Reading notes on: Marxist Literary and Cultural Theory by David Anshen (2017)
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1. The Basics of Marxism and Marxist Literary Theory
INTRODUCTION: THE SPECIFICITY OF MARXISM FOR LITERARY AND CULTURAL ANALYSIS AT THE PRESENT TIME
....literature and the world are interconnected.
....Marxist approaches have gone the furthest, in my view, in exploring the complex and variable nature of the connection between literature and the world.
....The same economic determinants that block our understanding can become the basis of our understanding.
....historicise the object and methodology of analysis while necessarily retaining the conviction that cultural interpretation can be true, valid and reflective of reality, provided one recognises that significant changes in reality continually unfold and that the class structure and resulting life practices obscure reality while posing contradictions that reveal hidden or undeveloped truths.
....Marxism aims to start with the real economic and social foundations that literature, culture and all social life ultimately remain determined by.
....all texts maintain a relationship to social reality which remains marked, in one form or another, by the reality of class divisions and class struggle present sharply in the antagonistic social order of capitalism, or previous class societies. Whether we look at a literary text from the point of view of its production, its inherent features as a text, or its reception, a Marxist approach situates the work within determinate parameters of social reality.
....economic and historical relations shape, on some level and in some form, the nature of culture and its artistic products
....for readers interested in learning 'how to read like a Marxist', the task is complicated because there is no single approach or precise methodology to guide the process. This book aims to show that Marxist literary theory is not some infallible guide but rather a series of questions and concerns based on the premises of Marxism to approach literature.
....note the importance placed by Marxist literary criticism on the series of symbolic and linguistic encounters that permeate daily life.
....All of capitalist society treats itself as natural, timeless, rational and eternal; however when one reads critically and learns to recognise the ways that language, emotion and affect are generated by layers of hidden or obscured meaning, the same lessons can be extrapolated to all conditions of life.
WHY WE MUST RETURN TO MARXISM: THE END OF THE END OF MARXISM
....in the face of a decaying society, the ability to read well and critically becomes more important.
....knowledge derives from existing material reality and social conditions, not mere speculation.
LITERATURE AS A REFLECTION OF OUR TIMES AND BEYOND
....suggests that contemporary culture seems partially aware that capitalism falters on the edge of crisis, and many welcome change. In this sense, Marxists sometimes describe cultural patterns as 'symptomatic' of underlying sea changes in economic and political conditions.
....Marxism, therefore, inherently involves the task of interpretation. This suggests the critical methods of Marxism that help interpret society have much to say about understanding concrete manifestations of culture.
....whether considering form or content, this generally requires probing beneath appearances and often discovering the central issues of Marxism as implicit subjects of the text.
....such realities, although partially hidden, appear more often than the casual eye detects. Just as Freud detects that desire often needs to hide itself, Marxism anticipates that antagonistic social realities conceal themselves when possible.
MARXISM RETURNS TO AN 'ANCIENT QUARREL': DOES ART PROMOTE CRITICAL THINKING OR DOES IT DECEIVE US?
....grappling with Marxism and its categories, particularly in relation to creative products, provides real truths about the world.
....art and its power transcends a precise historical period, with all its biases and ideology, more easily than, say, politics or jurisprudence, which necessarily protect clear particular class interests.
....ideas are shaped and formed by the dominant class and its values combining with material daily practices tied to the structure of a given society.
....to the degree that Marxism adopts the standpoint of the proletariat, the class in contradiction with the existing structure of society, new ideas become possible. In literary analysis proper, critics can draw attention to moments in culture where the mechanisms of ideology lower their guard.
....Marxism detects a glimpse beyond the confines of daily existence in literature and other products of the imagination. The fictional and the playful provide an opportunity for individuals to speculate, consider, critique and philosophise....
Aristotle.... defends the cognitive and political value of art when he argues that tragedy, with a well-constructed plot, attains higher ethical and philosophical status than history because 'the historian narrates events that have actually happened, whereas the poet writes about things that might possibly occur. Poetry is therefore more philosophical and more significant than history, for poetry is more concerned with the universal and history more with the particular'
....Plato argues that art stirs the emotions, confusing the audience and thereby misleading spectators to act in ways that the rulers of society and the traditions of propriety deem inadmissible.
