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Imaginary Islands and Turkish Dogs: İstasyon and the Ethics of Care

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Towards the end of the novella “İstasyon” (Metis 2020) by Birgül Oğuz, the protagonist Deniz looks at an illustration of a beach cabin drawn by her niece Elif who had been staying with her. She examines it carefully, turning the image to the side, and upside down, but still cannot tell whether footsteps drawn in the snow lead towards the cabin in the painting, or away from them. This quiet inscrutability, the serene silence of an artists’ motivations, makes her break down and cry.
We as readers are given just such an opportunity to sit with ambiguity throughout the novella. We can feel the care Oğuz has given to carefully finding a lightly tread pathway through her story, avoiding any excess facts or details. So much is left unsaid. In an interview with Nilüfer Kuyaş for the Kıraathane podcast (April 6 ), Oğuz admits to making the setting of “İstasyon” intentionally vague. Responding to Kuyaş’s comment that the story seems to have an attitude of “not wanting to give itself away,” (ele vermek) she affirms:

I didn’t want the story to signal to anything else besides its own spirit. Like, what time period, where, which country it takes place in…I didn’t want any of that to be front of mind.

(Hikayenin Kendi ruhundan başka bir şey işaret istemesini çok istedim. Yani, hangi dönemde nerede hangi ülkede geçiyor…bunlari ön plana çıksın istemedim)

Even though the story takes place on a small island located off the coast of a major city—which in most cases would be a dead ringer for Büyük Ada—the city is specifically referred to as “the capital” throughout the story almost as a way of assuring to readers that the city in question could not possibly be either Istanbul or Ankara. But any attempt at orienteering would be misguided. The spirit of the novel is mood not circumstance, place not geography. Without the need to know where she has come from and where she will go, we follow Deniz as she takes us with her on her long walks, wandering the landscapes of the island on small trails, through the forest and down the beach.
Oğuz is in good company as a Turkish author escaping to a speculative Island to avoid the burden of allegory and contemporary politics. The effort that both Pamuk and Oğuz have in explaining that their islands are not necessarily perfect stand-ins for Turkey is not due to faults of imagination or writing skill. It has everything to do with the suffocating, zero-sum cultural politics on the domestic front, and the restrictive, national-allegory framing forced on much of global literature on the international front. We should celebrate Pamuk’s Minger Island as it joins the ranks of countless other fictional geographies, those like Moore’s Utopia, Stephenson’s Treasure Island, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, and T. Hardy’s Wessex, as Bengü Vahapoğlu put it in a recent tweet. These types of fictional geographies are meant precisely as a way of giving breathing room for contemplation, a healthy dose of cognitive estrangement for thinking through the circumstances of the worlds we live in, without the immediate need for them to correspond to historical and political facts. The ambiguity is the point.
Likewise, Oğuz’s Istasyon is precisely about learning to love and to respect others even when they are inscrutable. This goes for people themselves as much as their art. That is to say, how should we care for others without requiring them to explain themselves? How do we give others space and not ask them to ‘give themselves away’? This is not just physical space, but mental and emotional space as well. Deniz comes to house sit for her friend Nihal on the island in order to get some alone time, but even from far away Nihal sends a string of e-mails to check in. Although they clearly come from a place of attentiveness and concern, they annoy Deniz. When she doesn’t immediately respond, Nihal asks another woman, Bahar, to come check on Deniz in person. Bahar understands the imposition, and tells Deniz as much.

“You feel like you’re being inspected . And you’re right to”
(“denetleniyormuş gibi hissediyorsun. Haklısın da.”)

