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Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Theory Tuesday Act V scene iii

And now for the third and final installment of Theory Tuesday (Special Raymond Williams Edition).  The moment a few of you have been waiting for!

But first we have to address two points made deep in the comments thread of installment number two.  Here’s Tom in comment 30:

there is still a great deal here that is problematic for the later development of cultural studies that Williams did so much to found. There is a sense in which the continuously variable determinations that Williams insists on blur the lines between oppositional and dominant in an unproductive manner (the difficulty of determining the relation of oppositional to dominant has all too often been an alibi for a quietist politics), to say nothing of the fact that the question of whether setting “the bounds of the thinkable” can’t amount to hegemony sitting on your chest and telling you what to think is still an open one.

To say nothing, indeed! I still think that hegemony operates by setting the bounds of the thinkable (in the US, a universal right to health care is barely thinkable; a universal right to paid vacations and family leave is not) rather than by overt propaganda exercises like The Path to 9/11. Left media critics make much of the fact (to take a random example) that millions of Americans believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11, and I have heard any number of my colleagues adduce this as evidence of the Foxification of national discourse. But the curious thing is that on September 12, 2001, millions of Americans believed that Iraq was involved in 9/11, and Iraq’s refusal to denounce the attacks didn’t exactly reassure those people. The question remains, then, of whether Fox News actively recruits people to the “Iraq was involved” agenda, or whether it simply confirms the Cheney-Rice conspiracy theorists in what they already believe. And behind that, the larger question looms of what Gramsci’s theory of hegemony would make of Fox—and other overtly propagandistic media—in general. And then there’s another question about the meaning of “consent”: as you know if you read these windy theory-things of mine, I keep insisting, against the Chomsky/Herman “manufacturing consent” model of culture and society, which I think smacks too much of old-school “false consciousness,” that consent is not manufactured but actively won by hegemonic blocs. But when the winning of consent is based largely on mass deception, as it was in the runup to the war in Iraq, then the difference between consent that is “manufactured” and consent that is “won” looks like the difference between orange-red and red-orange in the Crayola box—and a topic of interest only to pettifogging theorists who wonder exactly how many Marxists can dance on the head of a pin. (Or who have a masochistic interest in figuring out, to a couple of decimal places, whether they were defeated because the hegemonic bloc worked primarily by deception or persuasion.) Moreover, it is not clear how much of that consent has to be active, or whether people can “consent” to a hegemonic agenda partly by shrugging and saying “yeah, whatever.” The danger of putting too much emphasis on passive consent is that it leads back to vanguardism: the people cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. (Or: the hegemonic bloc prevents them from understanding their true position in the system of ideological production, so I, the Theorist, will have to speak for them.) But the danger of putting too little emphasis on passive consent is that it underestimates the powerful political value of apathy and disaffection. After all, if you can convince people that they have no power to affect things like national health care policies or decisions to go to war, you’ve won a good deal of the field right there.

So that’s why invoking “hegemony” should properly give rise to a series of questions rather than a series of answers.  Now for “totality.” I said it was as troublesome a concept as ever, and Colin Danby courteously showed up in a series of comments (hey, what’s with the patterns of three? am I being mocked again?) to say, in comment 82, that Williams sometimes nods—or at least tries to sneak one by us while we’re nodding:

There’s a dubious move late on page 7. Having enlarged the category of base and moved to totality, RW then worries about what would happen if we gave up the concept of superstructure altogether. He says that the reason we keep a concept of structure is that we need it to analyze institutions like law. He presents this with a very simple unmasking-type critique: these institutions which present themselves as “natural, or as having universal validity or significance, simply have to be seen as expressing and ratifying the domination of a particular class.”

Note the weakness of the assertion “simply have to be seen.” The idea seems to be that we need to rescue literature from philistine concepts like base-superstructure by situating it behind enough insulating concepts like residual/emergent to give it considerable autonomy, but this kind of crude, grubby theorizing is perfectly OK for analyzing, say, law.

