• WlES11ElRN SOCROlLOGRCAlL U1rlERARY 1rHlEORY: A lHillS1rOroCAlL SURVlEY

lEJPHlFANKO SAN JUAN, JR. Dept!Ytment Of English Univmity of Connecticut

The decline of New Critical formalism in the Anglo-SuOl'l world in the 19505 also witnessed a simultaneous retriool of a sociologiadly-oriented practice €1M theory of literary criticism derimd from a critical, I1On-dogmatic M!!Y%ism associated with Louis Althusser and Antonio Gmmsci. Traditional sociological approaches based 01'1 the idells of the fOIAl'lders of modern sociology, Weber €1M Durkheim, displaced in timeby positivism €1M ideal­ ism, 1zgt12 influenced New Criticism to the point that society and literature hat12 be~ irrewcably separated. Camparatists ham tried to remedy this separation but faIled. It was left to three influential Marxists - the Frenchman LMcien Goldmann, the British Terry Eagleton, €1M the American Fredric Jameson - to theorize the complex, dialectical mediations between society and literature in the social pmctices and institutions of specifiC formations. A summary of thecontn'butions of these three influential thinkers is presented here, together with IJ briefIJCcmmt of how the semiotics of the Russ;gn I!fstheticB!n Mikhail Balchtin, I10W recently re-discovered, can SMpplement €1M advance cOl'ltemporary theorizing on soci2ty €1M culture in general.

With the bankruptcy of new Critical forma­ Whereas in the fifties and sixties, one might lism as the reigning orthodoxy in the Western find panels or workshops on "sociologicalliter­ academy from the forties to the sixties, ary approach," today "the sociological" now following the worldwide rebellions of youth, informs and conditions practically all cultural women, intellectuals and Third World peoples studies and research in the humanities. It has against late capitalism, a revision of canons and disappeared as such in order to metamorphose standards has begun in North America as well and reincarnate itself in the trends -l've cited. as in Europe and in parts of the Third World Perhaps only the "sociological method" of Lu­ like the Philippines. The renaissance of cien Goldmann and his followers still com­ Western Marxism registered its impact by mands respect as a distinct hermeneutic prac­ • opening the compartmentalized disciplines to tice. the winds of change. Not only Marx's critiques, but also those of Freud and Nietzsche, infiltra­ ted through European structuralism, have Traditional Approaches battered the walls of specialization in the Anglo-Saxon world. The principles of modern sociology, first In the wake of such developments, the offi­ enunciated by Max Weber and Emile Durkheim cial U.S. Establishment center, the Modern chiefly in opposition to Marxism, may indicate Language Association of America

society governed by a homeostatic equilibrium implication social questions," Wellek and of distinct, unrelated parts. Warren insist that literature ''has its own justi­ For this part, Durkheim concerned himself fication and aim" separate from social life. with the division of labor and the problem of They contend 'that "the social situation, one conceptualizing the social totality. He singled should admit, seems to determine the possibili­ out for praise the Marxist project of explaining ty of the realization of certain aesthetic values, social life "not by the notions of those who but not the values themselves."! Such values, participate in it, but by more profound causes metaphysical in nature and origin, become truly not perceived by consciousness.'? Durkheim, problematic. however, discounted class struggle and the Wellek and Warren organize the study of the economic sphere as motivating forces in favor relations between society and ,literature into • of ascribing primacy to the unregulated divi­ three areas: first, the sociology of the writer sion of labor in industrial society. One influen­ and his profession, "the economic basis of liter­ tial sociologist, Ferdinand Tennies, in his book ary production, social provenance and status of Community and Association (1887), though ac­ the writers"; second, the social content of the knowledging his debt to Marx, betrays the work, its implications and purposes; and third, influence of We1n!r and Durkheim. the audience and the social influence of the In general, sociology as a discipline arose work on society. Because Wellek and Warren from the increasing fragmentation and share unwittingly the assumption of a neces­ atomization of industrial capitalist society. In sary division of labor in the production of trying to solve the problem of working-class knowledge, they refuse to integrate or synrhe­ unrest, sociologists repudiated Marxism and its size all those partial insights and observations totalizing mode in favor of nineteenth-century yielded by various studies. Consequently, their positivism constituted by an empirical-techno­ notion of Marxism is the vulgar one that con­ logical ethos and the social-Darwinist extrapola­ ceives it as economic determinism, relativistic tions from the biological sciences. The Italian and reductionist. Nevertheless, they do raise thinker Antonio Cramsci's description of the crucial question of "the social determination • sociology's genealogy sums up its limits: of forms," the social origins of form and styles, "Sociology has been an attempt to create a genre and actual literary norms, But their bias method for historlco-political science, against any synthesizing or historical method, dependent on an already elaborated philosophi­ and their search for a "rational foundation for cal system (evolutionary positivism)... an aesthetics," reveal a positivistic program con­ attempt to describe and classify historical and cealed by a pedantic liberal eclecticism. political facts schematically, according to crite­ Theorizing amid the pressures of the. ideo­ ria modelled on the natural sciences. Sociology logical Cold War in the late forties, Welle~{ and is therefore an attempt to deduce experi­ Warren expend considerable effort in refuting mentally the laws of evolution of human the alleged errors of Marxism. But what about society," as in Herbert Spencer's practice. the achievement of the founder of sociological Gramsci points out that this sociology "cannot criticism, Hippolyte Taine, who charted the • grasp the transition from quantity to quality, a cultural landscape with plural coordinates? transition which disturbs every evolution and Preceded by the socio-historical speculations every law of uniformity in the vulgar of Montesquieu, Vico, Herder and Madame de evolutionist sense,"! Stael, together with the radical changes The paradigms of Weber and Durkheim, wrought by the French revolution, Taine was constructed as a response to Marxism and the the most resolute exponent of the application of crisis of bourgeois society, may be seen opera­ the general principles of natural science to lit­ ting in the meticulous survey of the sociological erature. In his History of English Literature approach