Formalism and Marxism (New Accents)

New Accents

General Editor: TERENCE HAWKES

FORMALISM AND MARXISM

IN THE SAME SERIESStructuralism and Semiotics Terence Hawkes *

Linguistics and the Novel Roger Fowler

Reading Television John Fiske and John Hartley

Language and Style E.L.Epstein

Subculture: The Meaning of Style Dick Hebdige

Critical Practice Catherine Belsey

The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama Keir Elam

Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching Patrick Parrinder

Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion Rosemary Jackson

Translation Studies Susan Bassnett-McGuire

Sexual Fiction Maurice Charney

Re-Reading English edited by Peter Widdowson

Deconstruction: Theory and Practice Christopher Norris

Orality and Literacy Walter J.Ong

Poetry as Discourse Antony Easthope

Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

Literature and Propaganda A.P.Foulkes

Reception Theory: A Critical IntroductionRobert C.Holub

Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-ConsciousFiction Patricia Waugh

Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice Elizabeth Wright

Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism editedby Gayle Green and Coppélia Kahn

Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory Toril Moi

Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, Rebecca O’Rourke andChris Weedon

Alternative Shakespeares edited by John Drakakis

The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of AmericanLiterature Russell J.Reising

*Not available from Methuen, Inc. in the USA

iii

TONY BENNETT

FORMALISM ANDMARXISM

ROUTLEDGELONDON AND NEW YORK

To my father and mother, with thanks

First published in 1979 byMethuen & Co. Ltd

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francisor Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to

www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 1979 Tony Bennett

ISBN 0 416 70870 6 (hardbound)ISBN 0 415 05086 3 (paperback)

All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any

form or by any electronic, mechanical or othermeans, now known or hereafter invented, includingphotocopying and recording, or in any information

storage or retrieval system, without permissionin writing from the publishers.

ISBN 0-203-97790-4 Master e-book ISBN

CONTENTS

General Editor’s Preface ix

Acknowledgements xii

Part One: Formalism revisited xiv

1 CRITICISM AND LITERATURE 3

Questions of language 3

Questions of literature 6

Questions of aesthetics 9

2 FORMALISM AND MARXISM 17

Russian Formalism: theoreticalperspectives

17

Reassessing Formalism 26

Historical perspectives on RussianFormalism

30

New directions in Marxist criticism 39

3 RUSSIAN FORMALISM:CLEARING THE GROUND

45

Linguistics and literature 45

The question of literariness: criticismand its object

49

The system and its elements: formand function

53

Against the ‘metaphysic of the text’ 60

The problem of literary evolution 65

4 FORMALISM AND BEYOND 69

The accomplishments of Formalism 69

Saussure’s magic carpet 75

Bakhtin’s historical poetics 81

‘Literature’ as a historical category 89

Part Two: Marxist criticism: from aestheticsto politics

99

5 MARXISM VERSUSAESTHETICS

103

Formalism: a lost heritage 103

Marxist criticism: aesthetics, politicsand history

107

Literature’s ‘non-said’ 114

6 SCIENCE, LITERATURE ANDIDEOLOGY

118

On practices 118

On ideology 120

On science 126

On art and literature 128

7 THE LEGACY OF AESTHETICS 135

The lessons of Formalism 135

A new idealism 141

Criticism and politics 147

viii

8 WORK IN PROGRESS 153

The post-Althusserians 153

Modes of literary production 161

Literature and the social process 168

9 CONCLUSION 181

Notes 189

Bibliography 200

Index 206

ix

GENERAL EDITOR’SPREFACE

IT is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid andradical social change. It is much less easy to grasp thefact that such change will inevitably affect the nature ofthose disciplines that both reflect our society and help toshape it.

Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the centralfield of what may, in general terms, be called literarystudies. Here, among large numbers of students at alllevels of education, the erosion of the assumptions andpresup-positions that support the literary disciplines intheir conventional form has proved fundamental.Modes and categories inherited from the past no longerseem to fit the reality experienced by a new generation.

New Accents is intended as a positive response to theinitiative offered by such a situation. Each volume inthe series will seek to encourage rather than resist theprocess of change, to stretch rather than reinforce theboundaries that currently define literature and itsacademic study.

Some important areas of interest immediately presentthemselves. In various parts of the world, new methodsof analysis have been developed whose conclusionsreveal the limitations of the Anglo-American outlookwe inherit. New concepts of literary forms and modeshave been proposed; new notions of the nature ofliterature itself, and of how it communicates are

current; new views of literature’s role in relation tosociety flourish. New Accents will aim to expound andcomment upon the most notable of these.

In the broad field of the study of humancommunication, more and more emphasis has beenplaced upon the nature and function of the newelectronic media. New Accents will try to identify anddiscuss the challenge these offer to our traditionalmodes of critical response.

The same interest in communication suggests that theseries should also concern itself with those wideranthropological and sociological areas of investigationwhich have begun to involve scrutiny of the nature ofart itself and of its relation to our whole way of life.And this will ultimately require attention to be focusedon some of those activities which in our societyhave hitherto been excluded from the prestigious realmsof Culture. The disturbing realignment of valuesinvolved and the disconcerting nature of the pressuresthat work to bring it about both constitute areas thatNew Accents will seek to explore.

Finally, as its title suggests, one aspect of NewAccents will be firmly located in contemporaryapproaches to language, and a continuing concern of theseries will be to examine the extent to which relevantbranches of linguistic studies can illuminate specificliterary areas. The volumes with this particular interestwill nevertheless presume no prior technical knowledgeon the part of their readers, and will aim to rehearse thelinguistics appropriate to the matter in hand, ratherthan to embark on general theoretical matters.

Each volume in the series will attempt an objectiveexposition of significant developments in its field up tothe present as well as an account of its author’s ownviews of the matter. Each will culminate in aninformative bibliography as a guide to further study.

xi

And while each will be primarily concerned withmatters relevant to its own specific interests, we canhope that a kind of conversation will be heard todevelop between them: one whose accents may perhapssuggest the distinctive discourse of the future.

TERENCE HAWKES

xii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THIS is my first book and, in writing it, I havelearned—somewhat to my surprise—just how much of acollective undertaking a book really is. Whilst I mustaccept final responsibility for any errors of fact orinterpretation that remain, I owe a real debt of thanks tothose who commented on the book during the variousstages of its production and, in so doing, helped me toremove at least some of its weaknesses.

I am particularly indebted to Professor TerenceHawkes of University College, Cardiff—first, for givingme the opportunity to write this book and, second, forthe detailed and painstaking criticisms he made of myearly drafts. If I have succeeded at all in communicatingmy thoughts in a relatively direct and easily accessibleway, this is due in no small part to the extraordinarilyactive contribution which Professor Hawkes has madeas the editor of the New Accents series.

Next, I should like to thank those friends andcolleagues at the Open University who commented onearlier versions of the book: in particular, JanetWoollacott and Grahame Thompson. To my brotherMichael I owe thanks for both his encouragingcomments and for, as ever, spotting where I was skatingon thin ice. I should also like to record my debt toProfessor Graham Martin of the Open University: mybook would be the poorer but for the benefit I have

derived from discussing with him some of the questionsraised within it.

Thanks are also due to Pauline O’Mara and SheilaBeevers for their help in typing the final version of thebook. And I would like to make special mention ofMike Richardson of the Open University: without hishelp and support, this book might never have seen thelight of day.

Finally, and above all, my thanks to Sue for all herhelp and understanding and to Tanya, Oliver andJames for providing the distractions.

Since writing the above, I have received furthercomments on my book from Terry Eagleton of WadhamCollege, Oxford, and Stuart Hall of BirminghamUniversity. I am grateful to both of them for the helpfuland friendly spirit in which they offered theircriticisms.

xiv

PART ONE:

FORMALISM REVISITED

2

1CRITICISM AND

LITERATURE

Questions of language

THIS study addresses itself to three related tasks. First, itsets out to introduce the work of the Russian Formalists, agroup of literary theorists who madean extraordinarilyvital and influential contribution to literary criticismduring the decade or so after the October Revolution of1917. Second, by arguing for a new interpretation of theirwork, it suggests that the Formalists should be viewedmore seriously and sympathetically by Marxist critics thanhas hitherto been the case. Finally, as anundercurrentrunning beneath these concerns, it argues that many of thedifficulties in which Marxist criticism currently finds itselfcan be traced to the fact that it hasnever clearlydisentangled its concerns from those of traditionalaesthetics. We hope, in part, to remedy this by proposing,on the basis of a critical re-examination of the work of theFormalists, a new set of concerns for Marxist criticism, anew concept of ‘literature’, which will shift it from theterrain of aesthetics to that of politics where it belongs.

Wide-ranging though these concerns are, they allrevolve around the same set of questions: What isliterature? By what methods should it be studied? Or,more radically: Is the category of ‘literature’ worth

sustaining? If so, for what purposes? Much of our timewill be taken up in reviewing some of the different waysin which these questions have been answered and inexamining their implications for the ways in whichliterary criticism should be conceived and conducted.

We must therefore be clear about what is involved inquestions of this nature. For they are not questionswhich might be resolved empirically by generalizingfrom the similarities which those texts customarilyregarded as ‘works of literature’ seem to have incommon. They are, rather, questions about languageor, more specifically, about the specialized theoreticallanguages or discourses of literary criticism and thefunctioning of the key terms, especially the term‘literature’, within such discourses. Some understandingof language and of its implications for the nature of thediscourses of literary criticism is therefore called for ifwe are both to put and respond to such questions in theappropriate terms.

This is only apparently a digression. For linguistics,once a somewhat recondite area of inquiry, nowoccupies a central position within the social and culturalsciences. At the level of method, techniques of analysisderiving from Ferdinand de Saussure’s pioneering workon language have substantially influenced all areas ofinquiry where the role of language and culture is seen tobe central.1 Similarly, at a philosophical level, thewidening influence of linguistics has produced aheightened awareness of the role played by language inthe process of inquiry itself. Especially importanthere is the light linguistics has cast on the relationshipbetween the specialized theoretical languages ordiscourses of the various sciences and the ‘objects’ ofwhich they speak.

For the moment, it is the latter of these influenceswhich concerns us. Baldly summarized, Saussure’s

4 FORMALISM AND MARXISM

central perception was that language signifies reality bybestowing a particular, linguistically structured form ofconceptual organization upon it. What the signifiers oflanguage—the sound structures of speech and thenotations by which these are represented in writing—signify, Saussure argued, are not real things or realrelationships but the concepts of things, the concepts ofrelationships, each signifier deriving its meaning fromits relationship to other signifiers within the system ofrelationships mapped out by language itself. The‘objects’ of which language speaks are not ‘realobjects’, external to language, but ‘conceptual objects’located entirely within language. The word ‘ox’,according to Saussure’s famous example, signifies not areal ox but the concept of an ox, and it is able to do soby virtue of the relationships of similarity anddifference which define its position in relation to theother signifiers comprising modern English. There is nointrinsic connection between the real ox and the word‘ox’ by virtue of which the meaning of the latter isproduced. The relationship between the signifier andsignified is arbitrary: that is, it is a matter of convention.

This is not to deny that there exists a real worldexternal to the signifying mantle which language castsupon it. But it is to maintain that our knowledge orappropriation of that world is always mediated throughand influenced by the organizing structure whichlanguage inevitably places between it and ourselves.Oxen exist. No one is denying that. But the concept ofan ‘ox’ as a particular type of domesticated quadrupedbelonging to the bovine species—a concept throughwhich, in our culture, we appropriate the ‘real ox’—exists solely as part of a system of meaning that isproduced and defined by the functioning of the word‘ox’ within language.

CRITICISM AND LITERATURE 5

The difficulty is that, although bestowing asignification, a particular conceptual organization onreality, language constantly generates the illusion that itreflects reality instead of signifying it. The organizationof the relation ships between objects in the worldoutside language appears to be the same as theorganization of the relationships between the conceptsof objects within language and, indeed, the latterappears to be the mere mirroring of the former.

Questions of literature

What has been said about language in general applies justas much to the specialist languages or discourses of literarycriticism. These, too, are significations of reality and notreflections of it: particular orderings of concepts withinand by means of language which entirely determine theways in which written texts are accessible to thought.

Thus, if we put the question: ‘What is literature?’ thiscan only mean: what concept does the term ‘literature’signify? What function does it fulfil and whatdistinctions does it operate within language? Everythingdepends on the context within which the term is used.At the most general level, it simply denotes ‘that whichis written’ and refers to all forms of writing, from belleslettres to graffiti. In a second and more restrictiveusage, it refers to the concept of fictional, imaginativeor creative writing, including both ‘serious’ and‘popular’ genres, as distinct from, say, philosophical orscientific texts.

According to its most distinctive usage within literarycriticism, however, ‘literature’ denotes the concept of aspecial and privileged set of fictional, imaginative orcreative forms of writing which, it is argued, exhibitcertain specific properties that require special methodsof analysis if they are to be properly understood. It is this


concept of ‘literature’ that we find reflected in theconcerns of aesthetics. I shall henceforward representthis concept as ‘literature’ throughout the remainder ofthis chapter. If literary criticism has to do with theelucidation and explanation of those specifically‘literary’ qualities which are felt to distinguish a selectedset of written texts within the field of imaginativewriting in general, then clearly such a practice requiresa legitimating ‘set of rules’, an aesthetic, which willpropose criteria for distinguishing between the ‘literary’and the ‘non-literary’ in this special sense.

When we speak of ‘literature’ in this way, we are notspeaking of some objective and fixed body of writtentexts to which the word ‘literature’ is applied merelyas a descriptive label. We are rather speaking of aconcept—the concept of a circumscribed set of texts feltto be of special value—which exists and has meaningsolely within the discourses of literary criticism. This isnot to say that the actual texts to which this concept isapplied—the commonly received ‘great tradition’, say—exist only within such discourses. What is in dispute isnot the material existence of such texts but thecontention that, in any part of their objective andmaterial presence, they declare themselves to be‘literature’. Written texts do not organize themselvesinto the ‘literary’ and the ‘non-literary’. They are soorganized only by the operations of criticism upon them.Far from reflecting a somehow natural or spontaneoussystem of relationships between written texts, literarycriticism organizes those texts into a system ofrelationships which is the product of its own discourseand of the distinctions between the ‘literary’ and the‘non-literary’ which it operates.

As we shall see, this contention is fully substantiatedby the history of the term ‘literature’ which finallyachieved the range of meaning discussed above only


during the nineteenth century, side by side with theconsolidation of literary criticism and aesthetics asautonomous and academically entrenched areas ofinquiry. Meanwhile, it is important to note that theparticular meaning attributed to the word ‘literature’may vary to the extent that schools of literary criticismfrequently differ with regard to their conceptionsas to precisely what the distinguishing features of‘literature’ are and, accordingly, the methods requiredto elucidate them. Thus it may be argued, as in idealistaesthetics, that a particular type of sensibility uniquelydistinguishes the genuinely ‘literary’ text and that thediscernment of this sensibility is achieved throughempathy or intuition. Or it may be argued, as did theRussian Formalists, that the uniqueness of ‘literature’consists in its tendency to ‘defamiliarize’ experience andthat the true concern of literary scholarship should beto analyse the formal devices by means of whichsuch an effect is achieved. Finally, this time in the campof Marxism, it may be argued, as Louis Althusser,Pierre Macherey and Terry Eagleton have done, that‘literature’ is uniquely defined by its capacity to revealor rupture from within the terms of seeing proposed bythe categories of dominant ideologies. The concern ofMarxist criticism, according to this definition of‘literature’, thus becomes that of understanding theformal processes through which literary texts workupon and transform dominant ideological forms.

Different criticisms, then, propose different conceptsof ‘literature’, although all agree that ‘literature’ is to bedefined as, in one sense or another, a special type ofwriting which needs to be dealt with by a special level oftheorizing. In so doing, they also produce their ownconcerns in relation to such ‘literary’ works: their ownconstructions of the essential tasks of criticism and ofthe means by which these should be pursued.


Ultimately, the ‘literature’ with which different criticaltraditions deal is not the same ‘literature’. Even wherethere is broad agreement about precisely which textsare to be regarded as ‘literary’, these may be held to be‘literary’ in quite different ways and may, accordingly,be approached and studied from quite differentperspectives with often radically different aims in view.

It is tempting, faced with such competing definitionsof ‘literature’ and of the critical task, to ask: ‘Which iscorrect?’ But, if what has been said so far holds true,there can be no way of answering this question. Forthere is no such ‘thing’ as literature, no body of writtentexts which self-evidently bear on their surface someimmediately perceivable and indisputable literaryessence which can be invoked as the arbiter of therelative merits of competing traditions of literarycriticism.

In place of asking which is correct, then, we need toexamine how these different concepts of ‘literature’function within the critical discourses of which theyform a part and to assess them in terms of the linesof inquiry they open up. There is, however, from aMarxist perspective, a more primary set of questionsthat need to be asked: Does Marxism need a concept of‘literature’ at all? Does it need an aesthetic? Can it havethe one without the other?

It is to a preliminary consideration of these mattersthat we now turn. In doing so, however, it should beborne in mind that such questions are not resolvablewith reference to what literature is but depend on whatthe term ‘literature’ signifies, or might be made tosignify, as a term within Marxist theory.


Questions of aesthetics

If the line of argument pursued so far gives rise todifficulties, this is in part because it runs contrary to theempiricist assumptions of the dominant forms of Englishand American criticism according to which written textsare held spontaneously to sort themselves into the‘literary’ and the ‘non-literary’. Let me be clear, then,about what I am and am not saying. I am not maintainingthat those texts which, by common agreement, are referredto as ‘literature’ do not exist. To the contrary, such textshave an objectively veri fiable material presence as texts,and it is important not to lose sight of this. Nor am Imaintaining that the particular types of writing associatedwith those texts display no special properties whichwould justify or make useful their designation as adistinctive set of texts within the sphere of imaginativewriting in general. Indeed, this is the central point Iwish to debate. What I am maintaining is that thedesignation of such texts as ‘literature’ is not a response toa property that is internal or natural to them but asignification that is bestowed on them from without by thepractice of criticism.

Why is this important? Partly because, within thepractical conduct of many schools of criticism, theconceptual procedures whereby they construct theirobject—the concept of ‘literature’ with which theyoperate—are normally hidden from view. The criticismof F.R.Leavis is a case in point. In his essay ‘LiteraryCriticism and Philosophy’, he suggests that theappropriate questions for the critic to put to any giventext are:

‘Where does this come? How does it stand in relationto…? How relatively important does it seem?’ Andthe organization into which it settles as a constituentin becoming ‘placed’ is an organization of similarly‘placed’ things, things that have found their bearings


with regard to one another, and not a theoreticalsystem or system determined by abstractconsiderations.2

Here, the labour of criticism effaces itself completelyas the organization into which the critic places the textis represented as being a direct reflection of the way inwhich those texts are ‘placed’ in relation to one anotherindepe dently of his/her discourse. Such a criticism thus‘naturalizes’ both itself and its object. Its object, thoseselected written texts which are conceived as‘literature’, is represented as a pre-given world ofsimilarly ‘placed’ things, whereas criti cism, far frombeing an actively constructing discourse, representsitself as a simple mirroring of the real within language.

Speaking more positively, however, suchconsiderations naturally raise questions with regard tothe validity or usefulness of the category of ‘literature’.A certain degree of caution is advisable here. That theconcept of ‘literature’ exists solely as a term within thediscourses of criticism is no reason to dispense with it—all concepts only exist within specific discourses. Butnor is this any reason to retain it. Rather than pre-emptthe issue, we should examine how the concept hasfunctioned within the history of criticism and assess itsusefulness in terms of the types of approach to writtentexts which it permits and those which it prohibits.These sorts of questions are increasingly being raised byboth Marxist and non-Marxist scholars, who feel thatthe historically relative way of viewing culture that isembodied in the concept of ‘literature’ is both unhelpfuland outdated. Unhelpful, because from the point ofview of historical studies it artificially separates thestudy of ‘literary’ texts from adjacent areas of culturalpractice. Outdated, because it fails to do justice to thechanging face of cultural practice induced by the


reorganization of cultural production associated withthe development of the mass media.

It was in this respect that we raised the question:Does Marxism need a concept of ‘literature’? To avoidmisunderstanding, what is at issue here is not whetherMarxists should concern themselves with the study ofthose texts conventionally designated as ‘literary’, butwhether they should concern themselves with thosetexts within the framework of a theory of ‘literature’ assuch. Marxists have always been concerned, and rightly,to calculate the political effects of such texts and todevise methods of analysis whereby their production—alongside that of other cultural forms—might beexplained as part of a materialist theory of ideology. Butit is not so clear that the treatment of such texts as‘literary’, as a separated system of cultural practice, orthe development of an associated aesthetic is necessaryor even helpful to the development of such concerns.Indeed, as most aesthetic theories seek to establish thespecific nature of the aesthetic mode as a universal andeternal form of cognition, there are good reasons forsupposing that such a concern would not sit toocomfortably with the essentially historical andmaterialist theoretical orientation of Marxism.

Yet the fact is that all of the major theoreticalcontributions to the history of Marxist criticismcontain a theory of ‘literature’ and a legitimatingconception of the specific nature of the aesthetic modeof appropriation of reality. Lukács, for example,distinguishes aesthetic from scientific knowledge byarguing that, in contradistinction to the conceptualabstractions of science, art constitutes ananthropomorphic form of cognition which ‘truthfully’depicts reality with a vivid, human-centred poeticconcreteness.3 Similarly, the ‘Althusserians’—Althusserhimself, Macherey and Eagleton—have broached the


question of the specificity of the aesthetic mode byconstruing it as a form of cognition that is mid-waybetween the ‘knowledge’ of science and the‘misrecognition’ of reality said to be contained inideology. Although there are real differences betweenthese two positions, they share the same fundamentalconcerns: the distinguishing of the aesthetic from thenon-aesthetic, of the ‘literary’ from the ‘non-literary’.They both constitute ‘literature’ as a particular form ofcognition which, if its specific nature is to beunderstood, requires the development of anautonomous level of theorizing within Marxism—atheory of ‘literature’ as a specialist sub-region within ageneral theory of ideology.

It is only recently that this assumption has beenchallenged. In their more recent work, Étienne Balibarand Pierre Macherey have argued that, in its attempts toproduce an aesthetic, Marxism has responded not to itsown theoretical and political needs but to theideological demands placed on it by the need tocompete with bourgeois criticism.4 The result, theyallege, is that Marxist criticism has tended to proceedby bringing Marxist categories to bear upon a set ofproblems that was already given to it by the bourgeoiscritical tradition, instead of using Marxist categories totranscend those debates by producing a new set ofproblems, a new approach to written texts withinwhich the question of the specific nature of ‘literature’would be no longer visible as a problem or would atleast be differently formulated.

Similar reservations have been expressed byRaymond Williams. In his two most recent works—Keywords (1976) and Marxism and Literature (1977)—Professor Williams has shown how, through aprotracted process of development, the word ‘literature’gradually assumed its current meaning. Whereas it had


earlier been used to refer to all forms of learned orscholarly writing—including philosophy and history aswell as fictional forms—‘literature’, as a term referringto a restricted and privileged set of fictional writing,came into accepted usage only during the nineteenthcentury. Prior to that there was, to put it bluntly, no‘literature’ in the sense that we now tend to use thatword. True, the texts of Shakespeare and Marlowe, ofRichardson and Fielding existed. But they were notinserted within or perceived through the system ofdistinctions established by the concept of ‘literature’ asit has subsequently come to be defined.

Professor Williams further demonstrates how thisprocess was connected with related transformations insuch concepts as ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ and, indeed,how the cultural vocabulary we have inherited from thenineteenth century, with its distinctions between ‘highculture’, ‘mass culture’ and ‘popular culture’, wasrelated to a particular historical configuration ofeconomic, political and ideological relationships. Inshort, he suggests that the organization into whichcertain forms of imaginative writing are compressed bythe concept of ‘literature’ reflects a historically andideologically produced way of viewing the textsconcerned and their relationship to neighbouring areasof cultural practice.

What conclusions does Professor Williams draw fromthis? Let us first see how he views the problem:

The theoretical problem is that two very powerfulmodes of distinction are deeply implanted in modernculture. These are the supposedly distinctivecategories of ‘literature’ and of ‘the aesthetic’. Each,of course, is historically specific: a formulation ofbourgeois culture at a definite period of itsdevelopment…. But we cannot say this merely


dismissively. In each mode of distinction, and inmany of the consequent particular definitions, thereare elements which cannot be surrendered, either tohistorical reaction or to a confused projectivegeneralization. Rather, we have to try to analyse thevery complicated pressures and limits which, in theirweakest forms, these definitions falsely stabilized, yetwhich, in their strongest forms, they sought toemphasize as new cultural practice. 5

Williams suggests, then, that the distinctions positedby the concepts of ‘literature’ and ‘the aesthetic’ shouldbe reviewed critically to see if, suitably reformulated,they might be of value. Proceeding in this way, hesuggests that, whilst the concept of ‘the aesthetic’should be discarded, the concept of ‘literature’ mightusefully be retained if it is used to refer to a particular,historically determined form of writing, defined by themajor literary forms of bourgeois society, instead of, asis customarily the case, to a set of universal attributeswhich all major forms of writing, from Homer to Kafka, are held to have in common.

Thus, in discussing traditional aesthetic theories, heargues that the effect of their concern with the specificnature of the aesthetic, with the policing of theconceptual boundaries between the ‘literary’ and the‘non-literary’, is to abstract literary texts from thesocial and cultural processes within which they areinevitably contained, severing the connections whichlink them to other forms of cultural practice. Withregard to the concept of ‘literature’, however, he writes:

Yet the crucial theoretical break is the recognition of‘literature’ as a specializing social and historicalcategory. It should be clear that this does notdiminish its importance. Just because it is historical,a key concept of a major phase of a culture, it is


decisive evidence of a particular form of the socialdevelopment of language. Within its terms, work ofoutstanding and permanent importance was done, inspecific social and cultural relationships. 6

This is no mere empty dispute about words. What isbeing proposed here is a concept of literature that isincommensurable with the concept of ‘literature’ as ithas traditionally functioned within the discourses ofliterary criticism. It refers not to the concept of aprivileged set of texts which exemplify a universal andeternal aesthetic form of cognition but to a specificpractice of writing, bound, circumscribed andconditioned by the historical, material and ideologicalconditions of its production. Although such texts mayexhibit properties different from those displayed byother forms of writing, they are distinguished fromthem not aesthetically but as one practice of writingamongst others.

Used in this way, the term ‘literature’ exists no longeras a term within the discourse of aesthetics. Thedistinctions which it establishes are of a social andhistorical, not an aesthetic nature. It suggests anapproach to so-called literary texts which will construethem, not as the manifestations of some abstract anduniversal literary essence, but as the product of ahistorically particular conduct of the practice of writing.

This is an important step to take. Indeed, it is a vitalstep for Marxist criticism if it is to approach writtentexts from a consistently historical and materialiststandpoint. The question is: Can such a category of‘literature’ be substantiated? Is it useful, from the pointof view not of aesthetics but of a historical poetics, toreserve the term ‘literature’ for the dominant forms ofbourgeois writing as a historically limited categoryreferring to a particular type of cultural practice?


It is in an attempt to answer these questions that wenow turn to consider the work of the RussianFormalists and, later, that of the Althusserians. Byjuxtaposing these two traditions we hope, if not toanswer these questions, at least to suggest the directionsin which answers might be sought.

Yet, at first glance, the route we have chosen mightseem an unlikely one. For both the Formalists and theAlthusserians would seem to propose precisely thatform of discourse about ‘literature’ as abstracted andseparate that Raymond Williams has been seeking todisplace. The work of the Formalists has beentraditionally disparaged within Marxist circles as thevery apogee of aestheticism, whereas the essentialconcern of the Althusserians has been to distinguishbetween Literature, Science and Ideology as irrevocablyseparate categories. But it is also true that, althoughboth traditions have been concerned to develop anautonomous theory of ‘literature’ as such, thisattempt has, in both cases, broken down. The result, inthe work of the ‘Bakhtin school’ in Russia in the late1920s and, in the case of the Althusserians, in work thatis still going on, has been the emergence of newtraditions of inquiry which shift Marxist criticism ontoan ultimately non-aesthetic terrain.


18

2FORMALISM AND MARXISM

Russian Formalism: theoreticalperspectives

ALTHOUGH the roots of Russian Formalism go backto the 1880s, it existed as an identifiable criticalmovement only during the years immediately precedingthe October Revolution of 1917 and in the decade or sosucceeding it.1 Yet the term ‘movement’ is misleading. Forthe Formalists could not be described as members of aunified school of critical thought working, from anorganizational basis, toward the realization of an agreedprogramme or manifesto. Indeed, even the name‘Formalism’ was not of their choosing but was a pejorativelabel applied to them by their opponents in the turbulentcritical arena of post-revolutionary Russia.2

The so-called Formalists, then, were merely a groupof like-minded scholars—Viktor Shklovsky, BorisEichenbaum, Jurij Tynyanov and Roman Jakobsonwere perhaps the most prominent—who sharedtheoretical interests in common. The onlyorganizational bases of the ‘movement’ were theMoscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915 and headedby Jakobson, and the Society for the Study of PoeticLanguage (Opoyaz), founded in 1916 and dominatedby Shklovsky. For the greater part of their histories,

these bodies were largely discussion circles and, at most,bases for co-operative publishing ventures. There were,further more, important differences of theoretical stressand orientation between these two centres. Althoughboth groups were substantially influenced by thedeveloping methods of linguistics, this was more trueof’ the Moscow Linguistic Circle than of Opoyaz.Similarly, whilst the concern of Opoyaz was fairlysingle-mindedly with the specific distinguishing featuresof European belles lettres, the members of the MoscowLinguistic Circle were also interested in the study ofRussian folklore.

Nevertheless, the two groups did share sufficientground for us to gloss over these differences for themoment. Two concerns stand to the fore. First, theywere united in their wish to establish the study ofliterature on a scientific footing, to constitute it as anautonomous science using methods and procedures ofits own. This entailed, as their primary concern, thequestion of ‘literariness’: that is, the problem ofspecifying those formal and linguistic properties whichcould be said to distinguish literature and poetry fromother forms of discourse, and particularly from prosaicor ordinary language.

It was with respect both to the way in which thisconcern was pursued and the nature of the conclusionsthey proposed that the label of ‘formalism’ wasapplied to the Formalists. For, at the level of method,they held that the question of literature’s specificitycould be resolved solely with reference to the formalproperties of literary texts. It was not necessary, theyargued, to take into account the historical forcesoperative in the construction of such texts—anassumption that was to bring them into conflict withthe developing schools of Marxist criticism in Russia.More substantively, in common with other schools of


formalist criticism—Anglo-American New Criticism isperhaps the closest parallel3—the Russian Formaliststended to underwrite the Kantian doctrine of ‘art forart’s sake’.

This position was most fully developed inJakobson’s writings on poetry. According to Jakobson,the mode of functioning of the poetic word is such as tosecure the primacy of its aesthetic over itscommunicative function. The question of the word’sreferential meaning—its relationship to whatever itsignifies—which is dominant in ordinary language, issuspended in poetry where, Jakobson argues, the wordis installed within an incessant play of meaning uponmeaning. This process yields an excess of significationwhich, going beyond the mundane uses of the word issaid to be of value purely for its own sake.4

Second, the Formalists aimed to undermine thecogency of the concern with mimesis in literary theoryby arguing that literature was not and could not be areflection of reality but only a particular, semioticallyorganized signification of it. Far from reflecting reality,the Formalists argued, literary texts tend to ‘make itstrange’, to dislocate our habitual perceptions of thereal world so as to make it the object of a renewedattentiveness. Indeed, they argued that it was this abilityto defamiliarize the forms through which wecustomarily perceive the world that uniquelydistinguished literature from other forms of discourse.The vast majority of their studies accordingly set out toreveal the formal mechanisms whereby this effect ofdefamiliarization was produced.

Thus, at one level, they subjected particular sentencesor verse structures to meticulous analysis in order toreveal the precise nature of the transformations whichthey effected on the categories of ordinary language.

FORMALISM AND MARXISM 21

Take, as a brief example, the following sentence fromLen Deighton’s Billion-Dollar Brain:

It was a sunny day and the sky was like a new sheetof blotting paper with the blue ink tipped into themiddle of it.

What is achieved in this sentence, according to aFormalist analysis, is a trarasformation of the sentenceThe sky was blue’ in such a way that one’s flaggingperceptions are chastened into a renewed attentivenessto the sky’s blueness. The sentence does not serve apurely informative function; it focuses our attention onthe image of the sky that is offered so as to heightenour perception of it as an aesthetic end in itself.

More at the level of content, the Formalists soughtto reveal the devices through which the total structureof given works of literature might be said todefamiliarize, make strange or challenge certaindominant conceptions—ideologies even, although theydid not use the word—of the social world. It is in thissense, for example, that the couplet Don Quixote/Sancho Panza might be said to figure as a device of‘defamiliarization’ in relation to the canons of chivalricromance. Or, to give another example, it is clear that inMark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,Huck himself functions as a formal device whereby theideological forms upholding the institution of slaveryare turned inside out, made to appear strange and, inthe process, called into question. Take the episode inwhich Huck and Jim, the escaped Negro slave who ishis companion on the raft, come to the point in theirjourney down the Mississippi at which Cairo and, forJim, freedom beckon:


Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talkingto myself. He was saying how the first thing hewould do when he got to a free state he would go tosaving up money and never spend a single cent, andwhen he got enough he would buy his wife, whichwas owned on a farm close to where Miss Watsonlived; and then they would both work to buy the twochildren, and if their master wouldn’t sell them,they’d get an Ab’litionist to go and steal them.

It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn’tever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just seewhat a difference it made in him the minute hejudged he was about free. It was according to the oldsaying, ‘give a nigger an inch and he’ll take an ell.’Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking.Here was this nigger which I had as good as helpedto run away, coming right out flat-footed and sayinghe would steal his children—children that belongedto a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t everdone me no harm. 5

The most interesting feature of this passage is theway in which the contortions of Huck’s grammarreveal the contradiction between the reality of slaveryand the ideological forms of individualism. Whatshocks Huck is not so much that Jim plans to buy or, ifneed be, steal his children from their owner, but thefact that Jim dares to imagine himself as the subject ofany action whatever. Linguistically speaking, Jimconstitutes himself as the subject of predication: hedares to imagine himself as an ‘I’ to whom there can beattributed an autonomous volition. He thinks andspeaks for himself within language in anticipation ofthe situation in which he will be legally free to act forhimself within the world. It is in a firm rebuttal of thisthat Huck refers to both Jim and his wife not aspersons but as objects—‘his wife, which was owned on


a farm’; ‘this nigger which I had as good as helped torun away’. Slaves, Huck thus affirms, do not or shouldnot think or act for themselves. They exist,linguistically, as objects within the discourse of othersjust as, economically, they are the property of others. Inthis linguistic tension—the tension between Jim as the‘I’ of his own discourse and Jim as the ‘which’ ofHuck’s discourse—there is inscribed the tensionbetween the ethical, political and linguistic imperativesof individualism and the limits to those imperatives asset by the institution of slavery, a tension which is madevisible by the workings of the text.

Finally, and perhaps most sustainedly, theFormalists were concerned with the formal mechanismswhereby literary works tended to reveal or makestrange the systems of coherence imposed on reality bythe codes and conventions of other, usually earlierliterary forms. Shklovsky’s comments on LaurenceSterne’s Tristram Shandy may be taken as typical in thisrespect.6 Distinguishing between the concepts of fabula(or story) that is, the temporal-causal sequence ofnarrated events which comprise the raw materials of thework, and sjuzet (or plot) as the way in which these rawmaterials are formally manipulated, Shklovsky arguesthat the story of Tristram Shandy—ostensibly the lifeand opinions of Tristram—is told in such a way as tolimit and reveal the narrative conventions of the time.According to these, the developing forms of novelisticrealism purported to reflect the unfolding of eventsthrough an objective temporal sequence in whicheffect follows cause, cause begets effect and so on. Bytaking these conventions seriously and parodyingthem—by beginning at the beginning, with Tristram’sconception—Sterne reveals their essentially formal andcontrived nature in the innumerable digressions intowhich he is forced in order actually to locate a point in


time which can be regarded as a beginning and, oncelocated, to get beyond it. In this way, Sterne forces theconventions of novelistic realism into a corner where,their claim to be faithful and literal transcriptions ofreality having been disavowed, they stand revealed asmerely one set of formal conventions amongst others.