And here is where, to take Michael’s metaphor, Foucault may have transferred to a better bus. Because surely, if he did anything, Foucault showed that it is possible to analyze institutions critically without having recourse to base-superstructure. Indeed from this vantage point Williams’ notion of “intention” is not a contribution to analysis, it’s simply an a priori assumption.

So superstructure is held up with a slender prop indeed, and I think this plays a large role in the subsequent argument, because it creates one pole in the tension Williams is working with—given the assumption of the overall social-ontological validity of base-superstructure, we then need to rescue culture. Whereas without that prop culture wouldn’t need rescuing at all.

Damn! Good catch, Colin. That is indeed a dubious move, precisely because it assumes what it needs to prove—namely, the classical Marxist proposition that the faux-natural character of “laws, constitutions, theories, ideologies” needs to be unmasked as the expression of a particular class, and that “if these institutions and their ideologies are not perceived as having that kind of dependent and ratifying relationship, if their claims to universal validity or legitimacy are not denied and fought, then the class character of the society can no longer be seen.” Williams attributes this view to the “perception of many militants” who “have to fight such institutions and notions as well as fighting economic battles,” but it seems pretty clear that he endorses it himself. The question remains, however, as it remains for theories of “social construction” in general, whether the unmasking and demystifying move does all the salutary political work claimed for it. And the ancillary question remains—one would have thought, if one were me, that this question had been significantly complicated by Gramsci’s theory of hegemony—of whether one can speak so blithely of laws, constitutions, theories and ideologies as being the expressions of a single, unified class. For while it’s true (for example) that the U.S. Constitution is partly the expression of the interests of white men of property (some of whose property included other human beings), it seems more useful, as well as more accurate, to speak of class fractions and factions—otherwise we’d never be able to understand why some rich people are so deluded as to support progressive causes that involve the redistribution of wealth.  Let alone poor people who support policies that contribute to their immiseration.

And I agree that when Williams resorts to the unearned phrase, “simply have to be seen” (i.e., they have to be seen this way because the theory demands it), we’d be better off on L’autobus Foucault. For the analysis of institutions without recourse to base-superstructure implies (or simply demonstrates) not only that institutions have their specific histories and trajectories but also, more broadly, that the invocation of “totality” may not mean anything more than the faith that “it all hangs together” (as Colin suggests in comment 46). Now, for those of you who didn’t make it down to comment 46 last week, Colin opened it by asking, “are Jameson and his admirers too eager to nominate silly antitotalizers as the foil for their preferred totalization?”, to which the most judicious answer is probably Bugs Bunny’s “ehhhhhh . . . could be!” (But then, there was a great deal of silly antitotalizing going on roughly 15-20 years ago, so I tend to cut Jameson some slack here.) And the reason Colin raised the question was that (if I’m reading him correctly) he worries that an emphasis on “totality,” even of the most provisional and tentative kind, can slip too easily back into precisely the kind of brutal Lucien Goldmann-esque reductionism in which superstructural elements (like literary characters) “correspond” somehow to the means of production.  As Colin puts it:

It seems much too easy, especially at this rarified level, to slide from a statement about logical preconditions for analysis to totality to one particular kind of totality. Another way to put the question is to ask what room is left for political economy as critical, skeptical analysis after these moves. My suspicion, and I hope you’ll tell me I’m wrong, is the “capitalism” gets pushed up to the level of the worldspirit or political unconscious in a way that puts it beyond the work of a critical political economy.

Nope, you’re not wrong to have that suspicion. In the book I’m writing now (well, not right now), I remark on the strange phenomenon in which members of the academic left inveigh against reductive and monocausal explanations of world-historical events in their morning lectures and wear “No Blood for Oil” buttons during the afternoon teach-in. Stuart Hall was particularly adept at spotting this kind of slide and calling it by name, and we’ll deal with him one of these Tuesdays if I can keep up this manic pace of theory-explicatin’.

