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The Politics of Literature – Jacques Ranciere

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the poetic function of literature as a method for decoding life, addressed to the masses, and so already political

Sartre on committment: Sartre proposed a kind of gentleman’s agreement, by opposing the intransitivity of poetry to the transitivity of prose writing. Poets, he assumed, used words as things, and had no commitment to the political use of communicative speech. Prose writers, by contrast, used words as tools of communication and were automatically committed to the framing of a common world. But the distinction proved to be inconsistent.

– Sartre explains Flaubert’s petrification of language (intransivity of prose writing) as the contribution of bourgeois writers to the strategy of their class.

classically there was a hierarchy of style with subject matter, Flaubert made the absolutization of style radically egalitarian same thing going on with Arabic and Turkish, interesting comparison to make here

Voltaire says that Corneille’s audience was made of officials, people for whom speaking was the same as acting.

“the mute letter,” by contrast, spoke to anybody, without knowing to whom it had to speak, and to whom it had not.

– In my book The Names of History, I proposed to give the name of “literariness” to this availability of the so-called “mute letter” that determines a partition of the perceptible in which one can no longer contrast those who speak and those who only make noise, those who act and those who only live. Such was the democratic revolution pinpointed by the reactionary critics.

– Literature is the art of writing that specifically addresses those who should not read.

-Meaning was no longer a relationship between one will and another. It turned out to be a relationship between signs and other signs.

1800 De la littérature, Jules Michelet : writing is not imposing one will on another, in the fashion of the orator, the priest or the general. It is displaying and deciphering the symptoms of a state of things.

-new “politics” of literature is at the core of the so- called realistic novel. Its principle was not reproducing facts as they are, as critics claimed. It was displaying the so-called world of prosaic activities as a huge poem—a huge fabric of signs and traces, of obscure signs that had to be displayed, unfolded and deciphered.

-In the old representational regime, the frame of intelligibility of human actions was patterned on the model of the causal rationality of voluntary actions, linked together and aimed at definite ends. Now, when meaning becomes a “mute” relation of signs to signs, human actions are no longer intelligible as successful or unsuccessful pursuits of aims by willing characters. And the characters are no longer intelligible through their ends. They are intelligible through the clothes they wear, the stones of their houses or the wallpaper of their rooms. Language, dialect, dialogue in their sociolinguistic complexity as the “mute signs” of T/E literature

-deciphering literature using the Marxian of Fruedian key, their critical explanation of what literature “says” relies on the same system of meaning that underpinned the practice of literature itself. Explaining close-to-hand realities as phantasmagorias bearing witness to the hidden truth of a society, this pattern of intelligibility was the invention of literature itself.

-Literature had become a powerful machine of self-interpretation and self-poeticzation of life, converting any scrap of everyday life into a sign of history and any sign of history into a poetical element.

-First, I have tried to substantiate the idea that so-called interpretations are political to the extent that they are reconfigurations of the visibility of a common world. Second, I would suggest that the discourse contrasting interpretive change and “real” change is itself part of the same hermeneutic plot as the interpretation that it challenges.

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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