Tag Archives: marxism

Marxism and Literature – Raymond Williams

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Chapter 4: “Ideology”

Ideology for Williams is an inherently problematic concept, which he thinks requires radical revision. He outlines three meanings the concept has had in Marxist theory:

  • (i) a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group;
  • (ii) a system of illusory beliefs – false ideas or false consciousness – which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge;
  • (iii) the general process of the production of meanings and ideas.

In one variant of Marxism, senses (i) and (ii) can be effectively combined. (55)

Part 3: “Literary Theory”

Chapter 1: “The Multiplicity of Writing”

this identification of art with “imaginative” skill involves a reduction of art to a series of forms labeled the proper objects of aesthetic experience. In literature this has resulted in the reduction of “literature” to specialized forms that obscure the multiplicity in types of writing practices: literature is “fictional” and not “factual,” it is “imaginative” and not “practical,” and it is not “subjective” rather than “objective.” Literature’s association with these concepts is specific to the capitalist era, and a Marxist literary theory must attempt to recapture the multiplicity of forms of writing outside of the categories left to it by bourgeois critics.

The Soviet Novel, History as Ritual – Katerina Clark

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Citation

Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981

Contents

 

Introduction: the Distinctive role of Socialist Realism in Soviet Culture

 

  1. Socialist Realism before 1932
  2. What Socialist Realism Isand What Led to Its Adoption as the Official Method of Soviet Literature
  3. The Positive Hero in Prevolutionary Fiction
  4. Socialist Realist Classics of the Twenties
  5. High Stalinist Culture
  6. The Machine and the Garden: Literature and the Metaphors for the New Society
  7. The Stalinist Myth of the “Great Family”
  8. The Sense of Reality in the Heroic Age

III. An Analysis of the Conventional Soviet Novel

  1. The Prototypical Plot
  2. Three Auxiliary Patterns of Ritual Sacrifice
  3. Soviet Fiction since World War II
  4. The Postwar Stalin Period (1944-53)
  5. The Khrushchev Years
  6. Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained?

Author

 

Katerina Clark is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She is author of Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution and coauthor (with Michael Holquist of Mikhail Bakhtin.

Context

Thesis

the Soviet novel “in terms of the distinctive role it plays as the repository of official myths.”

Methodology

Key Terms

Socialist Realism, the Master Plot, the Positive Hero, the “spontaneity”/”consciousness” dialectic, the “Great Family,”

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

 

middlebrow- more like police novel, rests on canonical examples

tools for studying medieval hagiography or other formulaic genres better suited than highbrow lit tools

question of extratextual meaning, aesthetics not important ideology is

started in 1932 with writer’s conference

canon

Gorky – mother, klim Sangin

Furmanov – Chapeau

Gladkov – Cement

Sholokhov – quiet flows the Don, virgin soil upturned

Ostrovsky – how the steel was tempered

Fadeev- The rout, the young guard

***

Master plot is a ritual in the anthropological sense, a focusing lens for cultural forces, parables which confirm Marxist-Leninist stages of history over course of Soviet novel the cliches represented different things.

[Patristic Texts]

Lenin 1905 – “Party organization and party literature” – foundational text, party-mindedness

Gorky’s mother as putative foundational text / Borges on Kafka: each writer creates his own precursors

1927- Stalin consolidates power

Gleichschaltung –  a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of society, “from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education”.

comic combination of verisimilitude and mythicization

bad because it’s schitzophrenic

German debates (Lukacs and Brecht) not found in USSR

topics @ the congres: form vs. content, bracketing of modernism

-Lenin and Stalin as classic texts, dismissal of use of dialect as alienating (peasantry)

-validity of realism and surpassing of critical realism, good and bad romanticism, sense of history and the new man

Trotsky – against neologisms and regionalisms

skaz – oral form of narrative

Babel – Odessa tales (dialects)

obsession with transparency

“a monologic dream of cultural and ideological homogeneity”

Skaz and experimentation of 20s came under strict militaristic regimentation in 1930s

 

***

 

-it makes (perfect) sense to study socialist realism “from the point of view of the semiotics of culture, to discriminate the meaning of texts and the tradition they form, as opposed to their brute structure, by appealing to differences in different culture systems.”