in the canonical Theory of Literature by (1863), he seeks to analyze and classify texts Wellek and Warren. While admitting that "li­ according to three criteria: race (national charac­ terature is a social institution, using as its ter), moment (age or period), and milieu (cul­ medium language, a social creation," and that tural environment). Taine tries to combine • literary questions flare, at least, ultimately by systematically the historicist thinking of Renais- • 44 PHILIPPINE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW sance humanism, the stress on geography of life at large, but it must translate them into its romantic nationalism, and attention to environ­ own terms and adapt them to its peculiar ment mandated by the scientific positivism of forms,"? Levin seeks to mediate "the apparent mid-nineteenth century France. But Taine's polarity of social and formal criticism" which practice is less methodological than polemical. he considers"complementary frames of refer­ While race is often reduced to a psychological ence", in the process synchronizing "eternal quality (the English "national" character of impulses and internal peculiarities," effects of spirit crystallized in love of nature, dislike for environment and convention. Conceiving lit­ rules, etc.), and "moment" becomes a matter of erature as an expression of collective conscious­ physical setting, the category of milieu - for ness, refracting rather than simply copying Taine, the link between literary criticism and reality, Levin's method hopes to reconcile the • the social sciences -translates into what past . opposition between form and substance, truth events have established. As historical docu­ and beauty, which have so far prevented criti­ ments, literature embodies the motives of civili­ cism from being "the science of art." zation. In examining the causes, the "moral Levin's heroic endeavor to balance the temperature," of literature, Taine deploys an intrinsic and the extrinsic, to bridge the gap experimental apparatus suggested by French between the sociological and the aesthetic, may realists like Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert. be read as a liberal compromise, a counterpoint Taine's history confesses a positivistic intent, as to East-WestRealpolitik. Like his contemporaries evidenced by his assertion: Every kind of Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling and Kenneth human production "has for its direct cause a Burke, Levin offers a cosmopolitan latitude that moral disposition, or a combination of moral approximates Durkheim's quest for a supra­ dispositions: the cause given, they appear; the individual intelligence or moral agency which cause withdrawn, they vanish... They are would circumscribe the anomie of modem life. bound up with their causes, as a physical phe­ It also anticipates the phenomenological stri­ nomenon with its condition, as the dew with ving for certainty in the fifties and sixties. the fallof the variable temperature, as dilatation Levin's valorizing of convention, however, is with heat."6 flawed by its being premised on unquestioned • Taine's pluralistic schema, vitiated by a re­ axioms of bourgeois sociology: namely, society ductive procedure tied to Comtean evolution­ as an abstraction confronting the individual, ism, failed to escape its mechanistic and impres­ society as an autonomous entity with norms or sionistic logic. Its environmentalist hypothesis institutions independent of the natural world begot only "chronological dictionaries of liter­ and the like. ary biogaphy." Successors of Taine, notably In elucidating the foundations of sociological Georg Brandes, V.L. Parrington, and Ferdinand criticism and the complex transactions of litera­ Brunetiere (of interest is his L'Evolution degenres ture and society, it has become clear that the dans l'histoire de la liuerature, 1890), have not key element that differentiates critics is their displayed any critical awareness of the naive definition of "society." And what demarcates empiricism and teleology of their pradigm. the Marxist from the sociological strategies of In contrast to Wellek and Warren's faciledis­ Levin, Wellek, Erich Auerbach and Northrop • missal of Taine, the dean of U.S. comparative Frye, to cite Western practitioners, hinges on its literary studies Harry Levin took up the chal­ historical/dialectical mode of inquiry. What is lenge of New Critical formalism by extending distinctive in Marx's conception of society is Taine's milieu to cover the decisive role of liter­ that it posits the indivisibility of the human and ary convention. In The Gates of Hom and other the social. It rejects the antithesis of society and works, Levin proposes an institutional ap­ the individual linked only by a hypothetical proach that can preserve both the complexity of social contract. Nor is society cognized as a art in social life and its relative autonomy: lit­ supra-individual phenomenon. Marx explains erature as an institution "tends to incorporate a in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844): self-perpetuating discipline, while responding "Even when I carry out scientifiC work ... I per­ to the main currents of each succeeding period; form a social, because human, act. It is not only it is continually accessible to all the impulses of the material of my activity - like the language • • WESTERN soaOLOGICAL LITERARY THEORY 45

itself which the thinker uses - which is given effect of innumerable external circumstances, to me as a social product. My own existence is climatic and geographical influences, racial a social activity... The individual is a social peculiarities, historical influences from the out­ being."" side, etc." For Marx, human existence is essentially praxis, labor - the dialectical interplay of consciousness and the material surroundings. Models of Marxist Critical Practice Society is in nature; humans are part of the natural world, the material/setting for all ac­ It remains now for me to describe briefly tivities. Since the production and reproduction three models of a Marxist critical practice that is • of life, through work and procreation, is simul­ perhaps less sociological (in the sense discussed taneously a social and natural relationship, the earlier) than historical, more totalizing and economic processes cannot be divorced from concrete ("overdetermined," in the Althusserian those relations. Karl Korsch thus asserted that sense) than any of those noticed by Wellek­ Marx's science of society "is not sociology, but Warren and Levin. political economy." I submit that the funda­ mental principle of Marx's theory is the histori­ Lucien Goldmann cal transformation of societies: the interaction Lucien Goldmann is probably the most between society and nature develops in time influential and sophisticated sociological critic through collective labor. This historical interac­ claiming Marxist credentials and an interna­ tion climaxing in class struggles and revolu­ tional following. His theory of the social gene­ tions engenders and transforms relations sis of literature centers on a major premise: the among humans. Manifested in various levels of partial identity of subject and object, human contradictions and conflicts, the historical proc­ agents and objective reality, makes possible the ess which constitutes different stages or types of formation of "coherent world views" belonging societies presents two aspects: the development to a "transindividual subject."