The residents of the island all seem to have noticed Deniz walking around, and one even castigates her for being too lost in thought. Deniz doesn’t need to be checked on, she needs to be cared about enough to be left alone.
For her part, Deniz tries her best to exist alongside others, to care for them even, without asking them to answer to her. Elif comes to stay with her, and the child is almost totally silent, constantly looks at her phone, and Deniz struggles through the novel to find a way to relate to her. But nonetheless, Deniz’s actions show that she understands the dignity of not having to explain oneself, and that some of the most perceptive and attentive care is often silent. Deniz has this same approach with non-human others as well. She befriends a local dog named Arkadaş, who begins to accompany her on her long walks around the island, and who will even come in to sleep by the fire. But Deniz also lets Arkadaş come and go as she pleases, often leaving to go sleep in her own spot outside. The quiet dignity that Deniz grants to the dog is one of the most affecting elements of the novella.
At a pivotal moment of confrontation between Deniz and her niece Elif, Arkadaş awkwardly comes and stands in between them. It isn’t clear what she is doing or what she wants. The narrative focuses specifically on Deniz as she tries to decide how to react to this sudden change in the dog’s temperament at such an inopportune moment. She vacillates between anger and affection, and eventually decides to just let Arkadaş stand there. She puts care in thinking about how to react to the inexplicable behavior of another, and realizes the best thing to do is let the dog be in her strangeness. This decision suddenly gives Deniz a moment of profound emotional release, as though the dog’s behavior offers a key to unlocking her own emotional inscrutability.
The ethics of care in this novella are deeply moving. They are also universal, or at least universally feminist. It is a story about the subtle moral stances one takes in interpersonal relationships, the characters navigating between dependence and interdependence on one another. Nothing about the people or their relationships in this book necessitated the story be set in Turkey. As an American reader, I would have no trouble imagining the story taking place in a fictionalized Puget Sound, or the Outer Banks, or even Galveston Island. We too have nosy neighbors, taciturn pre-teens, and women looking for the freedom to be left alone.
That is, however, except for one detail. There is one relationship of care in the novella that was decidedly Turkish, and it repeatedly snapped me back from the universal to the specific and from the speculative to the anecdotal: the way humans relate to Arkadaş. As I have written elsewhere, “Whereas Americans treat dogs like their own pampered, unconditionally loving children, a Turkish person can see a dog in the street, living independently in the liminal space between nature and domesticity and help them without the urge to become their exclusive owner.” Were “İstasyon” to have taken place in Yoknapatawpha county, for example, there would have been a moral panic about wild dogs on NextDoor. Arkadaş would have been sent to a shelter and adopted long before Deniz ever arrived at the island. It would have been impossible for Deniz, as an American, to bring herself to grant Arkadaş the autonomy of her own behavior. Whether dragging them onto flights or putting them into baby strollers, projecting neuroses onto our pets is a national pastime. We have a lot to learn on how to let dogs be themselves.
But this difference reminded me that speculative islands like Oğuz and Pamuk’s, and fictional geographies in general, are not meant to be anonymous and generic. They are meant to be uncanny and déjà vu. More than anything they provide plausible deniability. All of the ethnic and international politics of late Ottoman society are still taking place on Minger Island. Likewise, the sense of crisis-ordinariness and ever-present threat of violence against women which plague Turkey seem to lurk just off shore from Deniz on her island. This is the backstory we can infer while reading, but not the one we must. We are free as well to just focus on just as much as what Deniz tells us.
This is all the more reason why “İstasyon” should be treated with the dignity of a universal work of global fiction rather than a representative of the Turkish ethos. Readers from other countries should be granted the opportunity to read such a beautiful work of literature that simultaneously presents such a moral argument for care based on accepting others’, even non-human others, in their ambiguity. The book has much more to say when it isn’t having to explain itself.

 

 

Prospectus Defense Notes

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KB

  • Are you claiming that there is an evolution of sophistication between these novels?
  • When looking at the difference between MSA and dialect, it will be more useful to focus on lexicon (look at corpus material), syntax may not provide enough material, you might want to focus on key vocabulary as a way to get at multivocality

SS

  • What precisely are you arguing against? (gave common historiography about committed literature, maybe even more played out than I thought). There are already recent work in the last 10 years working to recuperate socialist realism (seems like the narrative I am working against isn’t specific or unchallenged enough)
  • There seem to be two different possible tacts here, 1) there is just the updated conversation about the avant-garde vs. socialist realism that happened in 1920-1950 USSR, and all of the ways that that debate has been replayed over time.2) But then there is the idea of social formations changing syntax and the attempt to highlight these changes in the text i.o.w. the literary equivalent of economic changes. Which one is it? Sounds very much like the modernism/realism debate is way beyond played out, and should remain in the background.
  • If looking at the political economy, at least for Egypt, it is of special importance to focus on the central role of cotton. Is there a way to think about literary debates and changes in political economy simultaneously?
  • What is the actual intervention, what do you want to reshape?
  • Language changing to describe changes in the countryside, then the city (forensics in a linguistic sense).

