British Post-Structuralism

Since 1968

Antony Easthope

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000639322
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Through this exploration of the relation between Marxism, post-structuralism and the theory of the subject, first published in 1988, Antony Easthope contrasts the degree to which post-structuralism has made a radical impact on English and American national cultures. This book reprints an important interview in which Jacques Derrida discusses the

1
Beginnings: On the Left

English separateness and provincialism; English backwardness and traditionalism; English religiosity and moralistic vapouring, paltry English “empiricism” or instinctive distrust of reason …

Tom Nairn

In 1870 the British economy faced a choice: either to develop new industries — chemicals, even the new electrical industry — and compete there with the rising economies of Germany and the United States; or to sell its existing commodities to the protected market of the Empire. The gods give in to those they wish to destroy; the soft option was chosen, and this, in part, accounts for the chronic crisis afflicting the British economy ever since.

In 1974 British Marxism reached its peak, both in theory and practice. Whereas other national cultures went through a form of political and ideological crisis during the 1960s, as did France in 1968, Britain’s corresponding experience did not arrive until six years later. The long-term economic decline was focused that year in the attempt by the Conservative government to hold down wages in the hope of diverting capital into serious investment and renewal. This brought the government into collision with industrial workers and in particular the coal miners, whose demand for a pay rise was refused in October 1973. They banned overtime working, which immediately cut the supply of coal during the winter so that by Christmas the lights started to go off. From 2 January 1974 the government reduced the working week to three days in order to save gas and electricity (general production, however, only fell by 10 per cent). Strongly supported by workers in other industries, the miners held a ballot about a possible strike and on 4 February, when the result was declared, 81 per cent had voted for all-out action. In a final attempt to defeat the miners, on 7 February the government called a General Election over the question, “Who governs Britain?”, thus at a stroke turning an industrial action into a political issue, something the Left had been trying to do since Chartism.

The Tories narrowly lost the election. The incoming right-wing Labour government first paid off the miners and then spent the next twelve months defusing and deflecting the radical energies released by this combined economic and political crisis, a mobilisation extending from the many other industrial workers who had acted in support of the miners across to the many socialists who had been active in pressing the Labour Party to implement its “Alternative Economic Strategy” (see Hodgson 1981 and 1984). (How different the situation in 1974 from that of the coal dispute of 1984–5 when another strike was undertaken, though this time without a ballot, without significant help from other manual workers, and, according to polls, without at any time the support of more than 28 per cent of the electorate.)

The year 1974, then, can be seen in retrospect as the ‘moment’ of British intellectual Marxism. Since that is the parent culture onto which post-structuralism became grafted, this chapter will attempt to give a schematic and provisional outline of its main features (an adequate history of British Marxism from 1960 to 1985 has yet to be written). Two separate currents of British Marxism flow into the conjuncture of 1974. One, typified by the work of Raymond Williams, was left-liberal, culturalist and empiricist; another, deriving from the promotion of Althusserian Marxism by the New Left from the mid-1960s on, seeks to be, in contrast, theoretical, scientific and rationalist.

Two areas of controversy between them come to impinge particularly on post-structuralism. One is the question of how to conceptualise the way human action is determined by economic structures, how far social and ideological superstructures maintain a ‘relative autonomy’ in relation to the economic base. And connected to that is the question of the subject, specifically whether the subject is understood according to a humanist conception as freely choosing and constitutive or as structurally determined and constituted, ‘a support for a position’. This question in turn frames accounts of the literary text and the degree to which it is actively interpreted by the reader as against imposing itself on the reader. These topics provide an arena for contention between the culturalist and theoretist wings of British Marxism during the years before and after 1974. But around 1974 the two tendencies temporarily coalesce.

Raymond Williams and the traditional Left

Published in 1958, Raymond Williams’s Culture and society, 1780–1950 takes off from dissatisfaction with the notion of culture put forward ten years earlier in T. S. Eliot’s Notes towards the definition of culture. Eliot defines “culture” not in terms of an individual or a class but as the development “of a whole society” (1948, reprinted 1962, p. 21). In what has become a famous passage, Eliot’s Notes summarise his idea of culture in a collage of images and impressions:

Culture…includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches, and the music of Elgar, (p. 31)

Informal, consumerist, pastoral, this is a vision of culture Williams cites in the chapter on Eliot in Culture and society (1958, reprinted 1963, p. 230) and criticises by mobilising against it precisely Eliot’s own concept of culture as supposing “the development of…a whole society”. For even to attempt to represent ‘the whole’ in the full sense of that term the list would have to include also “steelmaking, touring in motor-cars, mixed farming, the Stock Exchange, coalmining, and London Transport” (p. 230).

