What is literature and how should one read it - Essay Example

What is literature and how should one read it' Ideology/ Hegemony/ Power There are various theoretical approaches to the study of literature such as Marxism, Semiotics, Poststructuralism and Psychoanalysis. Marxism tries to explain literature from the light of existing social, economic, political and cultural realities within the framework of a holistic understanding of history and societal development. However, Marxism is not a homogenous approach to the study of literature. Rather, it is a collective of contending schools of thought which understand and explain literature in radically different ways. It is possible to identify the major trends within the Marxist framework as Classical Marxism, Critical Theory, Frankfurt School and Structuralism. All of these perspectives have differing degrees of compatibility with what could be seen as the founding principles of Marxism such as Materialist conception of the world, and Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Art is one of the principal means by which human beings make sense of the world and through which their striving to change reality takes place. The need to translate experience, knowledge and desire into concrete imagery is not a whim or a fancy, it is clearly built into human consciousness. All of us are artists at night. Dreams, with their compressed, imagistic references to conscious experience, demonstrate many of the characteristics of works of art. The intellectually tumultuous twentieth century saw the emergence of various theoretical approaches, which were contesting each other and the same time mutually enriching. Psychoanalysis, Marxism, critical theory, structuralism and post structuralism were the prominent streams among them. As a theorist of writing, Roland Barthes best represents the transitional stage between structuralism and post structuralism. However, it is possible to identify the 'Barthes in the making' (as he always was) with the structuralist trend that was prominent among the intelligentsia(s) in France in the early decades of cold war period, along with other intellectual stalwarts such as Julia Kristeva, Levi Strauss and TzvetanTodorov. The present essay seeks to examine the central tenets of Barthes's philosophy and the impact of his notion of 'writerly text' on the relation between reader/viewer and writer/artist. Since Barthes's formulation on reader-writer relationship could easily be replicated into art without modifications, the essay does not intend to mention the viewer-artist relationship exclusively: however, the reader may understand them interchangeably. In its inception, Marxism was a challenge to Hegelianism and Marx is supposed to have turned Hegel upside down. Contrary to the Hegelian logic, Marx argued that history is not the unfolding of absolute reason but the coming to existence of mental systems which are the products or constructs of concrete historical conditions at a given point of time. Therefore, Marxism talks about literature which not only represents the social truth but also but also changes it. Although the writings of Marx and Engels provide crucial insights to the understanding of art and literature from a materialist standpoint, it is Georg Luk'cs who came up with philosophical and comprehensive Marxist elaboration of literature as a materialist force. In his 1923 History and Class Consciousness, Luk'cs defines realism as an approach that represents the social truth in its all complexities and contradictions than merely photographing it. For Luk'cs, literature involves the deep reflections over life as a social process. Art and literature, in a capitalist society, has become increasingly characterized by commodity fetishism which becomes prevalent as market subsumes the entire society under its logic. In Luk'cs view, the reification and fragmentation caused by the capitalist social machine brakes human consciousness into parts and thereby, a kind of art and literature which is completely impotent in terms of reproducing the social realities around the time. As the process of thought and imagination itself is alienated and disengaged, the totality social relations and exchanges will never be captured in art and literature. The economic realm will totally be mystified and the preservation of this mystification will be a systematic necessity so that it would be carried out through the medium of art and literature. Once the social totality is missed, one cannot grasp what is real. Precisely speaking, ideology is this missing out of the social reality through a variety of practices and discourses. For Luk'cs, ' great literature is that which manages to penetrate beyond surface appearances, to perceive and expose the social reality, with all its contradictions' ( Bottomore, et.al. 1991, p. 6). Luk'cs furthermore argued that totality would be achieved through the presentation of good characters in a exactly realist literature. Max Horkheimar, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse were the leading theorists of the Frankfurt School. Their works are characterized by the all-round rejection of social realism and an equal championing of social criticism from the vantage point of art and literature. The Frankfurt school attempts to have a synthesis between what its theorists see as useful in both Marx and Freud. Adorno sees popular art as the inevitable product of modernity in which the workers are deskilled and intellectually degraded. Art and literature is the non identity emerges from the dialectics