Psycho-Politics And Cultural Desires

Janet Harbord, Jan Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135360092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

A cultural studies textbook that deals with issues of methodology, as well as mapping out the history and theories and ideas in cultural studies. The book examines the work of Raymond Williams, Lacan and Hoggart, among Others, And Explores Notions Of Subculture, Psychoanalysis, Marxist thought, narrative, autobiography, fiction, subjectivity, language, history and representation. The book focuses on the past, present and future of cultural studies, with the aim of providing readers with a clear overview of the central ideas within the area, developing current debates and possible future avenues.

Part I
Politics and psychoanalysis

1
Beyond Marxism and psychoanalysis

Gary Hall

The question of the subject

The theoretical and political importance issues around both gender and sexuality and race and ethnicity have assumed in recent years has meant that the “question of the subject” has been put back on the agenda for many Marxists. For some, this has led to a turning toward psychoanalysis, in the hope that it will be able to supply Marxism with a fully fledged theory of subjectivity. For others, such attempts to bring psychoanalysis to bear on Marxism have raised more questions than they have answered. Indeed, for others again, the very idea that psychoanalysis is somehow able to add a “theory of subjectivity to the field of historical materialism” is a mistaken one, given that, as Ernesto Laclau observes, the “latter has been constituted, by and large, as a negation…of subjectivity (although certainly not of the category of the subject)” (Laclau 1990:93). What, then, is the value of psychoanalysis for a historical materialist understanding of subjectivity? More to the point, do Marxism and psychoanalysis have competing claims to theories of the subject?

Robert Young provides an excellent starting point for addressing these questions in an essay on “Psychoanalysis and political literary theories” (Young 1991), which is part of a collection, Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory: Thresholds, that arose out of a series of talks on the subject of psychoanalysis and culture held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London during the first few months of 1987—period when positions on this issue “entrenched in the 1970s were becoming more fluid and self-critical”, according to the volume’s editor, James Donald (Donald 1991a:vii). Situated by Donald (alongside the rest of the collection) at “the intersections between psychoanalysis and cultural theory” (ibid.), Young’s essay begins with a description of psychoanalysis as:

a theory of unhappy relationships which has itself a long history of unhappy relationships. In the first place there is the story of the tense relationships within psychoanalysis between analysts, the psychoanalytic politics that has been charted by Paul Rozen, Francois Roustang, Sherry Turkle and others. In the second place, psychoanalysis has a history of relationships with other disciplines (Young 1991:139).

Young proceeds to trace the history of “three of those relationships in the cultural sphere”—psychoanalysis’ relationships “with literary criticism, with Marxism, and with feminism” (p. 139). In doing so, he draws attention to some of the difficulties involved in any attempt on the part of Marxism and feminism to utilize psychoanalysis to produce a theory that unites and synthesizes the individual psyche with the social.¹

The way in which this relation is usually set up is that Marxism and feminism require a theory of the subject, while psychoanalysis, in turn, needs a theory of the social. The problem with such a pairing for Young is that:

psychoanalysis is already a theory of the articulation of the subject with the social: if desire, for instance, is the desire of the Other, this means that desire is a social phenomenon. Furthermore, as the concept of desire itself suggests, psychoanalytic theory amounts to the argument that the structure of the relation of the psyche to the social is one of incommensurability— which does not mean that they do not interact, only that they do so unhappily. When social analysis has tried to link itself with psychoanalysis, it seems often not to have noticed this aspect of psychoanalytic theory, with the result that those marriages between forms of social explanation and psychoanalysis, far from being able to exploit psychoanalytic theory, merely repeat the narrative of incompatibility that it theorizes (Young 1991:140–1).

Moreover, Marxist theories, in particular, have, as Young observes:

always tended to restrict [their] use of psychoanalysis to the occasional importation of one or two concepts in order to construct a model; [they have] never allowed it to affect the terms of [their] own theory substantially. Psychoanalysis always remain marginal…[they have] rarely attempted to rethink the Cartesian inside/outside dichotomy on which this division is based and which psychoanalysis challenges. A reworking of that dualism would also have to include a rethinking of the exclusive claims of the forms of rational logic on which is predicated (Young 1991:
149).

The “lesson of psychoanalysis” is that the psychic and the social have to be “lived simultaneously as two irreconcilable positions” (1991:142). Young privileges psychoanalysis for “producing a theory of that incompatibility”, rather than getting “caught up in acting out the conflict between the psychic and the social”, as Marxism and feminism tend to do (1991:142). Or rather, as Marxism and socialist feminism tend to do—for while alliances between Marxism and feminism “have tended to be predicated on the exclusion of psychoanalysis” (1991:150), other forms of feminism, Young insists, have found psychoanalysis “critical for [their] redefinitions, critiques and explorations of questions of sexuality and identity” (1991:153).