The influence of this latter concern on subsequentschools of literary criticism cannot be overestimated. Ithas provided both the inspiration and many of theconcepts for the theories of Roland Barthes and, in thiscountry, Stephen Heath, concerning the extent to whichcontemporary avant-garde literary practice—the worksof James Joyce, Franz Kafka and, more recently,such exponents of the nouveau roman as Alain Robbe-Grillet—can be viewed as enacting a work oftransformation on the classical canons of novelisticrealism.7 These latter, they argue, convey the illusionthat they are literal transcriptions of reality, forms inwhich, as it were, reality writes itself. In explicitlybreaking with, parodying or playing upon suchconventions, contemporary avant-garde literarypractice is said to ‘defamiliarize’ such conventions: toreveal them as conventions and, in so doing, to showhow they condition our perceptions of reality by,precisely, refusing to conform to them.

‘The nouveau roman’, as Stephen Heath puts it, ‘…isthus an essentially critical enterprise directed at aquestioning of the assumptions of the “Balzacian” noveland, through that, of the habitual forms in which wedefine or write our lives.’8 By refusing to end stories; bybeginning them at arbitrary points in time; byconstantly re-running the same sequence of events atdifferent stages in the unfolding of the narrative; byrefusing any anthropomorphizing description ofpersons or objects—in all of these ways, the practice ofthe nouveau roman reveals the essentially social and


conventional nature of those literary forms which doconstruct their narrative universe in accordance withthese conventions.

To conclude this thumb-nail sketch of Formalism,then, the Formalists argued that literature should beregarded as a practice which, through a variety offormal devices, enacts a transformation of receivedcategories of thought and expression. Subverting theparticular patterns of thought or perception imposed onreality by the categories of ordinary language, bydominant ideological forms or by the codes of otherliterary works, literature is thus said to make such formsstrange and, in so doing, to weaken their grip on theways in which we perceive the world. In this way,Shklovsky argued, literature ‘creates a “vision” of theobject instead of serving as a means for knowing it’.9 Itdoes not, as does science, organize the worldconceptually, but rather disorganizes the forms throughwhich the world is customarily perceived, opening up akind of chink through which the world displays to viewnew and unexpected aspects.

Finally, in all of this, the Formalists themselves had astrong preference for those literary forms which, ratherthan concealing or effacing their own formaloperations, explicitly display on their surface theprocesses of their own working. This preference for the‘baring of the device’ in part reflected theirsusceptibility to Kant’s doctrine of art for art’s sake.For, whereas realist modes of writing encourage thereader to read through the formal artistic devices,without noticing them, in order to appropriate the storythat rests beneath them, those works which wear theirformal operations on their sleeve force the reader toattend to the artistry of the work as an end in itself.Shklovsky was thus an outspoken supporter of zaumpoetry which, by a deliberate play on words and their


accepted meanings, aimed to produce a trans-rationallanguage in which words functioned in a purely formal,artistic way.

Reassessing Formalism

We can see from the above the sense in which, for theFormalists, it would have been inconceivable to regard anyset of literary forms as being realistic in the sense that theysomehow corresponded to reality itself. Formalism regardsall literary forms as equally and necessarily significationsof reality.10 They differ merely with respect to thecompendia of devices through which they effect their workof signification.

It was this perception that brought the Formalistsinto conflict with the developing schools of post-Revolutionary Marxist criticism which, especially in the1920s, were increasingly dominated by the concerns of‘reflection theory’. This demanded that the relativemerits of literary forms should be judged according tothe extent to which they succeeded in accuratelydepicting or ‘reflecting’ the underlying logic anddirection of historical development. From 1917 to1923–4, partly because the Party had more pressingmatters to attend to and partly because there was noclearly defined orthodoxy within Marxist criticism, thework of the Formalists was tolerated, even welcomed insome quarters. From the mid-1920s, however, theywere subjected to increasing pressures to revise theirnegative estimation of the theory of reflection and toconcern themselves with historical and sociological, asopposed to purely ‘literary’, considerations.

By 1929 these pressures, from being merelytheoretical, had taken on a more bureaucratic andovertly political colour. Individual fates varied.Shklovsky and Eichenbaum remained in Russia where,


by limiting their activities to routine textual criticism,they managed to survive the years of Stalinistrepression. Jakobson migrated westward, eventuallyreaching Prague where he was to become the doyen ofnascent Czech structuralism. But, by 1930, Formalismwas effectively dead, and, by 1934, had become a meresynonym for the concepts of bourgeois decadence andescapism within the ideology of socialist realismpromulgated by Zhdanov.

Putting the question of their political repression inthe name of Zhdanovite orthodoxy to one side, it is stillnot easy to see how the concerns of the RussianFormalists might be squared with those of Marxistcriticism. For, if there is a common core to Marxistcriticism, it is the conviction that works of literature canbe fully understood only if placed in the context of theeconomic, social and political relationships in whichthey are produced. The Formalists, by contrast, tendedto insist on the autonomy of literature, regarding theproper business of criticism as being solely with theanalysis of the formal properties of literary texts.Similarly, whereas Marxism adopts a political stance inrelation to literature, imputing certain political effectsto works of literature and seeking to evaluate thoseeffects from its own political position, the Formaliststended to be apolitical in their approach, viewing theaesthetic effect of defamiliarization to which works ofliterature were said to give rise as an end in itself,divorced from political considerations or consequences.

The difficulty of conducting a dialogue betweenFormalist and Marxist criticism has been compoundedby the circumstances in which the work of theFormalists first entered into critical debate in the west.Although Brecht was influenced by Formalist ideas indeveloping his theory of epic theatre,11 the Formalistsseem not to have had any appreciable impact on literary


scholarship in the West until the publication, in 1955,of Victor Erlich’s Russian For malism—History,Doctrine, and, in 1965, of Tzvetan Todorov’s Textesdes formalistes russes. As both of these appearedcontemporaneously with and assisted in the emergenceof structuralism and semiotics as influentialperspectives within the study of literature, both tendedto stress the continuities between Formalism andcontemporary structuralist criticism. The accuracy ofthis assessment will concern us shortly. Meanwhile, sofar as any rapprochement with Marxism is concerned,this particular form of the ‘rediscovery’ of theFormalists has been unfortunate. For, apart from aperiod of brief flirtation in the early 1960s, Marxistshave come to regard structuralism as a new idealism,indeed a new ‘formalism’, with the result that theFormalists have often been condemned as guilty bymere association.

It is only recently that a sustained dialogue betweenFormalism and Marxism has become possible. This isnot to say that such a dialogue has not previously beencalled for. ‘Every young science’, Pavel Medvedevwrote, with the Formalists in mind, ‘—and Marxistliterary scholarship is very young—must much morehighly prize a good foe than a poor ally.’12 This was inthe late 1920s when Medvedev, together with hiscompanion critic Mikhail Bakhtin and the linguistValentin Vološinov (arguably the same person), washimself engaged in such a dialogue which, however,was curtailed by the same political pressures whichdispersed the Formalists. More recently, RolandBarthes has admonished that, had it been ‘lessterrorized by the spectre of “formalism”, historicalcriticism might have been less sterile’.13

These are exceptions, however, and for the greaterpart of the Left the most influential commentary on the


Formalists has been that offered by Trotsky. Yet,although not entirely unsympathetic to the Formalists.,Trotsky’s overall assessment of their work wassignificantly off-centre. It was methodologicallyunsound in that it judged the Formalists solely on thebasis of Shklovsky’s polemical early writings whichwere not at all representative of the actualaccomplishments of Formalism. It was, furthermore,contradictory. In seeking to distance himself from thecharge of economic reductionism, Trotsky accepted,with qualifications, the Formalist thesis that artisticcreation effects ‘a deflection, a changing and atransformation of reality, in accordance with thepeculiar laws of art’.14 Yet he also criticized theFormalists for concerning themselves overmuch withthe minutiae of poetic devices in spite of their claimthat it was only by studying these that the precisenature of the transformation to which works of artsubject reality could be fully understood. Althoughwilling to adopt the phraseology of the Formalistsconcerning the relative autonomy of art, Trotsky at thesame time belittled the concrete empirical work whichcould alone transform that phraseology from emptyslogan-mongering into a sustained theoretical position.

In spite of this central contradiction, Trotsky’s workhas been responsible for the spread of a stereotype ofthe Russian Formalists as humble ‘underlabourers ofthe device’ who, concerned solely with the minutiae ofliterary forms, are alleged to have dismissed social andhistorical considerations as irrelevant. It willaccordingly repay our attention to show that, in theactual conduct of their criticism, the Formalists were notso apolitical, ahistorical or asociological, so ‘formalist’,as the stereotype would have us believe.


Historical perspectives on RussianFormalism

Although the Bolshevik Party faced more pressingproblems of an economic, political and military natureafter the Revolution, it was also faced with the need todevelop a policy in the artistic sphere. Unfortunately, thereexisted no well-developed body of theory in relation towhich such a policy might be developed. The result, in theabsence of an authoritative theoretical voice at the politicalcentre, was a complex concatenation of divergent voicescompeting with one another for Party approval.

This is not the place for a detailed consideration ofthese matters.15 Suffice it to say that the mostinfluential of the competing literary-political tendencieswere, first, the Proletkult and its later offshoots,notably the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.Heir to the populist tradition of Russian criticism, theProletkult valued chiefly the agitational value of amilitantly proletarian revolutionary literature—that is,of literature which depicted the barriers to socialismbeing overthrown by the revolutionary will of its central,largely working-class, protagonists. Second, there werethose, notably Maxim Gorky, who supported thevalue of traditional realism and the role of the‘fellow travellers’. Arguing that literature had acognitive function, offering a knowledge ofhistorical development through an anthropomorphicand poetically concrete depiction of the socially typical,they argued that revolutionary literature should aim toreflect historical contradictions and not to conjure themaway through an excess of revolutionary optimism. Itwas this position that was nearest to Party orthodoxyand which, in the 1930s, was taken up, extended anddeveloped by Georg Lukács.

Finally, there were the Futurists who aimed torevolutionize literature not by revolutionizing its


content but by revolutionizing the techniques of literaryproduction. They sought to use literature to promoteneither a substitute for scientific knowledge, norrevolutionary sentiment, but the shock effect ofrecognition, inducing a new perception of reality bymodifying the forms through which it is customarilyperceived.

The position of the Formalists amidst this array ofcompeting voices varied from individual to individualand changed as the climate of criticism itself changed.They did not, however, attempt to debate politicallywith the Revolution. Far from being linked withreactionary social forces, they were amongst the firstgroup of intellectuals to declare their support for thenew regime. They were more ambivalent, however, withregard to the theoretical and political debates aboutliterature unleashed by the Revolution. Whilst, prior to1920, the Formalists sought to maintain a criticaldistance from these controversies, this aloofness provedimpossible in the 1920s. Drawn inexorably into themaelstrom of debate, their position changedsignificantly.

The critical factor in this development was theFormalists’ relationship to Futurism. It would bemistaken to view Formalism as the theory of whichFuturism was the practice. But there was undoubtedly aclose connection between the two. At the theoreticallevel, the Futurists’ politically motivated concern todisrupt habitualized ways of seeing bore a closerelationship to the Formalists’ more general theoreticalconcern with the devices whereby literary worksattained their effect of defamiliarization. The work ofthe Futurists thus formed a convenient illustration ofthe Formalists’ central thesis and was often quoted withapproval by them.16 These theoretical connections wereconsolidated at a personal level, chiefly through


Mayakovsky. The leading exponent and theorist ofFuturism, the editor of the Futurist journals Lef andNovy Lef, Mayakovsky also participated in the affairsof the Moscow Linguistic Circle and Opoyaz, thusensuring an active exchange of ideas between the twomovements.

It was largely as a result of this connection with theFuturists that the Formalists were induced to revisetheir contention that the literary device was‘unmotivated’ and to take more seriously the claims ofsocial and historical considerations in literaryscholarship. The Formalists, as we have seen, initiallysubscribed to a form of ‘art for art’s sake’. AsShklovsky put it:

The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’,to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty andlength of perception because the process ofperception is an aesthetic end in itself and must beprolonged.17

Shklovsky thus viewed the literary device as being‘unmotivated’. The defamiliarization to which it givesrise, that is, was not thought to be motivated by anyconsideration beyond that of promoting a renewed andsharpened attentiveness to reality. The category ofdefamiliarization was thus invested with a purelyaesthetic, and not with an ideological significance.

This ran quite contrary to the position of theFuturists who viewed the devices of defamiliarization asa means for promoting political awareness byundermining ideologically habituated modes ofperception. As Osip Brik summarized the Futurists’position:


Thus art was still ‘a device’; what had changedfrom the original Formalist interpretation was theapplication of the device. The emphasis was shiftedfrom the aesthetic function of the device to its use inthe service of a ‘social demand’. All themanifestations of the device, including the extremecase of ‘the device laid bare’ in trans-sense poetry,were now considered in the light of their potentialsocial utility: ‘not an aesthetic end in itself, but alaboratory for the best possible expression of thefacts of the present day.’18

However, although the Formalists accepted theKantian thesis of ‘art for art’s sake’, they did not regardthis, as do most idealist aesthetic theorists, as theproduct of some invariant aesthetic faculty rooted inthe human psyche. They rather viewed the essentiallyself-referring nature of literary works as a product of theobjective properties of such works. This wasparticularly the case in the Formalists’ writings onpoetry where it was argued that, through themechanisms of what Mukařovský was later to call‘foregrounding’, the poetic word functioned so as tosignify merely itself and its own usage and not anycontent beyond itself, ‘to place in the foreground theact of expression, the act of speech itself’.19

‘Art for art’s sake’, then, was understood in aspecifically materialist sense as the product of objectiveformal devices which were fully amenable to scientificanalysis. However, even this conception was modifiedin the light of the theoretical demands placed on theFormalists by the Futurists.

The role of Lef and, later, Novy Lef was crucial inthis respect. Attempting, on the one hand, to persuaderevolutionary artists not to underrate the contributionof the Formalists, these journals simultaneously called


upon the Formalists to enhance the value of theircontribution by providing a sociohistorical, as opposedto purely technical, account of literary devices togetherwith an analysis of the ideological motivations whichaccounted for the use to which such devices were put.20

There is no doubt that the Formalists responded tothese demands. In part, this resulted in a re-examination of the Kantian premises on which theirearlier writings had rested, but, more sustainedly, it alsoled to greater appreciation of the relevance of historicaland sociological considerations to the concerns ofliterary scholarship.

This is a matter on which the Formalists have beenperhaps most persistently misunderstood. Jakobson,seeking retrospectively to set the record straight, wrote:

Neither Tynyanov, nor Mukařovský, nor Shklovsky,nor I have preached that art is sufficient unto itself;on the contrary, we show that art is a part of thesocial edifice, a component correlating with theothers, a variable component, since the sphere of artand its relationship with other sectors of the socialstructure ceaselessly changes dialectically. What westress is not a separation of art, but the autonomy ofthe aesthetic function.21

Jakobson relies on the wisdom of hindsight a littletoo much here. For the Formalists—especiallyShklovsky—were not always so clear about the natureof their concerns as this would imply.22 Nevertheless,it is true to say that, for the greater part, the Formalistsdid not maintain that works of literature existed in anahistorical vacuum. They merely argued that theorganizational features which distinguished such worksas precisely works of ‘literature’ could not be reducedto economic, social or historical considerations. There


was therefore a need, they claimed, for an autonomouslevel of theorizing, concerned solely with the formalproperties of literary texts, if those features whichuniquely distinguished literary works were to beproperly understood. It was only in relation to thisfacet of literary texts—their literariness—and not inrelation to such texts as totalities that the Formalistsmaintained that social and historical considerationswere irrelevant.

Where they were on perhaps more shaky ground wasin their attempt to explain the dynamics of literaryevolution as entirely the result of developmentaltendencies at work within literature itself. It was inrelation to this issue, and not the question ofliterariness, that the Formalists conceded ground in thedirection of history and sociology. There is no doubtthat, in part, these concessions were merely cynicalresponses to political necessity. Surveying the variety ofsyntheses between Formalism, history and sociologyproposed by the Formalists in the mid-1920s, VictorErlich concludes that they were, for the most part,merely mechanical, a synthesis of slogans and not oftheoretical perspectives.23

Nevertheless, the need to take account of social andhistorical considerations was prompted as much bytheoretical as by political necessity. At root, theFormalists contended that literary forms tended tochange and develop simply as a result of the passage oftime itself. New literary forms are called into being,they argued, by the need to challenge and disrupt thoseforms and conventions, innovative and defamiliarizingin their own day, whose cutting edge has been dulledthrough overuse. Yet it was made increasingly clear,particularly by the pace and extremely radical nature ofliterary experimentation in post-Revolu-tionary Russia,


that neither the tempo nor the direction of literarychange could be explained in this way.

Jurij Tynyanov’s and Roman Jakobson’s essay on‘Problems in the Study of Literature and Language’(1927) is widely regarded as a critical turning point inthis respect. Although the autonomy of literature is stillinsisted upon, that autonomy is now conceived asrelative in nature. Tynyanov and Jakobson formallyacknowledge that the history of literature could only bewritten by relating it to the histories governing thedevelopment of economic, social and politicalrelationships. Whilst each of these levels of socialactivity is regarded as being autonomous in relation tothe others in the sense that each is governed by quitespecific and irreducible laws, Tynyanov and Jakobsoncontend that they are also inextricably interconnectedand can only be explained with reference to theinteraction between them within the ‘system of systems’constituted by the concrete historical society concerned:

The history of literature (art), being simultaneouswith other historical series, is characterized, as iseach of these series, by an involved complex ofstructural laws. Without an elucidation of theselaws, it is impossible to establish in a scientificmanner the correlation between the literary seriesand other historical series…. However, these laws donot allow us to explain the tempo of evolution or thechosen path of evolution when several, theoreticallypossible, evolutionary paths are given. This is owingto the fact that the immanent laws of literary(linguistic) evolution form an indeterminateequation; although they admit only a limited numberof possible solutions, they do not necessarily specifya unique solution. The question of the specific choiceof path, or at least of the dominant, can be solved onlyby means of the correlation between the literary


series and the other historical series. This correlation(a system of systems) has its own structural laws,which must be submitted to investigation.24

This text is frequently interpreted as having markedthe foundations of structuralism. Such a reading isstrictly retrospective, motivated more by Jakobson’ssubsequent association with Czech structuralism thanby the theoretical position outlined in the text itself. Forthe structuralist usually maintains not merely that thevarious levels of human activity should be regarded asrelatively autono mous. He also contends that, as thereis present in each of these an order of culture, eachshould be viewed as being organized like a language.Perhaps one of the more famous and extreme examplesof this position is Claude Lévi-Strauss’ argument—aptlysummarized in his contention that incest is ‘badgrammar’—that kinship systems can be viewed assystems of rules regulating the exchange of women andgoods which, in their structure, conform to the model ofa language.25

Tynyanov and Jakobson do not take this step ofassuming that the methods involved in the study oflanguage can be directly transferred to the study ofother areas of social and cultural activity. Indeed, insuggesting that the correlation between systems ‘has itsown structural laws, which must be submitted toinvestigation’, they explicitly go beyond structuralism,which has so far proved notoriously incapable ofproposing a theoretical framework within which suchquestions might be posed.26

Furthermore, in certain respects, their positionanticipates the concerns of contemporary Marxism asdefined by Louis Althusser.27 For Althusser, too,conceives of society or, more accurately, a ‘socialformation’, as consisting of a number of relatively


autonomous ‘instances’ or levels of social practice—theeconomic, the political and the ideological. And he hasfurther argued that the essential concern of Marxism isto understand the ways in which these levels of practiceinteract with one another within concrete historicalsocieties. In doing so, he has opened up a new set ofconcerns within Marxism, a new way of looking atproblems that, in its implications for Marxist criticism,suggests close parallels with the concerns of theFormalists.

New directions in Marxist criticism

It is surprising, in the light of this brief historical resumé,that the Russian Formalists should have been so neglectedby Western Marxists. The explanation is in part political.The debate about literature within Western CommunistParties has, until recently, reflected the terms of the debatewithin Russia which, as the world’s first socialist state,enjoyed enormous prestige and authority in the West, notto mention the more tangible powers of direction assumedby the Comintern. In Germany, the intellectual centre ofEuropean Marxism in the 1920s and 1930s, the weight ofSoviet orthodoxy was relayed to the German movementvia the debates conducted within the Bund desProletarisches Revolutionärer Schriftstellers (BPRS)—theAssociation of Revolutionary Proletarian Writers. It was,in view of this, no accident that the dispersal of theFormalists and Futurists coincided, in Germany, with thedefeat of Expressionism within the affairs of the BPRS andthe consolidation of ‘the Lukács line’, a highlysophisticated version of Soviet critical orthodoxy which, ifit was not a dogma, quite clearly specified the terms withinwhich the debate was henceforward to be conducted.28

Not by politics alone, however. Theoreticalconsiderations also have their own determinations andeffects, and it was the theoretical and philosophical


assumptions of the Lukácsian approach to literaturewhich most effectively impeded the possibility of anyfruitful dialogue between Formalist and Marxistcriticism. We might usefully single out two matters forconsideration here.

The first concerns the impact of Hegelian categoriesof thought on Marxist aesthetics during this period.Partly as a result of Lukács’ own work and, allied withthis, the influence of Marx’s Economic andPhilosophical Manuscripts, first published in 1931,Western Marxism was, from the 1930s through to the1960s, dominated by the influence of Hegel. Theconsequence of this, in the aesthetic sphere, was thedevaluation of considerations of form in relation tothose of content. Hegel had argued that the sensuous,material forms of works of art were but the external,more or less contingent manifestations of thephilosophical contents they were said to contain andexpress. In a similar vein, the dominant concern ofMarxist criticism during this period was with the socialdetermination of the philosophical content of literaryworks. Specifically formal questions—in the senseunderstood by the Formalists—virtually disappearedfrom discussion as the concept of form wasreinterpreted so as to refer not to the distinctivenarrative structure of the literary text but to thestructure of the ‘world view’ which was said to informits social vision.

In Lukács’ view, for example, the most importantquestions about Tolstoy’s works had little to do withthe place of their narrative techniques within the historyof writing. Rather, Lukács was concerned with therespects in which the social vision they contained couldbe taken to express the world view of the Russianpeasantry. In this connection, the formal distinctionsbetween Tolstoy’s literary and his theological or


philosophical writings was regarded as being of noimportance whatsoever.29 These were regarded aspurely ‘surface’ differences; what mattered was theessential unity of content, of social and philosophicalworld view, that was alleged to exist beneath them. Inshort: the conduct of Marxist criticism during thisperiod was such that the formal differences betweendifferent types of writing—literary, poetic, theological,philosophical—was overlooked in pursuit of the similarphilosophical contents that could be discovered withinand abstracted from them.

The second matter has to do with the extent to whichthe notion of literature as a form of signifying practicewas replaced by a concern with literature as a form of‘reflec tion’. According to ‘reflection theory’, the crucialquestion refers not to the precise ways in which, in thelight of their formal properties, works of literaturesignify reality but rather to the extent of theircorrespondence to it. It was, again, Lukács who revivedthe full thrust of the Aristotelian concept of mimesisaccording to which the literary work is regarded aspushing beyond the world of surface appearances tocapture, crystallize and reflect ‘the essence of things’.The necessary corollary of such a concern was anattempt to rank literary forms according to the degreeto which they corresponded to ‘the essence of things’—in this case, the class struggle as ‘already known’ withinthe terms of Marxist theory. True, literature was stillregarded as a particular type of knowledge, workingvia devices of typification so as to yield ananthropomorphic, poetically concrete representation ofthe dynamic tendencies of historical development.However, it was evaluated not in terms of the effects ofits distinctive organizational properties but in terms ofthe degree of its correspondence to the model of realityproposed by Marxism.


It was, then, a combination of political andtheoretical determinations which precluded anymeaningful dialogue between Formalism and Marxism.If such a dialogue is now possible, this is mainly due tothe theoretical reorientations which have taken place,since the 1960s, within Marxist criticism itself. Manyinfluences have been at work here. Most important,from our point of view, is the pivotal position whichthe work of Louis Althusser has assumed in relation tothe revision of Marxist criticism which is currently inprogress. To understand the respects in which this is so,a schematic account of Althusser’s reading of Marxismis called for. The distinction he proposes between twodifferent ways of conceiving the nature of the socialtotality is particularly relevant to our purposes here.For these have markedly different implications for theway in which the concerns of Marxist criticism shouldbe approached.

In opposing Hegelian interpretations of Marxism,especially as represented by Lukács, Althusser refers tothe Hegelian conception of the social totality as an‘expressive totality’. It represents the social whole as atotality whose parts are conceived as ‘so many “totalparts”, each expressing the others, and each expressingthe social totality that contains them, because each initself contains in the immediate form of its expressionthe essence of the social totality itself.’30 The essence ofthe social totality, according to Hegelian versions ofMarxism, is said to be defined by the essentialcontradiction which is at its centre. This is usuallyconstrued as the clash between the dynamic momentumof new forces of economic production and therestraining hand of old social relations of production.This essential contradiction is then said to be presentin, and therefore capable of being deduced or read offfrom, each of the constituent parts which, taken


together, comprise the social totality. We find such aconception of the social totality deeply ingrained inLukács’ literary criticism which, at root, treats literarytexts as privileged forms of consciousness which can beread so as to reveal the essential contradiction of thehistorical period to which they refer.

Althusser, by contrast, argues that the social totalityshould not be regarded as being governed by a simpleor essential contradiction. Instead, he contends, itshould be viewed as consisting of a number of distinctbut inter-related ‘instances’ or levels of practicalactivity—the economic, the political, the ideological—each of which is relatively autonomous in relation tothe others in the sense that it is governed by laws of itsown that cannot be read off from elsewhere and eachof which possesses its own relative effectivity in relationto the others. Change, according to such a formulation,results not from the working out of a basic or simplecontradiction—such as. that between the forces andrelations of production—but from the overlapping, in aparticular historical conjuncture, of a number ofdistinct, relatively autonomous contradictions. Changeoccurs when the contradictions which are unique to theideological level of social practice overlap and combinewith those which are unique to the economic andpolitical levels of social practice, yielding a situation inwhich contradiction is thus said to be ‘overdetermined’.

The central problem which has had to be tackled inorder to sustain this formulation has thus been todetermine precisely what distinguishes each of theselevels of social practice and to analyse the nature oftheir interaction in concrete historical societies. In thecase of literature, this has meant that any analysiswhich sets out to read literary texts so as to reveal theessence of the social whole to which they refer mustprove irrelevant. Another sort of analysis is required


which attempts to reveal the precise nature ofliterature’s specific difference with reference to otherideological or cultural forms and to articulate theprecise place it occupies in relation to the other levels ofsocial practice which, together with it, comprise thesocial totality. Furthermore, rather than the concernbeing with how literature ‘reflects’ social reality,attention is focused on the effects which it is possible toattribute to literature as an autono mous level of socialpractice. Thus, literature is viewed, not as a secondaryreflection of something else, but as a real social force,existing in its own right, with its own determinationsand effects.

The result of this reorientation has been to bring thequestion of the specific nature of literature, as aparticular type of signifying practice, firmly back intothe centre of discussion. If literature is to be regarded asan autonomous level of social practice and, as such, isto be made the object of an autonomous level oftheorizing within Marxism, then clearly the question ofspecifying the features which uniquely distinguishworks of literature from other ideological and culturalforms becomes a matter of prime importance.

But it was precisely this problem which faced theFormalists. If there is ever to develop a truly scientificstudy of literature, they argued, then such a sciencemust first specify its object—it must, that is, provide adefinition for the concept of ‘literature’. Hence theirenduring concern with the problem of literariness. Nordo the similarities between Althusser and the Formalistsend here. The two positions closely resemble oneanother in respect of the processes by which theyconstruct the concepts of literature with which theywork. Furthermore, the definitions which they proposefor the concept of literature have much in common.Althusser, for example, has argued that the specific


nature of literature consists in the transformations towhich it subjects the categories of dominant ideology,distancing them from within, providing a Vision’ ofthem at work so that, within the literary work, thereader is to an extent divorced from the habitualmental associations which the forms of dominantideology foster. Similarly, the Formalists contendedthat the uniqueness of literary discourse consistedin the work of transformation it enacts on ordinarylanguage—the primal home of all ideology—bysubverting the conventional relationship betweensignifier and signified so as to restore a newperceptibility to the world.

However, we will not dwell on these similarities here.There are equally important differences between thetwo positions. It is not our intention to argue that thetheories developed from within these two traditions areidentical but merely that they occupy sufficient commonground for their juxtaposition to be fruitful. For whilstboth occupy the familiar terrain of traditional aestheticsin proposing a theory of ‘literature’ as such, they bothtend to undermine that terrain and, in so doing, to callinto question the concept of ‘literature’ as anirrevocably separate form of writing which is sealed offfrom other forms of cultural practice by some universaland invariant set of formal properties.


46

3RUSSIAN FORMALISM:

CLEARING THE GROUND

Linguistics and literature

MY concern in this chapter is to probe some of the issuesalready raised a little more closely; to move a little closerto some of the central concepts of the Formalists in orderto locate the theoretical, philosophical and methodologicalbedrock which gave a thematic coherence to their diversecritical concerns. It will be convenient to treat Ferdinandde Saussure’s work as the pivot on which to centre ourdiscussion. For, of the many influences which coalesced inthe formation of Russian Formalism, that exerted bySaussure and by linguistics in general was arguably ofprimary importance.

It is important, however, to be clear about thedifferent levels at which this influence operated. Theargument which maintains that there is anuninterrupted line of development running fromSaussurian linguistics through Formalism to present-daystructuralism hinges on the relationship between themethodologies of these three traditions. Saussure’scentral methodological perception was that the valueand function of a given unit of language, its acceptedmeaning, depends on its relationship to other such unitswithin the system of language. His recommendationwas that the study of this system of relationships—la

langue—should be the proper concern of linguistics.The structuralist projection consists, essentially, in thecontention that cultural forms—such as myths, folktales, literature—can themselves be viewed as beingarticulated like a language and that methods of studyderived from linguistics should accordingly be used intheir analysis.

To the extent that the Formalists did argue that thevalue and function of a literary device depends on itsrelationship to other devices within the system ofrelationships established by the literary text as a whole,it is quite correct to point to their influence on theformation of structuralism. But the argument has itslimits, chiefly because it depends considerably on thework of Jakobson which was atypical of that ofFormalism as a whole.

For Jakobson was interested in literature as merelyone area amongst others—notably folklore—to whichthe developing methods of linguistics might be applied.Although he was careful to note that the techniques oflinguistics should not be directly transferred, withoutmodification, to the study of literature—meaning, here,the belles lettres of the European tradition—in therespect that the latter was, unlike languages or folktales, a typically individual as opposed to a collective,anonymous creation, the strength of the linguisticconnection did significantly modify his approach toliterature.1 This is particularly clear in his writings onpoetry, especially during the period of his associationwith Czech structuralism. Poetry became, for Jakobson,the manifestation of a particular set of linguisticoperations which, by setting the poetic word free fromthe normal associations which define and restrict itsmeaning in prosaic speech, served to call attention to theact of communication itself. Poetry, on this definition,is the self-consciousness of language. It consists of those


forms through which language offers its ownmechanisms and workings conspicuously to view.

The inevitable consequence of this view was topush poetics and, more generally, the study of literatureback into the study of language, to make it a specializedprovince within the general science of linguistics. Thisran entirely contrary to the interests and motivation ofthe members of Opoyaz whose primary concern, as wehave seen, was that the study of literature should beconstituted as a genuinely autonomous science,employing distinctive methods and procedures of itsown, and not as a part of some other science, even thatof linguistics. Although undoubtedly influenced bylinguistics, they did not take the structuralist step ofassuming that literature was a system like language. Tothe contrary, they argued that literature was not a workof language but a work on language, an autonomouspractice whose uniqueness consisted, amongst otherthings, in the transformations to which it subjected thecategories of ordinary language.

Paradoxically, in thus distancing themselves fromlinguistics, the Formalists were merely followingthrough the implications of their philosophicalconception of the relationship that exists between ascience and its object—in their case, the object ofliterariness—which was, at root, not dissimilar to thatput forward by Saussure.

The question of literariness: criticism andits object

It has already been pointed out that the ultimate concernof the Formalists was with the concept of literariness.They approached particular literary texts not as ends inthemselves, to be understood on their own terms and fortheir own sake, but as vehicles for the exemplification and

RUSSIAN FORMALISM: CLEARING THE GROUND 49

development of this concept. To appreciate more deeplywhat was involved in such a concern, it will be helpful toreview the problems which confronted Saussure and themeans by which he resolved them.

Surveying the history of linguistics toward the end ofthe nineteenth century, Saussure contended that it hadfailed to establish the study of language on a scientificfooting chiefly because it had ‘never attempted todetermine the nature of its object’. For, he argued,‘without this elementary operation a science cannotdevelop an appropriate method’.2 Whereas in empiricisttheories of knowledge science is held to furnish aknowledge of an object or reality which is held to existindependently of its own conceptual procedures,Saussure argued that, in science, ‘far from it being theobject that antedates the viewpoint, it would seem thatit is the viewpoint that creates the object’.3

Saussure thus contended that it would be impossibleto found linguistics on a scientific basis if its concernswere taken to be with all aspects of language as apresumed real entity existing externally to andindependently of scientific thought about it. If progresswere to be made, he argued, the science of linguisticsmust specify those aspects of language it would makethe object of its inquiry: it must construct an artificialconceptual or theoretical object out of the heterogeneityof language and limit its investigations to the conceptualfield thus specified. He therefore proposed a distinctionbetween the concept of la parole—individual speechutterances—and la langue—the system of rules which,governing the permissible forms of combination of theunits of language, make the production andcommunication of meaning in individual speechutterances possible—and argued that linguistics shouldconcern itself exclusively with la langue.


This distinction is, of course, a purelymethodological one. La parole and la langue are not, inreality, either separate or separable from one another.The knowledge which linguistics was thus to producewas not a knowledge of the ‘real’ nature of language buta knowledge of the conceptual object of la langue, anobject of science’s own making. The relationship of‘knowledge’ between a science and its object was thus,so far as Saussure was concerned, located entirelywithin thought itself.

The Formalists faced similar problems with referenceto the study of literature. Surveying the schools ofcriticism available to them, they argued that theircrucial deficiency was their tendency to dissolve thestudy of literature into the study of something else—biography, the history of ideas, sociology orpsychoanalysis—as the study of a particular text waspushed back into a study of its author’s personalhistory, his intellectual and social milieu or hisunconsciousness. What was missing, they argued, was aconcern with the literary text itself and with theprinciples governing its construction as a particulartype of discourse. This meant that the study ofliterature, rather than resting on any autonomous bodyof theory, was forced into dependency on the theoriesand methods of those continents of knowledge—be theythose of psychoanalysis, sociology or linguistics—towhich the text was referred.

If there was a rallying cry which united theFormalists, it was that the study of literature shouldbecome an autonomous science, putting to workmethods and procedures of its own. For this to bepossible, such a science would need first to specify thenature of the object to which it would address itself, tostate clearly what it was to be a science of and to mapout clearly the conceptual space it would occupy. This


boiled down, as we have seen, to the question ofliterariness: of determining the precise nature ofliterature’s uniqueness and of developing theappropriate theoretical concepts and methodologicalprocedures to analyse the formal properties whichconferred on literary texts their uniqueness.

