LUCIEN GOLDMANN Essays on Method in the Sociology of Literature Translated and edited by William Q. Boelhower TELOSPRESS ST. LOUIS , MO. Copyright 1980 by Telos Press Ltd., St. Louis, Mo. All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-914386-19-0 cloth 0-914386-20-4 paper Library of Congress Card Number: 79-89567 Manufactured in the United States of America PN 51 . G&t./ I ?J ; 9 so Table of Contents Introduction, by William Q. Boelhower 5 Essays on Method in the Sociology ofLiterature 1. Subject and Object in the Human Sciences 35 2. The Epistemology of Sociology 55 3. The Concept of Significant Structure 75 in the History of Cul tu re 4. The Social Structure and the Collective 85 Consciousness of Structure 5. The Subject of the Cultural Creation 91 6. Theses on the Use of the Concept "World View" 111 in the History of Philosophy 7. Sociological and Cultural Denunciation 117 8. Genetic Structuralism and Stylistic Analysis 141 Index 157 5 Introduction The list of English translations and articles dealing with Lucien Goldmann's attempts to elaborate a sociological aesthetics clearly shows an increasing familiarity with his genetic structuralism and the corresponding need to come to an accurate definition of his theoretical contribution, especially in the field of literary method~ 1 Unfortunately, too many scholars have ignored the fact that Goldmann was above all an essayist. Specific works by Goldmann almost always have a tentative, polemical or even srl1cmatic character. Consequently, while his thought no longer 1wcds to be introduced to the English-reading public, it is evident from the very nature of these introductions (which are usually limited to a consideration of The Hz'dden God and Toward a Sociology of the Novel) that his work needs to be seen in its entirety to be correctly evaluated.2 There is a great deal of confusion and inaccurate criticism concerning the nature of certain categories that make up what Goldmann believed to be a formal method, precisely because only parts of his work are taken into account.3 Goldmann himself is partly to blame for this, . 1. A bibliography of Goldmann's work available in English (including essays about him) appears m Goldmann's Cultural Creation in Modern Society (Telos Press: St. Louis, 1976). Since then, Routledge & Kegan Paul has published my translation of Gold­ mann's Lukacs and Heidegger (1977). Goldmann's crucial essay, "The Epistemology of Sociology," also has appeared since then, in Telos 30 (Winter 1976·77). For the full list of Goldmann's scattered essays, see Eduard Tell's definitive bibliography, originally published in Revue de l'institut de sociologie, 3-4 (Brussels, 1973), pp. 787-806. 2. The best introductions to Goldmann's work are Raymond Williams' essay in New Left Review, 67 Qune 1971), pp. 3-18; Jacques Leenhardt's essay in Revue d'Esthetique, 2 (1971), PP· 113-128; Jean-Michel Palmier's essay in Esthetique et Marxisme (Union ~nhale d'Edition: Paris, 1974), pp. 107-188. 3. See M. Crouzet's essay, "Racine et le marxisme en histoire litt~raire," La nouvelle critique (November 1956), pp. 61-83. Here he accuses Goldmann of being eclectic, of mixing Marxism with certain neo-Kantian ideas implying a formal imposition of categories on his texts in an a priori fashion smacking of idealism. 6 insofar as he never clearly ordered or qualified his various borrowings - mainly from Lukacs, Marx and Piaget - in other words, he never carried out his intention to order his aesthetics in a systematic fashion as, for example, Lukacs and Adorno did.4 On the other hand, there has been too much haste in cate­ gorizing Goldmann. He is generally considered simply a disciple of the early Lukacs, as a fellow victim of the idealism in Lukacs' l\'larxism that resulted from Lukacs' inability to overcome his early neo-Kantian heritage. (Lukacs once belonged to the Heidelberg circle of Simmel, Rickert, Lask and Weber.) 5 Attempts to fix Goldmann's method in its Lukacsian dimensions (and here one can cite Grahl's introduction to Cultural Creation in Modern Society as the latest example) fail because they neglect crucial texts, most of which have been inaccessible or have been ignored to accommodate the speculative ambience of Lukacs the philosopher. The essays presented here, then, are chosen for their contri­ bution to a picture of a more positive and sociologically oriented Goldmann - a thinker who achieved intellectual autonomy by giving a new dimension to his "Lukacsian" categories. This he has done by giving them a coherent anthropological basis in Piaget's interactionist epistemology. Indeed, it is through Piaget's influence that he has made Lukacs less idealistic for methodological purposes. This is Goldmann's unique contri­ bution toward an interdisciplinary sociology of cultural creations. As Goldmann said in an interview, "I am less a speculative philosopher - I am not one at all - than I am a sociologist, a man of science who tries both to do concrete research and to isolate a positive method for the study of human and social facts. " 6 Besides bearing out this empirical dimension (one should point out that Lukacs was never concerned with elaborating a model of literary criticism as Goldmann and contemporary French critics 4. According to Leenhardt, in the essay mentioned above, Goldmann was thinking about ordering his model irito a theoretical system. 