!' World view is of productive forces and the changing social central, for Goldmann, since it is what artistic • division of labor within the production rela­ works embody. Qualifying a Kantian tradition tions. What defines the type of social formation of formal analysis with Piaget's genetic episte­ depends on the modes of production (level of mology, Goldmann defines world views as development of productive forces and the cor­ "ensembles of mental categories which tended responding production relations), and the ideo­ towards coherent structures and which were logical and the political practices in it. In the proper to certain privileged social groups 1859 "Preface" to "A Contribution to the Cri­ whose thought, feeling and behavior were tique of Political Economy," Marx states that orientated towards an overall organization of the relations of production serve as the founda­ interhuman relations and of relations between tion on which "rises a legal and political super­ men and nature."12 Only a group or class stri­ structure and to which correspond definite ving toward hegemony (to use Gramsci's term) forms of social consciousness. The mode of or a global organization of the social formation • production of material life conditions the social, is capable of achieving the stage of "maximum political and intellectual life processes in gen­ possible consciousness," in contrast to the eral/" (The term "conditions" does not mean contingent limits of individual consciousness.' "rigidly determine" but, following Raymond This group is the "transindividual subject" res­ Williams' interpretation, "sets the parameters ponsible for a world view and therefore cultural for change")." What these specific parameters creation. In the collective praxis of a class or are can only be discovered by investigating group to transform reality, complex structures "empirically given conditions" of the historic arise in the consciousness of its members; such conjuncture and cannot be mathematically cal­ structures are constellations of categories that culated like the values of commodities. An organize the everyday life of the group and the economic base may be the same in two or more imaginary universe created by the artist. Hence . societies but they, Marx advises, can possess the true creator of art, history and change is the • "infinite variations and gradations, owing to the "transindividual subject" which mobilizes those • 46 PHILIPPINE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

"significant structures" inscribed in collective ties in general, and by extension between men praxis, even though the individual artist may be and other men in a market society." In that credited with objectifying the "maximum possi­ society, "the collective consciousness gradually ble consciousness" of a group - but only loses all active reality and tends to become a through the structuring process of a world mere reflection of the economic life and ulti­ view. mately to disappear."13 Even actual conscious­ Positing the structural homology of corres­ ness, or ideology, also disappears. Goldmann pondence between the form (not content) of an employs here Marx's notion of commodity fet­ art work and the mental structures of a "trans­ ishism and Lukacs' concept of reification when individual subject" which patterns the he defines the plot of the novel as a "degraded everyday consciousness of a group, Goldmann search" by a "problematic hero" for authentic • proposes to explain the linkage between indivi­ values - values identified with real qualitative dual thought and collective consciousness. In use value overshadowed by exchange value. The Hidden God (1956), Goldmann shows how The general discontent with commodity fetish­ the world view of [ansenism in 17th century ism and disenchantment with market liberalism France, born from the increasing powerlessness produce the problematic hero. But it is the form of the Yloblesse de robe, finds its concentrated of the genre and the system of exchange (not expression in the form of Racine's tragedies. production) that are homologous. When mo­ Racine's protagonists typify the contradiction in nopolies replaced market capitalism, the novel the Jansenist world view between denying the witnessed the dissolution of character in Kafka, world and accepting it when it refuses to take Joyce and Camus. And when, following action. This tragic vision also informs Pascal's Marcuse's diagnosis in One Dimensional Man discourse. In Jean Genet's theater, Goldmann (1964), Goldmann juxtaposes organized, con­ discovered homologies between the world view sumer capitalism with an art "centered on ab­ of a "transindividual subject" (identified with sence and the impossibility of communication," militant workers and leftwi~g intellectuals) and he is arguing on the basis of his inference that dramatic technique. . the dominance of exchange value and reifica­ In evaluating the greatness of a work, tion has made impossible the attainment of • Goldmann focuses on the coherent structuring maximum possible consciousness by the bour­ of the text coinciding with the unified world geoisie, or by artists associated with it. Echoing view of a group. He adopts a pivotal distinc­ Lukacs, Goldmann reflects that "valid" cultural tion from Georg Lukacs' History and Class COYl­ creation takes place only when siousness (1923): the gap between "actual" and "potential" consciousness of a class, the latter man conceives himself or feels himself as part of signifying full self-knowledge, a grasp of the a developing whole and situates himself in a class' position in the social totality; and the historicalor transcendent trans-individual dimen­ former denoting empirical, immediate aware­ sion. But bourgeois ideology, bound up like bourgeois society itself with the existence of eco­ ness. The representative writer creates works nomic activity ... is precisely the first ideology in that articulate the maximum possible conscious­ history that is both radically profane and a his­ • ness of the class, given its objective possibility torical ... created the first radically nonaesthetic in a historically determinate period. form of consciousness (rationalism)." But when Goldmann shifts his attention to the novel (in Towards a Sociology of the Novel, Granted it is nonaesthetic, but still nonetheless 1973), he privileges the economic aspect in the a form of consciousness which one may discern absence of a mediating world view. No longer in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Voltaire's satires, homologous with the maximum possible con­ and Goethe's Faust. Goldmann seems to allow sciousness of a class, the form of the novel now no space for biographical or familial causation, directly reproduces economic life, "everyday nor for the impact of the formal traditions of a life in the individualistic society created by genre. market production. There is a rigorous homology Goldmann's critics all converge in targetting between the literary form of the novel ... and the the mechanistic and dualistic implications of everyday relation between man and commodi- establishing homologies. The chiefobjection is • WESTERNsoaOLOClCAL LITERARY THEORY 47