Behind this concern was the perception that theconcept of ‘literature’ would need to be spelt out withsome degree of rigour and precision if literary criticismwere to advance beyond drawing room chitchat andmake serious claims to scholarship. In recognizing thatthe construction of the object (or set of concerns) towhich criticism should address itself was a primary andindispensable theoretical process, the Formalists thustook direct issue with the empiricist assumption,discussed earlier, that literature exists as an externaldatum which is simply ‘given’ to criticism. The‘literature’ to which the Formalists addressedthemselves was not simply ‘already there’; it was aproduct of their own conceptual labours, a particularway of viewing so-called ‘literary’ texts which reflecteda specific set of theoretical choices. In this way,Formalist criticism produced its own problematic: thatis, its own set of problems and its own way ofapproaching those problems.

It is important to be clear about this. For, at onelevel, the Formalists could be said to have aimed simplyat providing a working definition for the concept of‘literature’ so that, in using this to sift out ‘literary’ from‘non-literary’ texts, the field of inquiry might becircumscribed. Whilst this is partly true, the concept ofliterariness had the further function of specifying theactual object of inquiry itself. Jakobson was quiteexplicit on this. ‘The real field of literary science’, hewrote in 1919, ‘is not literature but literariness; in otherwords, that which makes a specific work literary.’4 The


specific object of literary criticism is thus not the fullplenitude of the literary text as something that is simplypre-given to criticism but that specific aspect of theliterary text which makes it different from the non-literary series of cultural forms which surround it.

As we have seen, the Formalists argued that thisdifference consisted in the tendency of literary works todefamiliarize experience by working on andtransforming the adjacent ideological and culturalforms within which reality is dominantly experienced.The prime task for literary criticism became that ofanalysing the constructional devices whereby this effectof defamiliarization was achieved. The object of theFormalists’ research was thus not the concrete object ofliterary texts themselves but the abstract object of thedifferential relation between literary texts and non-literary texts, a problematic (in the sense defined above)that was entirely the product of their own theoreticalprocedures.

The paradox at the heart of the Formalists’ endeavourwas that the more they pursued this object, the more itreceded from view. For they were forced, by the logicof their own researches, to call into question theassumption that there existed a fixed and stable bodyof texts which might be regarded as ‘literature’. InFormalist parlance, the question as to whether a giventext should be described as ‘literary’ could be resolvedonly with reference to the function it fulfilled. And that,so it turned out, obliged the Formalists to take accountof considerations that were inescapably and radicallyhistorical.


The system and its elements: form andfunction

It is often argued that the Formalists viewed literary textsin a vacuum, regarding their ‘literariness’—their ability to‘defamiliarize’—as an attribute of their purely formal,intrinsic properties. To gainsay this, one must keep inmind the inherently relational nature of the concept ofdefamiliarization. To study the phenomenon of literarinessis to study the relationship between the series of textsdesignated as ‘literary’ and those ‘non-literary’ (butlinguistic) cultural forms which literary texts transform by‘making strange’ the terms of seeing proposed in them.Whether or not a given text can be said to embody theattribute of defamiliarization thus depends not on itsintrinsic properties in isolation but on the relationshipwhich those properties establish with other cultural andideological forms.

The accusation that the Formalists tended to fetishizethe literary device is similarly misconceived. For theeffect of defamiliarization depends not on the deviceitself but on the use to which it is put. ‘The evidence ofart itself’, Eichenbaum suggests, ‘is that its differentiaspecifica is not expressed in the elements that go tomake up the individual work but simply in theparticular use that is made of them.’5 Literary languageis distinguished from prosaic language, for example,not by the presence of metaphors in the former andtheir absence from the latter, but by the different use towhich the device of metaphor is put as between the twocases. Erlich argues:

If in informative prose, a metaphor aims to bring thesubject closer to the audience or drive a point home,in ‘poetry’ it serves as a means of intensifying theintended aesthetic effect. Rather than translating theunfamiliar into the terms of the familiar, the poetic


image ‘makes strange’ the habitual by presenting it ina novel light, by placing it in an unexpectedcontext.6

In this, the Formalists were again following Saussurein the distinction he maintained between the synchronicand diachronic levels of analysis—that is, between theanalysis of language as a static system of rules as itexists at any one point in time and the analysis of itshistorical change and development. In designating lalangue as the proper object of linguistics, Saussure’sconcern was with the system of arbitrary conventionsregulating the relationships between signifiers (such as‘ox’) and their signifieds (‘the concept of an ox’) whichmake the production of meaning possible within a givenlanguage community. Historical considerations, heargued, were irrelevant to this task. For the meaning ofa given unit of language can only be derived from ananalysis of its place and function in relation to the otherelements of la langue and is unaffected byconsiderations relating to its philological source orhistorical genesis. The word ‘ox’, for example, derivesits meaning from the present synchronic relationshipsof similarity and difference which exist between itssound structure and that of other words comprisingmodern English, and not from whatever roots it mighthave in Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon or medieval French.

Insisting on a similar synchronic/diachronic polarity,the Formalists concerned themselves not so much withthe origins of literary devices as with their mode offunctioning in particular texts. ‘The study of literarygenetics’, as Eichenbaum put it, ‘can clarify only theorigin of a device, nothing more; poetics must explainits literary function.’7 The same device, then, may servedifferent functions in different literary texts. Thecentral device of the mystery novel whereby the identity


of the murderer is concealed from the reader may play aquite humdrum, purely technical role as in AgathaChristie’s works. Alternatively, it may, by being useddifferently, figure as a device by which the conventionsof the conventional detective story are ‘made strange’.

Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur provides an example ofthis as the travelling salesman, Mathias, constantlystumbles, like an unwitting sleuth, over the traces of thecrime he has himself committed. (Or has he? Is it alljust imaginings?—Robbe-Grillet leaves these questionspermanently unanswered.) In thus doubling as thereader of signs (the sleuth) and their author (themurderer who has left behind the signs of his crime),Mathias serves to call into question the fixed divisionof labour between writer and reader which thetraditional novel proposes. In figuring, as it were, as thereader of his own story, Mathias offers to view theconventions whereby the relationship between the rolesof writer (the issuing source of meaning) and reader(the passive recipient of the offered meaning) isconstructed in realist forms.

The concept by means of which the Formaliststhought through this notion of the variability of thefunction of the device was that of ‘the dominant’. This,as Seldon describes it, constitutes ‘that focusingcomponent of a work which governs and orders othercomponents and guarantees the integrity of the entirestructure.’8 Although forming an important part oftheir theory of literary evolution, the concept is alsoimportant to an understanding of the Formalists’ centralconcept of ostranenie or defamiliarization as ‘thedominant’ which specifies the function of the devicewithin the uniquely literary work.

To appreciate why, we must first be clear about therelationship which is held to exist between those textswhich are said to embody this attribute and reality. It is


important to distinguish the position of the Formalistsfrom that of the Futurists on this matter. As with mostnew literary tendencies, the Futurists proclaimed thattheir techniques wrested reality away from itsdeformation in older literary forms to reveal it in its rawstate, its pristine purity. ‘If fact is needed,’ Novy Lefproclaimed, ‘old art is no use. Old art deforms facts—tograsp facts use new methods.’9 However, as Jakobsonbrilliantly maintained in his essay ‘On Realism in Art’,all literary forms are equally conventional modes ofsignifying reality no matter what ideological claims theymight lodge with respect to their ‘realism’. Incontradistinction to the Futurists, the defamiliarizationeffected by literary texts does not, according to theFormalists, reveal the world ‘as it really is’ butmerely constitutes one distinctive form of cognitionamongst others.

Shklovsky makes this clear in the distinction heproposes between ‘recognition’ and ‘seeing’:

This new attitude to objects in which, in the lastanalysis, the object becomes perceptible, is thatartificiality which, in our opinion, creates art. Aphenomenon, perceived many times, and no longerperceivable, or rather, the method of such dimmedperception, is what I call ‘recognition’ as opposed to‘seeing’. The aim of imagery, the aim of creating newart is to return the object from ‘recognition’to ‘seeing’,10

Literature is thus distinguishable as one amongseveral different forms of cognition. In particular, it isdistinguished from the way in which reality isspontaneously experienced in prosaic language andfrom the abstractions of science. It offers neither a direct,


experiential relation to reality nor a scientificknowledge of it, but a Vision’ of it.

Likewise, the ‘reality’ which literary works are said todefamiliarize is not some presumed raw, conceptuallyunprocessed, ‘out-there’ reality but ‘reality’ as mediatedthrough the categories of some other form of cognition.Literature characteristically works on and subvertsthose linguistic, perceptual and cognitive forms whichconventionally condition our access to ‘reality’ andwhich, in their taken-for-grantedness, present theparticular ‘reality’ they construct as reality itself.Literature thus effects a twofold shift of perceptions. Forwhat it makes appear strange is not merely the ‘reality’which has been distanced from habitual modes ofrepresentation but also those habitual modes ofrepresentation themselves. Literature offers not only anew insight into ‘reality’ but also reveals the formaloperations whereby what is commonly taken for‘reality’ is constructed.

Ortega y Gasset’s comments on the ‘dehumanizationof art’ afford a fruitful comparison here. Arguing thatour access to reality is always conceptually structured insome way, Ortega contends that our direct experience ofpersons, things, situations, the way in which we ‘live’them, is granted a position of primacy in being taken for‘reality itself’. It is this concept which Ortega designatesas human reality, arguing that the peculiarity of modernart consists in its tendency to ‘dehumanize’ reality byshattering the con cept of reality as it is directly ‘lived’and experienced. ‘By divesting them of their aspect of“lived” reality,’ he writes, ‘the artist has blown up thebridges and burned the ships that could have taken usback to our daily world.’11 However, art does notmerely ‘dehumanize’ reality as it is lived by depriving itof its spontaneity and directness. It also offers aninsight into the constructions of that lived reality itself,


making them appear ‘lean and angular’, ‘pure andtransparent’.12

The Formalists proposed two main candidates withregard to the habitual modes of perception whichliterature was said to work on and transform. First,particularly with regard to poetry, literature was said toeffect a semantic shift in relation to prosaic language byplaying on and subverting the conventional relationshipbetween signifier and signified, opening up the web oflanguage into a play of multiple meanings excludedfrom ordinary speech.

Second, literary works were said to defamiliarize thecodes and conventions of previous traditions which,although they had once themselves served as a means ofperceptual dislocation, have since atrophied to becomethe source of perceptual numbness. ‘The fate of theworks of bygone artists of the word’, Shklovskymaintained, ‘is the same as the fate of the word itself:both shed light on the path from poetry to prose; bothbecome coated with the glass armour of the familiar.’13

In this sense, literature is a play of form upon form. Ituses one set of devices to chisel the ground frombeneath another, usually canonical or revered set ofdevices and, in doing so, wrestles ‘reality’ away fromthe terms of seeing they propose, thereby making it thefocus of a renewed interest and attentiveness. At therisk of simplification, literature might thus be construedas a mode of discourse which constantly maintains ‘No,the world is not like that’ in relation to dominant formsof discourses which maintain that it is.

Literature, then, is a practice of transformation. Itworks on and transforms the raw materials provided byother literary works, ordinary language, and so on. It isimportant to note, however, that such raw materials donot exist solely in forms which are external to the text.The old and the new, the defamiliarized and the


defamiliarizing coexist within the text as different levels.As Jakobson put it:

It was the Formalist research which clearlydemonstrated that shifting and change are not onlyhistorical statements (first there was A, then A1arose in place of A) but that shift is also a directlyexperienced synchronic phenomenon, a relevantartistic value. The reader of a poem or the viewer ofa painting has a vivid awareness of two orders: thetraditional canon and the artistic novelty as adeviation from that canon.14

This throws into relief the truly abstract andrelational character of the category of literariness. For,given that the process of defamiliarization is essentiallya play of form upon form, it is clear that a text whichmay be regarded as ‘literary’ in one historical situationmay, in another, stand on the other side of the equation.Put another way, ‘the dominant’ of literature—defamiliarization—is a shifting dominant so thatwhether or in what respects a text is to be regarded as‘literary’ depends on the point from which it is viewed.

There thus exists an element of indetermination as towhat counts as ‘literature’ and what does not. Certainly,‘literature’ is not regarded as an immutable body oftexts but as a function variably fulfilled by differenttexts in different circumstances. In effect, the Formalistsdid not study texts at all but the apparently moreabstract—although, in reality, more concrete—object ofthe system of relationships between texts.

Against the ‘metaphysic of the text’

We must again refer to Saussure here. As we have seen,Saussure argued that the origin of a given unit of languagecould throw no light on its present-day use and meaning


within the system of la langue. The Formalists,maintaining a similar position with regard to the origin ofa literary device and its function within a given text,applied the same principle to the question of the value andfunction of literary texts themselves. A text’s standing as‘literature’—its ability to fulfil the function ofdefamiliarization—was not given for all time but was saidto depend on the nature of the relationships it establishedwith other texts within a given ‘literary system’.

Jurij Tynyanov thus argued that the classification of atext as ‘literary’ depended on its ‘differential quality,that is, on its relationship with both literary and extra-literary orders’.15 It is this concept of a particular set ofrelationships between the ‘literary’ and the ‘extra-literary’ orders that Tynyanov had in mind in hisconcept of ‘literary system’. His contention was that thesame text—he mentions the case of certain diaries—may take on a ‘literary’ or a ‘non-literary’ functionaccording to the nature of the literary system withinwhich it is set. Furthermore, he suggests that it is onlyby ignoring the different values and functions which thesame text may assume in different moments of itshistory as a received text that more conventionalschools of criticism construct the literary traditions towhich they address themselves:

Tradition, the basic concept of the establishedhistory of literature, has proved to be anunjustifiable abstraction of one or more of theliterary elements of a given system within which theyoccupy the same plane and play the same role. Theyare equated with the like elements of another systemin which they are on a different plane, thus they arebrought into a seemingly unified, fictitiouslyintegrated system.16


A similar notion of literature’s relative status is involved inShklovsky’s ‘law of the canonization of the junior branch’.According to this, the themes and motifs of such ‘junior’or ‘sub-literary’ genres as the thriller or the romance aresaid to provide the devices whereby literature renewsitself, moving beyond those forms which, although oncedefamiliarizing in relation to some previous norm of thefamiliar, have themselves since become ossified. Two casesmay be distinguished.

The first concerns those instances in which particularliterary forms renew themselves by drawing upon thethemes and devices of ‘junior’ or ‘sub-literary’ genres.In such cases there is no question of the ‘junior’ genresconcerned crossing the line between the ‘sub-literary’and the ‘literary’. It is merely that the same devices takeon different functions when they are put to differentuses in different contexts. The Formalists, for example,were very interested in the role which the use of certainstock-in-trade devices of the detective story had playedin renovating the Russian novel, as in the involved useof ‘whodunnit’ conventions in Dostoevsky’s BrothersKaramazov. Their point, however, was not that thedetective stories on which Dostoevsky drew had thusbecome ‘literature’ but that ‘literature’ had beenrenewed, in Dostoevsky’s works, by using devices fromthe detective novel to ‘make strange’, subvert and breakaway from the prevailing canons of novelistic realism.

The second case concerns the shift in the standingthat may be accorded a particular text during differentmoments of its historical existence as a received text. Asthe history of criticism amply confirms, a textpreviously regarded as unexceptional may beretrospectively ‘canonized’ in coming to assume aliterary function and value and, in some cases, fulfillinga renovative role within the literary field in general. Inthe same way a text, once granted a position of pivotal


importance, may subsequently be relegated to thepenumbral regions of literature. Shklovsky’s point hereis not the familiar one that literary texts may rise and fallin favour with changes in ‘literary taste’. It is ratherthat the position of any single text in relation to othertexts, and hence its function, is liable to constant shiftsand displacements as new forms of writing transformand reorganize the entire system of relationshipsbetween texts.

In recognizing these migrations of marginal literaryforms into the centre of literature and back again to theperiphery, the Formalists tended to dissolve the concernsof aesthetics and to nudge them in the direction ofhistory. Ultimately, the concept of ‘literature’ whichthey proposed referred not to a fixed body of textswhose literariness was guaranteed by their conformityto a universal and unchanging set of formal attributes,but to particular and changing sets of relationshipsbetween texts. The effect of this was to induce a‘binocular vision’ of literary texts which enabledtheir value and function to be viewed differentlyaccording to the different places they occupied withinthe received cultures of different societies and differenthistorical periods.

This is not, of course, to argue that the objectivematerial and organizational properties of literary textschange from one period to another. It is rather torecognize that those properties do not themselvessuffice to guarantee a text’s literariness. In effect,literariness depends crucially not on the formalproperties of a text in themselves but on the positionwhich those properties establish for the text within thematrices of the prevailing ideological field. Literarinessresides, not in the text, but in the relations of inter-textuality inscribed within and between texts. It is not a‘thing’, an essence which the text possesses, but a


function which the text fulfils. And whether or not aparticular text fulfils this function depends, in part, ondeterminations which are situated outside andindependently of that text.

A certain degree of arbitrariness might thus be said tobe attached to the question of a text’s literariness inmuch the same way as, for Saussure, the relationshipbetween signifier and signified is arbitrary in the sensethat there is no intrinsic connection between sound andmeaning binding the two. This does not constitute aflight away from historical considerations so much as amode of entry into them. ‘Because it is arbitrary’,Jonathan Culler has argued, ‘the sign is totally subjectto history, and the combination at a particular momentof a given signifier and signified is a contingent result ofthe historical process.’17 In the same way, it is not thetext’s origins or its purely formal properties whichdetermine its literariness but its mode of functioningwithin a society’s culture as determined by itscontingent, and therefore historical and changingrelations with other cultural forms.

Why is this important? Mainly because it requires usto perceive ‘literature’ in a historical and concretefashion and not abstractly. One must adopt a‘binocular vision’ in relation to the text, studying it as aconcrete, historically changing entity subject todifferent determinations in the different ways in whichit is appropriated and the different sets of intertextualrelationships in which it is placed during differentmoments of its history as a received text. To posit theconcept of the text outside of such matrices or to speakof its ‘effect’—aesthetic or political—independently ofsuch considerations is to fall prey to a ‘metaphysic ofthe text’: to a conception of the text as an abstractionwhich transcends history.


The Formalists’ critique of the ‘metaphysic of thetext’ was, however, a purely abstract one. For theprocess where by the value and function of a text mightbe subject to variation was never really analysed orexplained by them but was rather presented assomething which ‘simply happened’. This reflects adeeper problem. For, although the Formalists were ableto allow historical considerations (albeit in an abstractform) a central role in determining the value andfunction of literary texts, they were unable to integratesuch considerations into their account of the processwhereby particular forms and genres are themselvessubject to change and development.

The problem of literary evolution

The notorious weak spot of Saussure’s theory of languagelies, as we shall see later, in its inability to account for theprocesses and mechanisms whereby the system of rulescomprising la langue are subject to change through time.The most that Saussure offered was a theory of mutationsaccording to which innovations in usage are said toproduce a situation of disequilibrium within the system ofla langue. Change, by this account, results from thetendency of la langue, as a self-regulating system, torestore a state of equilibrium by effecting a series ofcounterbalancing mutations.

The Formalists’ account of literary evolution sufferedfrom similar weaknesses. Where the Formalists werestrongest was in pointing to the relationships of‘exchange’ within literature whereby, at a purely formallevel, literary change could be seen to be produced. ForShklovsky, as we have seen, literature renewed itselfpartly by plundering the devices of marginal literaryworks. Elsewhere, both Shklovsky and Eichenbaummaintained that the renovation of literature wasfrequently effected by writers having recourse to the


literary devices of earlier and often neglected literarytraditions. It was this that they had in mind intheir famous aphorism to the effect that the line ofliterary influence runs not from father to son but fromgrandfather to grandson or from uncle to nephew.However, although thus able to point to the sourcesfrom which innovatory writers derived their models,the Formalists conspicuously failed to explain either theparticular direction of the path of literary developmentor its historical curvature. Instead, literary evolutionwas viewed as the result of a purely abstract dialectic of‘the negation of the negation’ with new codes anddevices being called into being as those which precededthem were said to have reached a point of exhaustionor to have degenerated into formal clichés.

Boris Eichenbaum’s The Young Tolstoy illustratesthese problems nicely. Arguing that Tolstoy was writingduring a period when the canonical forms of theRussian romantic tradition were becoming ‘accessibleand easy’, Eichenbaum views Tolstoy’s works asembodying ‘a process of making these canonized formsdifficult again by breaking them down and mixing them,on the one hand, and by reviving old, long forgottentraditions, on the other’.18 By reviewing Tolstoy’s earlyworks as well as the evidence of his diaries, Eichenbaumshows that Tolstoy virtually ignored the romantictradition itself in favour of the grand philosophicalwriters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies (Goethe and Scott in particular) and suchnoted parodists of the novel as Sterne and Rousseau.He argues that Tolstoy used a stock of devices culledfrom these sources in order to effect a ‘bestrangement’of the canons of Russian romanticism.

His account of the means whereby Tolstoy‘bestranges’ the romantic idealization of war affords auseful illustration. He points out how, in both The


Sevastopol Sketches and War and Peace, Tolstoy followsStendhal’s portrayal of the battle of Waterloo in TheCharterhouse of Parma in effecting a ‘bestrangement’of the romantic concept of battle via the device of thenovice who, initially conceiving of war in accordancewith the usual romantic stereotypes, is brutallydisillusioned by his first contact with it. PerhapsEichenbaum’s most illuminating insight, however, is hisanalysis of the role of Tolstoy’s narrative style,particularly in its close attention to detailed, almostnaturalist description of minutiae, as itself a device of‘bestrangement’ in relation to romantic stereotypes. Ashe writes of The Sevastopol Sketches:

The battle scenes are bestranged by everyday detailswhich not unparadoxically, are placed in theforeground: ‘“That’s him firing from the new batterytoday,” adds the old man, indifferently spitting onhis hand’…. A young officer complains that it is badat the fourth bastion, not because of the bombs orbullets, as one might expect, but ‘because it’smuddy’. At the bastion itself…sailors play cardsunder the breastworks and an officer ‘ calmly rolls acigarette out of yellow paper’, The latter detail isreinforced by its repetition after a description of awounded sailor: ‘“Every day it’s some seven or eightmen that get it,” the naval officer tells you,answering the expression of horror expressed on yourface, yawning and rolling a cigarette out of yellowpaper’ The officer gives the command to fire, and thesailors ‘promptly, cheerfully, one thrusting a pipe inhis pocket, another finishing up a rusk, clattering onthe platform with their hobnailed boots, go off to thecannon and load it.’19

For Eichenbaum, then, Tolstoy’s essential literaryorientation is to say, in relation to the conventions of


romanticism: ‘No, things are not like that. People donot live, love and die as it is written. Nature is not as itis portrayed.’ As such, his approach to Tolstoy is purelypoetic: it describes the relation between the canons ofromanticism and Tolstoy’s ‘bestrangement’ of them as arelationship internal to Tolstoy’s texts themselves. Theonly historical considerations that are brought into thepicture concern the literary sources from which Tolstoyderived his devices of ‘bestrangement’. No account isoffered for the motivation behind Tolstoy’s‘bestrangement’ of romantic forms other than that of apurely artistic will to break with literary canons whoseapparent ossification is attributed solely to the passageof time itself rather than to any change in the structureof social, political and ideological relationships. Nor isany attempt made to relate Tolstoy’s literary ambitionsto the social, political or ideological aspirations of anywider social forces.

Of course, at one level, this may simply have reflectedEichenbaum’s decision to focus on certain matters atthe expense of others. Yet the evidence suggests that,even when the Formalists explicitly acknowledged theneed to take into account social and political factors inorder to account for literary change, they provedincapable of proposing a method which wouldaccomplish this. Nor is this surprising. For any progressin this direction required a revaluation of Saussure’slegacy. Fredric Jameson argues:

Once you have begun by separating diachronic fromsynchronic…you can never really put them backtogether again. If the opposition in the long runproves to be a false or misleading one, then the only


way to suppress it is by throwing the entirediscussion on to a higher dialectical plane, choosinga new starting point, utterly recasting the problemsinvolved in new terms…. 20


70

4FORMALISM AND BEYOND

The accomplishments of Formalism

IN his essay ‘On Realism in Art’, Jakobson summarized theFormalists’ perception of the intellectual flabbiness of thetraditional schools of literary criticism they sought todisplace:

Until recently, the history of art, particularly that ofliterature, has had more in common with causeriethan with scholarship. It obeyed all the laws ofcauserie, skipping blithely from topic to topic, fromlyrical effusions on the elegance of forms toanecdotes from the artist’s life, from psychologicaltruisms to questions concerning philosophicalsignificance and social environment…. The historyof art has been equally slipshod with respect toscholarly terminology. It has employed the currentvocabulary without screening the words critically,without defining them precisely, and withoutconsidering the multiplicity of their meanings.1

Perhaps the most significant achievement of theFormalists consisted in their recognition that the word‘literature’ would have to be ‘screened critically’ if itwere to serve any useful purpose. In proposing a highly

specific meaning for the term, the Formalists placedtheir literary criticism on a self-consciously theoreticalfooting by rigorously defining the object—theliterariness of literary discourse—to which it shouldaddress itself.

Although the type of study that the Formalists thusproposed was still an aesthetic—a theory of ‘literature’as such—it was essentially a scientific aesthetic.Breaking entirely with attempts to explain theparticular quality of the literary text with reference toits origin in some capacity—usually ‘the genius’—of theperson who wrote it, the Formalists sought to resolvethe question of literature’s specificity empirically byconsidering the formal properties governing thestructure of literary texts.

In doing so, the Formalists also called into questionthe concerns of reflection theory. In showing that allliterary forms were equally and necessarily a semioticmediation of reality, a signification of reality and not areflection of it, they cast doubt on the validity orusefulness of any debate about the degree ofverisimilitude attained by literary texts. The term‘realism’, they argued, could only be of value if, shornof its literalness, it were used to refer to thoseconventionalized systems of literary representation—notably the nineteenth-century novel—which generatethe illusion that they are transcriptions of reality, formsin which the real appears to ‘write itself’.

Finally, although their own work reflected theconcerns of traditional aesthetics, they simultaneouslyundermined those concerns by suggesting that theliterariness of a text depends not solely on its intrinsicproperties but on its value and function, on therelationship it establishes with other texts in different‘literary systems’. ‘Since a system is not an equalinteraction of all elements,’ Tynyanov wrote, ‘but


places a group of elements in the foreground—the“dominant”—and thus involves the deformation of theremaining elements, a work enters into literature andtakes on its own literary function through thisdominant.’2 But ‘the dominant’ through which a textenters into literature—its ability to defamiliarize—isessentially a relational property. A text can fulfil theliterary function of defamiliarization only in relation tosome established norm of the familiar. But as this, too,is liable to change, then the function of any given textmust itself vary as between different moments of itshistorical existence.

It is thus only from the point of view of historicalscholarship that the realist conventions of thenineteenth-century novel can be regarded as having, inthe Formalist sense, a ‘literary function’. From thestandpoint of contemporary cultural practice, theystand on the other side of the equation: they representthe ‘familiar’ against which much contemporaryliterature turns its face.

This perception of the changing value and functionof literary texts involved challenging the notion that theorganization into which the texts constituting a givenliterary tradition are compressed is in any sense anorganization of, in Leavis’s phrase, ‘similarly placedthings’. To the contrary, it is the practice of criticismwhich itself does the placing and, as Tynyanov noted,often by positing as part of the same tradition textswhich occupy different positions and fulfil differentfunctions in different literary systems.

Our own received literary tradition, for example, iscustomarily presented as an uninterrupted line ofdevelopment running from the Greeks through asmattering of late medieval writers and the Renaissancehumanists on to the mainstream of bourgeois poetry,drama and the novel to which there is added, although

FORMALISM AND BEYOND 73

more tentatively, a selection of ‘modern classics’. Yet itis clear that this is a highly selective and, in some senses,arbitrary orchestration of past and present culturalpractice, the result of a set of operations upon the textsconcerned rather than the reflection of any necessary orintrinsic connection between them.

The point is well illustrated in the response ofÉtienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey to Marx’squestion: ‘Where does the eternal charm of Greek artcome from?’:3

There is no good answer to this question, quitesimply because there is no eternal charm in Greekart: for the Iliad, a fragment of universal literature,used in this instance as a vehicle for memory, is notthe Iliad produced by the material life of the Greeks,which was not a ‘book’ nor even a ‘myth’ in oursense of the word, which we would like to applyretrospectively. Homer’s Iliad, the ‘work’ of an‘author’ exists only for us, and in relation to newmaterial conditions into which it has beenreinscribed and reinvested with a new significance:however odd it may seem, it did not exist for theGreeks and the problem of its conservation is thusnot a relevant one. To go further: it is as if weourselves had written it (or at least composed itanew). Works of art are processes and not objects,for they are never produced once and for all, but arecontinually susceptible to ‘reproduction’: in fact,they only find an identity and a content in thiscontinual process of transformation. There is noeternal art, there are no fixed and immutableworks.4

A given literary tradition, then, is not simply aninheritance, a reflection of things that are and alwayshave been ‘similarly placed’, but is an active


construction, a particular form of the culturalappropriation of representations ‘handed down’ fromthe past.5 This naturally calls into question the concernsof traditional aesthetics. For it is only a particular,historically produced reconstruction of the textsconcerned which suggests that there should be anyfundamental commonalty between Homer and Balzac,Aeschylus and Shakespeare, which is to be investigatedas part of a theory of the specificity of ‘literature’, as partof an aesthetic.

The Formalists, in complex and contradictory ways,administered the funeral rites to aesthetics in this sense.As we have seen, they theorized not ‘works’—not afixed and immutable set of texts—but changingfunctions and relationships between texts. In doing so,they undermined the ‘metaphysic of the text’ whichunderlies the bulk of both conventional and Marxistcriticism: namely, the assumption that the text has aonce-and-for-all existence, a once-and-for-allrelationship to other texts which is marked anddetermined by the circumstances of its origin. TheFormalists, by contrast, studied the text as a historicallychanging entity, giving rise to different ‘effects’ in thelight of the different determinations to which it issubjected during its history.

It has already been pointed out that theirunderstanding of these processes was, however, purelyabstract. Although they argued that the system ofrelationships between texts which determined the valueand function of any given text was subject to aperpetual, kaleidoscopic oscillation, they could offer noaccount of the mechanisms whereby this oscillation wasproduced.

At root, this reflected their inability to deal with theproblem of literary change. For both shortcomingsrested on the same fundamental flaw: the inability to


relate internal mechanisms of change within literatureto external forces of propulsion. Although theFormalists tried to link these two dimensions, theywere, as was suggested above, prevented from doing soby the theoretical heritage they derived from Saussure.

Saussure’s magic carpet

It would be difficult to overestimate the influence ofSaussure on twentieth-century thought. Quite apart fromhis impact on linguistics, we have seen that his work hasformed the basis for the structuralist projection ‘that allsocial practices can be understood as meanings, assignifications and as circuits of exchange between subjects,and can therefore lean on linguistics as a model for theelaboration of their systematic reality’.6 Whilst there islittle doubt that this projection has made much workpossible that would otherwise have been unimaginable,particularly in the evidence it has afforded of thesystemic properties of cultural forms as diverse as folktales and fashion, certain real difficulties have recentlybecome evident:

(i) Reductionism. Ultimately, as Jakobson’s laterwork on poetry suggests, the analogy with languageentails the denial of the specificity of such cultural formsas poetry and literature as it implies that their study isto be pushed back into and made dependent on thestudy of language.

(ii) Formalism. ‘The structure’, Terence Hawkeswrites, with Saussure’s concept of la langue in mind, ‘isnot static. The laws which govern it act so as to make itnot only structured, but structuring. Thus, in order toavoid reduction to the level merely of passive form, thestructure must be capable of transformationalprocedures, whereby new material is constantlyprocessed by and through it.’7 True: but this is to reifythe structure, to make it the subject of its own process.


Instead of being viewed as a concept, the structure isviewed as a thing—a real entity—with a life and will ofits own. Saussure’s concept of la langue, for example,initially conceived as merely a systematization of therules which make individual speech-acts possible, wassubsequently granted all the attributes of a person orphilosophical subject in being endowed with thecapability to undertake operations in relation to itself.This is clearly exemplified in Saussure’s conception ofthe process whereby la langue undertakes a series ofinternal adjustments in order to accommodate andcancel out the disturbing effects of those mutations ofusage which fail to comply with its rules.

(iii) Idealism. Tzvetan Todorov has argued that thereal concern of structuralism, as applied to literature, iswith ‘the system of literary discourse in so far as this isthe generative principle behind any and every text’. 8 Inhis A Theory of Literary Production, Pierre Machereyobjects that to explain a literary text in this way is todeny its real complexity by reducing it to the level of amere resemblance of the structure which is thus said tobe contained within it. The result is a form of Platonicidealism in which the real text is represented as a mereshadow cast by an ideal essence, a variant manifestationof some essential structure which is said to be visiblethrough it. Criticism, on this construction, is a processof ‘reading through’ the text to reveal the purely idealand disembodied structure which is said to underlie andproduce it.

(iv) Anthropologism. Structuralism rests on ananthropological conception of ‘man the communicator’with the result that the study of culture is enteredexclusively through the problematic of the exchange ofmessages. Thus it entirely omits any consideration ofthe processes whereby new cultural forms are broughtinto being. The most that can be offered is an abstract


typology of cultural forms which lack any anchorage inthe social and historical circumstances of theirproduction.

These criticisms, of course, relate not merely tostructuralism but to the Saussurian premises whichunderlie it. Saussure’s separation of the synchronicstudy of la langue as a system of rules frozen at a givenpoint in time from the diachronic study of the forcesregulating the historical development of language isparticularly important in this respect. This is not to saythat there is anything wrong with this distinction.Viewed abstractly, it is of considerable methodologicalvalue and, in intention at least, Saussure proposed thedistinction purely for the methodological yield to begained from it. He was primarily concerned with thesystem of conventions which make possible theproduction and exchange of messages betweenmembers of the same language community. That thesocial and historical processes whereby suchconventions are produced, sustained or changed mightalso be a worthwhile object of study Saussure did not,of course, deny. He merely contended that suchconsiderations of diachrony would not greatlyfurther our understanding of the mechanisms bywhich meaning is produced within a given system oflanguage rules.

The difficulty is that Saussure so construed andhandled the distinction between the synchronic anddiachronic levels of analysis as to suggest not merely acontrast between different methodological perspectiveson language but also a whole series of relateddistinctions concerning the sub stantive nature oflanguage itself. The synchronic/diachronic distinctionthus parallels the distinction between la langue and laparole, between what is taken to be the truly social sideof language, comprised by the rules of la langue, and its


more contingent or individual aspects comprised by theparticular uses to which those rules are put by differentspeakers within the events of la parole. In effect, bydriving a methodological wedge between the synchronicand the diachronic, Saussure also drove a substantivewedge between those facets of language which, in theirdialectical interplay, can alone explain the tempo anddirection of language change.

These difficulties are exacerbated by the fact that, forSaussure, language is social in a purely abstract sense.For, as a body of rules pre-existing the individual, lalangue is conceived of as a totally unitary system. Thestorehouse and embodiment of an undifferentiatedsocietal collective consciousness, it gives rise merely tothe concept of the ideal-typical speaker and has noroom for the concept of different, class-based linguisticpractices: that is, of different communities of speakerswho bring different sets of rules into play in their usesof language. Small wonder that change could notbe accounted for. For the very motor of change—conflict and difference—had been exiled from theheartland of language.

