Tag Archives: representation

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature – Franco Moretti

Posted on by

The bourgeois was always, as Franco Moretti puts it, “an enigmatic creature, idealistic and worldly,” and the form that best mapped out the boundaries and the gray compromises between these poles of bourgeois identity was the realist novel. In The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature, Moretti shows how the novel as form served as the capacious and adaptable home within which the bourgeois could both assert and camouflage itself.

With the passing of the last remnants of feudal society, bourgeois culture had the difficult job of asserting its specificity while finding a language through which to speak for the whole social order.

His method is to track the significance of particular keywords, and the texture of particular kinds of grammatical form

Long before the pioneering sociologist Max Weber identified “instrumental reason” as a key characteristic of bourgeois culture, Defoe created a syntax for it. Robinson’s labors are nothing if not efficient. What is useful is beautiful on the island of bourgeois thought, and what is both beautiful and useful is without waste. The world is nothing but a set of potential tools and resources. “The creation of a culture of work,” Moretti claims, “has been, arguably, the greatest symbolic achievement of the bourgeoisie as a class.”

The bourgeois self sees a world of particular things as if they were put there to be the raw materials of the work of accumulation

“[F]illers rationalize the novelistic universe,” Moretti writes, “turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.” This is the world that Marx describes, in Capital Volume 1, as appearing as an “immense accumulation of commodities.” The creeping welter of filler, present in Defore, will reach its apogee in Flaubert. It is the bourgeois novel’s one great narrative invention

In the novel, subjectivity decreases and objectivity increases. Description becomes analytic rather than romantic, induction rather than ornament. Or so it appears. Moretti: “description as a form was not neutral at all: its effect was to inscribe the present so deeply into the past that alternatives became simply unimaginable.” This is the novel’s conservative side. While the bourgeois in the economic sphere is a demiurge of industry and accumulation, in the political and cultural sphere he stands, above all, for the solidity and persistence of all things.

Adjectives like “hard,” “fresh,” “sharp,” or “dry” express a judgment without a judge, the author having retreated behind the screen of her or his putatively neutral prose. This, for Moretti, is the real significance of the bourgeois novel’s free indirect discourse, that strange point of view characteristic of the novel, which hovers close to a character but is not identical to it: “It is as if the world were declaring its meaning all by itself

The bourgeois realist novel went through three phases: ascendant, hegemonic, and a third, where it falls apart. The boom in the novel corresponds to the aftermath of the French Revolution; its decline to the rise of imperialism, and the emergence of social questions that — with rare exceptions, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — it was not able to encompass. The novel then split into two parallel streams. On the one hand, the genre novel, which presses on into uncharted territory, addressing a mass audience on themes the realist novel had only touched on: class struggle, the death of God, the industrial revolution, the colonial other. On the other, the modernist novel, from Joyce to Platonov, plays out a series of variations on the formal properties inherent in the novel as form, while at the same time trying to speak to the shock of the historical event which now outstrips the speed and scope of the trauma of the French Revolution

 

The Soviet Novel, History as Ritual – Katerina Clark

Posted on by

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.”

The Abyss of Representation – George Hartley

Posted on by

Citation

Contents

 

  1. Representation and the Abyss of Subjectivity 1

 

  1. Presentation beyond Representation: Kant and the Limits of Discursive Understanding 22

 

  1. The Speculative Proposition: Hegel and the Drama of Presentation 53

 

  1. Marx’s Key Concept? Althusser and the Darstellung Question 84

 

  1. Figuration and the Sublime Logic of the Real: Jameson’s Libidinal Apparatuses 127

 

  1. The Theater of Figural Space 182

 

  1. Can the Symptom Speak? Hegemony and the Problem of Cultural Representation 235

 

Author

Context

Thesis

 

Hartley describes how modern theory from Kant through Lacan attempts to come to terms with the sublime limits of representation and how ideas developed with the Marxist tradition—such as Marx’s theory of value, Althusser’s theory of structural causality, or Zizek’s theory of ideological enjoyment—can be seen as variants of the sublime object. Representation, he argues, is ultimately a political problem. Whether that problem be a Marxist representation of global capitalism, a deconstructive representation of subaltern women, or a Chicano self-representation opposing Anglo-American images of Mexican Americans, it is only through this grappling with the negative, Hartley explains, that a Marxist theory of postmodernism can begin to address the challenges of global capitalism and resurgent imperialism.

 

Methodology

 

Endless pages of talking

 

Key Terms

 

Hegel’s Absolute Negativity

 

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

 

  1. Representation and the Abyss of Subjectivity

 

-The abyss is not a problem of the subject, as the result of the subjects limited capacity for knowledge Beyond sensory experience, but the very ground of the subject: this paradox of a grounding Abyss means nothing more than that the subject is this space of inclination ability as such, the problem residing rather on the side of substance.

