School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemMarxism and literary history(Harvard University Press, 1986)In this book I try to theorize the concepts of system and history for a Marxist theory of literary discourse. This theorization is conceived as part of a semiotically oriented intervention in cultural politics. I am not interested in producing a general Marxist theory of literature or in contributing to an aesthetics; and I do not attempt a philosophical purification of these categories. They are difficult categories and I seek to make them more so; but the point is to make them fit tools for critical and political uses. I use the concept of system in the sense of a nontotalized formation which sets epistemological and practical limits to discourse, and which is thereby productive of discourse; it does not have here its speculative or its systems-theoretical sense of a closed and self-regulating totality. In addition, I seek consistently to deploy the concept in counterpoint to its ongoing deconstruction. In the same way, the concept of history does not carry the sense of an enfolding narrative continuum or of the given ground of human action. It is used to theorize the discontinuous, nonteleological dynamic of the literary system and the multiple temporalities of texts within complex sets of intertextual relations. The theoretical framework and intent of the book is a nondogmatic and nonorthodox Marxism which I hope will require no apology. I work within an antihumanist, antihistoricist, and anti-Hegelian tradition, but am also intellectually close to the post-structuralism of Foucault and Derrida. The interplay and sometimes the strain between these traditions will be evident (I hope fruitfully) throughout the book.
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ItemSystem and history: a critique of Russian formalism( 1980)The theoretical development of Russian Formalism, and of its structuralist successors in Prague, is the record of an exemplary attempt to fuse an immanent approach to the literary text to the literary system, which would locate significance in the structure of textual relations and not in genetic or mimetic features, with an awareness of the essential historicity of these relations. Implicit in the concept of literary evolution is a theory of the mechanism of change – that is, of the connection between literary history and history between the text and the social formation; but this theory was never adequately elaborated, both because of a refusal to postulate a direct causal connection between historical change and the apparently autonomous development of the literary system, and because of the Formalists’ almost constant separation of aesthetic from extra aesthetic functions (a separation which confirms the hiatus between the literary series and the social system in which it is inserted).
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ItemDiscourse and Power( 1985)The paper argues for the possibility of reworking the concept of ideology in such a way as to depend neither on a problematic of truth and error, nor on a division of the world into two parts one of which is more real than the other, nor on an expressive relation of subjects to meaning. The political force of the concept can be retained if ideology is thought as a provisional state of discourse (a function of its appropriation and use) rather than as a content or an inherent structure. Any discursive system produces a particular configuration of subject-positions which are the conditions of entry of individuals into discourse; but these acquire political significance only through the (historically variable) codification of discourse in terms of a play of relations of power, and the positions available can be refused or undermined. Some implications of this argument for models of the social and for discourse theory are discussed.
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ItemDiscipline and Discipleship( 1988)The transfer of knowledges is almost always mediated by institutions and by authorized persons. I set up some metaphors in this paper to try to examine these mediating processes by which knowledges are both reproduced and transformed. In particular, I take psychoanalytic andreligious training as metaphors for the transmission of a discipline, and then I briefly extend the figure of discipleship to talk about literary pedagogy and the training of graduate students.
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ItemAccounting for tastes: some problems in Bourdieu's sociology of culture( 1987)Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste completes what is perhaps the strongest case we have about the social functions of cultural artefacts; but it is a case that is deeply flawed. In this article I try to isolate some of the theoretical presuppositions and implications of its central concepts, and to clarify their political limitations.