The methodological artifice of the distinctionbetween the synchronic and the diachronic levels ofanalysis thus had its price. Whilst it enabled Saussure toaddress the problem of the systemic nature of language,it provided no means by which the problem of changecould be addressed. Saussure was, as a result, forcedeither to sidestep this problem or to seek to resolve it atthe price of an extreme reification. ‘Time,’ he wrote, inan almost hopeless gesture, ‘changes all things; there isno reason why language should escape this universallaw.’9 Time, the index of change, is thus converted intoits explanation; change is merely the effect of the timewhich measures it.


Alternatively, change is explained as the product ofthe sui generis transformations which la langueundertakes in order to cancel out the disequilibriuminduced by those changes in usage which break itsstrictures. This, as we have noted, has the effect oftransforming la langue from a concept into a reified‘real’ entity, a subject which oversees and regulates itsown processes. More fundamentally, perhaps, noexplanation is offered as to how it is possible that such‘disturbing’ patterns of usage should arise in face of theedicts of la langue in the first place. These, as it were,‘just happen’. Chance and necessity thus play a gleefulgame of tag with one another in Saussure’s theory oflanguage change as first the one and then the other isallowed a central role. First, necessity rules as allutterances are produced in compliance with the rules ofla langue; then chance has its say as these rules areaccidently and unaccountably broken; finally necessityreasserts itself as the iron laws of la langue take over tocounterbalance the effects of such accidental deviations.

This inability to deal with the problem of change, ofcourse, had a further consequence: namely, that thesystem of rules comprising la langue at any point intime is never itself explained but is merely described andsystematized. Language hobbles on from onesynchronic system of la langue to another without anyadequate account being offered as to how it does so oras to why, at a particular point in time, the particularsystem of rules which comprise la langue take the formthat they do.

The legacy the Formalists derived from Saussure wasthus essentially a double-edged one. On the one hand,in taking over the Saussurian distinction betweenfunction and origin, the Formalists were able to placeat the centre of their inquiries the concept of thevariable functions fulfilled by particular texts as


determined by the different and changing ‘literarysystems’ in which they were set. They approached agiven text in the same way that Saussureapproached a unit of language. Just as the function andmeaning of the latter is determined not by its originbut by its relationship to other such units of meaningwithin the system of relationships comprised by lalangue, so the function and meaning of a text derivesfrom its relationship to other texts within a given‘literary system’.

In this sense, the concepts of ‘literary system’ and lalangue might be regarded as parallel concepts. Bothrefer to systems of relationships which organize anddetermine the function and meaning of the elements(literary texts and units of language respectively) whichcomprise them. As such, however, they suffer fromsimilar defects. Just as no account is offered of themeans whereby la langue moves from one synchronicstate to another, so, although we know that ‘literarysystems’—and the functioning of particular texts withinthese—change, the Formalists could not explain how orwhy these changes take place. In a sense, Saussure’sconcept of la langue and the Formalists’ concept of‘literary system’ are a little like oriental flying carpets:both hover in the air, taking off in this direction or thatand, as no explanation is offered of the means by whichthey are thus propelled, one can only conclude that theyare magical.

Bakhtin’s historical poetics

We can see, then, both the radical potential of theFormalists’ work and, at the same time, the limitationswhich curtailed that potential. Whilst they dissolved theconcerns of aesthetics into those of history, they did so


only abstractly and, having produced questions that wereinescapably historical, had no means of resolving them.

The project of a historical poetics proposed byMikhail Bakhtin and Pavel Medvedev in the late 1920swas an attempt to realize this potential. Workingthrough the Formalists, they set out to go beyond them,to chart a terrain for Marxist criticism that would beunremittingly historical. There takes place in theirworks a dialogue between the concerns of Formalismand those of Marxism which, although it was, asSeldon puts it, ‘unconcluded’, was neverthelessextraordinarily productive.

However, we must first consider some aspects ofValentin Vološinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy ofLanguage.10 First published in 1929, this work ranksas the first systematic attempt to develop a Marxisttheory of language which reflected a thoroughgrounding in linguistics. In subjecting the categories ofSaussurian linguistics to critical analysis, Vološinovproduced a new, historical approach to the study oflanguage which provides the necessary theoreticalbackcloth against which the work of Bakhtin andMedvedev must be viewed.

It was to Saussure’s designation of la langue as theproper object of linguistics that Vološinov took mostviolent exception. This was chiefly because, inVološinov’s estimation, it did violence to the positionof the speaker who, he argued, orientates to languagenot as a system of invariant rules with which he mustcomply but as a field of possibilities which he is toutilize in concrete utterances in particular socialcontexts. The proper object of linguistics for Vološinov,then, was not the fixed system of la langue but the waysin which the rules comprising it are used, modified andadapted in concrete utterances, the determinations ofwhich are exclusively social. A concern with the


linguistic sign as the product of particular and differingsociolinguistic relationships was thus substituted forSaussure’s concern with ‘the relationship of sign to signwithin a closed system’.11

In order to effect such a theoretical shift, Vološinovargued that it was necessary to abandon Saussure’scontention that meaning is produced solely by virtue ofthe relationships of similarity and difference whichexist between signs within the closed system of lalangue. One must also, he argued, take account of thefact that, in concrete utterances, the structure, meaningand use of the linguistic sign—the word—is inherently‘dialogical’. The word, that is, is orientated to andtakes account of the use of words in the utterances towhich it is a response or in the utterances which it seeksto solicit as a response. Vološinov contended thatthese dialogic relationships must be placed at the centreof analysis if the mechanisms whereby meaning isproduced within language were to be properlyunderstood.

This position was, in part, derived from Vološinov’sreflections on the Formalists’ concern with the problemof skaz—that is, of the position which the speakingsubject adopts in relation to the language s/he uses.However, it received its most adequate and fullyworked out expression in Bakhtin’s study ofDostoevsky.

Analysing the conventions according to whichdiscourse is constructed in Dostoevsky’s works, Bakhtinargues that the Dostoevskian word is inherently a ‘side-glancing word’. Dostoevsky’s characters, that is, neverspeak without immediately altering or qualifying theirdiscourse in the light of the possible reactions of somereal (another character) or imaginary (the reader)interlocutor. The word is thus, within such a discourse,constantly looking over its shoulder and, ever-sensitive


to the words of others, is subject to incessantmodification. Used in this way, the word reflects andeffects a particular set of relationships between speakerand listener within language itself and can only be fullyunderstood when its functioning within the context ofsuch relationships is properly appreciated.

Vološinov’s first proposed modification of Saussurianlinguistics, then, was to suggest that the word should beunderstood not only along the axes of its relationship toother words but in the context of its functioning withinthe dialogic relationships between speaker and listener.These, to avoid confusion, referred not to the objectivesocial relationships between a real flesh-and-bloodspeaker and an equally material listener but to therelationships between the role of speaker and the roleof listener as constructed by and within particularlanguage forms or discourses. His second, and perhapsmore radical step was to argue that such languageforms or, as he called them, ‘speech-genres’ mightthemselves be explained with reference to the objective‘conditions of socio-verbal interaction’ on which theyare predicated.

It is arguable that the root source of Saussure’sdifficulties consisted in his separation of the system ofrules internal to la langue from any practices locatedoutside that system. Ultimately, it is Saussure’s conceptof the arbitrary relation between signifier and signifiedthat is crucially debilitating here. In itself, of course, theconcept is unexceptionable. Indeed, it is essential to anunderstanding of the historicity of language in therespect that, by denying any intrinsic connectionbinding signifier and signified, form and meaning, itpresents that relation as being subject to histori calvariation and determination. But, within Saussure’swork, it is only the variation and never thedetermination that is explained.


Raymond Williams has suggested that theexplanation for this is attributable to the (incorrect)assumption that, because the relationship betweensignifier and signified is arbitrary in the sense of beingconventional, it must also be arbitrary in the sense thatit displays no necessary or demonstrable relation to thehistorical processes by which, as a particular unit ofmeaning, it is produced. ‘On the contrary,’ he argues,‘the fusion of formal element and meaning…is theresult of a real process of social development, in theactual activities of speech and in the continuingdevelopment of a language.’ 12

The call here is for a theory of language which willexplain the particular unity of form and meaningestablished by the system of signs which constitutelanguage with reference to the socially based andhistorically changing linguistic practices on which thatsystem rests. It was to precisely just such a theory thatVološinov addressed himself. His concern was not withlanguage in isolation, however, but as part of anattempt to develop a comprehensive theory of ideologywithin Marxism.

As the concept of ideology has had a varied andchequered career within the history of Marxism, wemust be clear about the way in which Vološinov usedit. Briefly, in speaking of ‘ideology’, he had in mind thetotality of those conventionalized forms through whichsense and meaning are conferred on ‘reality’. The planeof ideology is thus equated with that of semiotics—theworld of signs—and, as such, is objective and materialin nature. Ideology, Vološinov argues, is not theabstract product of an equally abstract ‘consciousness’but has an autonomous and objective existence aseither a distinctive, culturally encoded organization ofsound waves (speech, music) or a codified co-ordinationof light rays (print, visual images) effected by the


manipulation of material substances. Unlike otherplanes of reality, however, the plane of ideology also‘reflects and refracts’, in accordance with its ownprinciples of organization, a reality outside itself. Thesign, in other words, not only exists: it signifies.

It is the double-edged nature of this concept of thesign that is vital. For Saussure, all that matters is therelationship of one sign to another within the closedsystem of la langue; the question of their referentoutside language is entirely ‘bracketed’. This means, aswe have seen, that there is no way in which thestructure of la langue can be explained with reference todeterminations which lie outside it. For Vološinov, bycontrast, although language and, in a more generalsense, all ideological forms are granted an autonomousreality of their own, imposing a signification on ‘reality’which reflects their own systemic organization, theseforms, although not reducible to economic and socialrelationships are, in part, explicable by them. For it isnot the abstract grammar of language that interestsVološinov but rather the uses to which the rulescomprising this grammar are put in concrete socialsituations. His primary concern was to establish atypology of speech forms or genres and to explainthese with reference to the conditions of socioverbalinteraction on which they rest and by which theyare produced.

The sign, in its actual and concrete usage, is thusalways socially formed. Its actual use and meaning, inthe case of language, is reciprocally determined bywhose word it is and for whom it is meant. It is alwaysset within and, in part, moulded by a particular set ofsocial relationships between speaker and listener: thatis, by particular conditions of socioverbal interactionwhich are themselves moulded by the broader social,economic and political relationships in which they are


set. Given that all language forms are predicated ondistinctive, historically produced relationships betweenspeaker(s) and listener(s)—Vološinov mentions suchcases as drawing-room conversation and languageetiquette—the central analytical task is to determinehow those language forms are determined by therelationships on which they are articulated and tospecify how, in their inner organization, they ‘refract’or signify those relationships:

This is the order that the actual generative process oflanguage follows: social intercourse is generated(stemming from the basis); in it, verbalcommunication and interaction are generated; and inthe latter, forms of speech performance aregenerated; finally, this generative process is reflectedin the change of language forms.13

Thus there is, in Vološinov’s work, a constant toingand froing between language forms and the socialrelationships in which they are set—between, in short,sign and reality. However, this is not to say thatlanguage is subject to change and development simplyin response to the changes which take place in theconditions of socioverbal intercourse. Change alsoresults from the elements of contradiction andinstability located within language itself.

In systematizing the rules comprising la langue,Vološinov argued, Saussure tended to smooth out thediscrepancies of meaning which may be attached to thesame words by virtue of the different uses to which theyare put in different, socially produced linguisticpractices. It was by failing to recognize and deal withthe theoretical consequences of the polysemanticity ofthe word—the word as the crossing-point of multiplemeanings—that Saussure exiled the mechanisms of


change from the heartland of language. Vološinov, bycontrast, views the use of the word as part of aprimarily class-based struggle for the terms in whichreality is to be signified. Language, far from being aneutral horizon of fixed and given meanings, becomesan ‘arena of class struggle’ as words are mobilized andfought for by different class-based philosophies. It is byvirtue of the interaction of ‘differently oriented socialinterests within one and the same sign-community, i.e.by the class struggle’,14 that, Vološinov argues,language change can be accounted for as the result ofmechanisms of contradiction inscribed within its verystructure.

In summary, then, Vološinov argues that the properconcern of linguistics should be to establish a typologyof speech genres which would explain the peculiarmode of the refraction or signification of reality theyeffect with reference to the social conditions ofsocioverbal interaction, themselves contextualizedwithin the framework of wider economic, social andpolitical relationships, which underlie and producethem. This, for Vološinov, applied just as much tolanguage in its written as in its spoken forms, just asmuch to literary genres—which he defined as ‘verbalperformances in print’15—as to speech genres.

It was in this respect that his work served as abackcloth to Medvedev’s and Bakhtin’s attempt toconstruct a sociologically and historically informedtypology of literary genres. Vološinov provided thenecessary concepts whereby the process of literarychange could be analysed as a result of shifting classrelationships. He also provided the means whereby thespecificity of different forms of writing could beexplained by referring them to the social relationshipson which they are predicated.


It is the latter of these concerns which interests ushere, particularly with regard to the way in whichBakhtin and Medvedev reworked the problem ofliterariness. By broaching the question of the specificnature of literature not as a separate issue but as merelyone concern within a general theory of forms of writing,they provided that concern with a wider theoreticallocation and, in so doing, transformed it. The concernwas no longer with ‘literature’ per se but with whetherso-called ‘literary’ works ‘have an autonomousideological role and a type of refraction ofsocioeconomic existence entirely their own’,16 and, ifso, how this might be explained in materialist terms.

They sought, in other words, to found a category of‘literature’ that would be historically informed. Thepeculiar signification of ‘reality’ that literary workseffected was to be explained not in idealist terms asthe manifestation of some unchanging set of formalproperties but as the product of a particular, sociallyconstrained practice of writing and as the manifestationof a particular constellation of class relationships withinlanguage.

‘Literature’ as a historical category

We have already glanced at Bakhtin’s work onDostoevsky. His broader study of the ‘carnivalization’ ofliterature will serve to exemplify the issues involved here.What is ‘carnivalized literature’? Bakhtin defines it as‘those genres which have come under the influence—eitherdirectly or indirectly, through a series of intermediarylinks—of one or another variant of carnivalistic folk-lore(ancient or medieval).’17

Although concerned with this phenomenon as ageneral problem in the history of poetics,18 Bakhtin wasmore particularly interested in the ‘carnivalization’ of


the major literary genres in the Renaissance as markingthe birth of contemporary European belles lettres. ForRenaissance literature, the world of carnival afforded astock of themes and devices which permitted whatBakhtin calls the ‘renewal’ of medieval ideology: that is,the subversion of the fixed hierarchies it represented or,in other words, its defamiliarization.

The issues involved here are admirably illustrated inhis Rabelais and His World (written in 1940, but notpublished until 1965). Ostensibly a study of the role offolk humour in Rabelais’ work, it is also an attempt toaccount for the historical formation of contemporaryEuropean belles lettres as a new and distinctive form ofwriting predicated on a new set of social, political andideological relationships.

In the classical medieval period, Bakhtin contendsthat the world of official medieval ideology and that offolk humour constituted two separate ideologicalspheres, totally opposed to one another, without anymediations or transition between them. The world ofofficial medieval ideology, embodied in sacred texts andreligious rituals and festivals, was one of an unrelieved,gloomy eschatology dominated by a view of existencein which God (and thence religious and secularauthorities who held their power on lease from God)figured as the centre and pivot of the world. Completelyopposed to this world and, in a sense, its mirror-imagewas the world of folk humour as embodied in popularrituals and festivals, especially carnivals, the comicshows of the marketplace and what Bakhtin calls the‘Billingsgate genres’—the popular oaths and curses ofmarketplace speech. Taken as a totality, these ‘carnival’forms constituted a ‘world turned upside down’ inwhich the official, hierarchic representation of theworld was inverted and, in some cases, ‘decentred’—asin the popular feast which ‘decentred’ Christian


ideology by placing the ass and not Jesus or Mary atits centre.

The world of folk humour thus constituted a worldapart from official ideology and was a ritualized‘discrowning’ of that ideology. ‘They offered’, Bakhtinwrote of these popular forms, ‘a completely different,nonofficial, extraecclesiastical and extrapolitical aspectof the world and a second life outside officialdom, aworld in which all medieval people participated moreor less, in which they lived during a given time of theyear.’19 What was made available then, was not somuch a ‘renewal’ or ‘making strange’ of ideologyas an alternative, ‘carnival’ view of the world: areversal of official ideology which was granted—largelybecause the people refused to relinquish it—aritualized, semi-legal existence within the interstices ofthe Christian calendar.

The historical significance of such texts as Rabelais’Gargantua and Pantagruel, Bakhtin argues, was thatthey transformed the function of folk humour. Nolonger an accepted area of licence and reversal outsideof and apart from official ideology, folk humour was,in the literature of the early Renaissance, brought intorelation with the official ideology as part of a set offormal devices whereby that ideology was not merelyparodied and inverted but transfixed and revealed,distanced from within, as the ideology of a crumblingworld order:

The culture of folk-humour that had been shapedduring many centuries and that had defended thepeople’s creativity in non-official forms, in verbalexpression or spectacle, could now rise to the highlevel of literature and ideology and fertilize it…. Thisthousand year old laughter not only fertilized


literature but was itself fertilized by humanistknowledge and advanced literary techniques.20

The meaning of this is perhaps most clearlyillustrated by the principle of ‘grotesque realism’ whichgoverned the world of folk humour and by the uses towhich Rabelais put this principle. According to this,bodily imagery serves as a means of inverting the officialsocial, moral and political order. It is a system whichhas at its ‘head’ the anus and at its ‘heart’ the belly. It isan image of the body as a devoured and devouringtotality which, related to the world through its orifices,remains forever in a state of incompleteness.

Within its original popular setting, Bakhtin argues,the principle of ‘grotesque realism’ served both toinvert established hierarchies and to furnish a ‘base’alternative to the officially sanctioned Christianeschatology. To the promise of heaven, it opposed ananatomical representation of a people’s utopia: a worldof surfeit and—there is no other word for it—ofgargantuan indulgence in the joys of the flesh.

With Rabelais, the function of ‘grotesque realism’ istransformed in two ways. First, by constantly recastingthe objects invested with ideological significance in theworld of official culture—as when the belfry of amonastery is likened to a phallus or a sermon to aprolonged fart—Rabelais effects a ‘degrading’ and‘renewal’ of objects, presenting them in a new light byplacing them in an unexpected context. In this way, theentire world of medieval ideology is ‘discrowned’: thatis, ‘renewed’ or ‘made strange’. Second, bodily imageryis also used as a means of proposing another ideologyin place of the official one. It is thus, Bakhtin argues,that the concept of the body as a boundless, ever-onrolling entity, swelling and expanding with each


generation, served as a device for expressing the newlyemerging historical humanism of the Renaissance.

In a double movement, then, the principle of‘grotesque realism’ served both to define and limitmedieval ideology and, by replacing the concept of theascent of the soul into heaven with that of thedevelopment of mankind, symbolized by bodilyimagery, along the historical axis of time, to substitutefor it the formative historicist ideology of the earlyRenaissance.

A couple of examples will, perhaps, help to make thepoint more vividly. Bakhtin’s analysis of the nature andfunction of Rabelais’ treatment of bells will serve toillustrate the formal means by which themes anddevices derived from the world of carnival are used tosubvert and belittle the official ideology of medievalChristian thought.

Within the culture of the Middle Ages, bells took ontwo quite different functions and symbolic valuesaccording to the context in which they were used.Within the context of the official religious ideology,they functioned so as to symbolize spiritual values.Located in the belfries of churches and monasteries,they belonged to the world of ‘the above’. Poised mid-way between the earth and heaven, the peals they tolledwere a summons to men’s higher calling. Within theworld of carnival, however, in which cowbells werefrequently tied to horses’ halters and smaller bells wereused as an accompaniment to festive feasting anddancing, bells were ‘brought down’ from their elevatedposition to take part in the world of ‘the below’, aworld of festive merriment and excess. By wrenchingchurch bells from the first of these contexts and placingthem in the context of carnival, Bakhtin argues thatRabelais effects a limiting of official ideology, trampling


its sombre seriousness underfoot beneath the merrydance of carnival.

It is thus that Gargantua, having relieved himself onthe citizens of Paris from on top of the bell towers ofNotreDame—itself, of course, a profound debasementof official ideology in its association of the mostspiritual bells in the land with the lowest of bodilyfunctions—decides to send the bells home to his father:

After this exploit Gargantua examined the great bellsthat hung in those towers, and played a harmoniouspeal on them. As he did so it struck him that theywould serve very well for cow-bells to hang on thecollar of his mare, which he had decided to send to hisfather, loaded with Brie cheese and fresh herrings. Sohe took them straight off to his lodgings.21

We can see here how the great bells of Notre-Dameare ‘brought down’, in a movement of profounddebasement, from their official exalted position tofunction in a carnival context—as cowbells—inassociation with the richest and most fulsome of festivefood: Brie cheese and fresh herrings. Nothing could beless spiritual.

Our second example concerns the use of bodilyimagery to symbolize the concept of the people as anever-expanding, self-generating and regeneratinghistorical force. It concerns the way in whichGargantua’s mother, Gargamelle, was brought to bedby eating an excess of tripe:

This was the manner in which Gargamelle wasbrought to bed—and if you don’t believe it, mayyour fundament fall out! Her fundament fell out oneafternoon, on the third of February, after she hadover-eaten herself on godebillios. Godebillios are thefat tripes of coiros. Coiros are oxen fattened at the


stall and in guimo meadows, and guimo meadowsare those that carry two grass crops a year. They hadkilled three hundred and sixty-seven thousand andfourteen of these fat oxen to be salted down onShrove Tuesday, so that in the spring they shouldhave plenty of beef in season, with which to make ashort commemoration at the beginning of meals, forthe better enjoyment of their wine. The tripes wereplentiful, as you will understand, and so appetizingthat everyone licked his fingers. But the devil and allof it was that they could not possibly be kept anylonger. For they were tainted, which seemed mostimproper. So it was resolved that they should beconsumed without more ado….

Now, the good man Grandgousier took very greatpleasure in this feast and ordered that all should beserved full ladles. Nevertheless he told his wife to eatmodestly, seeing that her time was near and that thistripe was not very commendable meat. ‘Anyone whoeats the bag,’ he said, ‘might just as well be chewingdung.’ Despite his warning, however, she ate sixteenquarters, two bushels. and six pecks. Oh, what finefaecal matter to swell up inside her!22

And later, when Gargamelle’s labour pains areindistinguishable from her bowel movements:

A little while later she began to groan and wail andshout. Then suddenly swarms of midwives came upfrom every side, and feeling her underneath foundsome rather ill-smelling excrescences, which theythought were the child; but it was her fundamentslipping out, because of the softening of her rightintestine—which you call the bum-gut—owing toher having eaten too much tripe, as has beenstated above.


At this point a dirty old hag of the company, whohad the reputation of being a good she-doctor andhad come from Brizepaille, near Saint Genou, sixtyyears before, made her an astringent, so horrible thatall her sphincter muscles were stopped andconstricted…

By this misfortune the cotyledons of the matrixwere loosened at the top, and the child leapt upthrough them to enter the hollow vein. Then,climbing through the diaphragm to a point above theshoulders where this vein divides in two, he took theleft fork and came out by the left ear.

As soon as he was born he cried out, not like otherchildren: ‘Mies! Mies!’ but ‘Drink! Drink! Drink!’,as if inviting the whole world to drink, and so loudthat he was heard through all the lands of Booze andBibulous.23

There are many distinctively Rabelaisian elements atwork in these passages: the material excess of festivalfeasting, for example, and the quite obviously ‘debased’version of a miraculous birth which parodies, in itsexcess of scatological detail, the highly spiritual affairof divine conception. Bakhtin’s concern, however, ismore particu larly with the functioning of tripe, bowels,faecal matter and foetus and with the eradication of thedifferences between them. It is an excess of tripe, theintestines of an animal, that induces in Gargamelle abowel movement of such extraordinary power andduration that it is indistinguishable from her labourpains. Animal intestines, human intestines, faecalmatter, foetus: all of these become one, part of a ‘greatbelly’ in which all events—eating, defecation,copulation, childbirth—take place and mergeimperceptibly with one another. The resulting image isone of a single supraindividual bodily life, of the greatbowels of mother earth which, in forever devouring and


being devoured, symbolize the ever ongoing andregenerating body of the people, a merry, abundant,unstoppable force which ‘opposes the serious medievalworld of fear and oppression with all its intimidatingand intimidated ideology’. 24

To conclude, then, Bakhtin argues that Rabelais usesa set of devices culled from the world of folk humour toso ‘work on’ the categories of the dominant ideology ofmedieval society as to make them appear strange, torecast them within the world of carnival so that, insteadof being filled with sombre seriousness, they are filledwith belly laughter.

The important point, however, is that this effect of the‘renewal’ of ideology is not regarded as somethingwhich typifies ‘literature’ as such. Offering his study asa pointer to the analysis of early Renaissance literaturein general, Bakhtin views Rabelais’ work asexemplifying a new form of writing—without parallelin medieval literature. Occupying a point mid-waybetween the folk-humour of popular culture andofficial medieval ideology, this new form of writing isthe product of a new, historically produced set of socialand cultural relationships which established somedegree of connection between two culturalspheres which had hitherto been kept hermeticallyseparate from one another:

The Renaissance is the only period in the history ofEuropean literature which marked the end of a duallanguage and a linguistic transformation. Much ofwhat was possible at that exceptional time laterbecame impossible. It can be said of belles lettres,and especially of the modern novel, that they wereborn on the boundary of two languages…. Anintense interorientation, interaction, and mutualclarification of languages took place during that


period. The two languages frankly and intenselypeered into each other’s faces, and each becamemore aware of itself, of its potentialities andlimitations, in the light of the other.25

Here, then, we have an approach to literature—meaning, here, all forms of fictional writing—that ishistorically and not aesthetically informed.Contemporary European belles lettres are distinguishedfrom other forms of the practice of writing not as aninstance of ‘literature’ as such, conceived of as anhistorical category, but in terms of the historical forceswhich bear on their production. The effect of ‘renewal’in Rabelais’ work is not simply given, as is the attributeof defamiliarization in Formalist writing, but derivesfrom its position at the crossroads of two previouslyseparate cultural systems. It exemplifies a new type ofwriting whose formal contours are determined preciselyby the point of confluence at which it is situated—aconfluence which, if culturally defined, has concretesocial, political and ideological determinants.

Although these latter do not occupy the centre ofBakhtin’s study, they are clearly implicated. The newform of writing which is the object of his study isgranted a firm material base. Thus, if the classicalmedieval age offered no ideological space within whicha literature of ‘renewal’ might be located, whereas theearly Renaissance did. this reflected a number ofdevelopments. The undermining of Papal hegemonyinduced by the development of paper and printtechnology and by the spread of lay centres ofeducation; the resulting interaction between popularculture and Church ideology effected by the newcentrality granted to the vernacular; and the ideologicaland political crisis within feudalism created by theupsurge of dynastic nationalism and the development


of a counter-hegemonic force in the urban burgherclasses are among those that might be mentioned.26 Inshort, the new form of writing introduced with theRenaissance is seen to have clear historical co-ordinatesand determinants, the dismantling of official medievalideology which it effected being viewed as part of theeconomic and political break-up of the feudal order.

Finally, to appreciate the full flavour of Bakhtin’shistorical method, it must be stressed that he in nosense attempts to reify Rabelais’ work by imputing to ita ‘once-and-for-all’ function or effect abstracted fromthe real history of its existence as a received text. Apartfrom being a study of Rabelais, his work also offers asurvey of Rabelais criticism. This makes it clear how,with the change in the political climate resulting fromthe onset of bourgeois and/or monarchical stability inthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, anappreciation of the role and significance of the folkhumour elements in Gargantua and Pantagruel was lostto view as the work (together with such parallel texts asCervantes’ Don Quixote) was relegated to the sidelinesof the ‘merely humorous’. Like the Formalists, Bakhtinthus recognizes that the function and effect of aparticular literary text may vary according to thepositions that it occupies within different ‘literarysystems’. The difference is that he understands this in aconcrete sense and not merely abstractly. The effect ofRabelais’ work is viewed not as an invariant oneproduced and guaranteed by the text itself but as amatter for concrete historical specification. It can onlybe calculated by taking into account the differentpolitical and ideological conjunctures which the textenters into during the course of its historical existenceand the different ways in which that same text is‘worked’ by the literary criticisms through which itsreception is mediated.


100

PART TWO:

MARXIST CRITICISM: FROMAESTHETICS TO POLITICS

102

5AESTHETICS MARXISM

VERSUS

Formalism: a lost heritage

BAKHTIN’S study of Rabelais would seem fully toexemplify what a Marxist—that is, a historical andmaterialist—approach to the study of literary texts shouldlook like. Remarkably free from the concerns of traditionalaesthetics, it explains the distinguishing formal features ofRabelais’ work not as the manifestation of some invariantset of uniquely distinguishing aesthetic properties but asthe product of a particular, historically and materiallyconstrained practice of writing. Further-more, this‘materialism of production’ is counterbalanced bya‘materialism of consumption’ in the equally concrete andhistorically specific analysis Bakhtin offers of the differentways in which Rabelais’ work has functioned and beenrecuperated within different ideological and politicalconjunctures. The question of a particular text’s politicaleffects, this suggests, cannot be resolved with reference toits formal properties, treated as an ahistorical abstraction,but requires an examination of the concrete and changingfunctions which that text fulfils in the real social process.

Although these achievements reflect a sustainedcritique of the Formalists’ work and of the premises onwhich it rested, it is equally clear that, without the

critical intervention made by the Formalists, theseadvances simply could not have been made. If Bakhtin’swork defines and occupies a theoretical space that issituated ‘beyond Formalism’, that space was producedonly by ‘working through’ Formalism. By takingboth its claims and its problems seriously, Bakhtinwas not only profoundly influenced by the Formalistheritage; he also reorganized that heritage, activelyworking upon and transforming Formalist concepts inthe process of integrating them into his owntheoretical concerns.

Bakhtin’s concept of ‘renewal’, for example, is notmerely a near-equivalent for the concept ofdefamiliarization—not a passive borrowing fromFormalism on his part. It is a different concept,reflecting a process of theoretical work on andtransformation of the concept of defamiliarization. Itrefers not to an invariant attribute which is felt to typifyall so-called literary texts but to a particular formaleffect wrought by European belles lettres during aparticular stage in their historical development.Similarly, although taking over the Formalists’perception that the question of a text’s function withina given ‘literary system’ cannot be resolved withreference to the conditions of its origin, Bakhtin givesthis perception a more precise, a more materialist andhistorical formulation. Such changes in the effects andfunctions which it is possible to attribute to a text donot ‘just happen’ but are a product of the concreteideological and political determinations which, throughthe mediation of criticism, operate on the text so as tocondition its consumption.

There is, then, no need to ‘call for’ or ‘invent’ adialogue between Formalism and Marxism. Thatdialogue has already taken place and, if our analysis iscorrect, was an extraordinarily productive one. Yet its


impact on the main-stream of Marxist criticism hasbeen negligible. The work of the Formalists, it is true,has exerted a marginal impact on Marxist criticism inrecent years in the attempts of Marxist critics to cometo terms with and incorporate the advances that havebeen made in structuralism and semiotics. The work ofRoland Barthes and of other scholars associated withthe journal Tel Quel has been most important in thisrespect. The general disillusionment with the politicalvalue of realist texts and, allied with this, a renewedinterest in Brecht’s work have also occasioned arenewed interest in the work of the Formalists. Inparticular, the concept of defamiliarization has provedan indispensable aid to theorizing the formal structureand effect of contemporary avant-garde literarypractice. Important though these developments are,however, they reflect only a partial rediscovery of theFormalists, concerned solely with the contribution theyhave to make to our understanding of the formaldevices which govern the construction of particularnarrative structures or discourses. The broaderphilosophical and methodological concerns whichformed the background to the Formalists’ concern withsuch formal devices as part of an integrated theory ofliterariness have, by and large, been overlooked or,worse, dismissed as merely Kantian.

The situation with regard to Bakhtin is even moreregrettable. With one or two exceptions, his works havebeen treated simply as exercises in ‘practical criticism’,little or no attempt having been made to quarry themfor their theoretical yield.1

However, we will not dwell further on the reasonsfor this neglect here. Our aim in the second part of thisstudy is to review some of the recent developmentswithin Marxism which suggest that a dialogue betweenFormalist and Marxist criticism may again be

MARXISM VERSUS AESTHETICS 105

undertaken with fruitful results. Our concern here willbe with the work of Louis Althusser and with that ofsuch critics as Pierre Macherey and Terry Eagleton who,although differing in particulars both from one anotherand from Althusser, can be generally said to share thesame approach.

Briefly, we shall attempt to establish four differenttypes of connection between this tradition and the workof the Formalists. First, we shall argue that the twoapproaches are formally similar with respect to the waysin which they respectively produce and define their‘object’—the concept of literature with which theywork—and their concerns in relation to that object.Second, we shall argue that there is a degree ofsubstantive similarity between the Formalists’ positionconcerning the defamiliarizing nature of literarydiscourse and the argument of the Althusserians to theeffect that ‘literature’ can be defined as a form ofcognition whose uniqueness consists in its capacity to‘distance from within’ the categories of dominantideology. This entails, as a third level of connection, asimilarity of technique in the respect that the detailedconceptual apparatus used by the Althusserians inorder to dissect the formal operations of literary texts isclosely modelled upon and clearly is influenced by thetechniques of formal analysis developed by theFormalists. Finally, it will be argued that the twotraditions are similar with respect to their theoreticaltrajec tories. Both start off with a theory of ‘literature’as such; both dissolve this essentially aesthetic concernin order to take account of the historical determinationswhich bear on both the text’s production and itsconsumption.

We are not, however, interested in these parallels fortheir own sake. That would be a lame and, ultimately,purely formal undertaking. If we set out to contribute


to a developing dialogue between Formalism andMarxism, to rediscover the lost heritage of Formalism,it is because we believe that this will be of positiveassistance to Marxist criticism in enabling it tosurmount some of the difficulties which currently faceit. Of these, the need to sever the connection which hasbound it to the concerns of bourgeois aesthetics,thereby impeding the realization of its historical andmaterialist ambitions, is perhaps the most pressing.

Marxist criticism: aesthetics, politics andhistory

Marxism has always claimed to be a revolutionaryscience. This means not merely that it is a science placed inthe service of social and political revolution but also thatit is, as a science, revolutionary in its approach to definingproblems. Marx’s thought, it is now generally recognized,constituted a genuine theoretical revolution in the historyof economic, social and political thought. Instead ofproposing new answers to the old problems that were pre-given in the traditional concerns of bourgeois politicaleconomy or philosophy, Marx displaced those concernsentirely by proposing a new set of questions: that is, a new‘problematic’.

The tradition of political philosophy which runs fromHobbes to Hegel, for example, regards the state as apolitical institution which is formed as the result of aseries of contracts entered into between individualcitizens and the sovereign power. The predominantconcern of this tradition is, accordingly, with the dutyof obedience individual citizens owe to the state andwith the conditions under which, if the state violatesthe terms of the contract under which power is leasedto it, this duty may be broken with. In Marx’s writingson the state, these problems are simply not present butare instead replaced by a radically new set of problems:


those concerning the state as an arena in which theconflicting interests of different classes are representedand fought out.

This notion of the ‘theoretical break’ between Marx’swork and pre-Marxist forms of economic, social andpolitical theory has played an important role in recentyears—largely as a result of Althusser’s work—injustifying Marxism’s claim to be a specific science.2

This ‘theoretical break’ was not, however, a once-and-for-all event which occurred simultaneously in allregions of Marxist theory.

