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In addition to
this presentation of the "aesthetics/history" debate from
the mid-twentieth century, I will briefly discuss here some of the implications
for literary history which follow from postmodern discourse theory in
the latter part of the century. During this period, a new conception
of literary history--"New Historicism" stems from the contributions
of Marxist and post-marxist thought (in the tradition of Louis Althusser
and Michel Foucault). In many cases this movement produced an anti-aestheticist
form of literary history--a literary history which could focus on the
historically various discursive coordinates of literature rather than
on qualitative evaluations of specific texts or genealogies of specific
genres isolated from other social discourses.
Althusser's essay
"Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" makes two significant
advances over the conventional Marxist understanding of ideology. First,
he rejects as an oversimplification the widely-held notion of ideology
as "false consciousness," or a distorted representation of
reality by which a dominant elite cynically exploits an under-class.
This oversimplification implies an opposition of "false consciousness"
to some kind of "true consciousness," or an understanding
that could transcend ideology, when, in fact, as Althusser shows, all
consciousness is constituted by and necessarily inscribed within ideology.
Ideology is as inescapable and indispensible as the air we breathe.
All that we can have are competing versions of "false consciousness,"
or understandings of reality which are limited and therefore, at some
level, incomplete.
Second, Althusser's theory challenges the traditional Marxist reflectionist
model in which a society's base (the economic structure--material relations
of production and comsumption) inevitably determines the society's superstructure
("state" and social consciousness, including ideology), with
a model of social formation that features a relatively autonomous superstructure.
By theorizing the relative autonomy of the superstructure Althusser
produces a privileged position for social practices (seen as explicit
manifestations of ideology) as mechanisms for producing particular social
subjectivities, and for producing and circulating particular understandings
of the "real." Literature, in this view, has a productive,
(not merely a reflective) role in ideology formation. Thus, Althusser
implies a decentering of the material contexts (the economic base) in
which traditional Marx-ist literary criticism often sought the sources
of ideas and concepts "reflected" in literature. Conversely,
literature, in its ideological role, is granted the status of a material
product.
This understanding
of literature, it seems to me, constitutes a significant advance over
conventional literary history precisely because it enables the practice
of literary historiography as a history of discursive functions--an
anti-aestheticist literary history. The problem is, Marxist literary
historians haven't realized this promise. They generally lapse into
an ahistorical notion of "literature" precisely because they
continue to see literature as performing a "transhistorical"
function.
Fredric Jameson
For example, In
The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson provides a model for
literary-historical analysis which emphasizes the function of literary
genres in ideology production and which places genres in their contemporary
social formations. Jameson asserts an inevitable interrelationship between
the aesthetic value and the specific historicity (seen in terms of ideological
function) of the literary text. As an indication of the universality
of relationship between aesthetic value and ideological power he cites
Levi-Strauss's interpretation of the body art of the Cadaveo indians
of South America. The Cadaveo facial tattoo is described as a "visual
text [which] constitutes a symbolic act, whereby real social contradictions,
insurmountable in their own terms, find a purely formal resolution in
the aesthetic realm." From Levi-Strauss's model, Jameson constructs
a productive role for literature:
We may suggest that from this perspective, ideology is not something
which informs or invests symbolic production; rather the aesthetic
or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right,
with the function of inventing imaginary or formal "solutions"
to unresolvable social contradictions.
(79)
Thus, in suggesting ways in which literature helps to constitute the
world-views of societies, Jameson represents literature as producing
(rather than simply reflecting) ideology. But, in locating the source
of aesthetic value in the text's power to articulate and resolve social
contradictions, Jameson seems to privilege a certain kind of text. He
implicitly devalues literary texts which confirm and/or reproduce existing
aesthetic/ideological formulations without exposing their hidden contradictions.
And, though he assumes that literary texts are especially significant,
he does not provide a basis for distinguishing literary texts from ostensibly
"non-literary" texts that also formulate new ideologies and
resolve social contradictions.
John Frow
John Frow's book Marxism and Literary History offers a more rigorously
anti-aestheticist model for understanding literature as discourse. Calling
for a radical rethinking of literary studies--"the self-abolition
of poetics and its transformation into a general rhetoric" (235)
Frow redefines formalism as a sort of refined, highly specific branch
of discourse theory capable of analyzing the particular complexity of
literary texts. As Frow demonstrates, the methods of close, careful
analysis of literary texts practiced by formalists can be extended productively
to the analysis of larger textual systems and discourses. Yet, at several
points, Frow's incorporation of formalism into discourse theory results
in a reification of the literary which inevitably would prevent the
"self-abolition of poetics" and the transformation of literary
studies. This occurs because Frow assumes that "literary"
texts have immanent formal properties which specifically mark them (either
in terms of identification or of difference) as "literary"
in relation to other texts and systems.
Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Frederick Halliday, Michel Pecheux,
and Michel Foucault, Frow theorizes a concept of ideology in semiotic
terms:
. . . ideology is thought as a state of discourse rather than
an inherent quality (a truth status or a particular thematic structure);
it is defined in terms of its appropriation by a hegemonic class, but
because language is the point of intersection of a network of power
relations this involves no necessary, motivated, or stable class correlations;
and utterances are thought of as being governed by the structures of
the genre of discourse and the discursive formation, structures
which are more or less specific and which delimit certain possibilities
of use and certain semantic domains. Effects of truth, representation,
and subjectivity are thought to be functions rather than causes of discourse.