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Having said all that, I’ll move to the final sections of “Base and Superstructure,” which I find less satisfying than the rest of the essay (though one of them, “Residual and Emergent Cultures,” has been hugely influential). There’s a very unfortunate sentence in the “Class and Human Practice” section, where Williams is writing of “practices and meanings” that fall outside the dominant culture, and notes that “since from the whole Marxist tradition literature was seen as an important activity, indeed a crucial activity, the Soviet state is very much sharper in investigating areas where different versions of practice, different meanings and values, are being attempted and expressed.” Come again?  Investigating? Yes, well, it was 1973, and I remember from my dissertation/first book research that there were plenty of American critics at the time who were willing to lament that thanks to the repressive tolerance (cough, cough) of American society, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow was given the National Book Award, and was thereby “incorporated” into the Matrix, whereas Pynchon’s counterparts in the Eastern bloc at least had the advantage of being properly repressed and exiled. As for me, I’d suggest that the word “investigating” in Williams’ sentence could be profitably replaced with “stamping out.” But you know how I am about such things.

The section on “Residual and Emergent Cultures,” however, is justly famous. I’ll explain my reservations about it in a moment; for now, I’ll just step back and quote.

I have next to introduce a further distinction, between residual and emergent forms, both of alternative and of oppositional culture.  By “residual” I mean that some experiences, meanings, and values, which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social formation.  There is a real case of this in certain religious values, by contrast with the very evident incorporation of most religious meanings and values into the dominant system.  The same is true, in a culture like Britain, of certain notions derived from a rural past, which have a very significant popularity. A residual culture is usually at some distance from the effective dominant culture, but one has to recognize that, in real cultural activities, it may get incorporated into it.  This is because some part of it, some version of it—and especially if the residue is from some major area of the past—will in many cases have had to be incorporated if the effective dominant culture is to make sense in those areas. . . .

By “emergent” I mean, first, that new meanings and values, new practices, new significances and experiences, are continually being created.  But there is then a much earlier attempt to incorporate them, just because they are part—and yet not a defined part—of effective contemporary practice.  Indeed it is significant in our own period how very early this attempt is, how alert the dominant culture now is to anything that can be seen as emergent.  We have then to see, first, as it were a temporal relation between a dominant culture and on the one hand a residual and on the other hand an emergent culture.  But we can only understand this if we can make distinctions, that usually require very precise analysis, between residual-incorporated and residual not incorporated, and between emergent-incorporated and emergent not incorporated.

OK, let me say this first: the residual-dominant-emergent scheme is a Good Thing.  It is a Good Thing insofar as it recognizes, as Marxist theory had been annoyingly reluctant to do, both the relative autonomy of culture and (relatedly) the fact that historical epochs and social formations are layered and polyphonic.  Simply breaking things up into residual, dominant, and emergent (inc. and not- inc.) goes a long way toward making Marxist theory every bit as complex and contradictory as lived experience itself—as does the distinction between “class” and “class fraction.” So what if the Reagan and post-Reagan right wing in the United States combines a wistful evocation of old-tyme, small-town American values and a commitment to the evisceration of old-tyme small-town values by unfettered Wal-Martism?  You were expecting maybe that the hegemonic bloc would be consistent and coherent?  Get out from here with such silly notions!

But apart from the question of whether this Good Thing goes far enough, in and of itself, to recognize the kind of complexity and contradiction that makes hegemony work (and makes the world go ‘round), there’s the possibility that it can congeal into yet another Bad Thing, namely, the creation of Marxist Culture Charts according to which cultural practices are weighed in the scales and valued chiefly (or exclusively) for their degrees of cool radical emergentness and even cooler resistance to incorporation.  When that kind of culture-charting meets up with the ritual glorification of the “counterculture” characteristic of some of the academic left, you wind up with . . . surprise!  Reductive and predictable celebrations of this or that allegedly transgressive or counterhegemonic practice, whose transgressive counterhegemonicality is secured by its doubleplusgood position on the “emergent” “not incorporated” side of the grid. 