5. See De Feo's Weber e Lukacs (De Donato: Bari, 1970); Laura Boella's Il Giovane Lukacs (De Donato: Bari, 1977) and the special issue of Aut Aut Qanuary-April 1977) on Lukacs as seen by the members of the Budapest School. 6. "Structuralisme, marxisme, existentialisme," L'Homme et la Societe, 2 (1966), p. 109. 7 were), these same "Piagetian" essays are also crucial for documenting an even more important fact: namely, that Goldmann succeeded implicitly in providing for his categories to be made into a systematic dialectical model. In other words, they can be brought together formally in a theoretically coherent fashion. In fact, his primary contribution lies here. As Goldmann 1ays, "We have also defined the positive human sciences and more exactly the Marxist method by means of a nearly identical term (which, moreover, we have borrowed from Jean Piaget), that of genetic structuralism. " 7 According to Goldmann, it is Piaget, "not at all ... influenced by Marx, who has empirically discovered in his research laboratory nearly all of the fundamental positions Marx had formulated a hundred years earlier in the domain of the social sciences. "8 Given this new emphasis on Goldmann's Piagetian context and the possibility of formally organizing his categories on this basis, then, it remains to point out Goldmann's use of certain categories borrowed from Lukacs and to order them into the model he intended. It is hoped that this approach will enable the reader to place the particular heuristic categories of single essays into a theoretical framework where they are related to other such categories. (Thus, while the essay "Subject and Object in the Human Sciences" introduces the reader to the delicate theoretical balance Goldmann achieved, the categories presented there are given a more rigorous order in the following essay, "The Epistemology of Sociology.")9 The major advantage, but also the major difficulty, of the sociology of literature in general lies in its recognizing the need to 7. Marxisme et sciences humaines (Gallimard: Paris, 1970), p. 246. 8. Entretiens sur Les notions de genese et de structure (Mouton: The Hague, 1965), p. 15. The two major Goldmann essays that most explicitly express his debt to Piaget are "The Epistemology of Sociology" (in this volume) and ''Jean Piaget et la philosophie," Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto, 10 (1966), pp. 5·23. There are also two essays on Piaget in Goldmann's Recherches Dialectiques (Gallimard: Paris, 1959). 9. The next step would be to use the model in concrete research and then, in terms of current theoretical developments, to incorporate it into the complementary research of Jan Mukarovsky and Jurij Lotman and Boris Uspenskij of the School of Tartu, all of whom attempt to elaborate a semiology of cultural creations using methods strikingly similar to Goldmann's genetic structuralism. See Jan Mukarovsky, Il Significato dell'Estetica (Einaudi: Turin, 1973); Jurij Lotman, La Struttura del Testo Poetico (Mursia: Milan, 1972); Lotman and Boris Uspenskij, Semiotica e Cultura (Riccardo Ricciardi: Milan, 1975); Lotman and Uspenskij. Tipologia della Cultura (Bompiani: Milan, 1975). 8 develop synoptic categories that can link two heterogeneous levels - society and literature or history and aesthetics. This need is expressed by Lotman: 'Just as semiotic relations require not only a text but also a language, so the artistic work, considered alone, without any cultural context, without a definite system of cultural codes, is like an 'inscription on a tomb in an unknown language'." 10 Given this need, what tools allow the theoretical grounding of the correspondences between such levels? While dialectical materialism has always been the most sophisticated method of linking art and society, it is precisely Goldmann's contribution to have taken this much embattled heritage and to have formed paradigmatic categories that allow one to pass back and forth between these two levels, but in a non-mechanistic fashion. Only with such dialectical categories could he have avoided privileging either the discipline of sociology or that of aesthetics. In order to conceptualize the levels of the cultural creation of society, the sine qua non of a valid sociological aesthetics, Goldmann collected certain macro-analytical categories (totality, world view, form, the transindividual subject and possible con­ sciousness-objective possibility) from Lukacs and grounded them in a series of positive and anthropological categories taken from Piaget (significant structure, function, the structuration-destruc­ turation process, the epistemological circle of the subject and object, equilibrium).