JO

  • Chapter 3 – seem to be taking on a lot, many novels, should the MSA debate be separated out?
  • Chapter 4 – no trauma studies included in the bibliography
  • I seem to be depending a lot on secondary sources for the lit crit aspect of things. Need to find more newspapers and correspondance, no good plan for 1st person research, read more and gender and language

NE

  • more systematic justification of what it is you are doing, are you looking at class or at power (the way you describe class seems to be closer to foucauldian power, need to be more explicit about the transformations both before and after the period 1950s-1980s
  • lot of people I am intervening against seem sort of like a strawman
  • maybe it’s a question of nationalist philology (not exactly sure what that meant)
  • need a more systematic map and survey of the fields looking at to see what’s actually missing
  • how do certain authors view their own work?
  • what are the breaks from the past pre-1950s, how is it different or unique from Soviet case
  • 50s-80s what new intervention what’s new about narration, what is revealed that is new, why this time period
  • J Dean stuff is a shift of theoretical approach and political belief
  • you should be looking more and country and city by WIlliams

final thoughts

  • the warrant must be much clearer and stronger
  • what is the state of the field that requires this intervention
  • is it changes to language?
  • is it changes in the political economy?
  • is it the modernism/postmodernism debate (it shouldn’t be)
  • what would you say to explain the importance of this work to someone not specifically interested in these novels, what would Jameson or Williams respond by saying “wow, I hadn’t thought of that”
  • The Arabic and Turkish each have different sides when it comes to experience with language, MSA vs. left/right language ideology
  • NATO vs. Soviet bloc as the global entry point for thinking about class and politics
  • “the NATO novel vs. the Pan-Arab novel”
  • These are Keynesian novels, state intervention as the framework, Soviet vs. NATO
  • politics different because of this
  • Keynesian era and its relationship to the state’s central role in policing language, there is this narrative that the state was the agent of linguistic change and that everything responded to it, that linguistic ideological rebellion was against the linguistic hegemony of the state, the state as producing a normative grammar to which everything else was a response, that there was standard language and then dialect, and that the novel was cast in this normative language. But these novels show language as imminant grammar, condensing all sorts of conflicts and power relationships, slipping between registers along a continuum, and that the line between fact and fiction is illusory.

conclusion

  • there is a concern about framing
  • thread language itself in the 1950s
  • different agents who all contribute to the changes in language, not just state project
  • one way to provide the historical background and context to the project could be the focus on changes in the language, make language change the historical object
  • perhaps reframe as political ideology and language ideology for which the novels are a case study
  • be precise about the intervention when you are saying something.
  • When you mention a thinker’s name, or drop a keyword, you are inviting in that entire debate and will need to respond to it, be well-versed in it, if you mention Gramsci, you have to be able to speak in-depth about it, it’s not a tactic of being aware of everything, it’s about being stragetic about which frameworks you choose and knowing them thoroughly
  • way to think of it what pisses you off? use that as a way to think about your intervention (mine so far have been strawmen)
  • state language policy does not equal language ideology

On August Star by Sonallah Ibrahim

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Sonallah Ibrahim: August Star

great article all about the novel with several academic sources.

Resources:

Politics, Discontent and the Everyday in Egyptian Arts, 1938–1966

Opaque and Transparent Discourse: A Contrastive Analysis of the «Star of August» and «The Man of the High Dam» by Son’ Allah Ibrahim — ﺣﺪﻳﺚ ﺍﻟﻌﺘﺎﻣﺔ ﻭﺣﺪﻳﺚ ﺍﻟﺸﻔﺎﻓﻴﺔ : ﺩﺭﺍﺳﺔ ﻣﻘﺎﺭﻧﺔ ﺑﻴﻦ ﺇﻧﺴﺎﻥ ﺍﻟﺴﺪ ﺍﻟﻌﺎﻟﻲ ﻭﻧﺠﻤﺔ ﺃﻏﺴﻄﺲ ﻟﺻﻨﻊ ﺍﷲ ﺇﺑﺮﺍﻫﻴﻢ
The Traumatic Subjectivity of Ṣunʿ Allāh Ibrāhīm’s DhātSonalla Ibrahim: Imagining stasisThe Experimental Arabic Novel: Postcolonial Literary Modernism in the LevantThe Imagination as Transitive Act: an Interview with Sonallah Ibrahim
Egypt in the Raw: Yasmine El Rashidi on Ibrahim’s novel The Smell of It
Profile: Egyptian Novelist Sonallah Ibrahim: Black Humor in Dark Times
Black, not Noir, review of ‘That Smell’ and ‘Notes from Prison’ by Adam Shatz
Ursula Lindsey: Egyptian writers and revolutions
Richard Jacquemond, Conscience of the nation

Gramsci’s Politics of Language

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Gramsci’s Politics of Language – Peter Ives