Whereas Marx himself cut the umbilical cordbetween his own economic theories and the bourgeoispolitical economy from which he developed them, forexample, it is frequently argued that Marxist politicaltheory achieved a parallel independence only withLenin’s The State and Revolution.3

Marxists working in the sphere of ideology have hada much more difficult time of it. Although it is clearthat a consistently Marxist approach to ideological andcultural forms must rest on historical and materialistpremises, it has proved to be no easy task to forge thedetailed theoretical and conceptual apparatus throughwhich such an ambition might be realized. True, allMarxist approaches to these questions claim to behistorical and materialist. But they too often turn out tobe fatally contaminated by idealist categories that theyhave taken on board, almost unconsciously, from whathave proved to be more developed and sophisticatedschools of bourgeois cultural theory.

This is particularly true of Marxist literary criticismwhich, far from progressing by displacing the concernsof bourgeois aesthetics to produce a distinctively newset of problems, has been developed chiefly via a seriesof borrowings from the more developed and moreavailable systems of bourgeois criticism and aesthetics.


If the ambition of Marxist criticism is to be a science,one can only conclude that it is still in the stages of its‘ideological pre-history’, firmly caught in an orbitaround the concerns of bourgeois criticism andaesthetics from which it must one day detach itself if itis to attain a genuine independence.

The reasons for this are many and complex. In part,it it reflects the ambiguity of Marx’s own writings onliterary and artistic matters. Although he did notattempt to develop a systematic theory of art andliterature, Marx did comment frequently and often atlength on these matters.4 Unfortunately, it is notalways easy to reconcile what he has to say in thesepassages with the concerns and procedures embodied inthe approach he took to the questions of economic andpolitical analysis with which he was more centrallyconcerned. The question of the value that is to beplaced on these writings is thus a vexed one that wecannot fully go into here.

It is quite clear, however, that the greater part ofMarx’s writings on art and literature, although pennedby Marx, are in no sense indicative of the position of‘Marxism’ on these matters. The ‘theoretical break’which would inaugurate the development of Marxistcriticism as a genuinely independent science is notlocated in Marx’s work. The failure to recognizethis uncomfortable fact and the correspondinglymisplaced theoretical weight that has all too often beenplaced on Marx’s writings in this area have formed afurther impediment to the development of such a‘theoretical break’.

Perhaps more important, however, have been thecircumstances in which the major schools of Marxistcriticism were formed and developed. Perry Andersonhas usefully distinguished two major phases in thehistory of Marxism which were of a crucial importance


in this respect. The first consists of the secondgeneration of Marxists—notably, Antonio Labriola,Franz Mehring, Karl Kautsky and Georgy Plekhanov—who assumed the intellectual leadership in thecommunist movement in the period immediately afterthe death of Marx and Engels and prior to theascendency of Lenin and Trotsky. Anderson arguesthat, owing to the lull of revolutionary expectationswhich characterized this period, these theorists ceasedto apply Marxism concretely and politically to theanalysis of changing economic and politicalrelationships. Instead, making Marxism itself theprimary object of their attention, they sought ‘tosystematize historical materialism as a comprehensivetheory of man and nature, capable of replacing rivalbourgeois disciplines and providing the workers’movement with a broad and coherent vision of theworld that could easily be grasped by its militants’.5

Although one should not underestimate theideological value of this moment in the history ofMarxism, its theoretical consequences were regrettable.For, in order to make Marxism compete with thetraditional bourgeois disciplines, it was necessary torealign it with them, to make their concerns its concernalso. By arguing that its categories could be applied tothe pre-given problems, say, of philosophy or aestheticsand, moreover, that it could deal with these moresuccessfully than its bourgeois counterparts, Marxismwas thereby regarded as merely one school amongothers within these areas. Its claims to be revolutionaryas a science were thus muted as it was made to providenew answers to old questions rather than to produce,within a theoretical space of its own making, an entirelynew, incommensurable set of problems.

This tendency was repeated and exaggerated duringthe period of what Anderson calls ‘western Marxism’,


running from Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness(1925) to the present. ‘The great wealth and variety ofthe corpus of writing produced in this domain,’Anderson writes of western Marxism’s contribution toaesthetics, ‘far richer and subtler than anything withinthe classical heritage of historical materialism, may inthe end prove to be the most permanent collective gainof this tradition.’6 This is true. Virtually all of the majortheorists whose work defines this period—GeorgLukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, HerbertMarcuse, Lucien Goldmann, Jean-Paul Sartre, GalvanoDella Volpe—have offered a major treatise on thecontribution Marxism has to make to the study ofliterature. But it is equally true to say that thesecontributions, at least in part, reflect an unquestioningacceptance of the problems of traditional aesthetics asbeing ones with which Marxism should legitimatelyconcern itself.

In this, western Marxism reflects the conditions of itsgenesis. The most distinctive feature of the period from1925 onwards, Anderson argues, has been the virtuallytotal severance of the link between theory and practiceinduced by the downturn of revolutionary expectationsin western Europe and the subsequent economic andpolitical consolidation of capitalism. All of the theoristswhom we have cited were either, after an initial periodof political involvement, divorced from concretepolitical pursuits, concerning themselves withtheoretical issues in what was tantamount to a politicalvacuum (as was the case with Lukács), or, from thevery beginning, had been concerned with Marxism in apurely theoretical sense (as was the case with Marcuseand Adorno). Furthermore, with the notable exceptionof Antonio Gramsci, they were all university professorswriting about Marxism from within bourgeois or, inthe case of Lukács, Stalinist academia.


Reflecting the impress of these constraints, thecollective output of western Marxism amounts to aseries of secondorder discourses, ‘on Marxism, ratherthan in Marxism’,7 which have sought to reinterpretMarx’s work by reviewing it in terms of categories ofanalysis supplied by some other theoretical orphilosophical system. The various attempts that havebeen made to derive a Marxist aesthetic by relatingMarx’s work to the aesthetic theories of Hegel (Lukács)or Schiller (Marcuse) are indicative of this. The result isnow a well-developed tradition of Marxist criticismwhich, although displaying a degree of conceptualsophistication and a mastery of both bourgeoisliterature and bourgeois aesthetics that can rival the bestof bourgeois criticism, remains a commentary on, acritique of and an attempted incorporation oftraditional aesthetics. It has failed to produce a new setof questions which would entirely supplant theconcerns of pre-Marxist aesthetics.

In saying this, of course, we do not intend to speakdis missively of these traditions but merely to point tothe price they have paid for being developed in suchclose proximity to the concerns of traditionalaesthetics. The history of Marxist criticism is a historyof two different sets of problems which have coexisteduneasily with one another. On the one hand, within thecontext of the topography of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’mapped out by Marx, there has been a sustainedattempt to explain the form and content of literarytexts by referring them to the economic, political andideological relationships within which they are set. Inaddition, Marxist critics have always sought tocalculate what sort of political effects might beattributed to literary works and, accordingly, to judgefor or against different types of literary practice fromstated political positions. On the other hand, with the


possible exception of Brecht’s work, every major phasein the development of Marxist criticism has been anenterprise in aesthetics. It has attempted to construct atheory of the specific nature of aesthetic objects and,within this, a theory of ‘literature’ as such.

Indeed, if there is a single dominant thread runningthrough the history of Marxist criticism it is theattempt to reconcile these two sets of concerns: the oneconsistent with the historical and materialist premisesof Marxism and with its political motivation, and theother inherited from bourgeois aesthetics. The crucialtheoretical break lies in the recognition that, instead of‘Marxism and aesthetics’, the real concern should bewith ‘Marxism versus aesthetics’. For it is not merelythat these two concerns sit uncomfortably with oneanother. The inheritance of the conceptual equipmentwhich goes with the concerns of aesthetics constitutesthe single most effective impediment to thedevelopment of a consistently historical and materialistapproach to the study of literary texts.

The latter concern requires one to focus on thedifferences between forms of writing, explaining thesewith reference to the differing, historically specificmaterial and ideological constraints which haveregulated their production. The former, by contrast, isconcerned with the similarities between forms ofwriting. By abstracting particular texts from thehistorically specific circumstances of their production,it is argued that these can be grouped together as‘literature’ precisely to the extent that they share someformal essence, some uniquely distinguishing set offormal properties, which marks them off from other,‘non-literary’ forms of writing.

This formal essence, however it may be defined, doesnot figure merely as the principle of classification whichjustifies the ‘literary’/‘non-literary’ distinction posited.


It is also endowed with explanatory power as part of anidealist theory of causation. It is what makes the textconcerned ‘literary’. Far from being moulded by thecircumstances of its production, the so-called ‘literary’work is said to break free from these so as to partake ofsome universal, unchanging, ever-present formalessence. History may be allowed some explanatorypower in relation to its peripheral features but, withregard to its essentially defining characteristics, theliterary work is viewed as the manifestation of someuniversal, unchanging, always ‘already there’ ideal formwhich, so it is alleged, it merely realizes in a particular,contingent way.

To incorporate the concerns of aesthetics intoMarxist criticism is thus necessarily to import into it aset of problems which can only be conceived in idealistterms. The result has been a mis-marriage as, moreoften than not, the materialist claims and ambitions ofMarxist criticism have been decisively curtailed by theprior acceptance of a question—‘What is literature?’—which necessarily requires an idealist solution.

This is as true of the work of the Althusserians as ofearlier traditions in Marxist criticism with the importantqualification that, in its more recent developments, agenuine attempt has been made to effect the necessarytheoretical revolution which will dislocate Marxistcriticism from the concerns of aesthetics. We shalltherefore, in the remainder of this study, try to followthe trajectory of these developments. In the case ofAlthusser, we shall show how the materialist ambitionwhich underlies his approach to literature is effectivelyundercut by the idealist legacy he derives frombourgeois aesthetics. We shall then summarize the morerecent work of Terry Eagleton and Pierre Machereywhich, reflecting a conscious awareness of theseproblems, seeks to deal with them—not always


successfully—in ways that reflect a more consistenthistorical and materialist approach to the questions ofthe production of literary texts and their politicaleffects. First, however, we must indicate the processesby which this tradition has constituted its object—theconcept of ‘literature’—with which it works and towhich it addresses itself.

Literature’s ‘non-said’

Most of the essential arguments here are contained inPierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production(although they are rehearsed and extended in Eagleton’sCriticism and Ideology) where the legitimate concerns ofMarxist criticism are defined by juxtaposition with thetwo dominant forms of contemporary bourgeois criticism:structuralism and what Macherey calls la critique commeappreciation. As we have already indicated Macherey’sposition on the former, we shall concern ourselves solelywith his objections to the latter. La critique commeappreciation, or interpretative criticism, is, Macherey andEagleton argue, inherently contradictory. Literary criticismsets out to deliver the text from its own silences bycoaxing it into giving up its true, latent or hidden meaning,but can only do so by intruding its own discourse betweenthe reader and the text. The more it seeks to enable thetext to speak with its own voice—and the work of Leavisis a classic example in this respect—the more the voice ofthe critic obtrudes as the text is referred to an ideal orsubstitute text, elaborated by the critic, in relation towhich the ‘original’ text is to be corrected, revised and, ingeneral terms, tailored for consumption.

Such a criticism, then, effects a certain productiveactivity. It so ‘works’ the text, usually by smoothingout the contradictions within it, as to subject it to aparticular, ideologically coded reading. But, at the same


time, it effaces its own productive activity in presentingthat reading as but the ‘truth’ of the text itself.

It is, ultimately, with the empiricist presuppositions ofthis form of criticism that Macherey and Eagleton takeissue. The distinguishing feature of empiricism, ColinMacCabe has argued, consists ‘in its characterization ofthe knowledge to be obtained as defined by the object ofwhich it is knowledge’.8 Empiricism, that is, consists inthe belief that the object of knowledge is supposed tobe somehow ‘given’ as a state of affairs, existing outsideand independently of thought, which constitutes ‘thatwhich is to be known’. The process of knowledge is thusviewed as one through which, by a mixture ofconceptual and empirical procedures, the ‘is to beknown’ comes to be known, becomes the ‘is known’.La critique comme appreciation thus constructs the textas if it had a pre-given hidden or true meaning which itis the business of criticism to ‘come to know’, to mirrorin thought.

In opposition to this, Macherey proposes the conceptof la critique comme savoir, of a criticism whichproduces its own ‘text-for-criticism’ through its ownconceptual procedures and, in so doing, displays itsproductive activity on its sleeve. The process of scienceis not one whereby, through methodological andconceptual artifice, knowledge becomes, in the image ofFaust, progressively more complete in relation to a pre-given reality which it mirrors. It is rather one in which,through the operations of science itself, reality istransformed into an object of knowledge that isproduced, defined and pursued by exclusivelytheoretical means.

With regard to Marxist criticism, it is thus arguedthat its object is not the ‘real object’ constituted by thetext as a pre-given entity. Nor should its aim be toarrive at a knowledge of what is already contained in


the text, a reformulation of its ‘already said’. Its aimshould rather be to produce, as its ‘text-for-criticism’,the concept of the text’s ‘non-said’: the process of thetext’s production. Marxist criticism must, as Eagletonputs it, aim to ‘show the text as it cannot know itself, tomanifest those conditions of its making (inscribed in itsvery letter) about which it is necessarily silent’9 —anobject which is not at all given or suggested by the textitself but which is produced solely by the analyticalconcerns of Marxism.

But what is this ‘it’ of which the text itself is silentand of which a knowledge is to be produced? ForMacherey and Eagleton, the essence of a text’s ‘non-said’ is its relationship to ideology and it is this—whatmay be described as the text’s ‘literary effect’—which isto be made the object of Marxist criticism. Literature, itis argued, is installed halfway between ideology andscience and, through its formal mechanisms, it is said towork on the terms of seeing proposed by ideology so asto parody, invert or reveal them. Literature ‘distances’ideology from within, affording a mode of access to theconditions of social existence which, whilst notproviding a ‘knowledge’ of those conditions—theknowledge, that is, proposed by Marxism—reveals the‘misrecognition’ of social relationships that isembodied in the ideology to which it alludes and fromwhich, as ‘literature’, it detaches itself in the process ofits production.

The central difficulty is that this concern is presented,at one and the same time, as both a historical andmaterialist concern and as a concern of aesthetics.According to the former, the promise is that of a scienceof literature which will reveal those mechanisms,inscribed within the literary text, which bring about thedistancing of ideology that defines the ‘literary effect’and which will explain the operation of such


mechanisms with reference to the material and historicalmatrices of the text’s production. This promise can onlybe—achieved by construing such a ‘literary effect’ asbeing historically defined: that is, as the product of theformal properties of one form of writing that isdistinguishable from others historically in terms of theforces and constraints which bear upon it.

This is a step which Eagleton seems always about totake, without ever quite doing so, and one which, in hismost recent work, Macherey has recommended, albeitcryptically. This hesitation is explicable, ultimately, interms of the legacy of aesthetics. For, side by side withthe above historical tendency within the work of theAlthusserians, there is also a tendency to define the‘literary effect’ aesthetically as the result of someinvariant set of formal properties which establish aneternal, ahistorical distinction between ‘literary’ worksand other forms of writing. According to this strandwithin the argument, the ability of certain texts to workon and subvert the categories of dominant ideologyappears not as the result of a historically particularpractice of writing but as the manifestation of aneternally pre-given and forever unchanging literaryessence. This tendency is most pronounced in the workof Althusser who, reflecting the traditionally closeconnection between aesthetics and epistemology,advances a theory of ‘litera ture’ as part of a generaltheory concerning the nature of the distinctionsbetween science, literature and ideology which, in hisview, stand as eternally separate and unchanging formsof our cognitive appropriation of reality.


6SCIENCE, LITERATURE AND

IDEOLOGY

On practices

ALTHUSSER, we have seen, views a ‘social formation’—anear equivalent of the sociological concept of ‘society’—asconsisting of a number of distinct but interrelatedlevels of ‘practice’—the economic, the political and theideological—each of which is relatively autonomous inrelation to the others. The decisive concept here is that of‘practice’:

By practice in general I shall mean any process oftrans formation of a determinate given raw materialinto a determinate product, a transformation effectedby a determinate human labour, using determinatemeans (of ‘production’).1

The basis for this argument is Althusser’s conceptionof economic activity as ‘the practice of thetransformation of a given nature (raw material) intouseful products by the activity of living men workingthrough the methodically organized employment ofdeterminate means of production within the frameworkof determinate relations of production’. 2 In referringto ideology as a ‘practice’ in this sense, Althusser thusproposes what might be described as a ‘materialism of

the superstructure’. Ideology is construed not as thepale, ethereal reflection of society’s material base but asa prac tical activity which has its own, equally materialmeans and relations of production and its own, equallymaterial products. As a relatively autonomous level ofthe social formation, ideology is thus the product ofquite specific determinants which are not reducible toeconomic relationships. Furthermore, as a materialforce, ideology wields a power all of its own in relationto the other levels of social practice.

So far, so good. The difficulty is that, within thisgeneral framework, Althusser seeks also to establish aseries of distinctions between ‘science’ as such,‘literature’ as such and ‘ideology’ as such. Indifferentiating between these as different forms ofpractice, each of which is said to work on andtransform a given raw material into a determinateproduct characterized by a determinate ‘effect’—the‘knowledge effect’, the ‘aesthetic effect’ and the‘ideological effect’ respectively—Althusser construesthem as eternal and unchanging forms of cognition.The result of approaching the matter in this way is,effectively, a denial of the materialist premises fromwhich Althusser sets out. Particular sciences, particularliterary texts and particular ideological forms turnout to be not the result of materially conditionedpractices so much as the mere manifestations ofinvariant structures.

On ideology

Althusser’s theories concerning ideology are outlinedmainly in two essays—‘Marxism and Humanism’ (1965)and ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1969)although it is the latter of these that has occupied thecentre of the debate in view of the highly specific meaning


it proposes for the concept of ideology.3 For Althusser’sconcern in this essay is not with ‘ideology’ as a synonymfor the concept of society’s intellectual ‘superstructure’comprising the totality of cognitive forms or signifyingpractices. He rather has in mind a concept of ‘ideology’which refers to one particular form of cognition as theproduct of one particular type of signifying practice.

His argument is a difficult one, riddled withsomewhat slippery and elusive concepts. Nevertheless,it can be summarized in six main propositions:

(i) Ideology has a material existence. Disputing thearguments advanced by Marx and Engels in TheGerman Ideology according to which ideology isviewed as the inverted reflection, in thought, of realsocial relationships, Althusser argues that ideology hasits own material existence. The ideas of a humansubject, he maintains, exist only in his/her actions, andthese actions are inserted into practices which are, inturn, ‘governed by the rituals in which these practicesare inscribed, within the material existence of an ideological apparatus’, 4 such as a church, a school or apolitical rally. The celebration of communion mightthus be regarded as quintessentially ideological. Itconsists of a practice of signification which, inscribed inritual form and housed within the ideological apparatusof the church, produces the consciousness of thecommunicant: that is, produces him/her as, precisely, thesubject of a religious consciousness.

More important than the insistence on the objective,material nature of ideology is the inversion of thetraditional Marxist approach to the question of thesocial determination of consciousness which thisinvolves. ‘It is not men’s consciousness that determinestheir being’, Marx wrote, ‘but, on the contrary, theirsocial being that determines their consciousness.’5 Thisimplies that men’s consciousness is to be explained as

SCIENCE, LITERATURE AND IDEOLOGY 121

the product of the social relationships in which they liveand of the particular positions which individuals orgroups of individuals occupy in those relationships.Reversing the order of determination which this implies.

Althusser contends that the consciousness of socialindividuals is organized and produced not by the placethey occupy within the social structure but by theoperations upon them of those material ideologicalforms which result from autonomous ideologicalpractices operating from within autonomousideological apparatuses. Far from being a mere reflex ofa consciousness which is determined by class position,ideology is viewed as an autonomous level ofproduction with its own product: namely, theconsciousness of human subjects. The work thatideology effects is that of transforming individuals intoconcrete social beings who are the subjects ofdeterminate forms of consciousness.

(ii) Ideology functions so as to secure thereproduction of the relations of production. NicosPoulantzas has summarized the main point at issue here.The inner action of capitalist production and exchange,he argues, operates so as to reproduce the conditions ofcapitalist production. The completion of every cycle ofexchange between capital and labour—that is, thetransfer of expropriated surplus-value from the workerto capital—increases the dependency of the worker oncapital at the same time as it increases the social powerexerted by capital over the worker. In this way, thesocial relationship of wage labour which forms thebasis of capitalist production is reproduced by themechanisms at work within that relationship itself.

However, this economic process merely reproducesthe places within the production process—wage-labourer, capitalist—that are to be occupied by theactual agents of production. There therefore remains,


Poulantzas argues, the ‘task of the reproduction anddistribution of the agents themselves to these places’: 6

that is, the allocation of different individuals to differentpositions within the production process and theproduction within those individuals of the capabilitiesand forms of consciousness and self-conscious nessappropriate to the positions they occupy. Put simply, ifcapitalism is to survive as an ongoing system, thenconcrete social individuals must be reconciled both tothe class structure and to the class positions within itwhich, as individuals, they occupy. They must beinduced to ‘live’ their exploitation and oppression insuch a way that they do not experience or represent tothemselves their position as, precisely, one in whichthey are exploited and oppressed.

For Althusser, this work is carried out by the‘ideological state apparatuses’: the education system,the media, the family, the church. What distinguishesthese from the normal apparatuses of state power—thepolice, the army—is that, whereas the latter function bycoercion or the threat of coercion, the ‘ideological stateapparatuses’ ‘function “by ideology”’.7 By thisAlthusser does not mean merely that such apparatusesprovide the location within which the business of theproduction of consciousness is actually organized andcarried out. Nor does he mean simply that their concernis to effect a willing or passive compliance which willreduce the need for active coercion. He moreparticularly means that these apparatuses function by‘ideology’ as such in the sense that the practices theyproduce and transmit conform to an invariant structurewhich induces in those who are subjected to its actionan ‘imaginary’ (and, by implication, ‘false’) relationshipto the conditions of their existence.

(iii) Ideology has no history. This next step isdecisive. Arguing that an understanding of particular


ideologies can only be constructed on the basis of atheory of ‘ideology in general’, Althusser contends that,whilst particular ideologies have a history which is, inpart, determined by historical forces situated outsidethemselves, ‘ideology’ in itself has no history. In otherwords, there is present in all particular, historicallydetermined ideologies an unchanging structurewhich is said to typify ‘ideology’ as such. The primarytask of the theory of ideology is thus that of describingthe structure which regulates not particular ideologiesbut the timeless totality of ‘ideology’ itself, aneternal, forever pre-given structure which overarches allthe variant, historically determined, concrete forms ofideological practice in which it is manifested. For it isalways by means of the operation of this invariantstructure that particular ideological practices fulfiltheir allotted function of organizing individuals into‘subjects’.

(iv) All ideology hails or interpellates concreteindividuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning ofthe category of the subject. The structure of ‘ideology’as such is ‘subject centred’. It contains at its centre theconcept of a Unique or Absolute Subject, capable ofserving as the guarantor of His own meaningfulness—the concept of God in Christian theology, for example,or of Man in bourgeois philosophical humanism. ThisUnique or Absolute Subject ‘recruits’, ‘hails’, or‘interpellates’ concrete individuals into concretesubjects. Although the argument is complex, the gist ofit is that the concept of such an Absolute Subject acts asthe focal point of identification whereby individuals areorganized into subsidiary ‘subjects’: that is, into sociallyformed subjects of consciousness who regardthemselves as having an identity, a role and a part toplay within a process—theological or historical—whichhas a sense, direction and meaning conferred on it by


the Absolute Subject. Ideology might thus be said toconsist of those myths through which individuals arereconciled to their given social positions by falselyrepresenting to them those positions and therelationships between them as if they formed a part ofsome inherently significant, intrinsically coherent planor process.

(v) Ideology is a ‘representation’ of the imaginaryrelationship of individuals to their real conditions ofexistince. It is by virtue of the operation of this subject-centred structure, then, that ideology produces withinindividuals a purely ‘imaginary’ relationship to the realconditions of their social existence. The ‘effect’ ofideology is thus one of ‘misrecognition’. It does notrepresent to men either the real nature of the conditionsof their existence or the real nature of their relationshipto those conditions. On the contrary, ideology proposesan entirely ‘imaginary’ and, by implication, falserepresentation of individuals’ relationship to theconditions of their existence which, in being taken forgranted, constitutes the form in which people ‘live’ (asin Ortega y Gassett’s sense) their relationship to thoseconditions.

The effect of the classical forms of bourgeoishumanism, for example, is such that the bourgeois‘lives’ his relationship to the conditions of socialexistence not on the basis of a ‘knowledge’ of hisobjective class position in the relationships ofproduction. His perception of his place in the socialworld is, rather, mediated through an entirely‘imaginary’ construction of his own role, and that of hisclass, in a historical process which is represented ashaving a logic, a sense and a direction as a series ofdevelopmental sequences through which Man’s essentialnature is progressively realized. The bourgeois thus‘lives’ or represents to himself his relationship to the


conditions of existence not as an exploiting capitalistbut as an instrument of History.

(vi) Ideology is as such an organic part of everysocial totality. Finally, ‘ideology’ as such is‘indispensable in any society’, including that of a fullydeveloped communism, ‘if men are to be formed,transformed and equipped to respond to the demands oftheir conditions of existence’.8 This means that, incommunist society too, ideology will continue tooperate through the category of the ‘subject’ and thatits function will continue to be that of adjusting andreconciling individuals to the positions they occupy inthe process of production.

Ideology, then, is regarded as a practice which workson the raw material of social relationships with theinstru ments of ideological production provided by itssubjectcentred structure. In so doing, it transformsthose relationships into representations of ‘imaginary’relationships to them which, defining the terms inwhich we ‘live’ our relationship to the conditions of oursocial existence, induce in us a ‘misrecognition’ of thoseconditions. Individuals are related, in ideology, to theconditions of their existence through the imaginaryconcept of their own self hood and of the place theyoccupy within ‘the order of things’ as governed overand given sense and coherence by the Absolute Subjectof God, Man, Nation, etc.

We can already see the tension between the historicaland materialist and the idealist concepts at work inAlthusser’s writings. On the one hand, ideology isviewed as a practice, the product of a real, materiallyconstrained process of production. On the other hand,its product is always ‘already there’ as an invariantstructure to which, it would seem, all ideologies mustinevitably conform. This tension is ultimately reducibleto the fact that Althusser makes the term ‘ideology’ do


too much. In one usage it refers to a particular type ofpractice which produces in men and women aparticular type of mental relationship to the conditionsof their existence. According to its other usage,however, it functions as an epistemological concept. Inbeing opposed to science it stands for the simpleopposite of Truth as an eternal and abstract category.

On science

A similar tension is evident in his theory of science. On theone hand, science is viewed as a practice which works onand transforms the raw material provided by prevailingideologies by bringing to bear upon them the instrumentsof theoretical production—that is, the distinctiveconcepts—which characterize that science. This wholeprocess of transformation, furthermore, is set within thecontext of socially determined relations of theoreticalproduction. On the other hand, the structure of the systemof scientific thought which results from this process oftransformation is something that is ‘already there’, a pre-formed essence which is not at all determined by the processof that science’s making.

Althusser thus argues that the structure of ‘science’ assuch is defined by its ‘subjectlessness’ as a form ofdiscourse. He seems to use this concept in severaldifferent ways. First, science is ‘subjectless’ in the sensethat it is only the impersonal ‘one’ that can serve as thesubject of ‘knowledge’. In science, what is ‘known’ isknown impersonally; ‘knowledge’ cannot beattributed to the subject ‘I’. Second, scientificknowledge is subjectless in the sense that it ‘is thehistorical result of a process which has no realsubject or goals’.9 Science has no ultimate end or telos.Nor is there any subject to which it can beattributed. Crucially, it cannot be viewed as a unitaryprocess tending toward a final state in which Man’s


knowledge—Man, here, serving as the subject ofpredication for ‘knowledge’—will be complete.

Third and most distinctively, however, science isdistinguishable from other forms of cognition by thefact that it imposes a ‘subjectless’ system ofrepresentation on the world. Althusser argues that it isin this sense that Marx transformed Hegel’s concept ofhistory. Whereas Hegel conceived of history as anevolutionary process which is governed over, givensense and coherence by the concept of Spirit, Marx issaid to have developed the concept of history as a‘process without a subject’.10 Historical change, that is,depends, for Marx, on the ways in which the realdeterminations of class contradiction work themselvesout. As such, history has no foreseeable end or goal, nointrinsic sense or direction as was traditionallyguaranteed by subject-centred philosophies or religions.Just as Galileo freed the orbit of the planets from thepull of geocentric conceptions, so Marx freed the realdeterminants of historical develop ment—classstruggle—from anthropomorphizing or spiritualizingconceptions.

Finally, as the product of a theoretical practice,science is characterized by its ‘knowledge effect’. This isnot to say that science is true in the sense of conformingto ‘reality’ but that a science opens up a newconceptual space, a new continent of knowledge (inMarx’s case, the continent of history) of which aknowledge is to be produced. Paradoxically, science isdistinguishable from ideology not by what it ‘knows’but by what it opens up as a possible object ofknowledge, by its production of problems incontradistinction to ideology’s effect of reducing them:of limiting inquiry by advancing claims of falseknowledge. Marx thus made the study of historyscientific, not because he claimed to know the ‘truth’ of


history as had earlier philosophies of history, but,precisely the opposite, because he made historyproblematic.11

On art and literature

Although primarily concerned with the relationshipbetween science and ideology, Althusser has sketched outthe implications of his position for the way in which artand literature should be viewed in three essays: ‘The“Piccolo Teatro”: Bertolazzi and Brecht’ (1962), ‘A Letteron Art’ (1966) and ‘Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract(1966).12 It is clear from these that what Althusser has inmind is the development of a theory of ‘literature’ as suchin parallel with his theory of ‘ideology’ as such and of‘science’ as such. Construing ‘literature’ as an unchangingstructure which, preexisting above and beyond the variantconcrete forms in which it is manifested, gives rise to aninvariant ‘aesthetic effect’, Marxist criticism is assignedthe task of producing a knowledge of the processes bywhich this ‘effect’ is produced:

As you can see, in order to answer most of thequestions posed for us by the existence and specificnature of art, we are forced to produce an adequate(scientific) knowledge of the processes whichproduce the ‘aesthetic effect’ of the work of art.13

A knowledge of art and literature, then, is tocomplete the ‘trilogy of the superstructure’ consisting ofpractices which give rise to different types of cognitiveappropriation of reality. We can see here just howmuch of the legacy of aesthetics is unquestioninglytaken on board by Althusser. That ‘art’ exists and has aspecific nature is simply taken for granted. Furthermore,in simply subsuming ‘literature’ under the generalcategory of ‘art’, it is clear that what is being sought is


some ‘effect’ which all art forms might be said to sharein spite of the fact that they differ both in material formand in respect of the relations of production withinwhich, as different artistic practices, they are set. Toput the objection simply: why should there be anycommon features shared by poetry, novel writing,painting, sculpture, music and drama which wouldjustify our regarding them as ‘art’ in this sense? Infailing to ask this question—and to ask this question isthe only means of breaking with the concerns ofaesthetics—Althusser simply assumes that there is somesuch set of common features which must be describedand analysed.

Given this, the specificity of art is said to consist inthe essentially mid-way, equivocal position it occupiesbetween science and ideology. ‘Art’ as such hoversbetween ‘science’ as such and ‘ideology’ as such. Whilstit does not form ‘knowledge’ in the strict sense,art—‘authentic art’, that is, ‘not works of an average ormediocre level’14—is said to occupy a specialrelationship to science in that it enables us to ‘see’,‘perceive’ or ‘feel’ something that alludes to reality. That‘something’ is ‘the ideology from which it is born,in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art,and to which it alludes’.15

Althusser, then, ‘does not rank art among theideologies’.16 To the contrary, ‘real art’ is a practicewhich, using instruments of production of its own,works on and transforms the raw material provided byideology to produce, not the ‘knowledge effect’ ofscience but the ‘aesthetic effect’ of ‘making visible’(donner a voir), ‘by establishing a distance from it, thereality of the existing ideology’,17 transfixing it so thatwe might see its operations at work. Art and literaturedo not deal with a sphere of reality peculiar tothemselves. The object on which they work and which


they transform is ‘the spontaneous “lived experience” ofideology, in its peculiar relationship to the real’.18 Butthis, Althusser argues, is also an object of science—bywhich, in this context, he means (but does not say) theMarxist science of ideology:

The real difference between art and science lies in thespecific form in which they give us the same object inquite different ways: art in the form of ‘seeing’ and‘perceiving’ or ‘feeling’, science in the form ofknowledge (in the strict sense, by concepts).19

Literature, then, ‘gives us’ ideology in a way that isdifferent from the knowledge of its objective classfunction as proposed by Marxism. It enables us, in avocabulary which recalls that of Shklovsky, to ‘see’,‘perceive’ or ‘feel’ it. In Shklovsky’s terms, it bestows aperceptibility on ideology, returning it from‘recognition’ to ‘seeing’ by ‘foreground-ing’ itsoperations.

How does it do this? In part, by working on andturning out habituated ideological forms including, inthis sense, previous literary or dramatic forms. In thissense, Althusser’s position is virtually indistinguishablefrom that of the Formalists. In a more specific sense,however, art and litera ture are said to attain their‘aesthetic effect’ by virtue of their ability to ‘decentre’the concept of the Absolute Subject which, as we haveseen, constitutes the focal point of identification withinany ideology. In so doing, they disrupt the ‘imaginary’forms through which individuals’ relationship to theconditions of their social existence is representedto them.

It is in this sense that Althusser refers to Brecht’sMother Courage as a ‘decentred totality’. For what iteffects, he argues, is a ‘decentring’ of bourgeois


humanist ideology by displacing the Subject of Manwhich is at its centre with an interrogation of the realconditions of existence. The true centre of MotherCourage, he argues, is not its apparent centre—MotherCourage herself as a ‘stand-in’ for the Absolute Subjectof Man and His Suffering—but the real conditions ofwar which are responsible for the loss of her children.Through the Brechtian devices of ‘alienation’, theaudience is inhibited from empathizing with MotherCourage’s plight and, instead, is directed toward anexamination of the conditions of war responsible forthat plight. Or, more accurately, it is Mother Courage’sbehaviour itself that the audience is invited to scrutinize.In distancing us from Mother Courage’s stoicalacceptance of her own suffering, Brecht enables us to‘see’, ‘perceive’ or ‘feel’ the ideological forms ofbourgeois humanism which lie behind that stoicism andwhich mediate and condition Mother Courage’sresponse to her trials. Through a literarytransformation enacted upon them, the ideologicalforms of bourgeois humanism are thus ruptured fromwithin. They are, in Formalist parlance, ‘foregrounded’in the character of Mother Courage herself.

A parallel example is provided by Pierre Macherey’sanalysis of Jules Verne’s works. These, Machereyargues, are characterized by a contradiction betweenwhat he calls the level of figuration and that ofrepresentation, between the ‘what is said’ or, if youlike, the story-line, and the way in which the story isformally manipulated by the workings of the text—adistinction which recalls that proposed by Shklovskybetween the concepts of fabula and sjuzet. With regardto the former of these levels, Macherey argues that thestory-lines of Verne’s works ‘reflect’ the ideology of thecolonizing French bourgeoisie during the ThirdRepublic. Verne’s works, that is, invariably concern the


domination of Nature by Man as a linear project that isnearing completion. This project is expressed in thefigure of the ‘straight line’ of the adventures of hisheroes who surmount the obstacles, human andnatural, placed in the path of their will to penetrate toand dominate one of nature’s extremities (the centre ofthe earth, the moon, the bottom of the sea). This is howthe ideological theme, the project of a colonizingbourgeoisie, ‘tells itself’. And we can see how, throughthe workings of such an ideology, the bourgeoisie ‘lives’its relationship to colonialism. It does so not on thebasis of a knowledge of its objective economic andpolitical causes and effects but through an entirelyimaginary form in which, ‘interpellated’, ‘called’ or‘hailed’ by the Absolute Subject of Man, the individualbourgeois represents to himself his position in theprocess of colonization as part of an inherentlymeaningful and cumulative historical process.