that it rules out fantasy, negativity, utopia, defect inheres in its inability to comprehend transcendence. In defense, Goldmann articu­ contemporary artistic expression because it lates the rationale of his methodology in overly depends on "a knoum history, a knoum defining two levels of criticism. First is compre­ structure, known products/"! hension or understanding of a text through a While Lukacs, Korsch, and the circle of description of its internal relations, its Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Lowenthal and coherence, the semantic polysemy of the text Marcuse (later known as the Frankfurt school) which subsumes the dialectic of desire, diffe­ developed the dialectical application of Marxist rence, death. Second is explanation or interpre­ principles in the twenties and thirties against tation which occurs when a text's function, the positivism of the Second International, other • inserted into the realm of the "transindividual Marxists like Christopher Caudwell, George subject," is grasped, When this totalizing act Thomson, Max Raphael, Ernst Bloch and Bertolt joins the work's imaginary universe with the Brecht explored other areas beyond the scope of collective consciousness of the group within the a mechanical base-superstructure equation. But historical totality, the aesthetic meaning and it was not until the intervention of the French intelligibility of the text is made explicit. The philosopher Louis Althusser in the early sixties goal then is to explain the social whole, not the that the renaissance of Western Marxism could individual transposition of a world view. If so, properly begin. 16 cultural praxis conflated with social praxis loses In For Marx (1965) and Reading iCapital' its concrete specificity - at least, on the level of (1970), Althusser questions the prevalent He­ explanation. Goldmann admits the division of gelian version of Marx's proglemtAtique by posit­ labor in the human sciences, and asserts that ing an epistemological break between the Marx "the problematic of literary history ... is to of 1844 Economic and Phl1osophic:al Man14scripts situate human behavior in a framework within and Capital (circa 1857). Inventing a method which it becomes necessary and comprehen­ called "symptomatic reading" which probes for sible." an absent field of discourse to disclose the text's For all its synthesizing power and concep­ condition of possibility, Althusser attacks em­ • tual reach, Goldmann's "genetic structuralism" piricism and its assumption of a knowing, co­ valorizes too much the homogeneous and uni­ herent subject claiming to know an object di­ tary virtue of world views and totalities at the rectly. In Althusser's problematic, knowledge expense of manifold contradictions and rup­ is a theoretical practice, a knowledge-produc­ tures that generate revolutionary changes. In tion distinct from the economic, political, and short, the dialectics of the historical process is ideological practices.· suppressed, or at least occluded, in favor of Althusser's most decisive contribution to functional necessity Piaget's assimilation-ac­ aesthetic theory is the idea of overdetetmina­ commodation cycle, and a meta-historical in­ tion already assumed in the works of Terry strumentalization of thought. Much more fatal Eagleton and Frederic Jameson, which I'll dis­ is the corporatist nature of world views quite cuss next. Since the demise of its founders, incompatible with the Marxist axiom of uneven Marxism has been plagued by both economism • development, non-synchronic conjunction of (where the superstructure passively reflects the base-superstructure, and the like which inescapable determinism of the base) and his­ Gramsci has summed up in his theory of he­ toricism (where all knowledge is relative to a gemony founded on class alliances in the his­ present consciousness). To rectify those mis­ toric bloc. takes, Althusser argues that a social formation In Marxism and Literature (l977), Raymond or totality has no essence or center. It is decen­ Williams reviews the inadequacies of the ho­ teredo Society is comprised of complex multiple mologizing strategy. He notes that by giving practices or structures, with their specific effec­ "social order" a structured form as world view, tivities, so that even though the economic deter­ it treats culture as formal products, not "active mines causation in the last instance, any num­ practices." By substituting "epochal" for "con­ ber of practices (such as religious ideology in nected historical analysis," it narrows its proce­ the Middle Ages) can play a dominant role in • dural selectivity of evidence." Its paramount certain circumstances. Reality is hence overde- • 48 PHILIPPINE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW termined. In the structured process of life, In general, Eagleton follows the Marxist the­ subjects are deemed effects of totalities and ory of uneven and combined development relations, endowed with no universal essence or when he defines the GMP as the dominant nature. Althusser avoids reductionism by in­ .mode of production in a social formation made sisting on a cardinal rule: society should be up of different, interpenetrating modes of pro­ grasped in its full concreteness, with each his­ duction. The LMP refers to a unity of certain torical conjuncture situated within the "struc­ forces and social relations of literary produc­ ture in dominance." tion. At a given time, one LMP may be contra­ Since then, Althusser's intervention has en­ dictorily linked to another LMP: for example, gendered a rich harvest of inquiries into the the coexistence of the patronage system and relations between literature and ideology, such capitalist literary production in 18th-century as Pierre Macherey's A Theory of Literary England; or, in the Philippines, the copresence • Production (1966) and the researches of Michel of balagtasan and other ritualized performances Pecheux and Renee Balibar. "Symptomatic with commercialized television serials. This reading" has been modified by a new conceptu­ complex articulation of different LMPs with the alization of ideology in Althusser's essay "On GMPs of a social formation is in turn internal­ Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" ized in