(83)
Literature, as Frow goes on to assert, is not to be conceived as an
essential category; it is a complex, historically specific, highly institutionalized
discourse. Most importantly, the effect of essentialism itself is discursively
produced: "the concept of the relative autonomy of the literary
system must be understood as the result of particular historical conditions
and a particular articulation with other systems, not as an inherent
quality of literary discourse" (84). Yet, Frow then turns from
discourse theory to construct an overlapping genealogy of Formalism.
The most important achievement of the Formalists, Frow argues, was
to establish
the unity of the conceptual level at which extraliterary values and
functions become structural moments of a text, and at which, conversely,
the "specifically literary" function acquires an extra-aesthetic
dimension. Holding on to this principle is perhaps a question of being
®MDUL¯sufficiently®MDNM¯ "formalist"--that
is, of being willing to relate literary discourse to other discourse
(to the structured order of the semiotic field) rather than to a reality
which transcends discourse; to relate literary fictions to the universe
of fictions rather than to a nonfictive universe.
This rescues Formalism from the conventional critique of historical
and political naivete, but the transcendental tendencies of Formalism
reappear when Frow goes on to specify the gains of his conflation of
Formalism and discourse theory. Since his method gives "as much
weight . . . to formal linguistic and rhetorical structures and to positions
of enunciation and reception as to thematic features," he states,
it can attend to "all of the interrelated and overdetermined levels
at which signification is constructed, although without assuming
that textual structure is in itself ideologically significant"
(my italics). That is, despite the fact that Frow's theory specifies
the levels at which the category of the "literary" functions
in relation to other texts, it results in what seems to be an uncritical
privileging of the "literary" in exempting formal textual
structures from ideological significance. Frow, in fact, asserts that
literature functions on a meta-interpretive plane:
. . . the possibility
of discursive contradiction or resistance means that literary discourse
can be though of as metadiscourse which is continuous with and yet
capable of a limited reflexive distance from the discourses it works
(although the conditions of this working are themselves not external
to power). . . . theorizing the relation between ideology and discourse
in this way also allows us to think the movement of the literary system
(its production and reception) in terms of reaction and discontinuity
rather than in terms of a correspondence or homology between literary
discourse and social structure. The central Formalist concept of the
negative dynamic of literary evolution makes it possible to escape
that historicism which can perpetuate itself only on the basis of
metaphors of identity. (100)
The problem with
this conception of the literary is that it could as easily be applied
to any discourse. Discursive contradiction or resistance cannot be seen
as identical with literary quality. That, in effect, is what the Russian
Formalists did by defining estrangement as the essential characteristic
of literary language. An important strength of discourse theory is that
enables one to treat literary discourse as merely one of a complex ensemble
of discourses in a particular social formation. Frow ultimately forfeits
that gain.
Though this aestheticist privileging of the "literary" dies
hard, other theorists--notably Terry Eagleton and Etienne Balibar and
Pierre Macherey--have questioned the acceptance of aesthetic value as
a proper concern of Marxist criticism. They acknowledge Althusser's
breakthrough in freeing Marxist criticism from the "reflectionist"
problematic, but they reject Jameson's assumption that literature has
a universal function which is the source of aesthetic value. Macherey
sees this notion as an unnecessary concession to bourgeois ideology.
Aesthetic value is not universal; it cannot always be traced to a particular
function of the text, even if that function is conceived within Marxist-oriented
problematics, such as defamiliarizing ideology, or resolving social
contradictions. As Balibar and Macherey state most simply, "literariness
is what is recognized as such" (82).
So, where does one turn for a rigorously historicist theory of literary
history? Well, actually, this is the wrong question to ask, because
the two terms are inherently contradictory. Whatever is literature isn't
history, and vice versa. Whatever one came up with wouldn't exactly
be "literary history." Rather, it would be more accurate to
call it discourse history--Foucault's histories of sexuality and medicine
would be seen as models. Some further pointers could be taken from the
historian of ideas, Dominick LaCapra. As LaCapra has pointed out, historians
regularly, though silently, reshape texts, making them conform with
super-imposed "historical" contexts (56). Such interpretations
ignore or smooth over elements of the texts which challenge or contest
the dominant ideas or ideology assumed to be embodied in the historical
context; these are elements which call into question the work's unity,
and, therefore, according to classical aesthetics, its aesthetic value.
Further, the assumption that literature passively reflects a simple,
transparently discernible historical context leads to a premature closure
of the critical investigation: the investigator discovers what appears
to be a suitable "original pattern" external to the work,
and the work is bent to fit that pattern. The causes or origins of ideas
in complex (including literary) texts are not likely to be found in
any one particular context (57).
LaCapra proposes to address this problem of totalization or oversimplification
by reading the text in relation to multiple interacting contexts (or
discourses), rather than assuming that it reflects just one context.
He suggests six possible contexts for interpreting complex texts: the
author's intentions, his motivations, society, culture (elite culture),
corpus (of the author's works), and structure (genre). Of course, each
of these contexts is a complex text in its own right, and each is unevenly
accessible. Thus, reading a text in its relation to multiple interacting
contexts is not a "final" solution to the problem of the indeterminacy
and conditionality of meaning. But it is a way of acknowledging the
problem, and it produces a more rigorous, openly "argued-for"
articulation of the contextual frame in which the historian will read
the text than do totalizing strategies such as those of Frow and Jameson.
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