Macherey’s point is that, as embodied in the textureof Verne’s works, this ideological theme is not ‘told’ inthis way but is rather ‘told’ in a way that limits it andreveals it as ideology. He thus points out that theproject of exploration in Verne’s works always turnsout to be a voyage of rediscovery as his heroes,believing themselves to be at the forefront of Man’sconquest of Nature, always find that they are followingthe path of one who has gone before them and hasalready arrived at the destination they believed theywould be the first to reach: the role of Arne Saknussemin Journey to the Centre of the Earth, for example.Nature’s extremities, in other words, prove always tobe already occupied, just as did the countries whichwere on the receiving end of France’s colonizingmission. In thus ‘working’ the ideology of thecolonizing bourgeoisie so as to catch it, as it were, withits pants down; in ‘decentring’ the concept of Man


which constitutes its focal point of identification,Verne’s works could be said to have called intoquestion the illusions through which the bourgeoisiefalsely represented to itself its colonizing ventures aspart of a historic mission undertaken on the part ofhumanity. For they constantly, if obliquely, drawattention to that part of humanity that was excludedfrom the equation: the ‘natives’.

Macherey does not, of course, suggest that thesignificance of Verne’s works is limited to theirrelationship to late nineteenth-century French colonialideology. Indeed, he treats the latter as but a particularmanifestation of a more general, West Europeanideological formation—best exemplified by theRobinson Crusoe legend—which, he argues, maskedthe real nature of the history of colonialism. Thathistory was falsely represented in the form of a myth ofgenesis, as a ‘new history’ created on virgin territorythrough the triumphant application of science andindustry. Verne does not, Macherey argues, oppose thismyth of origin by recording the real history ofcolonization. Nor does his work simply ‘reflect’ thecontradictions which are latently inscribed within theideology. For, in Macherey’s definition, ideologies areinternally coherent, non-contradictory wholes. They donot contain any contradictions which can be simply‘reflected’ in other practices. They can only be put intocontradiction by practices which work on them fromwithout. This, Macherey contends, is what Verne’sworks do by showing that the origin of the Crusoemyth is a false origin, a beginning which alwayspresupposes the real history it suppresses.

In thus acting as an agent-provocateur in the midstof ideology, silently nudging it into a betrayal of itself,the ‘effect’ of literature might be construed as inherentlycritical. In temporarily prising apart the chains of


ideology, it creates a kind of open, disengaged mentalspace within which a new attitude to reality might beproduced. Literature does not produce a revolutionaryconsciousness. Nor does it replace ideology withscientific knowledge. But it does induce a temporarysuspension of ideology, a temporary release from itsoperations, which may give rise to a new form ofattentiveness to and thoughtfulness about reality.

Of course, it is not pretended that all works ofliterature distance ideology with the same degree ofexplicitness as do Brecht’s. Nor is it argued that, in theexchange between ‘literature’ and ‘ideology’ as enactedwithin the literary text, it is always the former that hasthe last word. To the contrary, it is made clear inMacherey’s work that, having been ‘opened up’ by theoperations of the literary text, ideology reasserts itselfwithin the text itself, sealing the holes which have beenmade within it by effecting its own recuperation of theliterary transformations which distance it. Nevertheless,although fundamentally ambivalent, caught in a two-way movement from ideology and back to it again,literature, to a greater or lesser degree, ‘rocks’ thesolidity of ideology, revealing its fault-lines or fissures.

Indeed, this critical effect could be viewed as anecessary function which is mapped out for literaturewithin Althusser’s ‘trilogy of the superstructure’. For itis viewed not merely as a form of cognition that is mid-way between science and ideology but also as a kind ofhalf-way staging house on the road which leads theindividual from the ‘misrecognition’ of ideology inwhich s/he is always spontaneously trapped to the‘knowledge’ of science.20


136

7THE LEGACY OF

AESTHETICS

The lessons of Formalism

WE should, at this point, stress that Althusser is notprimarily a literary critic. He has dealt with matters ofliterary theory more or less en passant purely in order tosketch out the implications of his more general theoreticalposition for this area of debate within Marxism.Nevertheless, his comments on literature have assumed amore than ordinary importance. Although they do notamount to a developed and sustained theoretical positionin themselves, they do provide the general theoreticalbackground against which the more detailed work ofPierre Macherey and Terry Eagleton must be viewed.

As we move to criticize Althusser, we should alsostress that our concern is not to bite the hand that hasbeen the source of so much theoretical nourishment inrecent years. On the positive side, the outstandingcontribution of Althusser’s work, especially whenviewed against the concerns of reflection theory, is thatit has enabled us to ‘think’ the literary text as a practiceof transformation, as a working upon and transformingof other forms of representation which gives rise todistinctive ‘effects’ whose social impact can be subjectedto a political calculation. The difficulty is that, havingtheorized ‘science’ and ‘ideology’ epistemologically as

universal and invariant forms of cognition,Althusser was forced to theorize ‘literature’ aestheticallyas an equally universal and invariant form of ourmental appropriation of reality. The result is that,although literature is viewed as a process of theproductive transformation of other forms of cognition,the process of its production can never in fact beconceptualized. Equally, its political effects can becalculated only in an abstract, transhistorical fashion.

We might discover the reasons for this by consideringfurther the similarities between Althusser’s position andthat of the Formalists. For both theorize the specificnature of literature as a practice of transformationenacted on forms of cognition which, in one way oranother, are held to condition our habitual perceptionsof the social world. Literary works, in both cases, areheld to effect a ‘work’ on such habituated forms ofcognition which, so to speak, turns them inside-out,revealing the stitch-work by which they are heldtogether.

In both cases, then, it is a relationship oftransformation that is placed at the centre of study.Furthermore, this relationship is understood to beinscribed within the structure of the literary text itselfand to be analysable in the interplay between thedifferent levels of discourse which comprise it. We havethus seen that, for the Formalists, two orders areconstantly visible in the literary work: the establishedliterary canon and the artistic novelty as a deviationfrom that canon. In a similar way, according to theAlthusserian formulation and as stressed by Eagleton atgreat length, the ideology on which the text works ispresent in the text as one level within it, constantlypressing against and resisting the literary devices whichlimit it.


According to both the Formalists and theAlthusserians, then, the literary text affords a triplestructure of vision. First, it offers a vision of thehabituated forms on which it works, casting them in anew light by virtue of the transformation to which itsubjects them. Second, and in so doing, the literary textprises ‘reality’ away from the terms of reference whichnormally condition our access to the social world andthus produces a perception of new or unexpectedaspects of that world. Finally, the literary text offers avision of its own formal operations, revealing itself asthe product of a transformation in the disjunction ortension between the two levels—the ‘literary’ and the‘ideological’—which account for its real complexity.

Where the two approaches most obviously differ iswith respect to the nature of the ‘raw materials’ whichliterature is said to work on and transform. For theFormalists, the prevailing literary canons or, in the caseof poetry, the conventionalized relationship betweensignifier and signified within the structure of la langueare the prime candidates in this respect. Neither thesenor the effect produced by the literary transformationsto which they are subjected are viewed in terms of theirpolitical consequences within the framework of ageneral theory of ideology. For Althusser, by contrast,the forms which literature works on and subverts areheld to be conditioned by the architechtonic structureof ‘ideology’ and, therefore, to have an objectivepolitical role within the social process. This distinctionis most clearly visible in Eagleton’s Criticism andIdeology where it is argued—in terms that reflect asymbiosis of Formalist and Althusserian categories—that literature works on and transforms the ‘signifier’of ideology and the ‘signified’ of history. Literaturedoes not merely dissolve the bond between form andmeaning which attaches a particular signifier to a

THE LEGACY OF AESTHETICS 139

particular signified in an abstract and neutral sense. Itdissolves that particular bond of form and meaningwhich is placed on history by ideology. And it does soby means of the formal devices through which it‘foregrounds’ the operations of that ideology.

Beneath these similarities, however, there is onefurther crucial difference. The Formalists did not merelytheorize the relationships of transformation inscribedwithin the literary text. They also theorized the conceptof ‘literary function’. And they did not confuse the two.The question as to whether a given text fulfilled thefunction of defamiliarization required by the concept ofliterariness depended not solely on its formal propertiesbut on the relationships which those propertiesestablished for that text within a given cultural field. Inspeaking of ‘literature’ in this way, the Formalists hadin mind not a thing with an essence—a fixed andcongealed set of texts whose literary function isforever ordained by their formal properties—but arelationship and a function which may be fulfilled orrealized in different ways by different texts according tothe changing historical relationships between textswhich result from the organization of different ‘literarysystems’.

This is, admittedly, still an abstract formulation. Forit presents the function of literariness as being foreverpre-given and suggests that there must always andnecessarily be certain forms of writing which arecapable of fulfilling this function in every society. Inthus representing literariness as an eternal, abstract,unchanging function capable of being contingentlyrealized in different ways, the Formalists remainedprisoners of aesthetics. Nevertheless, their position wasmore historical than Althusser’s for it enabled them torefrain from drawing any permanent, irrevocable linebetween one set of written texts that might be regarded


as ‘literary’ and other forms of writing. The line theydrew was one between two different functions—theliterary function of defamiliarization and the non-literary function of recognition. The same text may thuspossibly shift from one side of this line to the otheraccording to both the point from which it is viewedwithin the history of writing and the different systems ofintertextual relationships into which it enters during itshistory as a received text.

This crucial ability to ‘think’ the variability of thetext’s function and effect is entirely absent fromAlthusser’s construction of ‘literature’ and ‘ideology’ asinvariant structures which eternally face one anotheracross an equally eternal epistemological gap. Bytheorizing the specificity of ‘literature’ in these terms,Althusser’s materialism is truncated at the point of bothhis analysis of the production of literature and hiscalculation of its political effects.

A new idealism

It has been pointed out that the analytical topography ofMarxism demands that, in some sense, ‘superstructural’forms should be explained with reference to the social andmaterial constraints which bear on their production.Althusser’s concept of ‘practice’ theoretically allows one todo this in a way that is not liable to the charge ofreductionism. Whilst admitting the determining role of theeconomy, it does so without denying the role ofautonomous determinants unique to the ideological level ofsocial practice. Further, it construes ‘practice’ as an activeprocess of transformation, resulting in the production ofcultural forms that are entirely new and unexampled. Thispromise, however, is denied by the idealist legacy ofaesthetic and epistemological categories. Far from beinggenuinely the product of particular, materially conditionedpractices, particular sciences, particular ideologies and


particular works of literature inevitably conform toinvariant structures that are eternally pre-given to them.

As a result, ‘practice’ turns out to be a redundantcategory. Or, more accurately, it is conceived as ateleological process of the adjustment of the real to theideal. It is a ghostly process in the sense that its productis always ‘already there’ as a formal essence whichgoverns the constitutive features of any science, anyideology or any work of literature quite irrespective ofthe historically concrete processes of their making. Inthe last analysis, it is not real, concrete individuals whoare the subjects of practice, but abstract structures. Thework of transformation that is effected in theinterchange between a particular literary text and aparticular ideology is, in effect, the work of oneabstract structure on another. Behind every particularprocess of literary transformation, the disembodiedgladiators of ‘literature’ and ‘ideology’ are locked in aneternal combat and, so far as Althusser is concerned, itis here that the real struggles take place.

We must, then, jettison the epistemological ballast ofAlthusser’s theory. For if it is to be argued that there isan invariant structure which defines ‘literature’ as aform of cognition which is distinguishableepistemologically from science and ideology asunchanging forms of our mental appropriation ofreality, then Marxism is confronted with what must,from a materialist point of view, be a paradox: namely,that this invariant structure is the product of practicesof writing which differ from one another quitemarkedly with reference to the concrete historical andmaterial determinants which underlie their production.How can such a unanimity of ‘effect’ result from such aplurality of ‘causes’? Clearly, one can answer such aquestion only by resurrecting idealist categories: bysuggesting that the structure which is manifested in


such texts is eternally present as an ideal forcemoulding the practices through which it eventuallyrealizes itself in variant concrete forms.

The only alternative is to argue that, if certain formsof writing do indeed display a tendency to rupture thecategories of certain ideological forms from within, thenthis is the result of a conduct of the practice of writingthat is distinguished from others not aesthetically buthistorically. This implies that other forms of writing—including major as well as minor forms—may displaydifferent forms of relationship to the dominantideologies with which, historically, they are coeval.What is needed is not a theory of literature as such buta historically concrete analysis of the differentrelationships which may exist between different formsof fictional writing and the ideologies to whichthey allude.

This may not be so neat as an all-encompassingaesthetic. But it does have the merit of enabling one tocome to terms with the full variety of cultural practicewithout constraining one’s inquiries within thestraitjacket of unworkable aesthetic andepistemological categories. If we interpret the conceptof ‘literature’ extensively to refer to all forms ofwriting, and if we go beyond the parameters of thereceived tradition—comprised, by and large, of thebelles lettres of the bourgeois epoch—to include notonly medieval literature but the literature of ancientChina and that of feudal Japan, not to mention the vastrange of contemporary writing which customarily goesunder the heading of either ‘mass’ or ‘popular’ culture,we confront a range and variability of writing whichcannot be compressed within a single formula nomatter how liberally it is interpreted. Althusser’s mistakeis that, although in fact concerned with bourgeois belleslettres, he misleadingly equates them with ‘literature’ as


such. By thus falsely abstracting bourgeois belles lettresfrom the historical matrices of their production, he‘misrecognizes’ their specific nature by construing andexplaining it in aesthetic instead of historical terms.

Equally important, the production of that ideologicalor cultural space within which certain texts may takeon a ‘literary’ function or effect (however this is defined)is itself something that needs to be explained. Thisinvolves a consideration of the determinations whichwork upon the text, once it has been produced, in orderso to establish its relationships to other texts that it is,by the practices which work on it, produced forconsumption as, precisely, ‘literature’.

This is not a problem for Althusser. To ‘answer thequestion of the relationship between art andknowledge’, Althusser writes, ‘we must produce aknowledge of art.’1 But this is to assume that there is asomething called ‘art’ of which a knowledge is to beproduced. As Macherey has subsequently argued, therelated question—‘What is literature?’—is a falsequestion:

Why? Because it is a question which already containsan answer. It implies that literature is something,that litera ture exists as a thing, as an eternal andunchangeable thing with an essence. 2

Althusser, explaining the process of literaryproduction in idealist terms, compounds this error bycocooning the literary text, once produced, from thefurther inruptions of history. Literature’s effect—aesthetic or political—would seem to be a given, theinvariant and necessary product of its purely formalproperties. If the effect of ideology is, by definition,that of a ‘misrecognition’ of social relationships and ifthe ‘knowledge effect’ of science—of Marxist


science—is, by definition, revolutionary in the sense thatit undercuts dominant ideological representations, thenliterature would seem to be necessarily ‘critical’,‘radical’ or ‘progressive’ in its effect by virtue of itscapacity to rupture ideological forms from within. Ifscience is always on the side of the angels whilstideology speaks always for the devil, literature,straddled mid-way between the two, symbolizes thehuman predicament: capable of denouncing the deviland his works but, at the same time, denied the lightof Truth.

But, as Marx reminds us often enough, it is onlyconsumption which completes the process ofproduction. Whilst the literary text may, by virtue of itsintrinsic properties, deter mine to a certain extent theway in which it is ‘consumed’ or read, it does not do soentirely. For the process of the consumption of literarytexts is necessarily that of their continuous re-production; that is, of their being produced as differentobjects for consumption. This is not merely to say thatthe history of criticism is one of ‘creative treason’whereby the same texts are successively plundered fordifferent meanings. The way in which the literary text isappropriated is determined not only by the operationsof criticism upon it but also, and more radically, by thewhole material, institutional, political and ideologicalcontext within which those operations are set.

The Formalists argued, as we have seen, that the valueand function of a text cannot be read off from thecircumstances of its origin but depend on its position inthe different systems of relationships between texts intowhich it is inscribed during different moments of itshistorical existence. Similarly, the political effects of atext cannot be read off from its relationship to theideology which, during the process of its production,


that text works upon and transforms. As FrancisMulhern has argued:

What a text ‘shows’ or can be made to show of itsmeans of production is of incontestable importance.But it cannot be decisive, either theoretically or inthe ‘politics’ of criticism. Firstly, because, if a text isnot an ‘event’ but a ‘function’ transposable in timeand space, its conditions of production can have nospecial priority in analysis over its subsequent andvariable conditions of existence and activity.Secondly, because what the entire history ofdiscourse on literature shows is how much, in howmany different circumstances, a text can be made tosignify; what has to be confronted in bourgeoiscriticism is not only the ideological import of itspractices but the fact of its results: an infinite varietyof interpretations and judgements, all groundedmore or less unimpeachably in ‘the words onthe page’.3

Two things follow from this. First, the politicaleffects of literary texts must be calculated not abstractlybut in relation to the historically concrete and varyingmodes in which they are appropriated. There can be nocomplete, final, once-and-for-all assessment of thepolitical value of literary works. The attempt to makean eternal political value out of realism, as undertakenby Lukács, or to make out that the disruptive forms ofcontemporary avant-garde literary practice areintrinsically radical in their effect: these and other suchahistorical systems of political evaluation are mistakenin principle. In history, nothing is intrinsically ‘literary’,intrinsically ‘progressive’ or, indeed, intrinsicallyanything. If production is completed only withconsumption, then, so far as literary texts areconcerned, their production is never completed. They


are endlessly re-produced, endlessly remade withdifferent political consequences and effects and it isthis, the position of the text within the full materialsocial process that must be made the object of inquiry.

It might, for example, be argued that Shakespeare’sMacbeth critically explores the torsions and limits ofnascent bourgeois individualism. But this tells usnothing about the role and function of Shakespeare’swork in our own society. Such matters can only beraised by examining the concrete mediating forceswhich currently bear on Shakespeare’s work. Thiswould require that we examine the way in whichShakespeare’s texts are used within schools, the way inwhich they are appropriated by the ‘culture industry’ atlarge, their place within the theatre and the social roleand function of the theatre itself. Furthermore, such ananalysis could not be a neutral, purely scientificundertaking. One can calculate the political effects ofa literary text only from the viewpoint of a given statedpolitical position. In today’s political arena, forexample, the strategic dictates of Eurocommunism giverise to one set of literary-political calculations whereasthose of an intransigent proletarianism give rise toanother. There is and can be no neutral, scientificallyvalidated ground which can assert the correctness ofone of these positions over and against the other.4

Second, it follows that the activity of criticism is itselfa pre-eminently political exercise. For the texts onwhich Marxist criticism works are, in a sense, already‘occupied’. They are already filled with interpretations.The way in which they are appropriated is alreadydetermined by the uses to which they are put in thesocial process. Given this, the quest for an objective‘science’ of the literary text is illusory. The literary texthas no single or uniquely privileged meaning, no singleor uniquely privileged effect that can be abstracted from


the ways in which criticism itself works upon andmediates the reception of that text. In this sense,literature is not something to be studied; it is an area tobe occupied. The question is not what literature’spolitical effects are but what they might be made to be—not in a forever and once-and-for-all sense but in adynamic and changing way—by the operations ofMarxist criticism. Perhaps the most important chargethat can be laid against Althusser’s work is that heexiles politics from his own criticism and, ultimately,from literature itself.

Criticism and politics

Althusser’s concept of ‘literature’ is perhaps mostvulnerable precisely because its stability depends on itsrelationship to the concepts of ‘science’ and ‘ideology’. Ifanything were to call into doubt either of these definitions,then the concept of ‘literature’ would be thrown into acutecrisis. Yet this is precisely what has happened. Althusser’sassertions concerning the relationship between ideologyand science have been so damagingly criticized that it isnow clear that they are untenable.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to rehearse this debatein its entirety as Jacques Rancière’s objections will takeus to the heart of the matter.5 Althusser’s mistake,Rancière argues, was to generalize the distinctionbetween Marxist science and those systems of ideaswhich it regards as ideological into an oppositionbetween science and ideology in general. Regardingideology as the Other of science, facing and sustainingits opposite in a mirror definition of Truth andFalsehood, Althusser further construed this oppositionas an inherently class opposition. Rather thanconceiving of particular ideologies, particular works ofliterature and particular sciences which, according to


their nature and the uses to which they are put, may beeither progressive or regressive in their politicalimplications, each being mapped out as an area of classstruggle, Althusser’s position implied that class struggletakes place between the eternal verities of science, theeternal falsehoods of ideology and the eternalequivocations of literature.

Class struggle, that is, is displaced from the sphere ofeach of these practices and comes to occupy theepistemological spaces between them. Its lines aredetermined, not by the positions which men andwomen themselves actually take up and develop withineach of these spheres, but by what we have alreadycalled the abstract and disembodied gladiators of‘science’, ‘literature’ and ‘ideology’. Ultimately,Althusser’s work echoes not to the sound of classstruggle but to the reverberating noise of emptyepistemological categories clashing with one another.

Althusser has conceded the central thrust of thiscriticism. 6 Rather than regarding science and ideologyas the equivalent of the fixed poles truth and falsehood,his more recent position is that a conception exists andcan be identified as ideological only in the respect thatit departs from the ‘knowledge’ proposed by aparticular science. Adopting Spinoza’s maxim of verumindex sui et falsi—a science is the measure both of itsown truth value and of what is false in relation to it—Althusser thus represents ideology as consisting of thoseideas which any science regards as false in relation to itsown claims to knowledge.

The difficulty is that, although Althusser wouldclearly like this argument to be applied with aprivileged force to Marxism, logic requires that it beapplied with equal force to any science or, indeed, anysystem of thought which claims to be a science. Giventhis, any system of ideas, including the so-called


‘sciences’, may appear as ideological or non-ideologicalaccording to the vantage point from which it is viewed.If the term ‘ideology’ is to imply, in some sense, ‘thatwhich is not true’ then it can only be consistently andmeaningfully used in relation to some stated criteria ofveracity. However, as these vary from one theoreticalcontext to another—the standards which obtain inMarxism, for example, are not the same as those whichobtain in non-Marxist sociology—it follows that therecan be no such ‘thing’ as ideology. There are and can beno ideas, no signifying practices which are inherentlyideological in the sense that they are distortions of the‘truth’ or ‘misrecognitions’ of ‘reality’. There can onlybe a series of relative propositions to the effect thatproposition ‘x’ appears to be ideological—that is, nottrue-when viewed from theoretical position ‘y’.

Yet the very meaning of the concept of ‘literature’which Althusser had earlier proposed depended entirelyon its position as a kind of epistemological mediatorbetween science and ideology. Its distinctive ‘aestheticeffect’ is specifically installed mid-way between the‘knowledge effect’ of science and the effect of‘misrecognition’ of ideology. The effect of calling thesecategories into question is thus necessarily to questionthe validity of the concept of ‘literature’ if this is takento refer to a distinct form of cognition. Lacking anyanchorage in a fixed epistemological distinctionbetween science and ideology, it simply collapses asa category.

More important, perhaps, these difficulties bring intofocus the sheer incoherence of maintaining that‘literature’ was installed mid-way between ‘science’ and‘ideology’ in the first place. For, although this soundsvery fine, it is difficult to see what its meaning mightbe. There are three possibilities. The first is thatliterature is installed mid-way between science in


general and ideology in general. But this will not dobecause, as we have seen, there are no such things. Thedistinction between science and ideology can only bedrawn within a particular science as a line dividingthose statements which conform to the canons ofscientificity proposed by that science and those whichdo not.

A second possibility is that literature should beviewed as being installed mid-way between particularsciences and particular ideologies. Whilst this mayenable some critical work to be undertaken in relationto some forms of writing—early Renaissance literature,for example, was clearly influenced by theconfrontation between the developing natural sciencesand the remnants of medieval ideology—there areequally vast tracts of literature in relation to which thisformulation is singularly irrelevant. How could it haveany bearing on the cultural practice of such ‘pre-scientific universes’ as the Homeric age?

Finally, literature could be viewed as being situatedmid-way between the ‘knowledge’ of ideology producedby Marxism and that ideology itself. This is theformulation Althusser suggests when he argues thatwhereas science ‘gives us’ ideology in the form of aknowledge of its objective social function, literature‘gives us’ that same ideology in the form of ‘seeing’,‘perceiving’ or ‘feeling’. All well and good.

I have no objections to such a formulation providedthat its real nature is fully understood. For, in speakingof ‘literature’ in this way, we are in no sense speakingof a fixed body of texts which, naturally andspontaneously, exists in some objective, sociallyavailable space between science and ideology as equallynatural and pre-given forms of cognition. It is ratherMarxist criticism itself which does the placing.


Brecht’s work, for example, is not in any sense‘placed’ mid-way between Marxism and ideology. Nor,to take some of Eagleton’s more particularformulations, can the work of Dickens or George Eliotbe viewed as being ‘placed’ midway between thedominant ideological forms of midnineteenth centuryEngland and a Marxist theory of the social function ofthose forms. But those texts may be so placed, byMarxist criticism, as a means for the development of itsown understanding and critique of such ideologicalforms and their fault lines. But, in this case, what wehave to deal with is a political intervention(masquerading as science) which so constitutes literarytexts as objects of study as to transform them into thepretexts, the pedagogical devices, whereby the Marxistreads the chinks in the armour of dominant ideologies.

The formulation that literary texts work on andtransform dominant ideological forms so as to ‘reveal’or ‘distance’ them, then, is impossible to sustain. It israther Marxist criticism which, through an active andcritical intervention, so ‘works’ upon the textsconcerned as to make them ‘reveal’ or ‘distance’ thedominant ideological forms to which they are made to‘allude’. The signification of ideology that they are thussaid to have is not somehow ‘natural’ to them; it is nota pre-given signification which criticism passivelymirrors but is a signification they are made to have bythe operations of Marxist criticism upon them.

But this is as it should be. All forms of criticism areinescapably and necessarily active and political formsof discourse. They so work upon literary texts as tomodify them. Their activities belong to those realdeterminants which influence and condition the life ofliterary texts within the real social process. This isespecially true for Marxist criticism. Indeed, its raisond’être, it might be argued, is that it should work upon


literary texts, wrenching them from the forms in whichthey are customarily perceived or interpreted, so as tomobilize them politically in stated directions. If so, itwill perform this task all the better for doing soconsciously and abandoning the masks of ‘science’ and‘aesthetics’ which serve but to disguise its true politicalconcerns and inhibit their development.


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8WORK IN PROGRESS

The post-Althusserians

WHERE does all this leave us? Where is Marxist criticismgoing? Where should it be going? There can be no singleanswer to these questions. The most that can be offered,at this stage, is a sketch of work currently in progress.Before embarking upon this, however, it may be helpful ifwe pause to review the central thrust of the argumentso far.

Our underlying concern has been to produce atheoretical space for Marxist criticism which will beconsistent with its historical and materialist premisesand with its political ambitions. We have argued that,in order to clear such a space, it is necessary to beatback the undergrowth of bourgeois aesthetic theorywith which, for a variety of historical reasons, Marxistcriticism has become entangled. We have sought, byconsidering Althusser’s work, to show why this is so.Further, by reviewing the work of the RussianFormalists, we have sought to identify some of theconcepts and analytical tools which seem to suggest themeans whereby a genuinely historical and materialiststudy of literary texts might be inaugurated.

It is worth singling out two or three points forparticular mention. First, on the question of the

production of literary texts, we have tried to show howthe idealist categories which Althusser derives frombourgeois aesthetics and epistemology inhibit therealization of his materialist ambitions. His approach toliterary texts is quite decidedly ‘formalist’ in the moregeneral and pejorative sense of that word. It is,moreover, difficult to see any respects in which hisposition is an advance on the particular variant of‘formalism’ proposed by the Russian Formalists. Theformulation that literature ‘gives us’ ideology in theform of ‘seeing’ in contradistinction to the conceptualknowledge of ideology provided by Marxist scienceremains, in many respects, identical with Shklovsky’sproposition that literature ‘creates a “vision” of theobject instead of serving as a means for knowing it’.1 Allthat has changed is the nature of the object—the rawmaterial—which literary works are said to work uponand transform. For the Formalists, this raw material isprovided by the structures of ordinary language and bythe atrophied forms of previous literary traditions. ForAlthusser, by contrast, literary texts enact a process oftransformation on those habituated cultural formswhich, in a very special sense of the word, play an‘ideological’ role within the social formation.

Given this difference, the programme mapped out forliterary criticism is the same: namely, that its primarytask should be to analyse the formal means wherebyliterary texts produce that transformation, whichuniquely distinguishes them as ‘literary’, of the rawmaterials on which they work. At a technical level, theresearches of the Formalists into these questions arestill considerably in advance of those proposed not onlyby Althusser but also of those evidenced in the moredetailed works of Pierre Macherey and Terry Eagleton.At this level, the work of the Althusserians remainsparasitic upon that of the Formalists.


There are differences between the two positions. Butthese result more from Althusser’s work on the conceptof ‘ideology’ than from his particular formulationsconcern ing ‘literature’. Thus if, for Shklovsky, thework effected by the literary text promotes a renewedattentiveness to reality which is valued as an aestheticend in itself, it is the political effect of the literary text’sdisruption of ideological categories that is valued byAlthusser.

But herein lies the central weakness of Althusser’stheory. For his theory of literature exists less in its ownright than as one that is necessitated by his theory ofideology. As we have seen, he construes ideology as auniversal and invariant structure which operates so asto produce in social agents forms of consciousnesswhich will reconcile those agents to existing socialrelationships. Any possibility of social change demandsthat there be an agency—in this case, literature—which,acting in the midst of ideology, so works on it as todiminish its grip on our consciousness. Literature thusacts not merely as a mediator between ideology andscience; it serves as a necessary agency of mediationbetween the two if any account is to be offered of theprocesses whereby the subject of an ideologicallyproduced consciousness is to become a subject of ascientific or revolutionary consciousness.

At root, these difficulties stem from the fact thatAlthusser uses the term ideology to refer simultaneously,on the one hand to a particular level of social practiceconcerned, as we have seen, with the production ofconsciousness, and, on the other to a particular form ofcognition which serves as the opposite of science. Giventhat, in this latter sense, Althusser theorizes the conceptof ideology as an unchanging form of cognition withinthe framework of a general theory of knowledge, therewas no alternative but to view literature in the same

WORK IN PROGRESS 157

terms with, as we have seen, inescapably idealistimplications.

Our first positive proposal, then, is that if we are toview literature as consisting of a set of formaloperations whereby ideology is distanced and revealed,we must have in mind ‘literature’ as a historical and notan aesthetic category. Further, in any such formulation,we must interpret the concept of ideology politicallyand not epistemologically. We must, that is, use it torefer to particular forms of signification which play aparticular political role in particular historical societiesand not to some universal, invariant form of cognitionto which there is attributed an invariant political effect.To speak of ‘literature’ in this way—and we haveBakhtin’s work in mind—is to speak of a particularpractice of writing which is moulded by a particular setof material, economic, political and ideologicalrelationships. Only by proceeding in this way will it bepossible to develop a theory of ‘literature’, as a sub-region of a theory of forms of fictional writing ingeneral, which will be consistently historical andmaterialist in orientation.

Second, it should be recognized that any such theoryof literature is a political one. To argue that certainforms of writing—the tradition of bourgeois belleslettres, say—effect a transformation of dominantideological forms is to propose a particular politicalplacing of those texts. It is to propose a particular wayof looking at the relationship between different formsof cultural practice—nominated as, respectively,‘literature’ and ‘ideology’—which effects a particularpolitical orchestration of those relationships. If, asEagleton argues, the function of conventional forms ofcriticism is to smooth ‘the troubled passage between textand reader’ by soothing the contradictions within thetext,2 then a reading which aims to render that passage


troublesome by dis covering contradictions within thetext is a political intervention. It does not restore to thetext contradictions which were ‘always there’ buthidden from view; it reads contradictions into the text.It does not reflect a work of transformation onideological forms that literary texts can be said alwaysto have possessed, like some secret essence whichcriticism has only recently discovered; it makes suchtexts effect a work of transformation on those forms ofsignification which are said to be ideological. Putsimply, there is no such spontaneous ‘thing’ as‘ideology’ which can be said to be worked upon andtransformed by an equally spontaneous ‘thing’ called‘literature’. There is no text which has such an ‘effect’independently of the way in which it is worked by acriticism which imputes such an effect to it.

This brings us to our final point: namely, that thepolitical effects of literary texts should be calculated ina historically concrete way. However, this involvesmore than merely saying that the same text should besubjected to different political calculations which reflectthe different ways in which it has been appropriatedduring different moments of its history as a received text.It is, rather, the very nature of the object of literarycriticism that is at issue.

The dominant assumption throughout the history ofcriticism has been that its proper object is furnished bythe literary text, however ‘literary’ is to be defined.Within historically orientated schools of criticism, thetext is construed as being, in some sense, a record of theperiod to which it refers. Although seeminglystraightforward, this concept of the literary text as ahistorical record is, in fact, a double-edged one. For,apart from being regarded as a record of socialcustoms, say, or of class-based world-views,the text is, in addition, customarily regarded as the


record of itself—the record of its own original or truemeaning, or of its own original or true politicalfunctioning or effect. It is as if, beneath the variety ofhistorically concrete ways in which the text has beenworked upon, reinterpreted, placed in different settingsand so on, there is an ideal or true text which has onlyto be discovered for, as it were, the debate to be finallyconcluded.

It is this metaphysic of the text as we have called it—the concept of the text as an ideal form which has aghostly existence behind the variant real forms in whichit exists historically—that must be broken with ifMarxist criticism is to be rigorously historical andmaterialist. Ultimately, there is no such thing as ‘thetext’. There is no pure text, no fixed and final form ofthe text which conceals a hidden truth which has but tobe penetrated for criticism to retire, its task completed.There is no once-and-for-all, final truth about the textwhich criticism is forever in the process of acquiring.The text always and only exists in a variety ofhistorically concrete forms. It always and only exists inthe midst of those concrete and changing realdeterminants—such as typographical and ideologicaldeterminants, its mode of social use, the institutionalsetting and so on—which condition the concrete andchanging ways in which it is appropriated during itshistory. Beyond these particular and differing texts, or,as the Formalists would have put it, particular anddiffering functions of the text, there is no such thing asa pure or limiting text except in a notional sense. It is inthis deep and radical way that each age, by producingits own texts, produces its own literature.

These, then, are the three points that we are anxiousto drive home. First, that a historical and materialisttheory of the production of different forms of writingdemands a prior break with the concerns of bourgeois


aesthetics. Second, that the concept of the text must bereplaced by the concept of the concrete and varying,historically specific functions and effects which accrueto ‘the text’ as a result of the different determinations towhich it is subjected during the history of itsappropriation. Third, that any enterprise in criticism isessentially a political undertaking. Criticism is not a‘science’ which has in view, as its goal, a day when itsknowledge of the pre-given universe of literary textswill be complete. It is an active and ongoing part of thepolitical process, defined by a series of interventionswithin, and struggles for, the uses to which so-calledliterary texts are to be put within the real socialprocess.

Most of these positions are discernible, in a more orless developed form, in the work of the ‘post-Althusserians’—that is, of those critics who, derivingtheir broad theoretical inspiration from Althusser,would accept many of the criticisms made earlier and,much as was the case with the relationship betweenBakhtin and the Russian Formalists, have been engagedin a process of working through Althusser to produce anew set of concerns which goes beyond those embodiedin his work.