the text. While the LMP generally re­ (Lenin and Philosophy, 1971). Instead of being produces the GMP which determines it in the "false consciousness," ideology is theorized last instance, they are not homologous: roman­ now as a system of social practices tied to cer­ tic poets, for example, resisted the commodity tain apparatuses and institutions that constitute fetishism of emergent capitalism. individuals into subjects. Instead of the condi­ General Ideology (GI) refers to the "rela­ tions of production, the work's specific ideo­ tively coherent set of 'discourses' of values, logical effects - ideological domination and its representations, beliefs" embodied in various reproduction through the educational system­ struchires and apparatuses. A dominant ideo­ now preoccupy the critic. From the perspective logical formation reflects "the experiential rela­ of Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, the lit­ tions of individual subjects to their social condi­ erary phenomenon exists within the determi­ tions as to guarantee those misperceptions of • nate 'social conditions; the notion of the text as the 'real' which contribute to the reproduction an object-in-itself, with a transcendent and im­ of the dominant social relations." All literary mutable value, makes no sense because the text production and consumption belongs to the is defined as the sum of its effects embedded . cultural ideological apparatus (communication, within material social practices. Balibar and education) subsumed in GI. What is required is Macherey expound a post-Althusserian Marxist to describe those modes of insertion of authorial theory of literature in their well-known essay, and aesthetic formations into the hegemonic "On Literature as an Ideological Form" (1978),17 ideology. Eagleton demonstrates how this oc­ curs through language and its political effect: Terry Eagleton "The genesis of English as a 'national' language I would like next to describe briefly the Brit­ is the history of imperialism and its aftermath." ish critic Terry Eagleton's formulation of a criti­ Similarly, Milton's decision to write Paradise • cal strategy presented in his book Criticism and Lost in English illustrates the conjuncture of lin­ Ideology (1976) which employs Althusser's con­ guistic ad political elements in the interdetermi­ cept of theoretical practice in an original way. nation of GI and LMP. In the academy Eagleton assigns himself the task of analyzing (whether captured by conservative positivism the complex articulation of various structures or liberal humanism), "literature is a vital in­ which produce the text as a mode of material strument for the insertion of individuals into practice. To illuminate overdetermination in a the perceptual and symbolic forms of the domi­ precise and rigorous way, Eagleton charts the nant ideological formation, able to accomplish field of Marxist critical discourse into six this function with a 'naturalness,' spontaneity spheres: General Mode of Production (GMP), and experiential immediacy possible to no other ideological practice.t"" . Literary Mode of Production (LMP), General 41 Ideology (Gl), Authorial Ideology (Aul), Aes­ As for Auth~rial Ideology (Aul), Eagleton thetic Ideology (AI), and Text. defines this as "the effect of the author's specific • WESTERN soaOLOGICAL UTERARY TI-lEORY 49

mode of biographical insertion in the GI "over­ ideological ensembles whose ultimate signified determined by class, sex, nationality, religion, is history. The text does not then directly region, etc. The ideology of the text is shaped appropriate history or real-life situations for its not only by AuI but also by Aesthetic Ideology immediate object, but rather works on (AD, the area of GI which includes theories of ideologically invested forms and materials to literature, critical practices, traditions, genres, produce a textual or imaginary "real." In pro­ conventions, devices, etc. The ideology of an ducing this "real," the text exhibits a peculiar LMP which mutually reproduces the relations overdetermination of its own signifying between the GMP and GI is encoded with AI. practice, an overdetermination which impels it Eagleton cautions us not to view the relations to negotiate "aparticular ideological experience between the five structures as symmetrical, al­ of real history." • though when the text's ideology is constituted Eagleton's approach is genuinely dialectical. by the interplay of LMP, GI, and AI, the GMP While ideologies (in their plurality outlined exerts its determination in the final analysis. earlier) generate the text's concreteness (the One may sum up by conceiving literary practice intense fusion of numerous determinants), the as the typical result of the complex conjuncture text in turn produces its own textual ideology of LMP, GI, and AI, with one or another of distinguished by categories that conceal and these elements asserting dominance. Reading, naturalize its raw materials as well as its own for Eagleton, is "an ideological decipherment of mechanisms. Through various displacements an ideological product," and criticism an inter­ and mutations of form, the text processes the face of the text's moments of production and ideological significations mediating the text and consumption (reading). history, producing thereby its own ideology. In the centerpiece of his book, Towards a Put another way, the text results from the inter­ Science of the Text, Eagleton proceeds to play of two mutually constitutive formations: concretize his founding thesis that the text is "a the ideology of society and the aesthetic mode certain production of ideology." While of constructing meaning; in producing its spe­ granting to text and ideology their status as cific structure, the text establishes distance or • distinct discourses. Eagleton insists that the relative autonomy form ideology. Eagleton ideology of the te~t is not an "expression" of borrows the notion of art's "distantiating effect" authorial ideology (AuI). It is "the product of from Althusser and Macherey. an aesthetic working of 'general' ideology as In postulating the existence of an ideology Of that ideology is itself worked and 'produced' by the text, Eagleton oppo~s Goldmann's theory an overdetermination of authorial-biographical of the work as a microcosm of a world view or factors. AuI, then, is always GI as lived, collective mental structures. Such a theory worked and represented for a particular over­ deprives the text of its own relatively independ­ determined standpoint within it." The text may ent and creative materiality. Like Raymond be defined as "a multiple articulated structure Williams and Fredric Jameson, both profiting that produces ideology" and constitutes it to from Althusser's critique of empiricism and reveal its relations to history. Contrary to form the revival of Gramsci's praxis-oriented • Lukacs, Eagleton states that history (society) is Marxism, Eagleton lays to rest the vulgar, re­ not immediately