  • The last section of the prison notebooks it Is dedicated to grammar hey there is substantial evidence that the concept of hegemony it’s fundamentally rooted in Italian linguistics.
  • Gramsci’s approach to language and ‘matter’ does not assume that these two things are inimical nor does it  privilege one at the others expense.
  • Vernacular materialism is a version of linguistic materialism that invokes oxymoron to illustrate the assumed opposition between language and ‘matter’.
  • Gramsci in line with Louis Dupre and Raymond Williams, seeing language as cultural and material product of human activity rather than rarified thought.
  • Do not equate Progressive with consent and regressive with coercion. Coercsion and consent are dialectically related.
  • CHAPTER ONE
  • the manner in which a proposition functions must be placed in broad context, its ‘global signification’.
  • Imminent Grammar – Gramsci’s term for spontaneous grammar in popular use; parole.Normative Grammar – Gramsi’s term for standardized hegemonic language use; langue.
  • For Gramsci, normative grammar cannot be delinked from philosophy. Normative Grammar amounts to the exercise of power and law, it operates molecularly at that which creates the spontanous of imminent grammar. (i.e. The Indexical Order)
  • The normative grammar is the historical product of these pressures and struggles because ‘in language too, there is no parthenogenesis.’
  • Gramsci’s problem of hegemony: it is not a  relationship  between coercion and consent rather it is a question of the formation of consent and the role of coercion. It is impossible to separate those forces which act from above externally as a force from the movements of spontaneous organic formation of collective will.
  • CHAPTER TWO: BAKHTIN CIRCLE
  • Volosinov’s description of language as a site of class struggle analyzed as signs with various possible ‘accents’, meanings, and nuances.

Volosinov’s five basic propositions about language:

  1. language as a stable system of normatively identical forms is merely a scientific abstraction, productive only in connection with certain particular practical and theoretical goals. (common sense)
  2. Language is a continuous generative process implements in the social-verbal interaction of speakers.
  3. The laws of the generative process of language are not at all the laws of individual psychology, but neither can they be divorced from the activity of speakers. The laws of language generation are sociological laws.
  4. Linguistic creativity does not coincide with artistic creativity nor with any other type of specialized ideological creativity. But at the same time, linguistic creativity cannot be understood apart from the ideological meanings and values that fill it.
  5. The structure of the utterance is a purely sociological structure.
  • Bakhtin contra Stalin and centralization = heteroglossia
  • Gramsci contra facism and disorder = national progressive language
  • “A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought… What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic minimum of a common language, in the sense of a system of elementary forms (linguistic symbols) guaranteeing a minimum level of comprehension in practical communication. We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization”
  • defining heteroglossia as the manifestation of social diversity in language has two advantages 1) does not divorce language from everyday life 2) does not reduce heteroglossia as good democratic and monoglossia as bad and antidemocractic.
  • the sign exists in itself and also reflects (refracts) reality, ‘various classes will use one and the same language’, malleability or multiaccentual aspect of the sign is central to its capacity for further development: “The ruling class strives to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign, to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgments which occurs in it, to make the sign uniaccentual.”
  • The naturalization of language works in the interests of those who wish to maintain a national language—by methods Gramsci rejects— since it makes opposition to this language impossible to imagine.
  • The most significant difference between Gramsci and Bakhtin is that Gramsci believes in the possibility of an actual progressive unified language in which differences are held intact and not obliterated, in which different voices exist. Four Bakhtin, this type of unity and organization is certainly found in the field of literature with the unity of the novel. But it is an open question whether Bakhtin thinks we should place our faith in constructing such an open unity Internation or community of people.

Gramsci on Language and Grammar

  • imminent grammar means the grammar rules which naturally occur in any language regardless of its being regimented (Gramsci Reader 354)
  • normative grammar also functions simultaneously in society through reciprocal monitoring, teaching, and censorship (the indexical order)
  • written normative grammar always entails a political choice (there is no neutral promotion of Fusha that is not at the same time political, every lexical choice in Turkish is political)
  • “the idealist current… involves a return to old rhetorical conceptions, to words which are ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ in and by themselves, conceptions which have been glossed over with a new psuedo-scientific language. What these people are really looking for is an extrinsic justification of normative grammar.” SCW 184-5 (Q29-5)
  • “in reality one is ‘always’ studying grammar (by imitating the model one admires)

State and Class in Turkey – Çağlar Keyder

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Citation

Keyder, Çağlar. State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development. London u.a: Verso, 1987. Print.