Culture and society takes a left-culturalist position. It is socialist in that the theme of the book is to compel recognition for working-class culture in addition to that of the class that might best be termed ‘the gentry’; socialist also in its grasp of economic determination (thus, against Eliot and his critique of liberal individualism, Williams is able to argue that Eliot’s defence of conservative and elitist culture rests on precisely that economic system of ‘free economy’ which goes along with the ‘atomised’, individualist view of society Eliot wishes to attack, pp. 235–8). But the position is culturalist in that its acceptance of the idea of “a whole society” makes it inevitably complicit with traditional liberal notions of the organic unity of society, state and nation in a ‘common culture’ imagined as transcending class divisions.

Such a domain of transcendence can only be founded in a notion of the individual as somehow constituting an essence and origin finally beyond all structural determinations, economic, social and linguistic (a ‘beyond’ Williams later in The long revolution names by introducing the term “structure of feeling” (1965, pp. 64–5)). Although Williams’s text criticises explicitly the “Romantic” tradition and works hard to negotiate an opposing position, it remains committed to a fundamental humanism, as is shown when there is direct confrontation with historical materialism in the chapter on “Marxism and culture”. This poses starkly the question of whether art is or is not determined by the economic structure of society and, implicit in this issue, whether the human subject is source or effect, constitutive or constituted.

Williams turns first to the canonical passage in Marx’s Preface to the Critique of political economy (1859) which argues that according to the epoch of a mode of production people enter social relations which, together with the forces of production, constitute the economic structure of society. This is the base,

the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life, (cited Williams, 1963, p. 259)

And there follows the sentence which, among other things, makes historical materialism a necessary antecedent of the post-structuralist assertion that human consciousness is an effect rather than a source: “It is not people’s consciousness that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness”. The chapter in Williams then enters a fine-print reading of these sentences and the rest of the passage, adding to it the qualification by Engels (from his letter to Bloch, 21 September 1890) that though “the determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction in real life”, account must also be taken of “an interaction” between base and superstructure such that elements of the superstructure, including the arts, exercise an active influence of their own.

Throughout his sympathetic discussion Williams is concerned primarily with literature and the arts, that is, with ‘high cultural’ aspects of the superstructure rather than the textual productions of modern technology and popular culture (radio, film, television). He pursues the question of how Marxism understands the autonomy of art because it focuses the issue of individual freedom and subjectivity, pressing it through a great deal of Romantic and Arnoldian obfuscation put up by British Marxists in the 1930s towards an inexorable either/or formulated as follows:

Either the arts are passively dependent on social reality, a proposition which I take to be that of mechanical materialism, or a vulgar misinterpretation of Marx. Or the arts, as the creators of consciousness, determine social reality, the proposition which the Romantic poets sometimes advanced. (p. 266)

If social existence determines consciousness, socialist culture will arise spontaneously from the emancipation of the working class; if, however, socialist culture has to be engineered, planned and fostered, then consciousness determines existence. At what is seen as a polarised impasse — either human individuals act consciously and collectively to shape history or they are passively determined by their position in relation to the mode of production — Williams gives up his engagement, avowing that he writes as “one who is not a Marxist” (p. 269). Yet the argument has reached exactly that point at which the issue of the subject and the problems of relative autonomy are rethought by Althusser’s first published essays in France in the early 1960s.

Writing in 1958, Williams is working “almost single-handedly” (Eagleton 1976, p. 23), largely in isolation from any native English socialist culture. The essay really has its home in the 1930s and a pre-war debate, as its list of British Marxists reveals — Rex Warner, Alick West, Christopher Caudwell. It ignores Lenin’s articles on Tolstoy of 1908–10 and Trotsky’s Literature and revolution. More seriously, it does not know of the passage on Greek art and its trans-historical survival apparently above and beyond any given economic base, written by Marx as part of the “Introduction” of the Grundrisse (see 1973, pp. 110–11). This was published separately in German in 1939 and in English in 1947, though it was not readily available until it appeared in an edition of the Introduction to a critique of political economy in 1971 (see Marx and Engels 1947 and Marx 1971). But this was all later. Georg Lukács’s The historical novel was not published in English until 1962. Between 1957 and 1964 Brecht’s German publisher had been putting out his collected prose, a selection of which appeared in English translation in 1964 as Brecht on theatre. These are only some of the older texts re-launched in the changed social and cultural conditions of the 1960s. The years after 1958 saw the ascendency in Britain and elsewhere of the New Left. Its strategy was to transform the whole British Marxist tradition.