-Clear is no  ideology/ representation  without the category of the subject:  the category of the subject is constituentive of all ideologies, But the category of the subject is constituent of of all ideologies insofar as all ideologies has the function of constituting concrete individuals as subjects.

– subjectification/ interpolation is nothing but the attempt to cover over the traumatic recognition of the abyss of subjectivity as such.  this confrontation with the traumatic thing is the subject as such. interpolation, on the other hand, is the exact attempt to avoid this confrontation.

– the job of idealogy criticism is to identify the position in the other that functions as the desire that the hysteric desires to please.

 

  1. Kant

– if one agrees with Jameson that the sublime object for us in this post modern age is no longer nature but the vast network of global capital this in no way changes the fundamental structure of the experience of the sublime as Kant outlines it in the critique of judgment. Kant Conte says judgment is a bridge that spans the abyss between the real and the sensible.

– kant’s conception of the negativity of the symbol never the last prepares the way for hagel’s project of dialectical negation. What is presented in the symbol is symbolism is a mode of thinking the limits of thinking itself of the negative relationship between discursive understanding and its own discursive limits.

– because of the limits of discourse language can never give a pure representation of super sensible objects it’s symbolic presentations always carry and excessive element within them an unintelligible thing at the heart of the presentation of the supersensible that prevents language from ever becoming a closed symbolic system.

 

  1. Hegel

– Speculative language is not some foreign word from above that captures in itself the imported means to convey because hegel’s theory of language denies any such immediacy. The sign must be emptied out, become some stupid contingent and meaningless thing devoid of any associations with a particular image or intuition and through the radical negativity of it stupidity embody the point of articulation of the subject. Speculative language is ordinary language only more so. Our ordinary language is more than sufficient to provide us with an adequate presentation of the drama of the speculative.

 

  1. Althusser and the Darstellung Question

 

If we are to analyze economic or social or any illogical phenomena in terms of the mode of production with which they operate then we must construct a concept capable of conveying the type of causality at work in the whole.

– the task facing readers of marks Althusser implies is to purify the Marxist text of its pre-scientific metaphors its Figures it’s vorstellungin its dependence on representation.

-Three Notions of Darstellung operating here at once:

-Kant’s concept of versinlichung with its emphasis on the flushing out of the concept.

– the Hegelian sense of scientific method the motive Exposition adequate to the nature of the dialectic

– A sense that I have yet to explore and Althusser points to above the Marxist sense of the presentation of value in commodity production that has a relationship to but cannot be reduced to Consciousness which must rather be seen as an objective historical structural effect.

-The question at stake here is an epistemological 1 concerning our ability to read the structural determinations of the value relation or relation that appears in a mystified form in a society based on commodity production. The key is to see this mystification, however, not as a problem of our ability to see, of our consciousness, of our any law gical shortcomings, of our failure to see what lies before us and is simply hidden beneath a mystifying exterior but to see this mystification instead as a structural effect, and effect of the very structure of commodity production itself. Fetishism is an objective effect of the structure of the value of relation in commodity production, not a subjective illusion or shortcoming. We cannot correct this problem then by learning to see what is there before us but hidden from our view. We must instead learn to read the absences existing in the very fullness of our vision.

– Darstellung then is the presentation in the form of value- by way of the value form- of abstract human labor as it is materialized in the body of the commodity.  The relative form is nothing but the impossible identity of value to itself the void of its own inadequacy. Value must become something other, it must become the value thing that exists apart from its own value being.

– value cannot present itself in this opposition between exchange value and use value because it is not a property specific to the single commodity what a social relationship articulated through the whole commodity structure of which the single commodity is only one part. This structural causality can only operate because of the exceptional one, the commodity excluded from the structure of values. Existence of the structure can only be presented by an element excluded from itself.

– we have arrived at Marxist description of structural causality through the concept of presentation. Value is the effect of structure in that the structure presents itself, through the elaboration of the value form, as the articulation of homogeneous human labor power.

 

  1. Jameson’s Libidinal Apparatus

 

-The political unconscious is the picture developed their of some collective Unity of Consciousness. Only a collected Unity- weather that of a particular class, the proletariat, or of its organ of Consciousness, the Revolutionary party- can achieve the transparency required for the subject- here a collective social political subject- to be fully conscious of its determination by class and be able to square the circle of an illogical conditioning by sheer Lucidity and The Taking of thought. (PU 283)

-The political unconscious is not much concerned with the conditions of possibility of such Lucidity but rather with the mechanisms whereby we attempt to square the circle of 80 illogical limitation by projecting a world in which our actions and values would at an a seemingly Timeless and natural legitimacy, a process of wish-fulfillment that Jameson models on Freud’s development of that Concept in the interpretation of Dreams: figuration. If we are to become aware of class the classes already must be in some sense perceptible as such but this requirements can be fulfilled only when the social conditions of our daily lives had developed the point at which underline class structures become representable in tangible form.