Modes of literary production

Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology has been hailed as‘the first major study in Marxist literary theory to bewritten in England in forty years’. 3 Yet, for all that, it isan uneasy book, riddled by a series of significant tensionsbetween idealist and materialist principles of analysis. Onthe one hand, in defining ‘literature’ as a form of cognitionwhich stands mid-way between ‘the distancing rigour ofscientific knowledge and the vivid but loose contingenciesof the “lived” itself’, 4 Eagleton would seem to take onboard all of the epistemological paraphernalia of


Althusser’s theory of literature. The difficulty is that,although this seems to be the case, Eagleton’s moredetailed considerations of the tradition running fromDickens to Joyce in fact suggest a different approach toliterature as a form of signifying practice which operatesat the points of contradiction between competingideologies. Yet Eagleton is unable fully to articulate thisquite different formulation precisely because of theepistemological baggage which he, by and large, simplytakes on trust from Althusser. On the other hand, whilstproposing a detailed system of concepts which will enableliterary production to be explained in materialist terms,Eagleton is unable to use these concepts precisely becausehe has already defined literature in idealist terms. The resultis a curious game of hide-and-seek in which a new conceptof literature as a particular, historically determined form ofwriting and a new set of concepts by means of which itsparticularity might be explained constantly evade oneanother.

So far as literary production is concerned, Eagletonproposes a system of concepts which translate, into theterms appropriate to literature, Althusser’s contentionthat any social practice is to be understood as a processof transformation of a determinate raw material into adeterminate product through the use of determinatemeans of production within the context of determinatesocial relations of production. He thus argues thatliterary practice is to be understood as a process ofproduction effecting a transformation of the rawmaterial furnished by (a) the literary traditions, genresand conventions constituted by the available ‘aestheticideology’, and (b) the discourses, values and beliefswhich constitute the dominant forms of ‘generalideology’. This process of transformation is enactedwith the instruments of literary production furnished bythe techniques and devices available to the writer withinthe given region of ‘aesthetic ideology’. Finally, this


whole process of transformation operates within thecontext of particular ‘literary modes of production’. By‘literary modes of production’, Eagleton has in mindthe variety of the different social forms in which theproduction, exchange and reading of literature havebeen organized and carried out, from patronagesystems of various sorts to the contemporaryorganization of literary production on a market basis.

It is clear that the key concept in all of this is that of‘literary mode of production’ by which Eagleton signalsthat the literary text is to be referred back to andunderstood in the context of those material and socialrelationships which most immediately fashion itsmaking. Paradoxically, this is a ground that has beenlittle occupied by Marxist criticism and it is tosociology that we must look for the most fullydeveloped exploration of these matters. Unfortunately,sociologists have broached the study of, for example,patronage systems or the organization of the literarymarket largely in a positivist spirit. Whilst thereexists a good deal of information on these matters, theyare only too often posited as a series of external ‘facts’which do not connect with the literary text so as toilluminate the principles of its organization. Eagletonmakes it clear that this is not the approach he hasin mind:

We are not merely concerned with the sociologicaloutworks of the text; we are concerned rather withhow the text comes to be what it is because of thespecific determinations of its mode of production. IfLMP’s (literary modes of production) are historicallyextrinsic to particular texts, they are equally internalto them: the literary text bears the impress of itshistorical mode of production as surely as any


product secretes in its form and materials the fashionof its making. 5

The literary text is to be read, then, so as to reveal, withinits formal organization, the impress of the conditions of itsown making. The only difficulty is that, in spite of thecentrality he accords the concept of ‘literary mode ofproduction’ and the claims he makes on its behalf,Eagleton never actually uses it.

The reason for this can be reduced to Eagleton’sconstant equivocation between two different objects ofstudy which he never clearly disentangles. At one level,in speaking of ‘literary modes of production’ and theother forces structuring literary practice, Eagletonclearly has in mind the generic category of ‘literature’ asreferring to all forms of imaginative writing. Indeed, heinterprets the concept even more broadly in referring,several times, to ‘oral’ or ‘pre-literate’ literary modes ofproduction. At another level, however, Eagleton’sconcern is with ‘literature’ in the more specific sense ofa particular form of writing characterized by thedistancing operations to which it subjects the receivedcategories of dominant ideological forms.

Much confusion might have been avoided if, insteadof speaking of ‘literary modes of production’, Eagletonhad spoken of ‘modes of cultural production’, reservingthe concept of ‘mode of literary production’ for thosespecific relationships of cultural production whichsupport ‘literature’ as a more limited, historicallyspecific form of writing.

Eagleton seems constantly to hover before this stepwithout ever actually taking it. For he clearly recognizesthat there may be certain ‘literary modes of production’which, in subordinating literary producers to thedominant ideological apparatuses, give rise to forms ofwriting in which the relationship between literary text


and dominant ideology is one of identity. It is thus thathe refers to the tribal bard as a ‘professional ideologueof the social formation’ and to the medieval author as‘typically a cleric, part of an ideological apparatus’. 6

This implication is reinforced by the great play which ismade of the uniqueness of the capitalist literary modeof production—the position of the literary producer inthe market place—in securing a certain degree ofindependence for the writer from dominant ideologicalapparatuses.

It would therefore seem reasonable to regard thoseforms of writing which do distance dominantideological categories as the product of particularrelations of cultural production. For in his actualhandling of the concept of ‘literature’ as opposed to hisformal statements of definition, Eagleton moves awayfrom Althusser in arguing that literature is determinedn.ot so much by its position of mediation betweenscience and ideology as epistemological categories as byits location at the point of intersection of competingideologies.

This comes across most forcibly in Eagleton’scomments on the problem of literary value. These arecurious in themselves. On the one hand, Eagleton arguesthat there is no such thing as intrinsic value:

For there is no ‘immanent’ value—no value which isnot transitive. Literary value is a phenomenon whichisproduced in that ideological appropriation of thetext, that‘consumptional production’ of the work,which is the actof reading. It is always relationalvalue: ‘exchange-value’.7

Yet, on the other hand—and he will brook no argument—the works of the ‘great tradition’ are indisputably ofaesthetic value. And the reason for this is not because they


rise above the conditions of their making but, to thecontrary, because the conditions of their making areinscribed within their structure. Quixotic in the extreme,Eagleton avoids fetishizing literary value as an immanentquality of the text only to present it as an effect of thework’s origins.

Arguing that the ‘major work’ is characterized by aplay of signification upon signification, of form uponform, Eagleton contends that this toing and froingbetween different levels of discourse is produced by ‘acertain curvature in the ideological space in which thetext plays’.8 This process of ‘playing’ reflects theoperations on the dominant ideology of ‘a particulardissentient conflictual position within it’.9 Surveying theworks of a series of representatives of the ‘greattradition’—George Eliot, Dickens, Conrad, James,T.S.Eliot and so on—Eagleton argues that, if all ofthese are commonly regarded as great writers, theyfurther have it in common (a) that their works throwinto relief the ‘fault lines’ of bourgeois ideology, and (b)that, at the level of explanation, this was because ‘bysome conjuncture of elements (class, sexuality, region,nationality and so on), these writers werecontradictorily inserted into an hege monic bourgeoisideology which had passed its progressive prime….’10

Laying particular stress on the petit-bourgeois classposition of the majority of these writers, Eagletonargues that it was because of their ambiguous classlocation that they were able to ‘encompass a richer,more significant range of experience than those writerssecurely lodged within a single class’,11 and suggeststhat only writers who were so placed were ‘open to thecontradictions from which major literary art wasproduced’.12 The conclusion he derives from this isthat ‘it is the production of the hegemonic formationfrom a particular regressive standpoint within it which


lays the basis for literary value’.13 It is this position,installed between ideologies, which supports the play ofsignification, the clash of discordant levels, that is thehallmark of the major work.

It is easy to see how several different sets of problemsare confused here. As an attempt to deal with theproblem of literary value, Eagleton’s theory must bejudged a failure. For there is simply no way in which agiven text can be said to be valued because of thecircumstances of its production. At root, Eagletonrealizes this, and his comments on the problem ofliterary value become successively more contorted as heattempts to reconcile this realization with the convictionthat there is something specific about the works whichcomprise the ‘great tradition’ which he does not wish tosurrender to those forms of populism which wouldclaim the parity or equivalence of all forms of writing.

We agree. But the way to theorize this specificity ishistorically and not aesthetically. There is, in Eagleton’scomments on the problem of literary value, a realpotential for the construction of a materialist conceptof ‘literature’. All that is necessary is to conceive theplay of form upon form not as a distinguishing featureof ‘major works’ but as a characteristic mark ofbourgeois belles lettres as a particular historical form ofwriting, leaving aside the question of the production ofthose texts as valued texts as a completely separateproblem. Once this is done, the way is clear to aninvestigation of the particular constellation oflinguistic, ideological and economic determinants whichbear upon such a form of writing so as to produce for itthat space, installed between ideologies, which definesit. After all, not all ideologies are spontaneously in acondition of crisis. To the contrary, they are throwninto crisis only by the nay-saying power of theideologies which face them, and it is far from being the


case, historically speaking, that all dominant ideologieshave been faced with developed counter-ideologies:certainly not to the extent that they have influenced themajor forms of writing. As Eagleton admits, ‘ideologieswithout literature have certainly existed’.14 If so, thisnaturally raises the question as to the nature of thenecessary material pre-conditions which must besatisfied for the emergence of those forms of writingwhich do distance ideological forms.

If Eagleton does not address this problem, it isbecause he has an answer ready to hand. ‘Literature’ ispre-defined as an abstract and eternal aesthetic categorywhich, resurrecting the terms of a familiar idealism,Eagleton ‘explains’ as a part of the self-activity ofideology which is itself viewed, in a final reification, asthe subject of its own process. There are thus severalinstances in which Eagleton suggests that ideology is tobe viewed as the subject which governs the literaryprocess through which it itself is distanced or throwninto relief. ‘We are concerned’, he writes, ‘with thespecific operations whereby the ideological produceswithin itself that internal distanciation which is theaesthetic.’15 It is true that Eagleton is aware of thedangers he runs here. And he has stated earlier:

One might even risk saying that the text is theprocess whereby ideology enters into a mode ofrelation with itself peculiarly enabling of its self-reproduction. Such a formulation. can easily bemisunderstood in Hegelian terms—the text as apoint where the spirit of ideology enters upon amaterial incarnation only to reappropriate itself,literature as a mere passage or transaction withinideology itself. It is to avoid such a misconceptionthat we need to speak of a relation of productionbetween text and ideology.16


Nevertheless, such misconceptions are justified so long asthe analysis of the process whereby the literary text workson ideology remains ungrounded in an analysis of thoserelations of literary production which permit the veryexistence of the ‘literary’ as a distinct sphere of operationson the ‘ideological’.

Literature and the social process

We come, finally, to consider once again the work ofPierre Macherey whose A Theory of Literary Productionis, in many senses, the classic text of the tradition. Clearlythe inspiration behind Althusser’s particular formulationsof the concept of literature, it is also the acknowledgedsource for Terry Eagleton’s work.17 However, althoughproposing a far more subtle and flexible set ofrelationships between literature and ideology thanAlthusser’s somewhat programmatic pronouncements onthese matters, this early work nevertheless reflectedAlthusser’s more general concerns in its attempt to situateliterature mid-way between science and ideology as part ofa tripartite set of epistemological distinctions.

It is all the more interesting, therefore, that it shouldbe Macherey who has spearheaded the call for a breakwith aesthetics. Disputing ‘the illusion that literature ingeneral exists’, Macherey, as we have seen, has morerecently contended that there is no sense to the question‘What is literature?’ or, rather, that such sense as itdoes possess derives from its presupposition that‘literature is something, that is to say a whole unitedaround a coherent system of principles which ensure itsconformity to a fixed and immutable essence’.18 To thecontrary:

Literature is a practical, material process oftransformation which means that in particularhistorical periods, literature exists in different forms.


What needs to be studied is the difference betweenthese forms, Literature with a capital ‘L’ does notexist; there is the ‘literary’, literature or literaryphenomena within social reality and this is whatmust be studied and understood.19

He furthermore contends, in co-authorship with ÉtienneBalibar, that the question of the relationship betweenliterature and ideology must be posed in terms whichescape the ‘confrontation of universal essences in whichmany Marxist discussions have found themselvesenclosed’.20 In speaking of ‘literature’, Macherey andBalibar make it unequivocally clear that they have in mindsolely the condition of literary texts within bourgeoissociety. They contend that both the production of thesetexts as particular forms of the practice of writing and thedeterminate way in which they are currently produced forconsumption or used within the social process ‘require thematerial conditions unique to the bourgeois socialformation, and are transformed with it’.21

More radically, Macherey breaks unequivocally withwhat we have called ‘the metaphysic of the test’. Urgingthat the concept of the ‘text’ or the ‘work’ that has forso long been the mainstay of criticism should beabandoned, he advances the argument we have notedabove: that there are no such ‘things’ as works or textswhich exist independently of the functions which theyserve or the uses to which they are put and that theselatter should constitute the focal point of analysis. Thetext must be studied not as an abstraction but in thelight of the determinations which, in the course of itshistory, successively rework that text, producing for itdifferent and historically concrete effects in modifyingthe conditions of its reception.

These theoretical shifts reflect, in the main, theinfluence of the work of Renée Balibar and DominiqueLaporte on the functioning of literary texts within the


French educational system in the nineteenth century.During the Ancien Regime, it is argued, the splitbetween ‘literature’ and ‘non-literature’ was a splitbetween writing and non-writing, between reading andnon-reading. In a society of limited literacycharacterized by a split between the official language ofthe court and the spoken language of the people,‘literary’ texts—meaning, in this case, philosophical,theological and historical as well as fictional forms ofwriting—symbolized and perpetuated class divisions atthe level of language simply by virtue of being writtenand as a result of the language in which they werewritten. The central question to which Balibar and hercoworkers have addressed themselves in the two studiesthey have so far produced—Les Français Fictifs and LeFrançais National—concerns the processes whereby‘certain writings (or readings?) are singled out,valorized, and recognized as literary in modern societywhere literature is no longer a question of a socialcategory openly denoting a privileged access to readingand writing’.22

They have sought to answer this question byconsidering the social function served by the productionof certain forms of fictional writing as ‘literature’—thatis, as a special and privileged form of writing—innineteenthcentury France. Basically, their thesis is that,in the context of the development of a uniform nationallanguage, the production of certain texts as ‘literary’ inthis sense together with their restricted use within theeducation system was a manifestation of class strugglein the sphere of language: a tactic by which thebourgeoisie created and reproduced for itself a positionof supremacy in language.

The argument is a complex one and we can onlyattempt the briefest of summaries here. Its main thrustis that the displacement of regional and class dialects


and idioms by a uniform French language was,politically and ideologically speaking, a double-edgedprocess. On the one hand, it constituted a necessaryprecondition for the formation of capitalism in therespect that it was necessary to effect the freecirculation of commodities on a national scale. It wasfurther necessary in that it alone could provide thenecessary linguistic basis for the juridical preconditionsfor the development of the wage-labour relationshipbased on the principle of legal contracts between theseller of labour-power (the worker) and its purchaser(the capitalist). Only the formation of a commonlanguage permitted the development of a legal systembased on contracts formed between ostensibly equalsubjects who occupy a free and equal relation to oneanother within language. Finally, it constituted thenecessary precondition for the emergence of republicanpolitical institutions in enabling all citizens to take partdirectly in public affairs without interpreters.

Accordingly, both during and in the immediateaftermath of the French Revolution a distinctiveideology and politics of language was inaugurated inwhich local dialects were discouraged and a newlycodified, uniform grammar installed as the officialvehicle of communication. This process wascounterbalanced, however, by the bourgeoisie’s takingover and transforming the function of the éliteschooling system inherited from the Ancien Regime andso preserving for itself a second, literary languageby means of the privileged position accorded in thatsystem to the study of those forms of fictional writingwhich were ‘produced’ as ‘literary’ texts: as superiorforms of writing which ‘went beyond’ the simplecommunicative function of ordinary language. Thistendency was reinforced with the development, in thesecond half of the nineteenth century, of a national


education system split, along class lines, between itsprimary and secondary levels.

Within primary schools, it is argued, the sons anddaughters of ‘the people’ received their education in thenational language in the form of an administeredgrammar—a set of formal rules whereby the linguisticfunctions of subject, object, predication etc. werelearned mechanically—which was derived from thegrammars of the Ancien Regime. However, thegenerative schema of this grammar—derived from theunderstanding of the rules of classical languagesproposed by the Ancien Regime grammarians—was, soto speak, withheld from the people. They simplyreceived the rules and were offered no understanding oftheir genesis or of the logic underlying them. The studyof these was reserved for the secondary schools,populated largely by the children of the bourgeoisie,and was developed chiefly through the study ofcomparative grammar on the basis of selected ‘literary’texts.

Just as the formal, juridical equality of economicagents under capitalism turns out to be illusory giventhe different positions of worker and bourgeois in therelations of production, so, Balibar and Laporte argue,the apparent equality of position of French speakers inrelation to the French language conceals a real, class-based inequality. The bourgeoisie, by virtue of thefacility acquired from an understanding of itsmechanisms, experiences that language as its own. It isat home with it, familiar with its workings. Thesubordinate classes, by contrast, receive that languagein an administered form, handed down from abovewithin the education system. Familiar only with itsshell, they experience the language as an exclusion anda limitation in relation to the ‘superior’ literarylanguage from which they are, by virtue of their class,


formally excluded. It is in this sense, viewed in the lightof the actual uses to which they are put in the socialprocess, that literary texts serve as a buttress to themaintenance of bourgeois dominance in language.

It would be wrong to generalize uncritically from thisstudy which is married fairly closely to specificallyFrench materials. However, it is fairly clear that theuses to which literary texts have been put within theeducation system in Britain—uses which, fromMatthew Arnold to F.R.Leavis, have evidently beenconcerned to reinforce a class differentiation at the levelof language—suggest many parallels which arecurrently being explored.23

More interesting, from our point of view, is themetho dological import of the work of Balibar andLaporte. On the question of the production of literarytexts—that is, of the dominant forms of contemporaryfictional writing—it is now suggested that these are‘essentially sublimations of the conflicts lived out in thepractice of language’.24 Far from seeing literarypractice as an activity which makes visible theoperations of dominant ideology in any transparentsense, it is now argued that literary practice constitutesan essentially ideological operation in its attempts toheal or placate class and ideological contradictionsinscribed within language itself.

Installed on a contradiction within language, theliterary text is structured by an interplay between thelevel of ordinary grammar and that of its owndistinctively literary language. The work it effects—although never with complete success—is such as tooverlay or soothe these contradictions, to preserve thefiction of ‘one language’. The literary text does nothave an ‘aesthetic effect’ which is opposed to that ofdominant ideology. It acts rather as a privileged regionof ideology within which, by concealing its


contradictions as they manifest themselves at the level oflanguage, the whole system of dominant ideology isreproduced, preserved intact as an ongoing system inspite of the tensions with which it is racked. Andcriticism, far from producing a knowledge of theideology-distancing mechanisms of literature, must setout ‘to read the ideological contradictions within thedevices produced to conceal them, to reconstitute thecontradictions from the system of their concealment’.25

It is, however, in Renée Balibar’s approach to the‘consumptional production’ of literary texts—to thevarying uses to which they are put—that the decisivetheoretical break is finally located. Breaking completelywith ‘the metaphysic of the text’, she suggests a way inwhich the question of the varying functions fulfilled bythe text may be analysed concretely and theorizedhistorically in the light of the concrete determinationswhich bear on the uses to which the text is put withinthe social process. The analysis she offers of twocontrasting uses to which two texts, both bearing thesignature of ‘George Sand’, have been put will serve tomake the point.

The first concerns the use of an edited passage fromSand’s The Devil’s Pool which formed the basis for aseries of grammatical exercises in an elementarylanguage primer dated 1914:

(Exercise no.) 318. Copy out the following passage,putting the subjects in brackets.

Ploughing scene

The day was clear and mild, and the soil, freshlycleft by the ploughshare, sent up a light steam. At theother extremity of the field, an old man was gravelydriving his plough of antique shape, drawn by two


placid oxen, true patriarchs of the meadow, tall andrather thin, with pale yellow coats and longdrooping horns. They were those old workers who,through long habit, have grown to be brothers. Theold labourer worked slowly, silently, and withoutwaste of effort. His docile team were in no greaterhaste than he; but, thanks to the undistractedsteadiness of his toil, his furrow was soon ploughed.

(Exercise no.) 319. Vocabulary. 1. Give six namesof agricultural implements such as a plough. 2. Writedown six times the noun: a field, adding in each casea singular or plural complement, according to itsmeaning, e.g. a field of wheat, a field of turnips. 3.Give six feminine nouns ending in ée like lajournée.26

Here, then, we have, in a particular determinate form, atext bearing the signature ‘George Sand’ which can be saidto have ‘effects’ only through the use to which it is put. Inthis case, in the context of elementary schooling, the workis used for teaching the abstracted functions of grammar.The pupil is to abstract from their particular exemplarscontained in the text the grammatical functions of nouns,the concepts of singular, plural, etc. The text functions toteach rules that must be complied with, not understood.

That is the ‘national language’ in one form. Let usnow see ‘the same’ passage as it appears in a 1962‘critical edition’ of George Sand’s works, speciallyprepared for use in secondary and higher education:

At the other extremity of the field, an old man,whose broad shoulders and stern face recalledHolbein’s ploughman, but whose clothes carried nosuggestion of poverty, was gravely driving his swing-plough of antique shape drawn by two placid oxen,true patriarchs of the meadow, tall and rather thin,with pale, yellow coats and long drooping horns.


They were those old workers who, through longhabit, have grown to be brothers, as they are calledin our country, and who, when one loses the other,refuse to work with a new comrade, and pine awaywith grief. People who are unfamiliar with thecountry call the love of the ox for his yoke-fellow afable. Let them come and see in the corner of thestable one of these poor beasts, thin and wasted,restlessly lashing his lean flanks with his tail,violently breathing with mingled terror and disdainon the food offered him, his eyes always turnedtowards the door, scratching with his hoof the emptyplace at his side, sniffing the yokes and chains whichhis fellow used to wear, and incessantly calling himwith melancholy lowings….

The old labourer worked slowly, silently, andwithout waste of effort. His docile team were in nogreater haste than he; but, thanks to the undistractedsteadiness of his toil and the judicious expenditure ofhis strength, his furrow was as soon ploughed as thatof his son, who was driving, at some distance fromhim, four less vigorous oxen through a morestubborn and stony piece of ground.27

Here we have ‘the same’ text, in a different form, fulfillingdifferent functions and giving rise to different effects. Theentire grammatical structure of the passage has beenaltered by the different use of punctuation, replacing thesimple sentence structure of subject-verb-predicate by amore complex structure in which subordinate clauses,phrases in apposition etc. proliferate. The words are, forthe greater part, the same; but the language is different.The complexities which characterize the second passagehave been flattened out in the first so that simplegrammatical functions might be easily identified.Moreover, the allusions of the two passages are different.The allusions of the first passage are technical; ploughingis described as a simple agricultural process. Those in the


second are pastoral and cultural: rural life is aestheticizedand, at the same time, constant allusions are made to thestock cultural themes of the bourgeois humanist tradition.There is the reference to Holbein reinforced, Balibar tellsus, by an engraving by Holbein which appears in anearlier chapter of the ‘critical edition’ and, at variouspoints in the editors’ annotations, references to AlbrechtDürer, Michelangelo, Goya and so on.

One could go on. But the point is that here we havetwo passages, bearing a signature authenticating themas the product of the same author. Nevertheless, placedin different contexts (primary as against secondary orhigher education) and ‘produced’ by differentdeterminants (grammatical exercises as opposed to thecultural references which surround the text in the‘critical edition’), these two passages, althoughostensibly the same, fulfil different functions and giverise to different effects. Neither one of these is the‘original’ or ‘true’ text Nor is either of them thebastardized version of the other. They are, simply,different texts. And there is no pure or limiting text—there is no ‘real’ or ‘essential’ George Sand—whichmight be invoked to adjudicate between them except ongrounds of scholarly accuracy. There was, that is tosay, a first date of publication for The Devil’s Pool(1846) and, in this sense, an ‘original’ form of the text (itappeared in serial form in a liberal newspaper). Whilstthis must serve as the critical standard against whichthe accuracy of subsequent editions must be checked,the particular form of this text, the moment of itsappearance and the intervention it embodied, is in nosense ontologically privileged in relation to subsequentforms of the text as, for example, in the critical editioncited. Both are equally real; both have given rise to realeffects; both need analysis in their specificity.


The text is always ‘worked’. In one form or another,in the variant forms of its concrete existence, it alwayscomes to us overlayered by the different determinants—the uses to which it is put, the annotations which areappended to it, the editor’s preface, the design of thecover—which ‘produce’ it for consumption in aconcrete form. It is here, and nowhere else, that theeffects of the text must be analysed.

However, this is not merely an advance ofmethodological significance. It is also a politicaladvance. ‘The philosophers,’ Marx wrote, ‘have onlyinterpreted the world, in various ways; the point is tochange it.’28 Marxist critics, it might similarly beargued, have merely interpreted literature in variousways. The point is to change it, to so work upon thosedeterminations which condition the real socialfunctioning of the literary text as to change the uses towhich it is put. Renée Balibar’s work maps out notmerely a new field for criticism; it maps out a new fieldfor practice.

Exactly how this new field for practice should beviewed and how Marxists should enter it are questionsthat can only be briefly commented upon here. At root,however, both have to do with the positions thatdifferent cultural forms and practices occupy in relationto one another within the internal disposition of a given‘cultural field’. By ‘cultural field’ or ‘field of culturalrelationships’, I mean simply to refer to the set ofstructural relationships which fix and define theposition of different forms of cultural practice withreference to one another and which, in so doing,produce for them their role and function, theireffectivity, within the social process.

It follows from all that has been maintained so farthat the position of any form of cultural practice withinthis field is never fixed for all time. Just as there is no


permanent line of demarcation between the ‘literary’and the ‘non-literary’, so there is no once-and-for-allboundary that can be drawn between dominant andoppositional cultural practices. The position of a givenform of cultural practice within the disposition of agiven cultural field and, accordingly, the part it playswithin the wider social process are constantly shiftingand changing as the relationships which define thatfield are themselves constantly redefined andrearticulated. There are no forms of cultural practicewhich are intrinsically and forever either dominant oroppositional. Their functioning and effect, in politicalterms, depend on the place they occupy within thatincessantly changing nexus of relationships whichdefines their position in relation to one another.

The practice of literary criticism, it has been argued,has played an important role in structuring the field ofcultural relations in a certain way, producing for so-called ‘literary’ texts a particular position within thatfield as the supports for the maintenance of bourgeoishegemony at the level of language. This position, it isimportant to stress, is in no sense natural to such texts.It is a product of a historically particular organizationof the field of cultural relations and of the particularway in which the texts concerned are produced forconsumption within that field. It can therefore bechanged. In effecting a redefinition of the cultural field,in shifting the ways in which the relationships betweenthe various forms of cultural practice which comprise itare viewed, Marxist criticism may contribute to sucha change.

The politics of literature, on this construction, areinseparable from the politics of criticism. Marxistcriticism has hitherto proceeded on the assumption thatevery literary text has its politics inscribed within it andthat the role of Marxist criticism is to enunciate this


politics, to give it voice by making it explicit. Thispolitical essentialism must be broken with. The textdoes not have a politics which is separable from thedeterminations which work upon it or the position itoccupies within the disposition of the field of culturalrelations. The task which faces Marxist criticism is notthat of reflecting or of bringing to light thepolitics which is already there, as a latent presencewithin the text which has but to be made manifest. It isthat of actively politicizing the text, of making itspolitics for it, by producing a new position for it withinthe field of cultural relations and, thereby, new formsof use and effectivity within the broader social process.


182

9CONCLUSION

LITERARY criticism, as we know it, has well over acentury of accredited activity behind it. It has developed alanguage which absolutely saturates the field and holdspowerful and entrenched positions within the bastions ofacademia. Through their grip on examination boards andtheir control over the training of teachers, the literaturedepartments of our universities effectively determine bothwhat literature should be taught and how it should betaught—what questions should be put to it—throughoutthe entire context of secondary and tertiary education. Inthis way, the discourses of literary criticism developed atthe frontiers of academic life reach back, through a varietyof well-worn institutional paths, to condition the ways inwhich literary texts are used within those ideologicalprocesses by which we, millions of us, make sense, or havesense made for us, of our lives.

Viewed in this light, literary criticism is not anexpensive luxury. To the contrary, as what has provedto be the most potent vehicle for the peddling of allsorts of ideological wares and mythologies, it is moneywell spent. The uses to which literary texts are putwithin the social process constitute the most privilegedmode of reproduction and social relay of the bourgeoismyths which disperse men and women, along with theirhistory, into a frozen world of idealist and essentialistcategories. Myths of creation, of genius, of man’s

essential nature, of the eternality and universality of theforms by which we express ourselves are all stronglysupported in this way.

Apart from the odd left-wing literary mole burrowingaway from within, the institutional power of orthodoxliterary criticism remains substantially unchallenged.Yet, at the theoretical level, its grip has been noticeablyweakened. A revolution in thought first presents itselfin the guise of a questioning or reformulation of oldproblems and the production of new ones. Untilrecently, Marxist critics have failed to meet thischallenge. They competed with bourgeois criticism, butdid not displace it. The significance of the newdirections in Marxist criticism we have surveyed in thisstudy is that they push the critical edge of Marxism onestep further. They question not merely the answers butthe questions, the founding assumptions of bourgeoiscriticism and propose, in their place, a quite new,radically different set of concerns.

Yet, although it has been contended that the centralquestion of bourgeois criticism—‘What is Literature?’—is a misplaced one, it has proved to be easier todenounce this question than to jettison it completely.For it is easier to announce a ‘theoretical break’ than tocomplete it. Revolutions in thought do not occurovernight. They are difficult and protracted processeshindered at every step by the weight of receivedconcepts which, lingering on, influence the thought ofeven those who lead the call to break with them. Wehave thus shown how, in the work of Althusser andEagleton, the question ‘What is Literature?’, althoughabsent in the sense that it is never explicitly put, iseffectively present in the answers it elicits. Althusser andEagleton do not ask the question ‘What is Literature?’But they answer it.


The stress on capitals—on Literature—is importanthere. For one must take care not to throw the baby outwith the bath water. Beneath the concern with thespecificity of Literature as a privileged and specializingcategory, there remains a further problem. For if oneadmits that the concept of Literature is a falseabstraction from the sphere of fictional writing ingeneral, the problem of the distinction betweenfictional writing as a general category and nonfictionaldiscourses—such as those of science or philosophy—remains.

This is not, it must be stressed, the problem of ‘Whatis Literature?’ in another guise. Any theory of writingmust address both the similarities and the differencesbetween forms of writing. The crucial differencesbetween such theories therefore relate to how theyarticulate the relationship between such relations ofdifference and similarity. Within traditional aesthetics,these problems are entered, through the pre-emptiveenclosure of Literature as a hermetically separateenclave of cultural practice. The differences that are tobe explained are, first, those between Literature andnon-fictional discourses and, second, those betweenLiterature and other, ‘degraded’ forms of fictionalwriting. The similarities to be examined are thosewithin the sphere of Literature itself. A possible thirdquestion—‘What do all forms of fictional writing havein common?’—is either suppressed or simply neglected.What is thus offered is usually a twofold set ofdistinctions. First, Literature is distinguished,exclusively on the basis of the ‘great works’, from non-fictional discourses; second, the separation of thiscategory of works from all other forms of fictionalwriting is justified in terms of valuational criteria—depth of feeling, universality of sentiment, etc.—which,as the case may be, may or may not have any

CONCLUSION 185

connection with the first axis of differentiation. Theresult is that those forms of fictional writing which donot fall within the category of Literature are consideredonly negatively as the pale, inferior imita tions of theprivileged category of works from which they areexcluded. They exist only to be condemned.

The procedural implications of Macherey’s morerecent concern with the problem of the ‘fiction effect’are entirely the reverse of this. They are that one shouldfirst establish the similarities between different forms offictional writing and then go on to examine thedifferences between them, This not only forestalls theritual, more or less obligatory condemnation of fictionalforms which fall outside the received tradition. It also,provided that one foregoes the temptation toreintroduce the concept of Literature through the backdoor, enables one to explain the differences betweendifferent types of fiction in materialist terms.

Yet the temptation is a strong one. The privilegedconcept of Literature survives, quite transparently inthe case of Althusser, in the formulation thatLiterature—only ‘genuine literature’, that is—effects acertain productive transformation of ideology whichoffers its workings to view. If this is true only of majorforms of writing, the question naturally arises: Whatabout the others? What do they do? Althusser has noanswer whereas Eagleton recognizes the problem onlyto sidestep it, to transform it into the problem of value.There are, he affirms, forms of writing which do notoperate upon ideology in the way outlined but which,instead, move within the withered ideological matricesof received myths without in any sense rupturing them.And that, he suggests, is why they are inferior. Thecondemnation is reflex. Such works are inferior becausethey are not great, and they are not great because their


conditions of production are not the same as thosewhich underlie and produce great works.

This is not to say that some forms of writing shouldnot be condemned and others preferred. But is we whodo the condemning; we who do the preferring, and ongrounds that have to be argued and struggled for. Thereneither is nor can be a science of value. Value issomething that must be produced. A work is of valueonly if it is valued, and it can be valued only in relationto some particular set of valuational criteria, be theymoral, political or aesthetic. The problem of value is theproblem of the social production of value; it refers tothe ever ongoing process whereby which texts are to bevalued and on what grounds are incessantly matters fordebate and, indeed, struggle. Value is not somethingwhich the text has or possesses. It is not an attribute ofthe text; it is rather something that is produced for thetext. To neglect this, to reify the text as the source of itsown value, is to run together two quite distinctproblems: the explanation of the text as the productionof a particular practice of writing and the production ofa text as a valued text. The result, as in Eagleton’ssuggestion that a text’s value somehow derives from theconditions of its production, and, thereafter, clings to itthrough subsequent conditions of the text’s existence, isthat the task of explaining the text is given a particular,pre-emptive skew in the respect that any suchexplanation must simultaneously present itself as anexplanation of the text’s value.

Macherey’s concern with the ‘fiction effect’ avoidsthis pre-emptive closure of the way in which Marxistsshould concern themselves with the history of writing.Although insisting on a necessary separation betweenthe literary (as a general category) and the ideological,and construing the literary as a distinctive sphere ofoperations on the ideological which gives rise to a

CONCLUSION 187

distinctive ‘fiction effect’, Macherey’s approach allowsthe study of the history of writing to be conductedmuch more open-endedly. It is not Literature thateffects a certain productive transformation of ideology,but literature—that is, all forms of fictional writing.The concern, within such an approach, is with thedifferent sets of formal devices through which differentforms of writing work upon ideology so as to produceit in different ways—sometimes distancing it,sometimes underwriting its effects by sealing itsenclosures. To plagiarize Eagleton’s key concept, theconcern of Marxist criticism should be with thedifferences between different literary modes of theproduction or transformation of ideology. Not a theoryof Literature, but a theory of literatures: concrete,historically specific and materialistic.

There is a second set of problems which, althoughrelated to the above, should not be confused with it: theproduction of ‘Literature’, that is, the social productionof texts as Literary and of the effects which thus accrueto them in the light of the position which they occupyin relation to other texts and the uses to which they areput within the social process. In spite of all its apparentconcreteness and facticity, the text is not the placewhere the business of culture is conducted. Culture isnot a thing but a process and a system of relationshipswithin which the production of meaning takes place.Within that process, the rituals and artefacts whichconstitute the visible surface of culture books, paintings,rituals of consumption—are constantly rearticulated inrelation to one another. The self-same objects andpractices are constantly placed within different contextsand put to different uses as the relationships betweenthem are constantly reshuffled. This is easily observedin the case of the visual arts where images are oftenphysically transported from one location (churches) to


another (art-galleries) and, in the process, used as thebasis for the production of different meanings. But thesame is true of written texts. The text is not the issuingsource of meaning. It is a site on which the productionof meaning—of variable meanings—takes place. Thesocial process of culture takes place not within textsbut between texts, and between texts and readers: notsome ideal, disembodied reader, but historicallyconcrete readers whose act of reading is conditioned, inpart by the text it is true, but also by thewhole ensemble of ideological relationships whichbear upon the incessant production and reproductionof texts.

