9/24/07 Marxism • Marxism is many different kinds of theories at once: • theory of history in which the proletariat inevitably end up the dominant order; this has proven historically to be false. • a critique of capitalism. This body of theory can be relevant to literature, but we’re not going to get into it explicitly. Barry and Richter give some sense of this; for the midterm, I’ll have you learn some terms so that you’ll be at least somewhat conversant with this kind of thinking if you run into it again. • a sort-of-literary theory. I say “sort of” because what Marx and others theorize is larger than literature: “consciousness and its expressions,” which would include not only literature but all of the arts, religion, politics, law, and so on. This is the part of Marxist theory we’re going to center on, because it raises a really huge problem for post-NC Theory in general, or least for all political theories (and we know that, as Barry says, “politics is pervasive” in post-NC theory, so ALL Theory is political according to this view). • Starting point: 410: “In the social production…determines their consciousness.” Some things to point out: • base/superstructure. “Relations of production”--economic system, more or less. At the most fundamental level, people have to survive, and the way we do that as a species is to produce stuff. But we don’t do that on our own; we do it as part of some kind of economic system that we are born into. There have been various stages of these systems, which he describes in this essay and the other one we read: tribal, ancient city-state, feudal, bourgeois. On top of this, “forms of social consciousness”--as I said before, all the arts, religion, politics, law, etc. • relation between them: mode of production determines social, political and intellectual life processes. More about this in a moment. • “independent of their will”--you don’t get to choose what relations of production you’re born into. And if those relations of production determine consciousness, i.e. what you can think, then what you think is not under individual control. By implication, individual selves are not autonomous, but are determined by larger political forces. So Marx, writing in 1845, long before New Criticism and still longer before post-NC theory, has already gotten us something very much like what Barry describes in post-NC theory. This is one reason why Marxism is very important to study in a theory class, despite the fact that there are relatively few American Marxists (there are a lot more British ones). • Within Marxist theory, there has been a lot of discussion of—and disagreement about—what it means for superstructure to be determined by base. Main disagreements are on two issues: • degree of determinism: degree to which economic base determines thought: strict determinism vs., e.g., Althusserian relative autonomy. Engels, letter to Bloch: “economic situation is the basis, but various elements of the superstructure also exercise their influence on the course of events” • means of determination: determine how? Lots of versions: superstructure reflects base (which can mean simply that art has a mimetic relation to the base); there are correspondences between superstructure and base (so, for example, the dissonant and atonal music of the early twentieth C can be taken to correspond to the crises of capitalism in that era); ideology mediates between base and superstructure, etc. I’m not going to try to cover all the different versions, or expect you to know them for an exam; we’ll look at an example in a moment. • An especially important concept in Marxist theory is the concept of ideology. There has been a lot of disagreement over that issue too; let me point to a few different definitions. • false consciousness: a convenient lie that covers up the truth of what’s really going on. Example from Barry: Browning’s “foggy verbalism” covers up class conflicts (Caudwell, about whom Terry Eagleton said that he was too vague even to be wrong). • Few practicing Marxists will ascribe to such a crude definition of ideology. But the connotations of “false consciousness” are never far away from more sophisticated understandings of the term. • Richter’s version of Marx: “the culture’s collective consciousness of its own being.” This is a more accurate statement of how ideologies actually work--if ideologies were just lies they wouldn’t be very effective–but it misses the element of power that the cruder definition centers on. • put them together: “a culture’s collective consciousness of its own being; a set of beliefs to which we freely subscribe because they have come to see natural, but which tend to support or conceal the existing relations of power.” • Not that these beliefs may not in fact be wholly false. • Ideology in this sense has power because it leads to HEGEMONY—a power structure in which one group dominates over another, which is upheld by people voluntarily acting in ways that tend to support that structure. Althusser: ideological structures as opposed to repressive structures. • IMO, ideology is the single most important concept Marxism developed--and as I’ll try to show later, it opens up huge theoretical problems. • How Marxists conceive of the relationship between ideology and the base/superstructure model varies. For some theorists, ideology is just a subset of superstructure; for others, it is all of superstructure; for still others, ideology is what mediates between base and superstructure. • Let’s dig into an example. • 411 “it is a well known fact…forces of nature….In no event…mythology.” What’s the base, and what’s the superstructure? In what way does base determine superstructure? • next ¶: why is there a difficulty in understanding why we still enjoy Greek art? • passim, and requiring some inference: ancient Greece was a slave state. In what way would Greek art as described here be ideological?