Antimonies of Realism – Fredric Jameson

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Citation

Contents

Author

Context

Thesis

 

to balance linear story-time with impersonal presence: realism’s attempted compromise.

Methodology

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

 

– THE ODD THING about literary “realism” is that it is not a descriptive term at all, but a period: roughly 1830–1895,

-Many classics of 19th-century realism would be conspicuously ruled out if plausibility were any criterion.

-realism becomes, in the folk vocabulary of everyday criticism, simply “the way that we used to do things.”

-This realism was supposedly built on “the transcendent importance of form, the incantatory power of language to reveal truth, the essential fullness and continuity of the self.”

-But there wasn’t subjective plenitude, characters were neurotic, Dickens characters were trager of economic roles.

-Realism is not a cultural logic, but instead multitasking, Realism was instead a period of uneasy transition between two types of narrative: the traditional forms of storytelling like the Bible or medieval romance, and new strategies for describing experience and sensation which were emerging in the 19th century. This struggle between showing vs. telling also had to do with the effort to illuminate historical processes: the attempt to make sense of the social world on the one hand, and the attempt to fully describe personal sensory experience and habits of mind on the other. The harsh truths of life vs. intense self-awareness.  It is more helpful to think about realism not as the unmistakeable presence of a set of classic features, but as an open-ended compromise, a tension arising between these narrative approaches.

– to balance linear story-time with impersonal presence: realism’s attempted compromise.

-realism consisted of a number of ambitious deployments and maneuvers to outflank the stalemated face-off between narration and description, story and scene.

-Realism’s antinomies are parsed in terms of three such unrepresentable projections: providence, war, and “staging our own present as historical.” All of these are untellable visions, but they have in common the collective that Utopia gropes to construct. Also, the titanic stature of Tolstoy’s War and Peace can be accounted for anew, as a book that tries to straddle all three straits: to be a historical novel about war, capped by a theory of historical causality.

“Jameson’s two poles of realism, the registering of affect and the unique destiny, suggest another (unmentioned) recent work: Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. All of the techniques of Scientology represented — the wall-touching, the unblinking confessional, the various tests of endurance, the states of inebriation — are certainly apparatuses of bodily specification and the discrimination of intensities; while the religious cult and its insertion into a thoroughly “periodized” (Hopper-esque) Americana evoke all of the problems of a collectivity (“The Cause”) and its emergence. The Master ignites all of these Jamesonian nodes — by way of L. Ron Hubbard’s own authorial proclivities, one could even make a connection to science fiction!”

– If there is to be, in Jameson’s phrase “realism after realism,” it will have to mean reclaiming motivation and decisions and the tracing of explanations, in whatever mode available, which will probably have to be invented.

 

Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form. – Anna Kornbluh

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Citation

Contents

 

Introduction: ‘A case of metaphysics’: realizing capital — Fictitious capital/real psyche: metalepsis, psychologism, and the grounds of finance — Investor ironies in Great Expectations — The economic problem of sympathy: parabasis and interest in Middlemarch — ‘Money expects money’: satiric credit in The way we live now — London, nineteenth century, capital of realism: on Marx’s Victorian novel — Psychic economy and its vicissitudes: Freud’s economic hypothesis — Epilogue: The psychic life of finance.

Author

Context

 

In close rhetorical readings of financial journalism, political economy, and the works of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, Kornbluh examines the psychological framing of economics, one of the nineteenth century’s most enduring legacies, reminding us that the current dominant paradigm for understanding financial crisis has a history of its own. She shows how novels illuminate this displacement and ironize ideological metaphors linking psychology and economics, thus demonstrating literature’s unique facility for evaluating ideas in process.

Thesis

 

reality of the financial capital is itself structured like a fiction.

Methodology

 

The realist novel engages economics neither via reference to economic content nor through its production and consumption in the market, but in its narratological, rhetorical, and temporal structures and the resonance, smooth or sticky, intensive of ironic, across those structures.

Key Terms

 

Reading – attending to the aesthetic material of literary language. to the historicist’s reduction of literature to discourse. I oppose deconstruction’s insistance on the irreducibility of tropes to intuitive ideas, and I work instead to encounter the material and process of literary thinking.