Contents

1) Before Capitalist Incorporation
2) The Process of Peripheralisation
3) The Young Turk Restoration
4) Looking for the Missing Bourgeoisie
5) State and Capital
6) Populism and Democracy
7) The Political Economy of Import-Substituting Industrialisation
8) Crisis Dynamics
9) The Impossible Rise of Bourgeois Ideology
10) Conclusion as Epilogue

Author

History Professor

Context

Turkish history is so distorted by the lionization of Ataturk, by the ideology of nationalism, that it’s hard to see the very normal and very decisive class conditions that are at play underneath them.

Thesis

A bourgeoisie was missing for much of Turkish history due to the history of small-holding peasantry, the power of the bureaucracy, and the expulsion of the fledging christian bourgeoisie.

Methodology

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

Class interests in the style of the 18th Brumaire become clear and overwhelming once you can take a step back. Maybe the anxiety over the analytical explanatory power of class in comparison with race/gender is of a different scale.

Notes

1) Before Capitalist Incorporation

-Ottoman order was constructed onto Byzantine order, not feudal. small peasantry stayed intact. no slavery or serfdom.
-Byzantine land code: protect peasants’ landed and other property, use village as communal unit for taxation.
-Ottoman centralisation 3 centuries later restored basic contours of Land Code.
-later half of 19th century restoration of agrarian structure.
-Dispersed agricultural producers required parallel dispersion of mercantile activity.

2) The Process of Peripheralisation

-Tanzimat socialization took small holding peasants as an ideal.
-No arisotracy, everything based on bureaucratic position.
-Civil bureaucracy differentiated itself from religious officials in 18th century.
-Trade convention with England 1838 started Ottoman financial integreation with European system.
– Bureaucracy threatened by growth of bourgeoisie as christian intermediary class.
-Bureaucracy emerged as paternalistic defender of a normative social order while the public debt administration represented the rule of the market.
-important to distinguish between merchant capital (local labour for commoddities) and productive capital (purely monetary)
-Proletarianisation was unlikely because defended by bureaucracy, reluctance to sell land ownership to foreigners, and small holdings.
-No disposessed peasantry as a free proletariat.
-Foreign capital remained limited to trade-related activities.

3) The Young Turk Restoration

-Bureaucrats’ how life depended on state, so were all completely wrapped up in state-centered perspective.
-Young Turks could take over state mechanism but did not have a manufacturing bourgeoisie whose interests could be served through the construction of a national economy.
-When the CUP took power they had not discovered the social group whose interests would provide an orientation for future policies. They tried to safeguard the centrality of state power, it was this, not ideological consistency, which informed policies.
-CUP ascension occasioned blossoming of christian art and culture. But bourgeois freedoms was not assimilated by perspectives of the ruling class in a state-centric empire.
-Started to distrust christians especially after the Balkan wars. This is what left towards policy of Turkish nationalism.
-Bureaucracy established itself on top during WWI. Could have have been a class controlling the productive structure, but class struggle with the bourgeoisie was displaced ideologically to ethnic and religious conflict.
-Settled on Muslim merchants as class to back.
-Christian minorities eliminated by 1924, 90% of the pre-war bourgeoisie.

4) Looking for the Missing Bourgeoisie

-Islamic Ottomanism out after ‘Arab betrayal’, Turks aligned with Soviets, Anatolia became ideoligcal focus, attack by Greeks helped to unify the military-bureaucratic class.
-Power shifted from Istanbul to Ankara after parlimentary elections.
-Any changes would have to be around edges of relationship between bureaucracy and independent peasantry.
-no capitalism in agriculture, christian merchants refused Ottoman state

5) State and Capital
6) Populism and Democracy
7) The Political Economy of Import-Substituting Industrialisation
8) Crisis Dynamics
9) The Impossible Rise of Bourgeois Ideology
10) Conclusion as Epilogue

Stuart Hall Cultural Studies 1983

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Citation

Hall, Stuart, Jennifer D. Slack, and Lawrence Grossberg. Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2016. Print.

Contents

Lecture 1: The formation of cultural studies

Lecture 2: Culturalism

Lecture 3: Structuralism

Lecture 4: Rethinking the base and superstructure

Lecture 5: Marxist structuralism

Lecture 6: Ideology and ideological struggle

Lecture 7: Domination and hegemony

Lecture 8: Culture, resistance, and struggle.