of modernity. In other words, the social realities as depicted in art and literature are the negative expressions or articulations of social realities. And, social realities are always multiple and diverse which cannot be captured in a metanarrative. Bertolt Brecht's plays are examples of enabling the audiences to develop a critical understanding of the world in order to make them see the world with their eyes. Brecht uses the techniques of alienation in his plays for distancing and detaching the spectator from the play but involving him/her in it. Walter Benjamin saw the mechanisms of production as central to understanding art and literature. The forces at work of industrial capitalism also have the capability to shape the form and content of art and literature at the times of mechanistic reproduction. For Althusser, literature is placed in somewhere between ideology and science. It depicts individuals and their real conditions of existence but misconceives the relationships between individual and the concrete conditions they are in. No work of art is completely devoid of real or full of fiction. Althusser has forcefully argued that although literary criticism could be a science, literature would always be vestige of ideology. Literature is a varied but sophisticated expression of ideology. In his delineation of ideology, Frederic Jameson examines the societal desensive mechanisms that helps the self-explanations of societies vis-'-vis the repressed contradictions of history. Jameson does not agree with the poststructuralist reductionism of literature into text. 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" (Balibar and Macherey 82). In his A Theory of Literary Production, Pierre Macherey views a text not as a finite object but is something becoming. Art is always the art-in-the-making. Texts are certainly not devoid of ideology because it is natural for ideology to be seen in anything created by human consciousness. Although the author consciously or unconsciously attempts to hide the traces of ideology in his/her work, the text reveals it. A text is composed of two levels; an open, told and visible realm and a realm of the repressed and the untold, i.e. the hidden ideology. Marx and Engels never provided a systematic theory of art and literature although they made serious and insightful inquiries into the complexities of human aesthetics. Primarily, Marx saw art as an expression of creative labor which is in turn a form of non-alienated labor. Here, Marx holds the view that art is the product of alienation and separation of some forms of labor from others (Bottomore, et.al. 1991. p.6). However, as capitalism progresses, art too increasingly becomes another form of alienated labor. Ideology is one of the central analytical categories used by Marxists of various hues to analyze and evaluate literature. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels state that ruling ideas of a given period 'are nothing more than the ideal expressions of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas' (Marx & Engels, 1974, p.153). It means that ideas are just the expressions of the dominant material relations, i.e. the content of the existing or prevailing ideas. Furthermore, '[i]f in ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life processes as the inversion of objects on their retina does from their physical life process' (Marx & Engels, 1974, p.78). Thus, ideology effectively portrays the world as standing in its head. Also, the word ideology in this sense implies that false consciousness is integral to it. One forgets his/her real, objective and long term class interests for illusory, subjective and short terms atomized interests when led by false consciousness. Althusser's essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (1971) tries to overcome the oversimplification of the concept of ideology as false consciousness or distorted reality in its classical Marxist elaboration. Althusser shows that ideology not only constitutes but also inscribes all forms of consciousness. Althusser ruthlessly argued that the superstructure is relatively autonomous. It is not true that the economic structure has a determining role over the superstructure which is composed of laws, ideas, religion, education and social consciousness. Ideological state apparatus represents those institutions of state which engages in the social engineering work of making the conditions favorable for the capitalist production relations and productive forces. Educational institutions, religious institutions and the media are the main carriers of the ideology of the state. Ideological state apparatus, however, does not work in a vacuum but in a close collaboration with the repressive state apparatus. While repressive state apparatus is used for gaining physical victory over the subjects, ideological state apparatus is the medium through which consent is systematically extracted from the oppressed and the dominated. When repressive state apparatus works with the actual use or threat of use of physical violence, ideological state apparatus effectively hegemonizes the working people and reproduces the conditions for their subjugation. According to the internal laws of capitalist development, art and literature also become commodities for exchange in the market. On the other hand, the artist becomes an exploited, ordinary laborer who has to sell his/her labor power in order to find the mere subsistence. The spirituality in artistic production, thus, gives ways for the materiality of artistic production. The