The world of appearances, in the arena of literarycriticism, is doubly deceptive. The apparently concrete,the text, turns out, on further inspection, to be anabstraction whereas the apparently abstract, the systemof relationships between texts, proves to be the concreteor, more accurately, a necessary abstraction throughwhich it is alone possible to encounter the text in itsparticular, determinate and historically varyingconcrete forms. The concrete, Marx remarks in theGrundrisse, is the result and not the point of departurefor thought. The concrete is the concrete, he argues,only because it is the concentration of manydeterminations whose interaction, far from being givenspontaneously to view, can only be grasped through theviolent abstraction of thought. One reaches theconcrete only via a detour. So long as criticism refusesthat detour and remains ensnared within the falseconcrete of the immediately given—the text—the trulyconcrete will elude it.

CONCLUSION 189

190

NOTES

Chapter 1Criticism and literature

1 This aspect of Saussure’s influence is discussed inT. Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London:Methuen, 1977)—a companion volume in this series.

2 F.R.Leavis, The Common Pursuit (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1969), p. 213.

3 Lukács’ most extended discussion of aesthetic questions iscontained in his two-volumed Ästhetik (Berlin:Luchterhand, 1963). For a partial English translation, see‘Introduction to a Monograph on Aesthetics’, NewHungarian Quarterly, Summer, 1964.

4 See P.Macherey and E.Balibar, ‘On Literature as anIdeological Form: Some Marxist Propositions’, OxfordLiterary Review, vol. 3 no. 1, 1978. A similar article, underMacherey’s name only, appears as ‘Problems of Reflection’in Literature, Society and the Sociology of Literature(University of Essex, 1977).

5 R.Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: OUP,1977), p. 145.

6 Ibid., p. 53.

Chapter 2Formalism and Marxism

1 For details of the history, intellectual roots andorganizational base of Russian Formalism, see V. Erlich,Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine (The Hague:Mouton, 1955); E.M.Thompson, Russian Formalism andAnglo-American New Criticism (The Hague: Mouton,1971) and K.Pomorska, Russian Formalist Theory and itsPoetic Ambience (The Hague: Mouton, 1968).

2 The Formalists preferred to call themselves ‘specifiers’ asmore accurately describing their overriding concern withthe ‘specificity’ of literature. See V.Erlich, ‘RussianFormalism’, Jnl of the History of Ideas, XXXIV (4), 1973,p. 67.

3 For a discussion of the relationship between RussianFormalism and New Criticism, see Thompson, op. cit. andthe final chapter of Erlich Russian Formalism: History,Doctrine. Briefly, the differences between the two are: (a)Whereas New Criticism subscribes to the neoKantiancritique of positivism in arguing that the human sciencesstand in need of qualitatively different methods from thoseemployed in the natural sciences, the Formalists subscribedto a neo-positivist ideology in holding that thedetermination of the uniqueness of literature was a matterto be resolved solely by scientific and empirical methods.(b) New Criticism, in arguing that the investigation of theuniqueness of literature can reveal something permanentand essential about the nature of Man, subscribes to ahumanist ideology that was entirely alien to theFormalists. (c) New Criticism has tended to stress theevocative and emotive—as opposed to the cognitive—function of poetic language and literary discourse.

4 See T.Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London:Methuen, 1977), pp. 76–87 for a fuller discussion ofJakobson’s work.

5 M.Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 145–6.


6 See Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ in L.T.Lemon andM.J.Reis (eds), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).

7 See S.Heath, The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practiceof Writing (London: Elek, 1972).

8 ibid., p. 33.9 Shklovsky, op cit, p. 18.

10 This position was most forcefully and succinctly stated byJakobson in his essay ‘On Realism in Art’ in L. Matejkaand K.Pomorska (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics(Cambridge, Massachussetts: MIT Press, 1971).

11 See B.Brewster, ‘From Shklovsky to Brecht’, Screen, XV(2), 1974.

12 Cited in L.Matejka, ‘On the First Russian Prologomena toSemiotics’ in V.Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy ofLanguage (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), p. 179.

13 R.Barthes, Mythologies (London: Cape, 1973), p. 112.14 L.Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Michigan: Ann

Arbor/University of Michigan Press, 1960), p. 175.15 For a useful introduction, see C.V.James, Soviet Socialist

Realism: Origins and Theory (London: Macmillan, 1973).16 It was partly to forestall such a reading of their work that

Shklovsky, in developing his theory of prose, included aconsideration of the defamiliarizing propensity embodiedin certain of the devices constitutive of classical realismitself. See, for example, his ‘The Mystery Novel: Dickens’“Little Dorrit”’, in Matejka and Pomorska (eds), op. cit.;‘The connection between devices of Sjuzet constructionand general stylistic devices’, in S.Bann and S.Bowlt (eds)Russian For malism (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press,1973) and ‘La Construction de la nouvelle et du roman’ inTodorov (ed.), Théorie de la littérature: textes des formalistes russes (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1965).

17 Shklovsky, op. cit., p. 12.18 Cited in M.Enzenberger, ‘Osip Brik: Selected Writings’,

Screen, XV (3), 1974, p. 51.19 J.Mukařovský, ‘Standard Language and Poetic Language’

in D.C.Freeman (ed.), Linguistics and Literary Style (NewYork: Rinehart & Winston, 1970), p. 44.

20 For details, see ‘Documents from Lef’, Screen, XII (4),1971; ‘Documents from Novy Lef’, Screen, XV (3), 1974;

NOTES 193

M. Pleynet, ‘The “Left” Front of Arts: Eisenstein and theold “Young Hegelians”’, Screen, XIII (1), 1972; andT.Todorov, ‘Formalistes et Futuristes’, Tel Quel, 1965.

21 Cited in Brewster, op. cit., p. 86.22 Shklovsky was, for a time, militantly ‘formalist’,

particularly during the period of his association with theSerapion Brotherhood. For details of this, see G. Kern andC. Collier (eds), The Serapion Brotherhood: A CriticalAnthology (Michigan: Ann Arbor/University of MichiganPress, 1975).

23 See V.Erlich, Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine (TheHague: Mouton, 1955), pp. 110–17.

24 J.Tynyanov and R.Jakobson, ‘Problems in the Study ofLiterature and Language’, in Matejka and Pomorska (eds),op. cit., pp. 79–80.

25 See C.Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship(London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970).

26 For a useful survey of semiotics and its difficulties in thisarea, see J.Kristeva, ‘The System and the SpeakingSubject’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 October 1973.

27 This argument is also advanced in R.Seldon, ‘RussianFormalism: An Unconcluded Dialogue’, Literature, Societyand the Sociology of Literature (University of Essex,1977).

28 For details of the relevant conflicts within the BPRS, seeH.Gallas, Marxistische Literaturtheorie: Kontroversen imBund des Proletarisches Revolutionärer Schriftstellers(Berlin: Luchterhand, 1971). A partial translation of thechapter relating to Lukács exists as ‘Georg Lukács and theLeague of Revolutionary Proletarian Writers’, WorkingPapers in Cultural Studies, no. 4, 1973. For anintroduction to some of the issues in the debate overExpressionism, see the exchange between Ernst Bloch andGeorg Lukács in E.Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics(London: New Left Books, 1978).

29 See the essays on Tolstoy in G.Lukács, Studies in EuropeanRealism (London: Hillway Publishing, 1950).

30 L.Althusser and E.Balibar, Reading Capital (London: NewLeft Books, 1970), p. 94.


Chapter 3Russian Formalism

1 See R.Jakobson, ‘On Russian Fairy Tales’, SelectedWritings IV (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), especiallypp. 89–91; and R.Jakobson and P.Bogatyvev, ‘On theBoundary between Studies of Folklore and Literature’ inL.Matejka and K.Pomorska (eds), Readings in RussianPoetics (Cambridge, Massachussetts: MIT Press, 1971),p. 91.

2 F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London:Peter Owen, 1974), P. 3.

3 ibid., p. 8.4 Cited in T.Todorov, ‘Some Approaches to Russian

Formalism’, in S.Bann and S.Bowlt (eds), RussianFormalism (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973),pp. 7–8.

5 ibid., p. 11. 6 V.Erlich, Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine (The

Hague: Mouton, 1955), p. 176.7 B.Eichenbaum, ‘The Theory of the “Formal Method”’ in

L.T.Lemon and M.J.Reis (eds), Russian FormalistCriticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1965), p. 117.

8 R.Seldon, ‘Russian Formalism: an Unconcluded Dialogue’in Literature, Society and the Sociology of Literature(University of Essex, 1977), p. 101.

9 ’Documents from Novy Lef’, Screen, XV (3), 1974, p. 67.10 V.Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and His Circle (London: Pluto,

1974), p. 114.11 J.Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art (New

Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 21.12 ibid. , p. 38.13 Shklovsky, op. cit., p. 68.14 R.Jakobson, ‘The Dominant’ in Matejka and Pomorska

(eds), op. cit., p. 87.15 J.Tynyanov, ‘On Literary Evolution’, in Matejka and

Pomorska (eds), op. cit., p. 69.16 ibid, p. 67.17 J.Culler, Saussure (London: Fontana, 1976), p. 36.

NOTES 195

18 B.Eichenbaum, The Young Tolstoy (Michigan: Ardis/ AnnArbor, 1972), p. 18.

19 ibid., p. 100.20 F.Jameson, The Prison House of Language (New Jersey:

Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 18.

Chapter 4Formalism and beyond

1 R.Jakobson, ‘On Realism in Art’ in L.Matejka andK.Pomorska (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics (Cam-bridge, Massachussetts: MIT Press, 1971).

2 J.Tynyanov, ‘On Literary Evolution’ in ibid., p. 72. 3 K.Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973),

pp. 110–11.4 P.Macherey, ‘Problems of Reflection’ in Literature, Society

and the Sociology of Literature (University of Essex,1977), p. 45.

5 For a further elaboration of the concept of literarytradition as an active selection, see R.Williams, ‘Base andSuperstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, New LeftReview, 82, 1973.

6 R.Coward and J.Ellis, Language and Materialism:Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 1.

7 T.Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London:Methuen, 1977), p. 16.

8 T.Todorov, ‘Some Approaches to Russian Formalism’ inS.Bann and S.Bowlt (eds), Russian Formalism (Edinburgh:Scottish Academic Press, 1973), p. 9.

9 F.de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London:Peter Owen, 1974), p. 77.

10 It has recently been suggested that Bakhtin was, in fact, theauthor of the works which appeared under Vološinov’sname. As we are not in a position to ascertain whether ornot this is true, we have followed the existing conventionin referring to Vološinov and Bakhtin as separate persons.

11 V.Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language(New York: Seminar Press, 1973), p. 53.

12 R.Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: OUP,1977). p. 37.


13 Vološinov, op. cit., p. 96.14 ibid., p. 23.15 ibid., p. 95.16 From I.R.Titunik, ‘The Formal Method and the

Sociological Method’ in ibid.17 M.Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics

(Michigan: Ardis/Ann Arbor, 1973), p. 88. (First publishedin 19290

18 ibid. See pp. 88–113.19 M.Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge,

Massachussetts: MIT Press, 1968), p. 6.20 ibid., p. 72.21 Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1970), Book One, chapter 17, p. 75.22 ibid., Book One, chapter 4, pp. 47–8.23 ibid., Book One, chapter 6, p. 52.24 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 226.25 ibid., p. 465.26 For a discussion of these developments and some

extrapolations concerning their literary consequences, seeH.Febvre and H.J.Martin, The Coming of the Book: TheImpact of Printing, 1450–1800 (London: New Left Books,1976).

Chapter 5Marxism versus aesthetics

1 See J.Kristeva, ‘The Ruin of a Poetics’ in S.Bann andS.Bowlt (eds), Russian Formalism (Edinburgh: ScottishAcademic Press, 1973) for a notable exception.

2 This concept of the ‘break’—or ‘epistemological rupture’—in Marx’s work was first introduced in Althusser’s ForMarx (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1969)

3 See P.Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism(London: New Left Books, 1976).

4 For a complete anthology, see K.Marx and F.Engels, OnLiterature and Art (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976).

5 Anderson, op. cit., p. 6.6 ibid., p. 78.7 ibid., p. 53.

NOTES 197

8 C.MacCabe, ‘Theory and Film: Principles of Realism andPleasure’, Screen, XVII (3), 1976, p. 10.

9 T.Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New LeftBooks, 1976,) p. 43.

Chapter 6Science, Literature and Ideology

1 L.Althusser, For Marx (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane,1969), p. 166.

2 ibid., p. 167.3 Contained, respectively, in Althusser’s For Marx and Lenin

and Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1971).4 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, p. 158.5 From the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of

Political Economy, cited in T.B.Bottomore and M. Rubel(eds), Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and SocialPhilosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 67.

6 N.Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism(London: New Left Books, 1975), p. 28.

7 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, p. 138.8 Althusser, For Marx, p. 235.9 L.Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New Left

Books, 1976), p. 56.10 See, in particular, Althusser’s essay on ‘Marx’s Relation to

Hegel’ in Politics and History (London: New Left Books,1972).

11 This argument is outlined most fully in L.Althusser, ‘TheConditions of Marx’s Scientific Discovery’, TheoreticalPractice, 7/8, 1963.

12 The first of these is in For Marx; the others in Lenin andPhilosophy.

13 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, p. 206.14 ibid., p. 204.15 ibid. 16 ibid., p. 203.17 ibid., p. 219.18 ibid., p. 205.19 ibid.20 There is, in this respect, a close relationship between

Althusser’s position and that of such theorists as Julia


Kristeva who, working in the orbit of Jacques Lacan’s re-reading of Freud, have sought to reveal the mechanisms bywhich, at the level of the psyche, literary works disrupt orunhinge the mental grip of ideological categories.Unfortunately, an examination of these relationshipswould take us beyond the boundaries of this study. For anintroduction, however, see R. Coward and J.Ellis,Language and Materialism (London: Routledge & KeganPaul, 1977).

Chapter 7The legacy of aesthetics

1 L.Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (London: New LeftBooks, 1971), p. 206.

2 ’An Interview with Pierre Macherey’, Red Letters, no. 5,Summer 1977, p. 3.

3 F.Mulhern, ‘Marxism in Literary Criticism’, New LeftReview, 108, 1978, p. 82.

4 For a further development of this perspective, see B.Hindess and P.Q.Hirst, Mode of Production and SocialFormation (London: Macmillan, 1977).

5 See J.Rancière, ‘ZOn the Theory of Ideology’, RadicalPhilosophy, VII, Spring, 1974. See also P.Q.Hirst,‘Althusser and the Theory of Ideology’, Economy andSociety, V (4), 1976, p. 397.

6 See Althusser’s Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New LeftBooks, 1976).

Chapter 8Work in progress

1 V.Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ in L.T.Lemon andM.J.Reis (eds), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 18.

2 T.Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New LeftBooks, 1976), p. 42.

3 F.Mulhern, ‘Marxism in Literary Criticism’, New LeftReview, 108, 1978, p. 78.

4 Eagleton, op. cit., p. 101.

NOTES 199

5 ibid., p. 48.6 ibid., p. 53.7 ibid., pp 166–7.8 ibid., p. 180.9 ibid., p. 181.

10 ibid., p. 180.11 ibid., p. 125.12 ibid., p. 126.13 ibid., p. 181.14 ibid., p. 77.15 ibid., p. 177.16 ibid., p. 98.17 ibid., pp 83–94 for Eagleton’s discussion of Macherey.18 P.Macherey, ‘Problems of Reflection’ in Literature, Society

and Sociology of Literature (University of Essex, 1977), p.52.

19 ‘An Interview with Pierre Macherey’ in Red Letters, 5,Summer, 1977, p. 3.

20 P.Macherey and E.Balibar, ‘Sur Littérature comme formeidéologique: quelque hypotheses Marxistes’, Littérature,14, 1974.

21 ibid.22 R.Balibar, ‘An Example of Literary Work in France:

George Sand’s “La Mare Au Diable”/“The Devil’s Pool”of 1846’, in F.Barker et al. (eds), The Sociology ofLiterature: 1848 (University of Essex Press, 1978), p. 28.

23 See, for example, T.Davies, ‘Education, Ideology andLiterature’, Red Letters, 7, 1978.

24 R.Balibar, op. cit., p. 42.25 ‘An Interview with Pierre Macherey’, op. cit., p. 7.26 R.Balibar, op. cit., pp. 29–30.27 ibid., p. 35.28 XIth Thesis on Feuerbach, The German Ideology

(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965), p. 667.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

MY concern in this Bibliography is simply to guide thereader who is interested in following up the debatesintroduced in this study. It falls into three sections. In thefirst, I list those works of the Russian Formalists which aremost easily available in English translation together withdetails of the most easily accessible commentaries on theRussian Formalists. I have, for purposes of convenience,included the works of Valentin Vološinov and MikhailBakhtin in this section. Readers interested in the moregeneral contribution which Russian Formalism has madeto the development of structuralism and semiotics couldusefully consult the bibliography in Terence Hawkes,Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1977).

In Section two, I list the works of Louis Althusser together with those of such critics as Pierre Macherey andTerry Eagleton who, broadly speaking, share the sameconcerns. Some critical commentaries on the work ofAlthusser are also included. The reader who requires amore general introduction to Marxist criticism mightusefully consult Terry Eagleton, Marxism and LiteraryCriticism (London: Methuen, 1976) and thebibliography contained therein.

In both Sections one and two I have asterisked thosetitles which I think the reader could most usefullyconsult in order to familiarize him/herself more fullywith the two traditions concerned.

Finally, in Section three, I provide details of somejournals which the reader might find helpful if s/hewishes to keep abreast of current debates withinMarxist criticism.

Section one: Russian Formalism

*1 Bakhtin, M., Rabelais and His World (Cambridge,Massachussetts: MIT Press, 1968)

*2 Bakhtin, M., Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Michigan:Ardis/Ann Arbor, 1973)

*3 Bann, S. and Bowlt, S. (eds), Russian Formalism(Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973)

4 Brewster, B., ‘From Shklovsky to Brecht: A Reply’, Screen ,XV (2), Summer , 1974

5 Brewster, B. (ed.), ‘Documents from Lef’, Screen , XII (4)?1971

6 Brewster, B. (ed.), ‘Documents from Novy Lef’ , Screen ,XV (3) , 1974

7 Culler, J., Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguisticsand the Study of Literature (London: Routledge & KeganPaul, 1975)

*8 Eichenbaum, B., The Young Tolstoy (Michigan: Ardis/AnnArbor, 1972)

*9 Erlich, V., Russian Formalism: History, Doctrine (TheHague: Mouton, 1955)

10 Erlich, V., ‘Russian Formalism’, Jnl of the History of Ideas ,XXXIV (4) , 1973

11 Enzenberger, M., ‘Osip Brik, Selected Writings of theNovy Lef Period’ , Screen , XV (3) , 1974

12 Garson, J., ‘Literary History: Russian FormalistViews,1916–1928’, Jnl of the History of Ideas , XXXI (3) , 1970

13 Gourfinkel, N., ‘Les Nouvelles Méthodes d’histoirelittéraire en Russie’, Le Monde Slave , VI , 1929

14 Jakobson, R., Selected Writings (4 vols) (The Hague,Mouton, 1962-)

*15 Jameson, F., The Prison-House of Language: A CriticalAccount of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (NewJersey: Princeton University Press, 1972)

16 Kern, G. and Collier, C. (eds), The Serapion Brother hood:A Critical Anthology (Michigan: Ann Arbor/ University ofMichigan Press, 1975)

*17 Lemon, L.T. and Reis, M.J. (eds), Russian FormalistCriticism: Four Essays (Lincoln, University of NebraskaPress, 1965)

*18 Matejka, L. and Pomorska, K. (eds), Readings in RussianPoetics (Cambridge, Massachussetts: MIT Press, 1971).


This is the best of the available anthologies of Formalistwritings.

19 Pleynet, M., ‘The “Left” Front of Art: Eisenstein and theold “Young Hegelians”’, Screen , XIII (1) , 1972

20 Pomorska, K., Russian Formalist Theory and its PoeticAmbiance (The Hague: Mouton, 1968)

*21 Seldon, R., ‘Russian Formalism: An UnconcludedDialogue’, Literature, Society and the Sociology of Literature (University of Essex, 1977)

22 Shklovsky, V., A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1970)

23 Shklovsky, V., Zoo: Or Letters Not About Love (Ithacaand London: Cornell University Press, 1971)

*24 Shklovsky, V., Mayakovsky and His Circle (London: Pluto,1974)

*25 Thompson, E.M., Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism (The Hague: Mouton, 1971)

*26 Todorov, T. (ed.), Théorie de la littérature: Textes desformalistes russes (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1965)

27 Todorov, T., ‘Formalistes et Futuristes’, Tel Quel , XXXV ,1965

28 Tomashevskij, B., ‘La Nouvelle École d’histoire littéraireen Russie’, Revue des études slaves , VIII , 1928

29 Trotsky, L., ‘The Formalist School of Poetry’, Literatureand Revolution (Michigan: Ann Arbor/University ofMichigan Press, 1960)

30 Tynyanov, J., ‘The Notion of Construction’, New LeftReview , 43

*31 Vološinov, V. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language(New York: Seminar Press, 1973)

32 Vološinov, V., Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (NewYork: Academic Press, 1976)

33 Voznesenskij, A.N., ‘Problems of Method in the Study ofLiterature in Russia’, Slavonic Review , VI , 1927

Section two: Althusserian Marxism and literary criticism

*1 Althusser, L., ‘The Conditions of Marx’s ScientificDiscovery’, Theoretical Practice , 7/8 , 1963

*2 Althusser, L., For Marx (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane,1969)

BIBLIOGRAPHY 203

*3 Althusser, L., Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays(London: New Left Books, 1971)

4 Althusser, L., Politics and History (London: New LeftBooks, 1972)

*5 Althusser, L., Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New LeftBooks, 1976)

*6 Althusser, L. and Balibar, E., Reading Capital (London:New Left Books, 1970)

*7 Balibar, R., Les Français fictifs: le rapport des styles littéraires au français national (Paris: Librarie Hachette,1974)

*8 Balibar, R., ‘An Example of Literary Work in France:George Sand’s “La Mare Au Diable”/“he Devil’s Pool” of1846’ in F.Barker, et al. (eds), The Sociology of Literature:1848 (University of Essex Press, 1978)

*9 Balibar, R. and Laporte, D., Le Français National:Politique et practique de la langue nationale sur laRevolution (Paris: Librarie Hachette, 1974)

10 Callinicos, A., Althusser’s Marxism (London: Pluto, 1976) 11 Eagleton, T., Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the

Brontës (London: Macmillan, 1975) 12 Eagleton, T., Marxism and Literary Criticism (London:

Methuen, 1976)*13 Eagleton, T., Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left

Books, 1976). Two sections of this book were publishedearlier in New Left Review , 90 and 95

14 Eagleton, T., ‘Ecriture and Eighteenth-Century Fiction’ inLiterature, Society and the Sociology of Literature(University of Essex Press, 1977)

15 Eagleton, T., ‘Tennyson: Politics and Sexuality in ThePrincess and In Memoriam’ in F.Barker, et al. (eds), TheSociology of Literature: 1848 (University of Essex Press,1978)

16 Eagleton, T., ‘Marxist Literary Criticism’ in H. Scheff(ed.), Contemporary Approaches to English Studies(London: Heinemann, 1977)

17 Hall, S., ‘Culture, the Media and the “Ideology Effect”’, inJ.Curran, M.Gurevitch and J.Woollacott (eds), MassCommunication and Society (London: Arnold, 1977)

18 Hirst, P.Q., ‘Althusser and the Theory of Ideology’,Economy and Society , V (4) , 1976


*19 Macherey, P., A Theory of Literary Production(London:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) (First publishedin France, 1966)

*20 Macherey, P., ‘Problems of Reflection’ in Literature,Society and the Sociology of Literature (University ofEssex Press, 1977)

*21 Macherey, P.—an interview given in Red Letters , no. 5,Summer , 1977

*22 Macherey, P. and Balibar, E., ‘On Literature as anIdeological Form: Some Marxist Propositions’, OxfordLiterary Review , vol. 3, no. 1 , 1978

23 Mulhern, F., ‘Marxism in Literary Criticism’, New LeftReview , 108 , 1978

24 Rancière, J., ‘On the Theory of Ideology’, RadicalPhilosophy , VII, Spring , 1974

Section three: Relevant journals

1 New Left Review is well worth keeping up to date with. Inrecent years, most issues have contained some contributionto the debate about Marxism and literature and the reviewhas been invaluable for the service it has provided inmaking the works of continental Marxists available inEnglish translation. It is available from New Left Review,7 Carlisle Street, London, W1 V 6NL.

2 Screen, although primarily concerned with film theory, ishelpful at a theoretical level. Past issues contain some of theearliest translations of Formalist writing and the firstsustained analysis of them from a Marxist perspective.These have recently been collated into a reader, Cinema,Ideology, Politics, available from Screen. More recently, thejournal has been concerned to effect a dialogue betweenthe concerns of Althusser and the psychoanalyst JacquesLacan in the context of film theory. Screen is availablefrom The Society forEducation in Film and Television, 29Old Compton Street, London, W1 V 5PL.

3 Red Letters, the literature journal of the Communist Party,has recently been much concerned with the work ofAlthusser and Macherey. It is available from 16 KingStreet, London, WC2E 8HY.

4 Ideology and Consciousness is an independent criticaljournal founded to explore all of the debates implicated in

BIBLIOGRAPHY 205

the attempt to found a Marxist theory of ideology. Itsconcerns are to some extent derived from Screen. It isavailable from 1 Woburn Mansions, Torrington Place,London WC1.

5 The Oxford Literary Review is a journal concerned withcontemporary developments in literary theory. It isavailable from 2 Marlborough Road, Oxford, OX1 4LP.

6 University of Essex Conference: the University of Essexhas, in recent years, organized a conference on thesociology of literature. These, despite their name, haveproved to be fairly single-mindedly concerned with theproblems of Marxist literary theory. A selection of theconference papers is published each year. Two of thesehave already appeared—Literature, Society and theSociology of Literature and The Sociology of Literature:1848. A collection of papers relating to the 1978conference, organized around the year 1936, should beavailable by mid-1979. These publications give a livelysense of the sort of work that is currently in progress andof the sorts of concerns to which Marxist critics arecurrently addressing themselves. They can be obtainedfrom the Conference Committee, Department of Literature,University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ.


INDEX

Adorno, Theodor, 110Aeschylus, 74aesthetics, concept of, 6–8, 12,

14–15(see under Marxistcriticism)

Althusser, Louis, 8, 12, 38, 41,44, 105, 107, 114, 117,139, 140, 153–5, 161, 162.164;on ‘overdetermination’,41–42;on ‘expressive totality’, 42;on ‘practices’, 42–1,118–12, 141–2;on ideology, 42–2, 118–18;on art and literature, 44,128–6;on science, 126–20;critique of, 135–8, 141–42,157

‘Althusserians’, the, 12,16–17, 95, 107, 117, 138

Anderson, Perry, 109–3Arnold, Matthew, 173avant-garde, the, 24–4, 105,

146

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 88, 103–7;

historical poetics, 81,88–2;on Dostoevsky, 82–7;the ‘carnivalization ofliterature’, 89–4;on Rabelais, 90–99;‘literature’ as a historicallyspecific practice of writing,96–98, 103–6, 157–6;identity, 189(see under Vološinov)

‘Bakhtin school’, the, 17Balibar, Étienne, 12, 73–8,

169Balibar, Renée, on literature,

language and education,170–62;on George Sand, 174–5

Balzac, Honoré de, 74Barthes, Roland, 24, 29, 105belles lettres, 6, 20, 48, 89–3,

97, 104, 143, 157–6Benjamin, Walter, 110Bertolazzi, Carlo, 128‘bestrangement’, 66–4

(see underdefamiliarization)

Bolsheviks, the, 26, 30

207

Brecht, Bertolt, 28, 105, 112,128, 151;Mother Courage, 131

Brik, Osip, 32Bund des Proletarisches

Revolu-tionärerSchriftstellers, 39

Cervantes, Miguel de, 98Conrad, Joseph, 165Cremonini, Leonardo, 128criticism and politics, 146–7,

151–2, 158–7, 161, 177–8Culler, Jonathan, 63cultural practice, 11–12,

14–15, 45

‘defamiliarization’, 8, 21–5,28, 31–2, 52–61, 73, 89, 97,104–8, 140(see under Formalism)

Deighton, Len, 21diachronic/synchronic, 54–2,

59, 68, 77–4(see under Saussure)

Dickens, Charles, 151, 161,165

dominant, the, 56, 59, 72–7Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 82–89;

Brothers Karamazov, 61Dürer, Albrecht, 173

Eagleton, Terry, 8, 12, 105,135–9, 151, 156, 158, 161;on literary criticism,113–9;literary modes ofproduction, 162–2;literary value, 165–5

Eichenbaum, Boris, 17, 27,54–2, 65;

on Tolstoy, 66–4Eliot, George, 151Eliot, T.S., 165empiricism, 9–11, 50–9;

critique of, 115–8Engels, Friedrich, 109, 121Erlich, Victor, 28, 36, 54Eurocommunism, 147Expressionism, 39, 187n

Fielding, Henry, 13Formalism, Russian, 3, 8, 16;

history of, 17, 26;basic principles, 17–26;and structuralism, 28,37–6;comparisons with Marxistcriticism, 28, 38, 44–3,103–8, 130–4, 138–31,153–5;and Futurism, 31–5, 39,56;and ‘art-for-art’s sake’,32–2;problem of literaryevolution, 36–5, 65–4, 75;theory of science, 51;and New Criticism, 183n(see under literariness,literary system, literaryfunction)

foregrounding, mechanismsof, 33, 67, 130, 139

Freud, Sigmund, 192n

Goethe, Johann Wolfgangvon, 66

Gorky, Maxim, 30Goya, Francisco, 177Gramsci, Antonio, 111

208 INDEX

Hawkes, Terence, 76Heath, Stephen, 24–4Hegel, Georg Wilhelm

Friedrich, 39–8, 42, 107,111, 127(see under Lukács)

Hobbes, Thomas, 107Holbein, Hans, 175, 177Homer, 15, 74;

the Iliad, 75

ideology;Althusser on, 42–2,118–18;Vološinov on, 84–9

intertextuality, 62–63

Jakobson, Roman, 17, 27, 35,52, 59, 69, 76;on poetry, 20–21, 48;and Czech structuralism,27, 37, 48;on literary evolution, 36–6;on realism, 56

James, Henry, 165Jameson, Fredric, 68Joyce, James, 24, 161

Kafka, Franz, 15, 24Kant, Immanuel, and ‘art-for-

art’s sake’, 20, 26, 32–2Kautsky, Karl, 109Kristeva, Julia, 192n

Labriola, Antonio, 109Lacan, Jacques, 192nlangue, la, 45, 50, 54, 60, 65,

76–4, 139;critique of, 81–88(see under Saussure,synchronic/ diachronic)

Laporte, Dominique, 170, 173Leavis, Frank Raymond, 10,

73, 173Lef, 32–2Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 38Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 108–1linguistics, 4–5, 20

(see under Saussure,synchronic/ diachronic)

linguistics and literature, 38,45–6

literariness, 20, 35–4, 44,49–53, 59, 62–63, 72–7, 88,140(see underdefamiliarization, literarysystem)

literary criticism, discoursesof, 4, 6–9, 10, 15

literary function, 53–3, 59–65,72–7, 80, 104, 140

literary/non-literary, 7, 12,52–53

literary system, 60–8, 72–7,75, 80, 98, 104, 140, 145

literary tradition, 73–8literature, concepts of, 3–4,

6–9, 13–16Lukács, Georg, 12, 31, 110–3;

and Hegel, 39–8;on Tolstoy, 40;and Aristotelian concept ofmimesis, 41

MacCabe, Colin, 115Macherey, Pierre, 8, 12–13,

74, 77, 105, 131, 135, 144,156;on literary criticism,114–10;on science, 116;

INDEX 209

on Jules Verne, 131–5;against aesthetics, 168–7

Marcuse, Herbert, 110–3Marlowe, Christopher, 13Marx, Karl Heinrich, 39, 111,

121, 144;and the eternal value ofGreek art, 74;‘theoreticalbreak’, 107–109;science of history, 127–20

Marxist criticism, 3, 9, 12–13,16–17, 20, 27;early Soviet forms of,26–6, 30–31;dependency on bourgeoiscriticism and aesthetics,107–114, 116–10, 141–2(see under criticism andpolitics, Formalism)

mass culture, 14, 143Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 32Medvedev, Pavel, 28–8, 81,

88Mehring, Franz, 109Moscow Linguistic Circle,

17–20, 32Mukařovský, Jan, 33–3Mulhern, Francis, 145

neo-Kantianism, 183nNew Criticism, 20, 183nnouveau-roman, the, 24–4, 55Novy Lef, 32–2, 56

object, theoretical orconceptual, 50–9

Ortega y Gasset, José, 3, 57–5OPOYAZ, see under Society

for the Investigation ofPoetic Language

ostranenie, 56(see underdefamiliarization)

parole, la, 50, 77–2(see under Saussure)

Plekhanov, Georgy, 109popular culture, 14, 140Poulantzas, Nicos, 122problematic, 52–53, 77, 107,

110Proletkult, the, 30

Rabelais, François, Gargantuaand Pantagruel, 91–99

Rancière, Jacques, 148realism, 24–5, 30, 55–4, 72,

146reflection theory, 26–6, 40–9,

72, 135Richardson, Samuel, 13Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 24;

The Voyeur, 55Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 66Russian Association of

Proletarian Writers, 30

Sand, George, The Devil’sPool, 174–5

Sartre, Jean Paul, 110Saussure, Ferdinand de, 4–5,

45, 49–7, 54, 63;signifier/signified, 4–5, 44, 54,

58, 63, 83–8, 139;langue/parole, 45, 50,54–2, 60, 65, 76;theory of science, 49–8;

synchronic/diachronic, 54–2,59, 68;critique of, 65, 75–87

Schiller, Friedrich von, 111

210 INDEX

science, theories of (see underAlthusser, Formalism,Macherey, Saussure)

Scott, Sir Walter, 66Seldon, Ray, 56, 81semiotics, 28, 84, 105Shakespeare, William, 13, 74,

146Shklovsky, Viktor, 17, 27, 29,

35, 56–5, 65, 130, 156,157;on Laurence Sterne’sTristram Shandy, 24;art-for-art’s sake, 25–5, 32;canonization of the juniorbranch, 61–9;theory of prose, 185–2n;Serapion Brotherhood,187

signification, 5, 21, 26, 72Skaz, 82Social formation, 38, 41–43,

49, 118–12Society for the Investigation of

Poetic Language(OPOYAZ), 17–20, 32, 49

Spinoza, Benedictus de, 149Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle),

66Sterne, Laurence, 66;

Tristram Shandy, 24structuralism, 27–7, 37–6,

45–5, 105;critique of, 75–77

synchronic, 54–2, 59, 68, 77–4(see under Saussure)

Tel Quel, 105text, metaphysic of, 63, 75,

159–8, 169–8, 174, 177

Todorov, Tzvetan, 28, 35,76–1

Tolstoy, Leo, 40;Sevastopol Sketches, 66–4

Trotsky, Leon, 109;on Russian Formalism,29–9

Twain, Mark, The Adventuresof Huckleberry Finn, 22–2

Tynyanov, Jurij, 17, 35, 60–8,72;on literary evolution, 36–6

Vološinov, Valentin, critiqueof Saussure, 81–89;on ideology, 84–9;on identity, 189n(see under Bakhtin)

Volpe, Galvano della, 110

Williams, Raymond, 13–15,84

world-view analysis, 40

zaum poetry, 26, 33Zhdanov, Andrei, 27

INDEX 211

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