Author
Stuart McPhail Hall, FBA (3 February 1932 – 10 February 2014) was a Jamaican-born cultural theorist, political activist and sociologist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.[1]

In the 1950s Hall was a founder of the influential New Left Review. At the invitation of Hoggart, Hall joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. Hall took over from Hoggart as acting director of the Centre in 1968, became its director in 1972, and remained there until 1979.[2] While at the Centre, Hall is credited with playing a role in expanding the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and gender, and with helping to incorporate new ideas derived from the work of French theorists like Michel Foucault.

Context

The publication of Cultural Studies 1983 is a touchstone event in the history of Cultural Studies and a testament to Stuart Hall’s unparalleled contributions. The eight foundational lectures Hall delivered at the University of Illinois in 1983 introduced North American audiences to a thinker and discipline that would shift the course of critical scholarship. Unavailable until now, these lectures present Hall’s original engagements with the theoretical positions that contributed to the formation of Cultural Studies.

Thesis
Throughout this personally guided tour of Cultural Studies’ intellectual genealogy, Hall discusses the work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson; the influence of structuralism; the limitations and possibilities of Marxist theory; and the importance of Althusser and Gramsci. Throughout these theoretical reflections, Hall insists that Cultural Studies aims to provide the means for political change.

Methodology

A very interesting de-sacralization of figures like Althusser, Williams, and even Marx himself in order to point out their methodology, historical/intellectual limitations, key insights, and contribution to major questions plaguing the Marxist tradition.
Key Terms

social determinations – less in the abstract, more as you approach historical conjuncture.

Criticisms and Questions

Notes 

Lecture 1: The formation of cultural studies

talks about the history of the new left review, the challenge of post-war consumer culture on challenging Marxist writ, and the base-superstructure question. Major inspiration and and methodologies are literary critical ones.

Lecture 2: Culturalism

this is an intellectual biography of Raymond Williams which, although highly critical, still celebrated his importance to cultural studies.

– changing focus of cultural studies from elite canons to popular traditions.

– social practices also include attempt to live socially in ways which reflect how we understand and experience our circumstances.

– distinctive culture emerges out of interactions between different social groups or social classes: that is the object of William’s analysis: structures of feeling that are reflected or expressed in different social practices.

-first chapter of “Marxism and Literature” on language.

-how to possibly deal with structure of feeling using base-superstructure

-“this is how history presents itself— as an undifferentiated set of interwoven practices.”

-dominant, residual, and emergent culture very important way to think about cultural change.

-dominant culture allows opposition to exist in the place it assigns

-makes a particular kind of break with the mechanistic definition of base and superstructure.

“to begin to generate notions of culture which are democratic, notions of culture which are popular, notions of culture which are materialist, is a real labour, and one wants to acknowledge the work and learn from it without swallowing the whole pill.”

 

Lecture 3: Structuralism

A beautiful summary of the history and approach of structuralism.

-starts with Durkheim looking at facts of social life rather than our ideas about them.

-Language, as primary symbolic system, gives clues to wider symbolic universe of cultures.

– Whereas language uses limited set of rules to come up with near endless combinations, the same is true to any social domain (mythology for example)

-over time structuralism becomes more interested in symbolic forms themselves rather than their relationship to social structures.

-structuralist methology is more intuitive than it pretends.

-Marxism and Levi Strauss connection: marxist project as a way to discover distinct social logics of difference social formations with underlying structure creating them.

-the use of linguistics as a rich generative metaphor enables semioticians to analyze the inventory of particular culture,

-all social practices are made meaningful not by language which expresses the world, but by languages which are able to produce meaning, enabling human societies to signify. social practices do not exist outside of the meanings which different societies give to them.

 

Lecture 4: Rethinking the base and superstructure

This lecture focuses on the concept of base/superstructure through Marx’s own thought, specifically by contrasting the much more theoretical german ideology and grundrisse intro (and communist manifesto) vs. the much more nuanced and historically specific 18th Brumaire.

Three main premises which distinguish Marx’s method: 1) all historical forms are historically specific 2) principle objects of analysis are laws, tendencies, and structures of a particular mode of production 3) human societies can only be understood as result of social organization and its dependency on modes of extracting means for survival from nature.

-Marx often elaborates complex ideas and then collapses them into single sentence or image.

-two objections to base-superstructure model: economic reductionism and class reductionism.

-false consciousness is a dumb idea, ideologies have something true about them, truths people recognize.

-need to remember Marx and Engels real struggle was against idealism, still a real pull into idealism built into academic life and the structure of western thought. If you let a materialist idea alone for just a moment, you find that it has slid over to idealism. Idealism is still the most powerful language available for talking about complexity.