The New Left

In October 1964 Labour, led by Harold Wilson, won a narrow victory over the Tories, led by a man who was born the fourteenth Earl of Home (pronounced “Hume”). A smell of old corruption hung over the last months of the Conservative government, a sense of crisis which the newly founded New Left Review named and explored in a series of ‘manifesto’ articles published in 1964. Starting from an analysis of the contemporary conjuncture as a product of British historical experience, they aim to intervene in a present struggle.

For historical materialism the dominant class and the character of an epoch is defined by its mode of production (primitive communism, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, capitalist). In the classic (Oedipal) scenario the oppressed class of one epoch throws out its oppressor to become the ruling class of the next. Thus at the Renaissance the bourgeoisie (aided by the serfs) destroys the feudal nobility and takes its place in charge of a new mode of production which produces the proletariat, who, learning from the bourgeoisie yet exploiting no other class, are uniquely able to overthrow the bourgeoisie and introduce a genuinely democratic, classless society.

Why hasn’t this happened yet in England? That is the question addressed by the New Left Review in two 1964 essays, Perry Anderson’s “Origins of the present crisis” and Tom Nairn’s “The English working class”. Their answer, which follows Marx closely, is that there has been no working class revolution: (1) because the English bourgeois revolution (also known as the English Civil War) was the first of its kind and happened too early, the English bourgeoisie, unlike the French, never broke fully with the landed aristocracy to establish a separate bourgeois character; (2) because the bourgeoisie had no clear and separate class identity, the working class that emerged in the Industrial Revolution correspondingly could not find a clear class identity to set against it; (3) because the English bourgeoisie developed so early, between 1642 and 1660 rather than after the Enlightenment and 1789, the dominant ideology in Britain, formed in the religious ideas of the seventeenth century, became a form of empiricism rather than a coherent and rationalist world-view.

Accordingly, in a process exacerbated by the success of Empire and sustained by Britain’s immunity from defeat or occupation in the Second World War, the British working class was “forced into a corporative mode of existence and consciousness, a class in and for itself” (Nairn 1964, p. 52). Cut off from Europe, divorced from rationalism and the Enlightenment, defeated in the early nineteenth century by the joint manœuvres of the landed gentry and the industrial bourgeoisie, the English working class — so Nairn concludes — “immunized against theory like no other class, by its entire historical experience, needed theory like no other”. And, he adds, “It still does” (p. 57).

The New Left version of British history and strategy for remaking it was rapidly opposed by the traditional left. Edward Thompson’s The making of the English working class had been published in 1963 and in fact Nairn’s essay is in part a review article on this book. Representing the traditional left, Thompson replied to the New Left account of English history in a long article, “The peculiarities of the English” published in 1965 (and reprinted later in Thompson’s anti-Althusserian work, The poverty of theory, 1978). To this Anderson in turn replied in “Socialism and pseudo-empiricism” in 1966. Rather than rehearse this debate at the level of content, it may better signal the differences between old and new left Marxism if two passages of text are looked at with attention to the assumptions and style of their discourse.

The first, from the “Conclusion” of Culture and society, starts to turn Burke’s notorious reference to the working class as “the swinish multitude” against the class Burke speaks for:

The record of the working-class movement in its attitudes to education, to learning and to art is on the whole a good record. It has sometimes wrongly interpreted, often neglected where it did not know. But it has never sought to destroy the institutions of this kind of culture; it has, on the contrary, pressed for their extension, for their wider social recognition, and, in our own time, for the application of a larger part of our material resources to their maintenance and development. Such a record will do more than stand comparison with that of the class by which the working class has been most actively and explicitly opposed. This, indeed, is the curious incident of the swine in the night. As the light came, and we could look around, it appeared that the trampling, which we had all heard, did not after all come from them. (Williams 1963, p. 314)

The second, from Anderson’s 1964 essay, moves with similarly broad brush-strokes over a large historical perspective:

The distinctive facets of English class structure, as it has evolved over three centur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Beginnings: On the Left
• 2. Structuralism/Post-structuralism
• 3. Film Theory
• 4. Cultural Studies
• 5. The Social Sciences
• 6. Historical Studies
• 7. Psychology
• 8. Art History
• 9. Musicology
• 10. Philosophy
• 11. Literary Theory
• 12. Deconstruction
• 13. Post-structuralism and the English Tradition
• Appendix I Textual Practice: One Example
• Appendix II A Note on Institutions
• Appendix III An Interview with Jacques Derrida
• Bibliography
• Index