....in an unjust world (like our own) his description of art's force to unleash and destroy 'unity' and create conflicting emotions promoting 'strife' provides justification for the poetic to Marxists, based on valuing the very features Plato describes as negative.
....relishes the kind of disruption of normal behaviour that Plato fears.
....the Plato/Aristotle dispute anticipates one of the central dividing lines amongst Marxist literary theory.
....Is the poetic that stirs the mind and the emotions valuable, or not to be trusted?
'copy of a copy'
....Plato argues that exposure to representations creates a situation where appearances or imitations are mistaken for reality.
....audiences viewing representations or performances are swept up by the power of the illusion and confuse the nature of fiction leading to the likelihood of applying mistaken judgments to the world.
....warn that when we lose ourselves in the aesthetic we remain susceptible to ideological manipulation. Worse than that, for some critics, particularly Marxists influenced by contemporary theoretical approaches such as poststructuralism or deconstruction, a dangerous illusion emerges that literature or language actually mirrors the world in a clear and simple way.
....he distrusted Aristotelian theatre for reasons that seem distinctly Platonic; identification with fictional characters leads away from reality, and substitutes simple 'culinary' or 'narcotic' pleasures for those spectators who lose arts relation to the world, thereby dulling their critical sensibility.
....fear of art, particularly when it purports to describe reality
....As the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who takes the claims of this strand of Marxism and theory the furthest, argues in his work Reading Capital (1968), 'the distinction between the real object and the object of knowledge implies the disappearance of the ideological […] myth of a one-to-one correspondence between the terms of these two orders' (47).
....Don Quixote effect, where ideological images of reality, derived from literature and cultural representations, confuse the masses about the nature of society.
....The myths Barthes critiques deceive the masses by a process of confusing representations for reality, in ways that echo Plato's concerns, despite a historical separation of over two thousand years. He later coined the term 'reality effect' to denote literary devices producing deceptive 'effects' that simulate reality to lure readers into confusing politically motivated fiction (ideology) with reality.
....even seemingly innocuous or liberal humanist works of art can contain hidden dangers.
....the apolitical or heartwarming often turns out more political and guilty than expected.
....warn that when we lose ourselves in the aesthetic we remain susceptible to ideological manipulation. Worse than that, for some critics, particularly Marxists influenced by contemporary theoretical approaches such as poststructuralism or deconstruction, a dangerous illusion emerges that literature or language actually mirrors the world in a clear and simple way.
HISTORICAL AND DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM, EXPLAINED
Marxists recognise that science remains limited not just by social conditions but also by the incredibly complex nature of reality, from access to an absolute truth. That, however, does not lead to epistemological relativism (the position that knowledge does not exist except as a social construct). Truth exists, for Marxists, but it is not absolute, timeless, eternal or fixed; rather it is learned in social practice through a movement of abstract and concrete levels of thought and social investigation. Reality only gets constituted in the mind through human interaction on existing conditions that transform reality through labour, but scientific thinking presupposes reality beyond consciousness. Science, understood broadly as incorporating the struggle to think rationally, to access truth through reason and striving for evidence and coherence as a guide to understanding, remains the strongest weapon in the human intellectual arsenal. For Marxists the scientific approach is constituted by and offers a form of knowledge that allows us to focus upon the real conditions facing real humans in the real world.
Other-worldly speculations and mystical accounts of events, on the other hand, lead away from clarity of purpose and grasping real truth in thought, according to the traditional Marxist view. Ironically, religion and idealism claim both absolute truth and the inability of humans to access it through a rational method. Marxism denies absolute truth while holding onto the possibility of accurate thinking. The sense of valuing scientific approaches explains Marx and Engels referring to their approach, in contrast to other socialist and communist forces, as 'scientific socialism'. The stress upon rationality and reason also implies that when examining literary works, there can be a real basis for understanding the social relationship between the imaginary and the real, at least potentially and within a given moment in time. This must be stressed because Marxism is often falsely equated with two opposing charges: it is a macro-theory that is unfalsifiable and supposedly explains everything and that it is pure historical relativism in which all values remain arbitrary. Both claims misunderstand the materialist theory of history and the nature of the Marxist theory of cultural production. Indeed, both charges actually apply more to anti-Marxist approaches. Marxism aims to provide practical and timely truths that aid the struggle of the oppressed while recognising all values and concepts are socially constructed within objective historical parameters.