–” the relationship between Class Consciousness and figurability in other words demand something more basic than abstract knowledge and implies a mode of experience that is more visceral and existential than the abstract certainties of economics and Marxian social science.”

-This visceral and existential motive experience is the demesne of culture where the classes have to take on the function of characters. In other words at the most basic level class Consciousness is always allegorical each class achieving figure ability to the extent to which it can represent it unconsciously through ART narrative and other idiot logical Productions as a character with its own particular qualities and personality. Figuration then is essentially a mode of allegorical personification.

– all interpretation is it base allegorical various interpretive models functioning not so much as theories per se but rather as unconscious structures and so many afterimages and secondary effects of a given historical mode of figuration. all allegorical methods are unconscious attempts to articulate a system for representing history.

– The political  unconscious it should be remembered is ultimately the process of a figurative meditation on the destiny of community.

Historical –  the ideology of form as a matrix of symbolic messages related to different coexisting modes of production

Social-  The ideologeme as a unit in class discourse

political – Individual cultural object as a symbolic Act.
– figuration is necessary because the process of cultural revolution is not a positive empirically available event but rather a structural limitation on how we perceive ourselves and our relationship to the larger social totality that determines us.

– this search for ways of seeing whether conscious or unconscious is the process of cognitive mapping by which we obtained the figures necessary for locating ourselves in history.

– allegorical criticism does not so much interpret a given subject matter through the terms of another Master narrative- where interpretation is seen as the unearthing of some deeper meaning below the surface- as rewrites that subject matter in terms of a different code. Allegory is a process of diversion and reinvestment: the initial terms are diverted from their surface function into the service of other idiot logical functions in reinvested by what we have called the political unconscious.

– this process is not internal to me as an individual but is made possible by the objective figural apparatus available to me. In this way the text draws the real into its own texture as its imminent subtext but not as something external orange extrinsic to the text but something born within and vehicle ated by the text itself interiorized in it’s very fabric in order to provide the stuff on the raw material on which the textual operation must work.

– the literary work or cultural object brings into being that very situation to which it is also a reaction. it articulates its own situation and texture Eliza’s it there by encouraging and perpetuating the illusion that the situation itself did not exist before it that there is nothing but a text.

– ideologies is not something internal to individual consciousness what is an external effect of certain social practices that are displayed by staged by condensed in libidinal apparatuses.

-” it is not terribly difficult to say what is meant by the real in lacan. It is simply history itself”

– Lacanian split subject : The acquisition of language functions as a kind of primary repression, a repression of the imaginary logic of identification, which constitutes the subject as a divided, mediated by language because the subject can never coincide with the signifier that represents it. But binary logic of the imaginary is broken up by the introduction of this mediating third, the other, the unconscious, language itself.

– History is not a text not a narrative but an absent cause it is inaccessible to us except in textural form.

– language manages to carry the real within itself as its own intrinsic or imminent subtext.

– the literary work or cultural object brings into being that situation to which it is also add one in the same time or reaction.

– the difference between the sublime object for Kant and that for Hegel is that the sublime object for Kant is simply the phenomenal object that stretches are representative faculties beyond their limits while the sublime object for Hagel is the obscene embodiment of the nothing Beyond representation the embodiment of radical negativity. We experience the sublime when we come into contact with the miserable object through its it’s very wretchedness embodies this negativity.

– what unites the three levels is the concept of contradiction: at the first level the text functions as a symbolic act that seeks a figural resolution to some Unthinkable social contradiction. At the second level text functions as an ideologeme an utterance in the larger dialogue between contradictory class discourses and at the third level of the text functions as the ideological sedimentation at the level of form or genre itself of the larger process of cultural revolution, the ongoing contradictory process in which historical classes vie for hegemony.

– we cannot simply identify class types in novels because such a position treats class identification as an inert given line and tact outside the text where as the task is to show the textual reflection as constituent of the value of this outside as an allegorical process that produces alternatives to empirical history by emptying them of their finality Andrey orchestrating them in terms of some master fantasy structure of Phantasm.

– the real, this absent cause, which is fundamentally unrepresentable and non-narrative and detectable only in its effects, can be disclosed only by desire itself, whose wish-fulfilling mechanisms are the instruments through which this resistance surface must be scanned.

 

  1. Spivak

 

-A desire to touch the everyday. She does not desire to know what they think or to grasp their consciousness. The everyday and Consciousness operate according to different critical itineraries.

– is after a certain Poetics, a certain mode of putting together of a continuous seeming self for everyday life. This self which only seems continuous but has to seem as such for everyday functioning has been put together for such a seeming despite the chance Inus that may be reined in in the necessary production of this continuity.