sole purpose of artistic production becomes the production of capital. Theorists such as Adorno develops the classical Marxist idea of the artistic laborer as a productive laborer as basis for the understanding of what is popularly known as culture industry. In a culture industry, the distribution of cultural products and services takes place not based on their use-value and needs but exchange value. Therefore, culture itself becomes an assemblage of cultural commodities produced by the mechanized labor. In addition, culture industry plays the role of mediator between the ruling classes and the working masses. It constantly reproduces the ruling ideas in covert forms and, thereby, legitimizes them. The traditional Gramscian conception of Hegemony is as a system of power relations that emerges only in liberal democracies (see Gramsci, 1971) where the focus for the dominant group is on obtaining widespread consent in civil society for its activities. More contemporary theorisations of hegemony develop the Gramscian conception along logical lines in order to arrive at a position where hegemony is not merely aheuristic for making sense of political affiliations but is actually seen as the terrain of politics itself. That is, hegemony is seen more as a social ontology: "it defines the very terrain in which a political relation is actually constituted" (Laclau, 2000, p.44). Hegemony, therefore, is politics Literature, especially propaganda literature has been widely used as tool for making hegemony for the dominant classes. Gramsci argues that ruling classes can never preserve their power and the status quo merely through the use of force. The dominant classes must combine the forces of force with the forces of consent to make their rule legitimate and actual. The historic bloc is the concept which Gramsci uses to describe the situation that bourgeoisie wages a passive revolution through literature and culture to preserve its dominance. Barthes provides a good criticism of the Marxist or Marxist-centered approaches to the study of literature. Barthes even rejects the very idea that there exists an outside reality. Still, it is noted that Barthes looks at the mechanisms of capitalist development to describe the process of production of a text. In capitalist society, while the majority of the population is degenerated as mere consumers, a minority triumphs without actually engaging in the process of production. Barthes sees the replication of same crisis into the realms of art and writing where readers are considered as passive consumers of 'finished cultural products' delivered constantly to them. The practice of considering the author as the producer is, in the ultimate analysis, the source of cultural corruption. Barthes challenges this dominant formulation by asserting that 'the text is experienced only in an activity, a production'. A text is a 'galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds' (Barthes, 1974, p.5). Actually, the text is an infinitely varied fabric, there is no inherent meaning embedded in it. A text is just a surface. Weaving is the logic of writing, not copying. Hence, Barthes's assertion that 'text, fabric, braid: the same thing' (Barthes, 1974, p.160). Consequently, the reader has nothing to decode from a text for the fact that meaning itself is a construct of reading. Therefore, reader cannot be seen as a passive receiver of what is coded in the text. A writerly text democratises the relationship between the reader and writer and ensures the active participation of the reader. The dichotomies, which are constructed through the mainstream discourse of a self-elect(ed)ing literary establishment, 'between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer' must be challenged (Barthes, 1974, p.4). While exposing the idea of a fragmented reader, Barthes has pointed out that 'this 'I' which approaches the text is already a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite' (Barthes, 1974, p.10). Clearly, the reader is not a homogenous, monolithic entity that is malleable in accordance with the craft of the text. Not only the text, the reader is also multiple. Such a productive relationship between text and reading makes reading a rhizomatic activity. Hence, it does not occur in a striated space. Reading does not and can not be subsumed to any codes set by the (so-called) author. Conclusion The simplest goals of Marxist literary criticism can include an assessment of the political "tendency" of a literary work, determining whether its social content or its literary form are "progressive"; however, this is by no means the only or the necessary goal. The very heterogeneity of Marxist approaches to literature makes it difficult to comprehend. However, one could argue that ideology, class, hegemony and power are the major analytical categories of approaches which analyze literature from without. The limitation of the extrinsic approaches to the literature is that they fail to capture the complexities of text even in its mere existence as a text. Works Cited Barthes, R., (1974). S/Z., Transl. Richard Miller. New York : Hill & Wang. Bottomore, T. B., et.al,(1991) A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. (ed.). New York. Blackwell Publishers. Edgar, A. and Sedgwick, P. (2004). Key Concepts in Cultural Theory, London, Routledge. Laclau, E and Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Verso, London Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1974). The Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Moscow, Progress Publishers. Read More