For Marxists, religion, like fiction, remains an illusion, but there is a necessary truth in the illusion....
....Marx aims to direct attention at removing unnecessary forms of suffering that derive from an irrational world by creating new conditions that promote rational understanding and action. This involves a radical rupture with traditional methods of thought. But clearly, religion, like art, corresponds to a real lack and social need in reality.
....Marx's complex attitude towards religion overlaps with attitudes towards art, entertainment and pleasure.
....Marx views religious faith as a surrogate for humane social conditions. These hopes and desires then transmit into the realm of the imaginary, and this prefigures, compensates for, and blocks real joyous conditions.
....materialism is based on the scientific conviction that reality and nature derive from matter or substance that evolves, transforms and changes form.
....critics of Marxism claim its theory is reductive and determinist when Marxism has never offered such an impoverished and simplistic explanation for human behaviour as much mainstream scientific discourse, which often looks for a scientific 'quick-fix' explanation for complex social issues, such as a genetic explanation for homosexuality, among many other examples.
Dialectics, or dialectical thinking, attempts, in thought, to capture the continuity and changes in reality that first became deeply obvious in the French revolution and its aftermath.
....Dialectical materialism suggests that, unlike a machine, which changes in absolutely mechanical and fairly predictable patterns, reality, particularly social reality, changes in ways that move at a faster or slower tempo than expected at times. In other words, 'historical time', to use Walter Benjamin's phrase, must be distinguished from chronological time.
....dialectical logic notices the impurity of categories as absolute identities.
....complexity of reality in its change and development becomes obscured.
....The logical 'rule' that explains how opposites can contain elements of each other is termed by Engels and other Marxists as the law of the unity or interpenetration of opposites.
....opposing categories or identities contain elements of each other.
....dialectical view of Zola's ideology and writing allows for appreciation, distinction, and the need to evaluate the different ideological and political meaning and effects of his writing. The identity of Zola's output contains divergent and even contrary elements and a too-quick evaluation of the individual makes critics one-sided and inaccurate. The goal of evaluating the political implications of Zola's writing must avoid all-or-nothing judgments.
....all that exists goes through a process of developments, through tensions and contradictions that ultimately change form. Dialectics attempts to capture the changing nature of reality that bursts into radical transformations, often seemingly out of nowhere. Engels defined the second aspect or law of dialectical logic thus – 'transformations of quantity become quality'. This means that a slow, almost invisible accretion of changes in quantity (say number of strikes or the unemployment rate or the adding of a third member to a Greek chorus) can suddenly transform into a new situation (revolution or a proper Greek tragedy). All those who argue, for example, that capitalism remains powerful, given appearances, and therefore will last forever, fall prey to what dialecticians might term 'the worship of the accomplished fact'.
....inversion of conditions, which at some point involved a series of quantitative changes (diminishing military power, levels of obedience, diminishing respect for authority and so on) that developed until the identity of the powerful tyrant and his empire crumbled and faded.
....the second law of dialectics, the 'transformation of quantity (or quality) into its opposite'.
....third law, the 'negation of the negation' recognises that forces defeating an existing reality, over time, develop contradictions that then must be ultimately overcome.
MARXISM AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR LITERARY AND CULTURAL PRODUCTS
As Terry Eagleton explains in the introduction to the anthology he co-edits, Marxist Literary Theory (1996): '[…] the relation between literary works and forms of social consciousness […] has also involved some subtle epistemological reflections: is art reflection, displacement, projection, refraction, transformation, reproduction, production? Is it an embodiment of social ideology or a critique of it? Or does it […] critically 'distantiate' that ideology while remaining caught up in its logic?' (11).