 

-Engels tried to recognize polemical context of much of Marx’s writing – avoid epigones repeating as scientific truth what had been a vulgar joke in a political pamphlet.

– In Communist Manifesto classes are being continually split up until there are only two.

– 18th Brumaire explains how 1848 revolutions led to a man on a horse with a three-cornered hat.

– as you lower the level of abstraction, you come closer to the details of a particular concrete historical formation, and you have to bring in other determinations into discourse in order to make sense of what you’re talking about.

–Some of the so-called silences in Marx’s discourse [race, gender] are the result of the relevant level of abstraction rather than From the fact he thinks these other determinations are insignificant” -Stuart Hall in rethinking the base and superstructure

-It is against the proletariat that the bourgeois form a party built around a language of family ,law, order, and property using rural voters as base.  Proletariat is anarchist other.

– 18th Brumaire  built on analysis of social movements, social groupings, alliances, and blocs without clear class character, although intrinsic language remains decidedly materialist. 18th Brumaire offers alternative to base-superstructure metaphor without giving up the ground that the metaphor has won.

Lecture 5: Marxist structuralism

Lecture on the Althusserian break, talks a lot about how Althusser hardens distinctions and makes overly rigid distinctions/definitions, but has some invaluable contributions to Marxism including 1)the problem of the subject 2) nature of social formations 3) theory of determinations

Levels of Abstraction  

abstract levels of how surplus value is created

historical account of things like the factory laws, where far more specific determinations (political organizations, popular morals, etc.) come into play. Human agency depends on which level of abstraction that analysis is dealing with

Althusser points out Marx’s synchronic approach in mature works like Capital – we have sense of totality which is a complexly structured whole, irreducible to either humanism of historicism.

Articulates levels in the social formation: economic, politics, ideological, theoretical.

Develops non-reductionist ways of thinking about determinancy using: “overdetermination” and “relative autonomy”

displacement: the economic might be manifested in the political

structural autonomy as a concept is more coherent than relative autonomy, but less effective.

big takeaway from Althusser is that although society is a complex totality, it still has a definite structure with a “structure in dominance”, not just a random assortment of sociological empirical facts.

Althusser allows us to think about “difference” in a particular way. Post-structuralism only allows for difference (Foucault), plurality of discourses, going beyond the “unity in difference”. Althusser gives us “articulation”: the form of a connection which allows us to make a unity of two different elements under certain conditions. Difference in complex unity. So make sure to look at not the proto-Lacanian, neo-Foucauldian, pre-Derridian, Althusserian text “ideological state apparatuses” but more generative original essays in For Marx like “On Contradiction and Overdetermination”.

For revolution you need contradictions to build up and fuse into “a ruptural unity”.

Structures exhibit tendencies — lines of force, openings —which constrain, channel, and in a sense “determine”. But they cannot guarantee.

Lecture 6: Ideology and ideological struggle

Knowledge, whether ideological or scientific, has to be produced through a practice. It is not the reflection of the real in discourse, in language. Social relations have to be “represented in speech and language” to acquire meaning. Meaning is produced as a result of ideological or theoretical work. It is not simply a result of an empiricist epistemology.

“ideological state apparatuses”  has two points 1) purpose of ideology is social reproduction 2) made through interpellation. Most work has focused on only second part (Foucult on discourse, Lacan on unconsious processes)

Language and behavior are the media, so to speak, of the material registration of ideology, the modality of its functioning. We have to deconstruct language to understand the ideological thinking which are inscribed in them.

Does not explain why there is complacency even when the state is not dictating everything. Why do journalists choose their stories and viewpoints in a democratic capitalist society.

question of reproduction assigned to Marxist (male) pole and subjectivity to the psychoanalytic (feminine) pole.

It does not follow that because all practices are in ideology, that they are nothing but ideology.  Ideologies do not operate through single ideas, they are plural acting in discursive chains, in semantic fields, in discursive formations.

Social relations exist, independent of mind, independent of thought. And they can only be conceptualized in thought.

We need a much simpler and more productive way to think about ideolgy: the theory of articulation how ideology discovers its subjects rather than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable thoughts which belong to it. ideology empowers people, enables them to begin to make some sense of their historical situation, without reducing those forms of intelligibility to their socioeconomic or class location or social position.

“If you want to move religion, to rearticulate it in another way, you are going to come across all the grooves that have articulated it already.”