Social close reading – blending deconstructive techniques and the best historicist impulses to explore the intellectual and political force of literary forms that do not reiterate a preexisting world, but rather limn. ironize, and even unmake forms of worlding.

literature – a mode of thought structured by juxtoposition and condensation, by senuous syntheis and syncretic sedimentation. To pose the question “what connexion could there be?” between voices, motifs, temporalities, and images that and mobilized within one bounded work.

Criticisms and Questions

 

Book is mostly useful in showing a powerful approach to Marxist literary reading. Finding an object of study, and to offer a methodology of close reading.

 

For Kornbluh, realism written in the 19th-century blossoming of finance capitalism performs much of the same work as political theory. She works with a specifically Marxist framework, but instead of subjugating literature to a Marxist program, her version of “aesthetic mediation” finds similar historical, aesthetic, scientific, and political thought in Marx’s metaphors and in the critiques embodied in novels.

The idea that finance is the naturally complex lifeblood of our economy whose path only a rarefied group of white men can chart, and not the triumph of the middle man: that’s a trope. It’s a cultural narrative, with material consequences. It’s a cultural narrative that engages with the question of what is and isn’t real because, for example, only Goldman Sachs’s money was treated as real in the last crisis.

the realms of value, fiction, and language are inextricable from each other. Money is a real fiction, itself a representation, and as Kornbluh writes, it is like literature, “a kind of representation that makes a claim to value.” Money is “a claim to represent an abstraction that lacks ontological positivity, money contrives to effectuate the concrete existence of that abstract substance” that is value. It’s only in seeing this contrivance that we might see how we create value and what is realistically open to change.

Kornbluh wants to denaturalize one of the “seminal metaphors of late modernity”: the idea of “psychic economies.”

– What We Talk About When We Talk About Finance By Michelle ChiharaNotes

“By tracing the cultural circulation of two specific tropes–“fictitious capital–” and “psychic economy”–Kornbluh makes a compelling argument about the complex figurative ties that bind the realist novel to our understanding of both capitalism and the psyche. This exciting and original book will make us reconsider the novel’s cultural work as well as that of its criticism.”

-Mario Ortiz-Robles, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Notes

 

Introduction: ‘A case of metaphysics’: realizing capital —

realism is a destabalization of reified reality, victorian novel’s investigating financial capitalism’s parallel destabilizations.

the realism of capitalism is not a matter of mimetic recording, but rather of aesthetic mediation: “the only true social element in literature is the form” -Lukacs

The truly financial element in realism is the form. The realist novel engages economics neither via reference to economic content nor through its production and consumption in the market, but in its narratological, rhetorical, and temporal structures and the resonance, smooth or sticky, intensive of ironic, across those structures.

London, nineteenth century, capital of realism: on Marx’s Victorian novel —

For Marx, capital functions like a novelistic protagonist.

Two tropes in catpial: personification, the representation of an abstraction for a person, and metalepsis, the substitution of one figure for an another with which it is closely related. And the concert between these two concepts intone the concept of drive. Coats and linen are personified, but people are just trager, agents of the ur-person: capital itself. Capital is the subject in this world.

the psychic economy metaphor is arguably nothing other than the personification of capital.

the power of these metaphors show how Capital realizes its insights not argumentatively, but aesthetically.

 

The Debate on Classes – Erik Olin Wright

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Citation

Wright, Erik O. The Debate on Classes. Verso, New York;London;, 1989.

Contents

Author

Context

 

In the late 1980s in the United States trying to figure out how to incorporate the reality of the Middle class into a Marxist understanding of class.

Thesis

 

Methodology

 

A use of statistics and a questionnaire to try to map out mediary class positions. The book is a series of articles which debate back and forth the basic premise presented in the first article.

 

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

Lots of the interesting responses in this book of essays to Wright’s theory show just how tricky and difficult the question of class is. How does the relationship between empiricism and Marxism, Weberianism vs. Marxism (does it all have to lead back to the main antagonistic division between bourgeois and proletariat), how much do other forms of exploitation and oppresion like gender and race fit in to the schematic, etc.  couldn’t you use gender and race as other axis in the forms of exploitation? (the category of status exploitation)

 

In this equation (the commonality of material interests helps to explain the inherent tendency towards conflict between classes; the commonality of lived experience is how they develop common identities.) wouldn’t the first part, the tendencies, not be captured within the realm of consciousness at all? Isn’t it beyond individual consciousness, but something structural to a class?