Feminism, then (and especially what Young refers to variously as “Derridean feminism” or “deconstructive feminism”), like psychoanalysis—indeed precisely because of the very closeness of its relationship to psychoanalysis— contains at least the possibility of theorizing the psyche’s “incommensurable” relation to the social. By contrast, those theories associated with Marxism (including Marxist feminism) are presented as admitting few such possibilities— in no small part because psychoanalysis has been far less important to Marxism, serving merely as “a worry at its margins” (1991:153). But can psychoanalysis really be prioritized over Marxist theories of culture on the basis that the “living through of this incompatibility between the individual and the social is the subject…of psychoanalysis”, whereas this incompatibility is not the subject of Marxism (1991:142)? Even if it is not achieved by means of a close relationship with psychoanalysis, does Marxism offer so few opportunities for theorizing the individual’s “incompatibility” with the social? What is more, is this placing of Marxism in what appears to all intents and purposes to be an oppositional relationship with psychoanalysis not a little curious, given the vigour with which Young, both here and elsewhere, has defended the emphasis placed by both psychoanalysis and deconstruction on the instability of such polarities?² In particular, is Young’s positioning of Marxism as the subordinate term in this relationship not somewhat at odds with his insistence in an earlier essay on “The politics of ‘The politics of literary theory’”, that “as deconstruction has shown, there is no text so politically determined that a clever reading cannot show how it simultaneously undermines its own strategy, thus allowing the text to be claimed for an opposing point of view” (Young 1988:133).

Certainly, there may be strategic reasons for situating psychoanalysis in a hierarchical relationship to Marxism. Marxism and psychoanalysis might have competing claims to theories of the subject, but it is Marxism that has tended to dominate the realm of cultural theory. Is privileging psychoanalysis over and in opposition to Marxism therefore a strategic move on Young’s part, designed to participate in the dislodging and overturning of Marxist discourse from its traditional position of theoretical dominance? (As feminism has never been quite so powerful, it is presumably less of a threat.) Even if it is acknowledged that, in arguing against the institutional validation of Marxist theories of the subject, the emphasis Young places on psychoanalysis may have a certain strategic effectiveness, a number of questions remain. For while Marxism may still cast a large shadow over the sphere of cultural analysis (as Campbell and Harbord observe in their introduction to this volume, a cultural study which has Marxism as its “explicit foundation” is the “ascending star in international [academic] circles and institutions” (this book, Chapter 1)), its degree of influence in the public arena, in Europe at least, has declined rapidly in the face of the new dominant consensus which, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, regards Marxism, more often than not, as a rather uninteresting discourse that has long since been outmoded. Seen from this point of view, does Young’s subordination of Marxism to psychoanalysis in “Psychoanalysis and political literary theories”, while offering a challenge to Marxism’s “success” within the realm of cultural theory, not at the same time risk participating in the anti-Marxist discourse that is currently holding sway in the capitalist economies of the West?

Ironically, it is precisely the prevailing common sense tendency to dismiss Marxism as a discourse relevant only to a superseded age, that has prompted a recent “deconstructive” intervention into the texts of Marx by Jacques Derrida. Prior to Specters of Marx (Derrida 1994), the Marxist text had constituted merely a series of “lacunae” in Derrida’s work, “explicitly calculated to mark the sites of a theoretical elaboration…still to come” (Derrida 1981:62). But the consensus around the death of Marxism and the triumph of capitalism’s free-market economy has become so unbearably dominant in the late 1980s and early 1990s that, for Derrida at least, there is an urgent need to reawaken the spirit of Marx’s critique of capitalism via a “radical critique” of Marx’s critique. The “radical critique” Derrida invokes in Specters of Marx is not to be confused with the previous sort of dogmatic Marxism with which Marxism is often associated. Indeed, it was the wish to reject this dominant, oversimplified interpretation of Marxism that for a long time made producing a “trtransformational” reading of Marxism difficult for Derrida. Instead, he takes his:

inspiration from a certain spirit of Marxism [that]…has always made of Marxism in principle and first of all a radical critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake its self-critique. This critique wants itself to be in principle and explicitly open to its own transformation, re-evaluation, self-interpretation (Derrida 1994:88).