Now, Williams actually doesn’t say “residual bad, emergent good,” but the implication is there nonetheless, with the alignment of the residual with the religious (boo!) and the rural (also boo!).  (And, of course, with the possible alignment of the emergent with the utopian classless society Yet To Come.) However, even though Williams seems to stack the deck in this section, particularly when he insists that “our hardest task, theoretically, is to find a non-metaphysical and non-subjectivist explanation of emergent cultural practice” (thereby letting us know that the emergent is where all the good action is at), his theory does have the good sense to thumb its nose at any number of vanguardist theories of literature and culture, in which the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, seers and sages well avant of the garde:

It would be easy to say, it is a familiar rhetoric, that literature operates in the emergent cultural sector, that it represents the new feelings, the new meanings, the new values.  We might persuade ourselves of this theoretically, by abstract argument, but when we read much literature, over the whole range, without the sleight-of-hand of calling Literature only that which we have already selected as embodying certain meanings and values at a certain scale of intensity, we are bound to recognize that the act of writing, the practices of discourse in writing and speech, the making of novels and poems and plays and theories, all this activity takes place in all areas of the culture.

Williams’s complaint here about the “sleight-of-hand” goes back to an earlier passage in which he’d spoken of the “selective tradition”—“that which, within the terms of an effective dominant culture, is always passed off as the tradition, the significant past” (and which, I would surmise, simply has to be seen as expressing and ratifying the domination of a particular class).  These gestures can be read as, among other things, swipes at F. R. Leavis’s “great tradition” and the entire Arnold-Eliot-Leavis cultural tradition that shaped Williams’ thought from Culture and Society onward, which is to say, shaped Williams’ thought.  And in their insistence on the legerdemain by which the full range of literature (think of the sense in which “literature” still means “all written matter,” as in the injunction against handing out literature in the mall) is reduced to the narrow group of texts designated as Literature (“embodying certain meanings and values at a certain scale of intensity”), these gestures also helped set the stage for the Great Wars of the Canon in the 1980s. 

And we’re still not done with this essay!

Now we get to talk about “Critical Theory as Consumption” and “Objects and Practices.” The first of these final two sections is brilliant.  Like so:

What seems to me very striking is that nearly all forms of contemporary critical theory are theories of consumption.  That is to say, they are concerned with understanding an object in such a way that it can profitably or correctly be consumed.  The earliest stage of consumption theory was the theory of “taste,” where the link between the practice and the theory was direct in the metaphor.  From taste there came the more elevated notion of “sensibility,” in which it was the consumption by sensibility of elevated or insightful works that was held to be the essential practice of reading, and critical activity was then a function of this sensibility.  There were then more developed theories, in the 1920s with I. A. Richards, and later in New Criticism, in which the effects of consumption were studied directly.  The language of the work of art as object then became more overt.  “What effect does this work (‘the poem,’ as it was ordinarily described) have on me?” Or, “what impact does it have on me?”, as it was later to be put in a much wider area of communication studies.

And from there we could go to the raft of “media effects” theorists (on the right and the left) whose interest in culture has to do mainly with how and why it makes our kids violent and asocial and sullen and misogynist and also gay.

But before we go there, let’s just stop and enjoy the long view Williams provides here.  Once upon a time, theorists from Horace to Sidney told poets how to write: “be pleasing and instructive,” they said (boiling things down a bit), “and oscillate between the general and the specific, so as to avoid the extremes of philosophy and history.” These days (where “these days” means “since Kant or thereabouts”), literary theories are theories of reading, of consumption.  We Are All Theorists of Reception Aesthetics Now!  Williams elaborates on the point in Marxism and Literature (1977), where he ties theory-as-consumption to the division of labor, arguing that in bourgeois aesthetic theory

art and thinking about art have to separate themselves, by ever more absolute abstraction, from the social processes within which they are still contained.  Aesthetic theory is the main instrument of this evasion.  In its concentration on receptive states, on psychological responses of an abstractly differentiated kind, it represents the division of labour in consumption corresponding to the abstraction of art as the division of labour in production.