Notes

 

A general framework for the analysis of class structure – Erik Olin Wright

-main sticking point of class analysis is the “embarrassment” of the middle class.

-how to restore exploitation at center of class analysis to accommodate the empirical complexities of the middle class.

-in state bureaucratic socialism, exploitation is based on burueacratic power: control over organizational assets.

-so two things to add in along with ownership of the means of production: skills and organizational assets.

Bourgeoisie Expert manager Semicredentialed manager Uncredentialed manager
Small employer Expert supervisor Semicredentialied supervisor Uncredentialed supervisor
Petty bourgeois Expert nonmanager Semicredentialed worker proletarian

 

X access is organization assets, Y is skill assets

-class alliances can take place among classes, but there are only certain combinations that are plausible. The more skilled and managerial, the more likely to support existing class relations.

 

Concept of class structure:

1) class structure imposes limits on class formation, class consciousness, and class struggle.

2) class structures constitute the essential qualitative lines of social demarcation in the historical trajectory of social change.

3) the concept of class is relational.

4) social relations which define class are intrinsically antagonistic rather than symmetrical.

5) the objective basis of these antagonistic interests is exploitation.

6) the fundamental basis of exploitation

 

-To save sociology from the sins of bourgeois thought and to save Marxism from the sins of dogmatism: the joining of statistical methods with conceptual rigour is the most effective way to accomplish this. Hard to suss out empiricism sing we can only see experiences (facts) in this causal chain:

mechanisms ====> Events ========> experiences (facts)

class consciousness (mechanisms) ====> attitudes (Events) ========> responses to questionnaire (experiences (facts))

 

competing models of consciousness formation:

 

initial model:

class structure =========> patterns of ideological class formation

alternative model:

ideologies of class =======> party strategies =========> ideological class formation

 

slight debate between Wright and michael Buraway about dogmatism and scepticism between marxism and empiricism.

impossible to view mechanisms or know if they really exist in the Real. Wright clarifies that there is an inherent tension between the psychological states required for revolutionary practice and scientific activity.

-class consciousness is not static and measurable by a questionaire. both structures and ideologies need to be seen in their historical and conjunctural specificity. May be contradictory. Many social phenomenon go into an individual’s consciousness. Not only determined by individual ideas about capital, but also by attitudes toward unions, women, migrants, blacks, gays etc.

-politics and ideology are only relatively autonomous from conjunctural class interests, but her it is just this autonomy that makes conjunctural class interests deviate from true class interests.

LaClau and Mouffe: concepts like objective class interests lack “any theoretical base whatsoever” and the search for the working class is a “false problem.” the social is open and made through discourse, class is just one identity, and not even priveleged.

-objective class interests tied up with teleology, has become one of the bad “-isms”

-capitalists have objective interest in capitalism, new middle classes have interest in statism, and proletariat in full communism.

-analysis of class structure can not be used to find “take off areas” of teleological historical processes or for rational objective interests. There are other dimensions at play.

-Weberian analysis of classes does not need the basic class schism behind it between who own the means of production.

-Middle class are exploited in terms of capitalist mechanisms of exploitation, and exploiters in terms of the one of the secondary mechanisms of exploitation. with hegemony of bourgeoisie middle class tie their class interests to them.

-the commonality of material interests helps to explain the inherent tendency towards conflict between classes; the commonality of lived experience is how they develop common identities.

-Lived experience and Habitus help to explain the source of variation within a class rather than a criterion for class as such.

-the relationship between class structure (exploitation and interests) and class experience (workplace practices and identity formation) which then can be treated as a theoretical problem in its own right.

imagine a triangle:

capitalist mode of production                           simple commodity production

bourgeoisie

small employers

 

managers and supervisors                              petty bourgeoisie

 

semiautonomous employees

 

proletariat

 

state mode of production (and the class position of the bureaucracy) has been notoriously undertheorized.