“The relationship between social forces and ideology is absolutely ideological”

The moment of historical formation is critical for any semantic field. Commonsense thinking contains what Gramsci calls the traces of ideology “without an inventory”

Field of the ideological is “relatively autonomous” field of constitution, regulation, and social struggle”. But it is not reducible to the simple determinancy of any of the other levels of social formations.

ideology does not only have the function of social reproduction, but sets limits to the degrees to which a society can reproduce itself. Ideology is shifting in a constant, undending process — what Volosinov called “the multiaccentuality of the ideological sign” of the “class struggle in language.”

Lecture 7: Domination and hegemony

wonderful intellectual history of Gramsci.

Ideology consists of two floors: coherent theoretical explanation of an ideology / its common sense practical consciousness. New ideologies must compete in a realm already filled with other popular conceptions and viewpoints.

common sense ideas are “themselves material forces”

consciousness is not an individual matter but a relationship between self and ideological discourses which compose the cultural terrain of a society. Hegemony entails the formation of a bloc, not the appearance of a class.

Victory is seizing the balance of power on each of the fronts of struggle. The balance of political, social, and ideological forces at each point in the social formation. Few in the left have understood, but the bourgeoisie had done beautifully.

Lecture 8: Culture, resistance, and struggle.

the field of ideological discourse are neither organized nor are directly reducible to economic class positions.

The Marxian Imagination: Representing Class in Literature – Julian Markels

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Citation

Contents

PART I: The Literary Representation of Class

  1. A Marxian Imagination
  2. Class in Dickens from Hard Times to Little Dorrit
  3. Representing Class in the Realist Novel

PART II: Some Consequences for Critical Theory and Practice

  1. “Socialism-Anxiety”: The Princess Casamassina and Its New York Critics
  2. The Gramscian Ordeal of Meridel Le Sueur
  3. Denying the Imagination in Marxian Cultural Studies: Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson

CODA: Imagining History in The Poisonwood Bible

Author

Julian Markels is professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University, Columbus, and the author of The Pillar of the World: “Antony and Cleopatra” in Shakespeare’s Development and Melville and the Politics of Identity: From “King Lear” to “Moby Dick”.

Context

In the trio of critical concepts — gender, race and class — that often recur within academic discourse, the notion of class is rarely paid more than lipservice. This is partly because both gender and race, while primarily being a focus of oppression, can also be celebrated positively as a locus of identity. Class relations, in contrast, always involve conditions of inequality, exploitation and expropriation. The issue of class in the final analysis also poses the question of power: who rules?This is also due to the fact that class in literature raises questions about class-consciousness, the social function of writing and the ideology of the text hardly favorite postmodern issues.

Thesis

Where earlier theorists have treated class as a fixed identity site, Markels sees class in more dynamic terms, as a process of accumulation involving many, often conflicting, sites of identity. Rather than examining the situations and characters explicitly identified in class terms, this makes it possible to see how racial and gender identities are caught up in the processes of accumulation that define class. Markels shows how a Marxian imagination is at work in a range of great literary works, often written by non-Marxists.

Methodology

Key Terms

imagination:
Another difficult problem, which this book addresses, is that of the nature of ideology. How for instance does ideology impact the daily lives of ordinary people? Raymond Williams, one of Markels’ s prime sources of critical inspiration, famously suggested the term ‘structures of feeling’ to capture this elusive relationship between life and ideas. Ideology is, according to Williams, a continuum of past, present and future, a subjective mixture of residual, dominant and emergent thoughts and emotions that affect our individual and social behavior. In his own more dialectical view of ideology that moves away from Williams’ ’empiricist subsumption of literature to sociology’ (114), Markels locates this most slippery of concepts within the imagination, in how we make sense of the world.

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

-the litmus test of realism is, rightly, the fictional representation of working-class characters. In many of the social novels discussed in the book, this involves either dull, slice-of-life versions of fictional reportage or the similarly reductive caricaturing of workers as either helpless victims of poverty or stainless steel proletarian heroes.
– On the understanding of class as a historically structured, socially invisible, overdetermined process of transient expropriation, I argue that the representation of class requires the abstracting power of imagination… Not being directly visible, this process can only be represented indirectly, and its indirect manifestations need to be represented with sufficient variety and scope to produce a literary structure through whose point of entry class is overtly thematized and not left to be retrieved from a political unconscious. (21)
-The circus in Hard Times represents just such an escapist alternative to the irreconcilability of class interest. In Little Dorrithowever, Markels argues, Dickens’ s potential as a revolutionary writer is fully realized through his clear and uncompromising image of capitalism as a prisonhouse of expropriation, both for the individual and for society as a whole.
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