.....Historical materialism contrasts with other theories of history in several key ways. First, theories that assert 'great men' make history, separate from broad social forces, get rejected. The individual always operates in a context. However, Marxism does not rule out any role for the individual or subjective factors in historical development (we can consider the role of Lenin or Fidel Castro in helping to facilitate revolutions in their nations as highly significant). But historical materialism asserts that the general thrust of the totality of political, economic, technological and social conditions combined with class struggle remain decisive in shaping the broad contours of history.
.....Different works, genres and aesthetic movements may operate differently.
....common patterns suggest causal factors that, theoretically, can be discerned.
....Marxist approaches can be comprehensible, logical and reducible to straightforward propositions.
Marxism does not exclusively discuss capitalism....
....any theory that asserts pure contingency or randomness in history (while Marxists don't deny that such factors play a role) fails to explain the many continuities and common features of human history that can be detected. We often find similar patterns of social development in divergent places when similar conditions prevail.
....The history of art also demonstrates common patterns across space and time.
....Friedrich Nietzsche's approach to history, which has gained adherents through the influence of Michel Foucault, Heidegger, and others, stands in stark contrast to the Marxist views. Throughout his writings, Nietzsche understands history in two broad interrelated ways: first, as articulated originally in his On the Genealogy of Morality (1887); then, throughout his entire work including the posthumous publication of notebooks, Nietzsche argues that history and morality are constructs and the arena in which the 'will to power' of powerful individuals creates values disguised as universal features such as the concept of good. Instead, these represent strong individuals influencing and shaping history with their power and needs which they have the 'will' to promote. The second way that Nietzsche understands history concerns the argument that historical categories, conditions or claims for truth are mere disguised heuristic devices (concepts, such as truth or morality, which have no reality outside of language and in Nietzsche's view, serve established power structures and modes) designed to promote an illusory sense of meaning. Nietzsche's framework, while serving perhaps to unmask the neutrality claimed in some historical or literary analysis ultimately diverges from Marxism and devolves into irrationalism.
....promoting the claims of the rulers to superior will and overestimating the ability of the powerful to construct historical myths and fables, unchecked and at command. Marxism rejects Nietzsche's view that the oppressed are weak-minded, easily deceived 'slaves' who accept naïve conceptions of history and power.
....Nietzsche's nominalism, or belief that words have no real referrent but serve merely to mask differences under a conceptual label falsely taken as 'things', underestimates the real, determining power of forces such as the profit motive, or the market, in the capitalist system, which prove their reality when workers lose their jobs due to such allegedly unreal 'concepts' as falling rates of profit.
....if history as history ultimately remains rational then the search for valid meaning and truth in relation to literature also remains possible....
As the Marxist George Novack puts it in his work Understanding History (1968):
It is not elites but the many-membered body of the people who have sustained history, switched it in new directions at critical turning points, and lifted humanity upward step by step.
....Novack quotes Engels defining historical materialism as:
[…] that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historical events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another. (qtd. in Novack 29)
....similar forces also should, at least on some level, shape the products of history, including cultural products. Whether discussing modes of cultural production (painting, sculpture, architecture or literary texts), literary genres (broadly or narrowly understood), artistic practices and movements, exemplary artists, or great individual works, there remains a key relationship to historical, technological, material and social conditions and life practices.
....Enlightenment thought and its evolution into modern liberalism also contrasts with Marxist approaches to historical determination.
....conviction that reason and correct thinking can overcome the problems of society. Enlightenment thinkers believed that reason and rationality could overcome traditional authority that had been invested in religious obscurantism and long-term, unexamined social practices.
....American Declaration of Independence required struggle in the realm of ideas but also in revolutionary struggle that took a violent form.
....Althusser rightly, from a Marxist point of view, challenged such a view as to how ideas dominate minds by suggesting such explanations remain in the realm of ideas and ignore 'material existence' (1265) or the life practices of individuals. In addition to the lack of materialist credentials such ideas offer, they share much in common with conspiracy theories, which Marxists reject out of hand. Such irrational explanations describe history as the result of secret groups of bad individuals who plot behind the scenes to deceive the masses. The problem with such ideas is that, in contrast to historical materialism, they cannot explain why people are so easily manipulated. Do people just believe what they are told even when the individuals telling them how to look at the world clearly do not share common interests? Are humans just sponges for whatever authorities present? Obviously, sometimes deception does work to blind people to social realities. But this explanation reduces to the tautology that people are confused when they are confused. It also allows the systematic nature of oppression to be obscured; if we can only find the cabal, the secret elite, all will be well.