And finally, we get to the last section, “Objects and Practices.” For Williams, the reign of “critical theory as consumption” is closely tied to the idea of the work of art as object, as a static, reified thing, whereas “in literature (especially in drama), in music and in a very wide area of the performing arts, what we permanently have are not objects but notations.  These notations have then to be interpreted in an active way, according to the particular conventions.” In one sense this is uncontroversial, even cliché: Hamlet really is a different text each time you read it, and there have been (and can be) so many different stagings of the play that you could be bounded in a nutshell with it and count yourself a king of infinite space.  But in another sense it troubles Williams’s distinction between “objects” and “notations” (or, to use the term he prefers here and in Marxism and Literature, “practices”), because if notations have to be interpreted in an active way, then they too give rise to a form of critical theory as consumption.

Williams opens the final section by announcing starkly (and a bit histrionically) that “the true crisis in cultural theory, in our own time, is between this view of the work of art as object and the alternative view of art as a practice”; he closes the first paragraph by announcing that “we have to break from the common practice of isolating the object and then discovering its components.  On the contrary we have to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions.” I don’t quite buy it.  I agree that we shouldn’t isolate the work of art as object from its conditions of production and reception (or just fetishize it the way certain old-tyme art historians do!  shudder—that would be far worse), but I don’t believe that the object/practice distinction gets you everything Williams promises.  To be sure, it puts relations of production back on the table, thus helping to overcome that static and reductive base-superstructure model we set out to trouble in the first place, way back at the beginning of the essay.  Likewise, it opens the door to all kinds of delicious historicizing and contextualizing.  And yeah, it even helps us analyze, “as two forms of the same process, both [the practice’s] active composition and its conditions of composition, and in either direction this is a complex of extending active relationships.” But Williams contrasts this fun and dynamic and active-extending enterprise with a ridiculous caricature of Criticism As Usual, in which texts are sorted into file cabinets: “we identify it by certain leading features, we then assign it to a larger category, the genre, and then we may find the components of a genre in a particular social history (although in some variants of criticism not even that is done, and the genre is supposed to be some permanent category of the mind).” Whew!  Treating the work of art as object sure makes you stupid.  Clearly we have to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions instead.

It is, I think, a strained and disappointing ending to a remarkable essay—almost as if Williams had ended with the cry, “Let the ruling classes tremble at Marxist cultural theory! The critics have nothing to lose but their objects.  They have a practice to win.” But to his credit, Williams develops the argument further in Marxism and Literature, where—also to his credit—he takes on the brilliant and nuanced and completely forgotten 1936 monograph by Czech theorist Jan Mukarovsky, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts.  And if you’d like to find out what I have to say about the encounter between Williams and Mukarovsky, you can always read the introduction to this fine volume, which I haven’t hawked on this blog for many months now, mainy because I’m unaccountably shy about such things.

Well, folks, thanks for staying tuned to the Base and Superstructure Network all week.  Let me know what you’d like to see by way of a postscript to this series; I can either visit Stuart Hall’s Land Without Guarantees or I can follow up on the objects-and-practices bit by excerpting and explaining my take on Williams’s take on Mukarovsky.  Poor Mukarovsky’s not on anybody’s must-get-to list; he certainly wasn’t on the reading list for English 501 (nor was Hall).  But I assure you that he’s worth your while if you care about smart, capacious theories of the aesthetic.

I’ll be back on Thursday with a brand new—dare I say emergent?—bloggy feature.

Posted by Michael on 09/12 at 09:45 PM
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