inscribed in the text but ductive version of "Marxism" which construes registers itself in ideology. Following ideology and art from the outside. Althusser, Eagleton treats ideology as an Eagleton conceives both text and ideology as "inherently complex formation which, by modes of production. Their relations are inter­ inserting individuals into history in a variety of nal to each other, each one reciprocally opera­ ways, allows of multiple kinds and degrees of ting on the other in historically determinate access to that history." Now the raw materials ways. In Criticism and Ideology, Eagleton des, on which the text operates its own categories cribes in detail how the text "destructures and protocols (genres, symbolic techniques, ideology in order to reconstitute it on its own etc.), the latter being also overdetermined, relatively autonomous terms, in order to pro­ consist of society's self-representations, cess and recast it in aesthetic production, at the • assumptions, codes of perceptual habits - same time as it is itself destructured to variable • 50 PHIUPPINE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW degrees by the effect of ideology upon it."19 collective destiny fades with the increasing Like Jameson, Eagleton would also stress the atomization of life in capitalist society, the tra­ "inner logic" of content, content referring here jectory of novelistic action yields to psychologi­ to the real given, lived history, significations cal montage and eventually postmodernist pas­ which are already articulated in ideological tiche. Jameson describes how, in the twentieth forms, together with specific modes of the aes­ century, the primacy of the linguistic model in thetic production of ideology. In part the text semiotics and various post-structuralisms (de­ already foregrounds the "ideologically construction, Foucault, Lacan) is rooted in cate­ determined conventionality of its modes of gories of exchange and reification in consumer constructing sense," but it also conceals and capitalism. Without this historical contextuali­ naturalizes its modes of production into the zation, form is meaningless. semblance or simulacrum of "concrete life." A dialectical mode of interpretation then • This prototypical effect of literature as an becomes imperative. When the critic exposes empirical or natural object which sociologists the culture- or time-bound character of all cate­ study hides those determinants of the gories of thought - their ideological function production process that Marxist criticism vis-a-vis classes, gender, etc. - she is perfor­ addresses. Consequently Eagleton submits to ming an act of demystification. This is the us that ''The function of criticism is to refuse the . moment of negative hermeneutics. But the task spontaneous presence of the work - to deny of the critic goes beyond this since the lived that 'naturalness' in order to make its real experience (the raw material) of the work determinants appear."20 unfolds a latent content which supports at the In the thirties, Bertolt Brecht and Walter same time undermines the repression of its Benjamin carried out that critical mission. possibilities with a utopian force. Jameson Brecht invented epic theater to disclose the points out that "all stylization, all abstraction in determinants of illusion through Ver­ the form, ultimately expr~sses some profound fremdunkseffekt and other .~iliarizing ruses, inner logic in its content, and is ultimately while Benjamin (in The Work of Art in the Ageof dependent for its existence on the structures of MecJumiail Reproduction) theorized on the role of the raw materials themsetves/"! This inner • the means of intellectual production in consti­ logic can only be unfolded by a method tuting the function and value of the art-work. Jameson calls "metacommentary," a procedure Their findings will be reconceptualized in which combines the negative with a positive Bakhtin's "intertextuality" and ''heteroglossia'' hermeneutic whose aim is to restore some origi­ in teday's Marxist-poststructuralist dialogue (of nal forgotten meaning - the dream ofa more which more later). humane community - antithetical to the boredom and alienation in capitalism. Meta­ lFrederic~ Jmne80n commentary thus seeks to account for the The single Western Marxist who has tried to mechanism that censors the dream (the fantasy restore the dialectic to its central locus in the about emancipated work) and releases also the human sciences is the American critic Fredric impulses which motivate the fantasy. What Jameson. His fundamental insight is that the metacommentary aims to produce in effect is a • categories of our understanding always reflect, symptomatic reading of texts (jameson adap­ albeit in oblique or sublimated fashion, "a par­ ting Althusser's hermeneutics} in order to ticular and determinate moment of history,"!' realize the two-sided project (for Goldmann) of A category like the plot of the realistic novel, for understanding and explanation. Jameson, may be cognized as possible only In its application, metacommentary exhibits when society is grasped as a coherent totality; the relational dialectics mobilized in Marx's when the intuition of such a totality disappears, Grundrisse and Capital. Given the inclusion of the rhetoric of the realistic plot either evapo­ thought in the unfolding contradictions of a rates or modulates in late Victorian society to stratified reality, the way the writer thinks rea­ melodrama where the unity of personality, the lity - the manner in which form, or the possi­ identity of point of view, replaces unity of ac­ bilities of Experience itself, can be conceived­ tion. When collective life fused with a sense of depends on this intrinsic logic of content, • • 52 PHIUPPINE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW ously Utopian power as the symbolic affirma­ necessarily polemical and charged with values. tion of a specific historical and class form of "All understanding is dialogical" because all collective unity."24 . utterances occur in unique social spaces and In sum, Jameson's historical or dialectical historical times. Bakhtin insists that because the poetics endeavors to resolve the problem of structure of the utterance is a social structure, metaphysical dualism (form/content, con­ "every literary work is sociological and that it is sciousness/institution, art/society) by a self­ so internally, immanently.?" l3akhtin uses the critical mode of totalization whereby a text term "enunciation" to designate the coalescence becomes intelligible or meaningful when its of the voice of the sender and the horizon of the manifold inscriptions into history are mapped receiver. Contexts of orientation, the common without annulling the relative autonomy or horizon of two interlocutors, function as consti­ specificity of the text in the process. This criti­ tutive elements of utterance. All discourses are cal performance answers Lukacs' "riddle of oriented to the Other. Thus