So if one problem with Young’s subordination of Marxism to psychoanalysis in “Psychoanalysis and political literary theories” concerns doubts about the strategic effectiveness of such a manoeuvre, another relates to the way in which Young’s presentation of Marxism tends to underestimate the extent to which, as deconstruction implicitly, and Derrida explicitly, suggest, Marxism contains within itself the possibility of its own self-critique, its own “transformation, reevaluation, self-interpretation”. Given sufficient time and space, it would be possible to demonstrate how Derrida’s turning to the ghosts in Marx’s text—not only the ghost of Marx, but the function of the ghost in Marx’s text—and his following through of this thread in Specters of Marx to produce a rereading of Marxism which is neither simply for Marxism, nor simply against it, enables a theory of the “incommensurable” relation of the subject to the social to be located within the Marxist text itself. For the moment, such an analysis seems superfluous, given that Young himself, in an essay on “The dialectics of cultural criticism” published only five years after “Psychoanalysis and political literary theories” (1991), insists that the “incompatibility of the inside and the outside” psychoanalysis theorizes is also the subject of a “particularly acute and productive” Marxist analysis (Young, 1996:12, 17).

The paradoxes of cultural criticism

In “The dialectics of cultural criticism” Young described how the dilemmas and paradoxes of the “inside/outside dichotomy” have found themselves “endlessly perpetuated” in cultural criticism: from Burke, Coleridge and Arnold’s embodiment of the concepts of culture in cultural institutions; through the attempt to shift the proper subject of cultural criticism’s attention outside such institutions and onto history, in the case of New Historicism, and culture, in that of Cultural Materialism; to Fredric Jameson’s “celebrated use of the The Bonaventure Hotel as a metaphor of the post-modern condition” (Young 1996: 16) of cultural criticism, in which the intellectual is trapped on the inside of the institution, unable to get out. Indeed, Young observes that:

the very project of cultural criticism involves an impossible contradiction in which the critic places him or himself simultaneously inside and outside the culture. Here we find the basis for the interminable dialectic between inside and outside so characteristic of critical thinking. In general, individuals are inclined to endorse either one side or the other… The result is that the options remain entirely within the culture’s own terms, and thus either repeat it uncritically…or take up a transcendent position outside it and dismiss it in its entirety with the critic implicitly claiming that he or she possess the true knowledge (or the culture) which the culture itself lacks (Young 1996:18).

This tendency is particularly apparent in critical attitudes toward popular culture. As I have demonstrated elsewhere in an analysis of some of the irreducible paradoxes that produce cultural studies (Hall 1996, from where the remainder of this paragraph has been taken), the criticism of popular culture is often set up very much in this way: as a struggle between two opposing forces—“cultural critique and critical distance versus a populist celebration of the popular” (Webster 1990:85). What is more, it is a struggle neither side seems able to win. What one side sees as assuring victory, the other regards simply as a product of the same old problem; one that it is all the more dangerous for being held up as some sort of solution. Cultural criticism consequently appears trapped in a struggle in which the representation of popular culture is restricted to a choice between what appear to be two equally unacceptable positions—between a traditional intellectual position of critical difference and distance on the one hand, and a populist denial of any such difference on the other—with each side charging the other with adhering to the very system of rules and values it should be questioning. For traditional critics, what cultural studies needs is a supply of the sort of critical weaponry only they can deliver. From this point of view, cultural studies is not nearly objective, critical or political enough. Meanwhile, cultural studies argues in turn that, far from offering any sort of solution, such critical weapons are in fact precisely the problem. As far as cultural studies is concerned, the only thing it would be making if it were to join forces with a criticism already weakened by elitist, masculine norms, is the sort of strategic mistake that has already cost cultural criticism too dear.³

An answer to the “quandary of the choice between” these two positions, Young argues, can be found in a “short but difficult” early essay by the Marxist cultural critic Theodore W.Adorno entitled “Cultural criticism and society” (Young 1996:18). According to Young:

…the deficiencies readily apparent in both methods led Adorno to propose that the practice of criticism must sustain an antinomy between them, a critical dissonant doubling which parallels the fissure within the individual work of art or in culture itself. He argues that cultural criticism must operate through an incompatible logic of transcendent and immanent critique, even if that removes the finality associated with either and substitutes unresolved contradiction. Dialectical criticism must sustain a duality, which means a continuous mobility between contesting positions (19:21).

The point, then, for the Adorno of “Cultural criticism and society” (in marked contrast to the emphasis on reproducing this interminable dialectic usually identifiable a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes On Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Politics and Psychoanalysis
• Part II: Between Psychic Processes and Culture
• Part III: Race, Ethnicity and Fantasy
• Part IV: History and Postmodernism
• Part V: Corporeality
• Part VI: Auto/Biography