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ItemThe margins of the law( 1988-02)Text reviewed Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. 128pp. One of the most powerful current readings of the law is that developed, as an “expansion of doctrine” by Roberto Mangabeira Unger. This reading begins with an acceptance of “the mimimal characteristics of doctrine - the willingness to take the extant authoritative materials as starting points and the claim to normative authority” (15). It accepts the historical givenness of doctrine, that is to say; but then pushes on from there to the point where doctrine crosses over into ideological conflict. This is the reading, in other words, of a “double inscription” it explores the “internal development” (2) of legal categories (for example, the causal categories embedded in notions such as imputed purpose), but it then tries to open this development out into a recognition and a deepening of the clash between contradictory principles. Legal categories are so closely tied in with the structure of the world that to contest them, or to elaborate them to the point of contradiction, is to challenge the naturalness and the necessity of that structure. Such a method of reading derives its political force from its belief that “the focussed disputes of legal doctrine repeatedly threaten to escalate into struggles over the basic imaginative structure of social existence”
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ItemFormal Method in Discourse Analysis( 1989)Developing a workable method of discourse analysis matters, presumably, and if it does, because it would allow us to demonstrate the play of power in language, the play of ideology. To demonstrate means being able to substantiate arguments in the public arena – to politicians, in courts of law, in hospitals or prisons or museums. What we envisage is something like the possibility of proof. We envisage, not a political process of judgement, but procedures of demonstration which could be mechanically repeated to produce identical results, and so bear witness to the underlying structure which causes them. Discourse analysis, like other uncertain knowledges, aspires to a state of hardness. My tone of irony covers a real ambivalence about this project, these projects, and certainly I intend no easy dismissal of them. Here I want to raise a series of questions about some of the work being done in and around the Dutch Konteksten series, especially by Tony Hak and Brian Torode;1 and to see whether it might be possible to define some of the limits touched by this raw, exploratory, interesting work. This is not, even in the case of individual writers, a unified body of research, but it has certain common points of reference. One of them is the ethnomethodological conversation analysis of Sacks and Schegloff; the other, more properly linguistic, is the work of Michel Pêcheux, and to a certain extent the analytic methods of Zellig Harris. The attraction of Pêcheux’s work is, I think, that it promises a rigorous and quasigrammatical account of presupposition: that is, the concept of the preconstructed promises direct access to ideology insofar as it appears to be equivalent to the Gramscian categories of 'common sense' – the obvious, the unthought, the taken-for-granted; and insofar as it both embodies these in a particular grammatical construction and relates them to a particular process of subject formation.
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ItemRepetition and limitation: computer software and Copyright Law( 1988)The recent evolution of copyright law in the United States is particularly rich in contradictions because of the pressure exerted by new information technologies and by the requirements of an information economy - that is, an economy based in the progressive commodification of information. In so far as this process is mediated through the law relating to intellectual property, it exacerbates the contradiction between the principles of limited monopoly rights and the public availability of ideas.
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ItemThe subject of the law(Local Consumption Publications, 1987)This paper is part of a larger piece of work on juridical discourse in which I try to elaborate a general description of the discursive and interdiscursive structures of the law and to specify some of the central doctrinal categories of contemporary law. The category of legal subject has an exemplary status in such a project for a number of reasons: it is constructed, in historically differential ways, through a diversity of overlapping positions in legal and para-legal practices and languages; it covers both human and non-human entities; it. is formed in direct relation to the juridical/economic concept of property; and it is closely linked, as both foundation and effect, to the philosophical category of subject. My account here is necessarily cursory, but it should be apparent that it has implications, in part, for the broader debate that has taken place in recent years around the concept of the subject.
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ItemSystem and norm in literary evolution: for a Marxist literary history( 1981)Russian Formalism provides a number of central categories for the construction of a non-teleological Marxist theory of literary evolution. In this paper I am concerned with working out some of their implications and in extending them to different problem areas. Particularly in its latter phases, the Formalist school worked towards a dynamic conception of the temporal field in which the literary text is situated; this field is constituted by the unity of the diachronic and synchronic systems to which the text belongs, that is, by the fact that every diachronic series is at each moment determined by the systematic configuration of elements at that moment, and that conversely “the synchronic structure of the work includes diachrony in that it carries within itself as a negated or cancelled element those dominant modes of the immediately preceding generation against which it stands as a decisive break, and in terms of which its own novelties and innovations are understood.”