MARXISM AND THE PRODUCTION OF IDEAS
....Ideas and long-held assumptions shift in pace with social transformations. This suggests that ideas, in themselves, do not remain uncontaminated by broader shifts in society.
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
....Historical materialism does not concern itself merely with history in the grand sense. It also provides a theory of how ideas, conceptions, viewpoints and cultural conceptions derive from the economic base and material practices of a given condition of life.
....that 'from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature'. For Marx and Engels the material transformations in technology and trade, generated by capitalism in its relentless quest for profits, inadvertently produces a new material basis for literature and sharing of ideas. This is seen as a positive for the oppressed that can share ideas and culture. The internet and the World Wide Web and the opportunities generated for quick and easy transmission of ideas offer new possibilities in this direction.
....who we are and what we believe gets shaped by real-life conditions
....Daily life builds upon economic processes and 'definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will' (Marx, qtd. in Eagleton and Milne 31).
....broadly and indirectly to modes of writing, genres, styles, literary approaches and individual works of literature and the imagination. We will look at this question more closely in the following section.
MARX'S BASE/SUPERSTRUCTURE MODEL
In Contribution, Marx writes: 'In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are […] independent of their will, namely, relations of production appropriate to a definitive stage in the development of their material forces of production' (20).
This suggests both that these 'definite relations' and 'forces of production' are knowable and open to analysis. They can be empirically verifiable and judged as sociological or technological facts because they are material, not conceptual. Marx continues:
....The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
....varieties of a given mode of production are not as relative as often appears. Social conditions and the economic and technological base dictate real potential situations.
The Human Costs of the Failure of the Market
....Marx's base/superstructure model, which metaphorically describes society like a building or pyramid built upon foundations in real material, objective economic processes that lay the basis for higher, abstract and theoretical realms of ideas, it provides a conceptual starting point for the historical materialist theory of how ideas develop out of prior material conditions. Marx distinguishes between economic 'conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science' (21) and the more ambiguous and subjective 'legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out' (21).
....They offer the chance for men or classes to 'become conscious and fight it out'.
....prior to and alongside the direct struggle for power, a war of values ensues. This 'cultural war', as rightist forces in the US dub their effort to undermine expanded conceptions of humanity and solidarity that developed out of the social movements of the 1960s and beyond, determines the relative strength of rival class forces.
....But we can formulate an approach to literature derived from basic points of Marxism and then consider some of the major efforts to elaborate a more fully developed theory.
A BASIC DEFINITION OF A MARXIST APPROACH TO LITERARY THEORY
Society is key....
....Marxism uncovers relations between cultural expression and modes of life shaped by conflicts that operate in societies divided socially and economically by classes. Indeed, for Marxism, the use of the term 'society' without attention to class divisions is an abstraction since class divisions operate in all societies since the dissolution of communal tribal societies and the rise of agriculture and economic surpluses beyond mere subsistence.
....The Marxist wager remains that if the working class as a class can only free itself by universal emancipation and has no interests in forms of property that can be privately owned, then its rise is the dissolution of class society in general.
....'There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits'
....Marx's base/superstructure model, which metaphorically describes society like a building or pyramid built upon foundations in real material, objective economic processes that lay the basis for higher, abstract and theoretical realms of ideas, it provides a conceptual starting point for the historical materialist theory of how ideas develop out of prior material conditions. Marx distinguishes between economic 'conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science' (21) and the more ambiguous and subjective 'legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out' (21).
....They offer the chance for men or classes to 'become conscious and fight it out'.
....prior to and alongside the direct struggle for power, a war of values ensues. This 'cultural war', as rightist forces in the US dub their effort to undermine expanded conceptions of humanity and solidarity that developed out of the social movements of the 1960s and beyond, determines the relative strength of rival class forces.
....But we can formulate an approach to literature derived from basic points of Marxism and then consider some of the major efforts to elaborate a more fully developed theory.
Jay
5 November 2021