categories of alte­ elevating individuality to the typical without rity and exotopy - the realization of meaning destroying the individual relief."25 through difference, through other's positions ­ are needed to map and assay the "irreducible heterogeneity of human existence." Like deconstruction and other poststructu­ ralist criticism, the concept of intertextuality No survey of sociaI1y-oriented literary theo­ rejects the liberal-humanist privileging of a ries today can be complete without mentioning single, dominant consciousness that decrees Mikhail Bakhtin. His works, particularly Marx­ value and meaning. The intertextuality of dia­ ismandthe Philosophy oflAnguage (1912) and his logic form decenters the Cartesian "1" which innovative studies on Dostoeosky (1929) and Ra­ has no identity except only in relation to an belais (1940), as well as numerous essays on other..Since meaning and value inhere in the discourse, have introduced heuristic and synop­ reciprocity of speaker-listener (whose speech tic concepts such as "intertextuality," ''heter­ evokes the response, the answerability of all), oglossia," "chronotope," etc., which have Bakhtin argues that the genre of the novel ­ • proved useful in mediating the complex trans­ particularly Dostoevsky's polyphonic structure actions between art and society. A burgeoning and Rabalais' carnivalesque and heteroglotic Bakhtin "industry" has enlivened the happen­ style - captures the intertextual constitution of ings in the Modem Language Association of subjects in history. Bakhtin chronicles in schol­ America in the last five years. arly detail how the novelistic genre emerged Beginning with the premise that the act of precisely when the authoritarian, dogmatic dis­ communication (production-reception of course of the Roman empire disintegrated and meaning) through language is constitutive of was replaced by "the Galilean language con­ human existence, Bakhtin formulates a theory science" characterized by the multiplicity of or utterance grounded on intersubjectivity. voices and styles. Monologue yields to dia­ Underlying this is his view that "human perso­ logue when "a verbal-semantic decentralization nality becomes historically real and culturally of the ideological universe" occurs. • productive only insofar as it is part of a social For Bakhtin, genre is the key concept of liter­ whole, in its class and through its class... Only ary history that synthesizes the sociohistorical such a social and historical localization makes and formal: "The utterance and its types, that man real, and determines the content of his is, the discursive genres, are the transmission personal and cultural creation."26 Because the belts between social history and linguistic his­ speaking subject is "wholly the product of tory."20 What notions such as "production of social interrelations," linking internal and exter­ ideology" does for Eagleton and "inner logic of nal, the act of knowing a text or grasping content" for Jameson, genre does for Bakhtin ­ meaning is, for Bakhtin, essentially dialogical. genre conceived as modelling system, fabricator Somebody else's speech makes it possible to of simulacra of reality. The novelistic genre, generate my own. Likewise the word in litera­ from the Menippean satire to Dostoevsky, in­ ture exists as part of a dialogue and therefore carnates the fullest intertextual play and • WESTERN SOCIOLOGICAL UTERARYTI-lEORY 51

content as the lived experience of groups in level the ideologeme of education or rational specific times-places articulated in concrete enlightenment as pre-requisite for liberation forms. This content-form linkage may 00 seen versus the ideologeme of apocalyptic faith as Jameson's translation of Althusser's concept which paradoxically unites Simoun and Padre of ideology as the imaginary relation of the Florentino. Third, sublating the first two stages, subject to the real conditions of existence. What the text is now inscribed in the network of metacommentary strives to discover is why the coexisting sign-systems (traces or anticipations limiting effect of form - repression, its of different modes of production) in a social symptoms and dynamics - obtains. Metacom­ formation with sequenced, layered codes. On mentary proposes to analyze the dream-work in . this anagogic level, the narrativizing capacity of all writing or signifying practices to reveal the the imagination is measured by its power to • form-content dialectic: for example, science translate Necessity into a temporal process, the fiction with its glorification of the powerful touchstone of the "ideology of form" being the scientist and the nightmare of uncontrolled adequacy of such forms to carry out the task of technology can be read as a contemporary representing history. Here we need. to scruti­ expression of both the deepest anxieties of the nize how Rizal's novels stage the breakdown of individual psyche as well as the collectivefolk­ the ilustrado belief in rationality symptomati­ dream of self-fulfillingwork, a vision of human cally evinced. in the collapse of linear plot and redemption. the disclosure of its conditions of production in in his The PolitiClZI Unconsciou« (1981), the fissures and gaps of the discourse itself. Jameson sharpens and elaborates his thesis that These three horizons are then theoretically cor­ the Marxist master-narrative of the collective related to map "the traces of that uninterrupted struggle of humankind to wrest a realm of narrative," to restore "to the surface of the.text freedom from the realm of Necessity is the c the repressed. and buried reality of this funda­ "ultimate semantic precondition for the intelli­ mental plot" of humankind's struggle to liber­ gibility of literary and cultural texts." The ate itself from "alienating necessities," from the critic's quest for intelligibility, for a knowledge fate of being a victim of History. • of the social grounding of a text, culminates We can now conclude that what metacorn­ with the apprehension of the "ideology of mentary above all intends to accomplish is what form." Jameson reminds us that aside from the Jameson calls the discovery/recOvery of "the truth of experience, we are also concerned with political unconscious." The "political uncon­ the "truth of thought." the ideological nexus, scious" signifies the text's precise ideological how knowledge is constructed or textualized. function, its value as a social act, at unique In other words, texts are rendered. intelligtble moments in history - a function concealed or by their systematic insertion into a narrative of repressed. in all class societies. All critical theo­ history distinguished by complex overlays of ries and interpretive strategies will then find overlapping modes of production, by their ultimate justification in the pursuit of "the overdetermined contradictions. political unconscious," in short, in history as In this paradigm of history, metacommen­ "the ground and untranscendable horizon" of • tary now assumes the pattern of a methodologi­ all action and thought. Jameson is convinced cal process of insertion comprising three stages that Marxism "provides a way of comprehend­ triangulating distinct semantic horizons: First, ing how literary texts achieve a kind of cogni­ the text is apprehended as a political act - for tive authority by virtue of their capacity to example, Rizal's novels are read as articulations' 'work up a certain knowledge (not merely a cer­ of the grievances and protests of the t1ustrado/ tain 'intuition') of the conditions of their own principalia sector of Filipino society'in nine­ production and render those conditions intelli­ teenth-century colonial milieu. Second, the text gible thereby."23 In addition to the axiom that is grasped. as a manifestation of a general ide­ all artistic representation of life is ideological in ologeme of the social formation in which it nature, the Marxist analysis of culture, Jameson arose, the ideologeme being "the smallest intel­ argues, "must seek, through and beyond a ligible unit of the essentially collective dis­ demonstration of the instrumental function of a • courses of social classes." We examine at this given cultural object, to project its simultane- • WESTERN soaOLOGICAL LITERARYTHEORY 53

heterology (diversity of languages and voices) 'William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Cleanth Brooks, possible. Changes in genre always register Literary Criticism, A Short History (London, 1957), social transformations: "The true poetics of pp.531-532. See also Walter Jackson Bate, Criticism: genre can only be a sociology of genre." In The MIljor Texts (New York 1952), pp. 500-501. addition to genre, Bakhtin theorizes the form­ 7Harry Levin, "Literature As An Institution," content dialectic in the category of the "chrono­ Sociology of Literature and Drama, edited by Elizabeth tope,' "the set of distinctive features of time and Tom Bums (Middlesex, 1973), p. 68. and space within each literary genre," which serves as the architectonic principle of the artis­ °Bottomore, pp. 448-449. tic universe. Ifonly for reminding us that comprehending 9The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker • a literary work requires alterity, the Other with­ (New York, 1978), p.5. out whom we cannot speak, dialogue, and in­ tertextuality, all of which exceed the limits of 1000ymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New positivistic or formalist hermeneutics, Bakhtin York, 1977), pp.83-89. deserves to be credited for confirming once "This section summarizes ideas found in the fol­ more the truth of the indivisibility of culture, lowing texts by Goldmann: Essays on Method in the society and history in all human disciplines. Sociology of Literature (St. Louis, 1980); "Genetic Structuralism in the Sociology of Literature" and ''The Moral Universe of the Playwright," Sociol/;lgy of Literature and Drama. pp.l09-124, 311-318; The Sodol­ Notes ogy of Uteralure: Status and Problems of Method," International Social Science Journal, XIX (1967); To­ IAny program of the annual MLA Convention for wards II Sociology of the NOTJZI (1975). the last ten years will bear this out. S2e also the survey of tr~ds in the introduction of Josue Harari, IlQuoted in William' Q. Boelhower, "Introduc­ Textwll Stmtegy (Ithaca, 1979), pp.9-72, and also Terry tion," Essays on Method in the Study of Literature. p, 24. Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minneapolis, 1983) • I~oted A good indicator of changes in this discipline Is in Jane Routh, "A Reputation Made: Robert Oements, QmipamtiTJZ Utemture As Academic Lucien Goldmann," The Sociology of Literature: theo­ Discipline (New York, 1978). retical Apprcmches. ed. Jane Routh and Janet Wolff (Keele, 1977), p. 154. 2A good collection of Weber's writings are found in EcollOmy and Society (New York, 1968), 3 volumes, I'David Laing, TheMtJrxist Theory of Art (Brighton, and also Mia Weber: SelectiO?ls in Translation, ed. W. 1978), p. 56. G. Runciman (London, 1978). Mannheim's classic work is Ideology and Utopis ISWilliams, pp. 106-107. Compare William's idea (New York, 1936). of "structures of feeling" (pp. 128-135) with Goldmann's world-view. ~ Durkeim's The Elementary Forms of the Reli­ • gitJus Life (London, 1955). CE. Tom Bottomore, A 14For a selection of Writings by Caudwcll and Dictionsry of MtJrxist Tlwught (Cambridge, Mass., other critics cited, see the following anthologies: 1983), pp. 105-109. Maynard Solomon, MIlrxism and Art (New York, 1973); Berel Land and F. Williams, MIlrxism and Art 4Antonio Gramscl, The Modern Prince end Other (New York 1972); Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics liPId Writings (New York, 1957), p. 93. Politics (London, 1977). See also Leo Lowenthal, Lit. emture, Popular Culture and Society (Englewood Cliffs, 9Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of litera­ N.J., 1961), esp. Chapter 5. F~r an exemplary appU.. ture (New York, 1956; original edition 1942), pp. 94­ cation of Althusser's ideas, see Catherine Belsey, 109 passim. For a review of the field, see also David Critical Praaice (London, 1980). . Daiches, Critical Approaches to Literature (Englewood OiIfs, N.J., 1956), pp. 358-375. For a sampling of l1lncluded in Robert Young, ed. Untying the Text: sociologically-oriented essays, see David Lodge, 20th A Post-Structuralist Reader (Boston, 1981), pp. 79-100. Century Literary Criticism (London, 1972). IOTerry Eagleton, Criticism in Ideology

IOlbid., pp. 98-99. Z!Quoted by Harry Slowocher, "Literature and S0­ ciety," Marxism and Art, ed. Maynard Solomon, p. ZOlbid., pp. 101. 482.

ZIThis section summarizes the main ideas of Z'Quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, MikJulil Bakhtin The Jameson found in: Mtrrism andFonn (Princeton, N.J., DiJJlogical Principle (Minneapolis, 1984), p. 31. 1972); The Prison House of lAnguage (Princeton, 1972); The Politit:al Unconscious (Ithaca, 1981); "Metacom­ Z'lbid., p. 34. mentary" in Robert Con Davis, ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism (London, 1986), pp.111-123; "Criti­ ZOlbitl., pp. 81-82. See also the enlightening sum­ cism in History," in Norman Rudich, Weapons of maries and comments of Katerina Oark and Michael Criticism (palo Alto, 1976), pp. 31-50. Holquist, MikJulil Bakhlin (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), Chapters 3, 9, 10, 13, 14. • UJameson, quoted in Robert Con Davis, p. 120. For an indication of sociological literary trends in England. sea the works of Richard Hoggart and ZSlbid., p. 149. Stuart Hall Both of whom were connected with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Univer­ Z4lbid., p. 158. sity of Birmingham; see, e.g., Richard Hoggart, "Contemporary Cultural Studies: An Approach to the Study of Literature and Society," Contemporary Criticism (Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 12) (London, 1970), pp. 155-170.

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