The Marxist concept of reflection has suffered from so many misinterpretations and distortions that we must stop here for a moment. The conclusions reached by Dominique Lecourt through an attentive reading of Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism will be useful to us.⁴

Dominique Lecourt shows that the Marxist and Leninist category of reflection contains two propositions which are combined within a constitutive order – or better, two successive articulated problems. (Thus according to Lecourt there is not one simple thesis, but a double thesis of the reflection of things in thought.)

The first problem, which materialism always re-establishes in its priority, is that of the objectivity of reflection. It poses the question: ‘Is there an existent material reality reflected in the mind which determines thought?’ And consequently it has the rider, ‘Is thought itself a materially determined reality?’ Dialectical materialism asserts the objectivity of the reflection and the objectivity of thought as reflection, i.e. the determinance of the material reality which precedes thought and is irreducible to it, and the material reality of thought itself.

The second problem, which can only be posed correctly on the basis of the first, concerns the scientific knowledge of the exactitude of the reflection. It poses the question, ‘If thought reflects an existent reality how accurate is its reflection?’ or better, ‘Under what conditions (i.e. historical conditions whereby the dialectic between “absolute truth” and “relative truth” intervenes) can it provide an accurate reflection?’ The answer lies in the analysis of the relatively autonomous process of the history of science. In the context, it is clear that this second problem poses the question, ‘What form does the reflection take?’ But it only has a materialist implication once the first question has been posed and the objectivity of the reflection affirmed.

The result of this analysis, which we have only given in outline, is to show that the Marxist category of ‘reflection’ is quite separate from the empiricist and sensualist concept of the image, reflection as ‘mirroring’. The reflection, in dialectical materialism, is a ‘reflection without a mirror’; in the history of philosophy this is the only effective destruction of the empiricist ideology which calls the relation of thought to the real a specular (and therefore reversible) reflection. This is thanks to the complexity of the Marxist theory of ‘reflection’: it poses the separate nature of two propositions and their articulation in an irreversible order within which the materialist account is realised.

These observations are central to the problem of the ‘theory of literature’. A rigorous use of this complex structure eliminates the seeming opposition of two contrary descriptions: that between formalism and the ‘critical’ or ‘normative’ use of the notion of ‘realism’. That is, on one side an intention to study the reflection ‘for itself, independent of its relationship to the material world; on the other, a confusion of both aspects and an assertion of the primacy of thought, a reversal of the materialist order.⁵

Hence the advantage of a rigorous definition like Lenin’s, for it is then possible to articulate, in theory as in fact, two aspects which must be both kept separate and in a constitutive order: literature as an ideological form (amongst others), and the specific process of literary production.

Literature as an ideological form

It is important to ‘locate’ the production of literary effects historically as part of the ensemble of social practices. For this to be seen dialectically rather than mechanically, it is important to understand that the relationship of ‘history’ to ‘literature’ is not like the relationship or ‘correspondence’ of two ‘branches’, but concerns the developing forms of an internal contradiction. Literature and history are not external to each other (not even as the history of literature versus social and political history), but are in an intricate and connected relationship, the historical condition of existence of anything like a literature. Very generally, this internal relationship is what constitutes the definition of literature as an ideological form.

But this definition is significant only in so far as its implications are then developed. Ideological forms, to be sure, are not straightforward systems of ‘ideas’ and ‘discourses’, but are manifested through the workings and history of determinate practices in determinate social relations, what Althusser calls the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). The objectivity of literary production is therefore inseparable from given social practices in a given ISA. More precisely, we shall see that it is inseparable from a given linguistic practice (there is a ‘French’ literature because there is a linguistic practice ‘French’, i.e. a contradictory ensemble making a national tongue), in itself inseparable from an academic or schooling practice which defines both the conditions for the consumption of literature and the very conditions of its production also. By connecting the objective existence of literature to this ensemble of practices, one can define the material anchoring points which make literature an historic and social reality.

First, then, literature is historically constituted in the bourgeois epoch as an ensemble of language – or rather of specific linguistic practices – inserted in a general schooling process so as to provide appropriate fictional effects, thereby reproducing bourgeois ideology as the dominant ideology. Literature submits to a threefold determination: ‘linguistic’, ‘pedagogic’, and ‘fictive’ (imaginaire) – we must return to this point, for it involves the question of a recourse to psychoanalysis for an explanation of literary effects. There is a linguistic determination because the work of literary production depends on the existence of a common language codifying linguistic exchange, both for its material and for its aims – in so far as literature contributes directly to the maintenance of a ‘common language’. That it has this starting point is proved by the fact that divergences from the common language are not arbitrary but determined. In our introduction to the work of Renée Balibar and Dominique Laporte, we sketched out an explanation of the historical process by which this ‘common language’ is set up.⁶ Following their line of thought, we stressed that the common language, i.e. the national language, is bound to the political form of ‘bourgeois democracy’ and is the historical outcome of particular class struggles. Like bourgeois right, its parallel, the common national language is needed to unify a new class domination, thereby universalising it and providing it with progressive forms throughout its epoch. It refers therefore to a social contradiction, perpetually reproduced via the process which surmounts it. What is the basis of this contradiction?

It is the effect of the historic conditions under which the bourgeois class established its political, economic and ideological dominance. To achieve hegemony, it had not only to transform the base, the relations of production, but also radically to transform the superstructure, the ideological formations. This transformation could be called the bourgeois ‘cultural revolution’ since it involves not only the formation of a new ideology, but its realisation as the dominant ideology, through new ISAs and the remoulding of the relationships between the different ISAs. This revolutionary transformation, which took more than a century but which was preparing itself for far longer, consisted in making the schooling apparatus the means of forcing submission to the dominant ideology – individual submission, but also, and more importantly, the submission of the very ideology of the dominated classes. Therefore in the last analysis, all ideological contradictions rest on the contradictions of this apparatus, and become contradictions subordinated and internal to the form of schooling.

We are beginning to work out the form taken by social contradictions in the schooling apparatus. It can only establish itself through the formal unity of a ‘single’ and ‘unifying’ educational system, the product of this same unity, which is itself formed from the co-existence of two systems or contradictory networks: those which, by following the institutional division of ‘levels of teaching’ which in France has long served to materialise this contradiction, we could call the apparatus of ‘basic education’ (primaire-professionnel) and that of ‘advanced education’ (secondaire-supérieur).⁷

This division in schooling, which reproduces the social division of a society based on the sale and purchase of individual labour-power, while ensuring the dominance ...