Showing papers in "Substance in 1976"

Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature

Abstract: A work of technical skill as well as outstanding literary merit, Structuralist Poetics was awarded the 1975 James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. It was during the writing of this book that Culler developed his now famous and remarkably complex theory of poetics and narrative, and while never a populariser he nonetheless makes it crystal clear within these pages.

Toward a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign

Abstract: Just as the critique of political economy set for itself the task of analyzing the commodity-form, the Critique of the political economy of the sign intends to do so of the sign-form. As the commodity is both exchange value and use value-requiring that a total analysis of this form consider both slopes of the system-so too is the sign both signifier (Sr) and signified (Sd); the analysis of the sign-form must therefore proceed at both levels. Of course, this simultaneously requires a logical and strategic analysis of the relationship between the two terms, namely; 1) Between the EV system and the UV system (or between commodity-form and object-form), which we endeavored to do in the preceding article*: 2) Between the system of the Sr and that of the Sd (or between the respective codes which define the articulation of the sign-value and of the sign-form). This relationship sets itself up in both cases as an hierarchical function between a dominant form and an alibi form, or satellite form, the latter being both the logical crowning and ideological fulfillment of the former.

The Ideology of Form: Partial Systems in "La Vieille Fille"

Abstract: Whatever else it may mean, the term ideology may be taken as a sign designating the agreement of those who use it on a common field of study or problematics, if not a common solution to the latter's problems: those who consent to pronounce it, or who insist on doing so, may indeed be supposed to share at least a minimal conviction that the forms of consciousness are shaped or at least influenced by their social or historical ground, and that this "determining" relationship is worth studying in its own right. On the other hand, the analyst of ideology ought always to take into account the possibility that, once raised, the concept of ideology may ultimately prove more troublesome than it is worth: in it, indeed, two contradictory tendencies are at war-the one, a promise, held out by the very application of the name itself to so many diverse social phenomena, that it will be possible to elaborate a model of the relationship in question; the other, a pressure from the historical side of the same concept which, by insisting not only on the variations in the nature of ideology from moment to moment within a given social system, but above all on the immense changes in the structure of power from one type of system to anotherl, begins to make us feel that there is something misleading about using the same word for all of them. Nowhere do the antinomies of the concept of ideology manifest themselves more dramatically than in what is practically a locus classicus of such study, the novels of Balzac: socially and politically polyvalent enough to make the construction of an ideological model an exciting task, they ultimately inspire the feeling that they are too exceptional, owing to the unique transitionality of the age which they reflect, to be of any use in understanding the literary and ideological structures of other periods. The ambiguities in Balzac have frequently been rehearsed, generally in an attempt to do away with them in one way or another and thereby to have peace, as the Brechtian character said; but most recently, one has the impression that it is the Left that has won out, and this partly because of the disappearance of the old classical and monarchist Right, and partly because the reigning liberal intellectual establishment (with its ideology of modernism) has been less well able to assimilate Balzac than other, more individualistic or stylized writers of the same period, such as Stendhal or Hugo. So the very choice of Balzac as object of study has come itself to have the value of a sign, and to function a little like a declaration of Marxism (and let the present essay be no exception). Not that the Marxist solution to the "problem" of Balzac is without substance in its own right: on the contrary, the recent Mythes balzaciens of Pierre Barbdris has demonstrated, with an overwhelming fullness of detail, the truth of Lukics' canonical assertion that there is a narrative logic in Balzac's novels which is in direct contradiction to his professed political convictions. Barbdris shows that Balzac's conservatism and royalism can only be considered an "abstract" or "ideal" position-his concrete judgements on the ancien rigime and the historical Restoration

"Ou est la loi?": Law and Sovereignty in Aminadab and Le Tres-haut

Abstract: The law governing the boarding house in Aminadab (Paris: Gallimard, 1942) is tirelessly, indeed tiresomely clarified, as though there were no end to the sentences concerning it, for even the most contradictory do not rule each other out but expand at great length to accommodate each other. Explications, interpretations are ceaselessly exchanged, projects of investigation and research are energetically initiated, reports circulate, documents pile up at an amazing rate, dossiers become ever bulkier, the air is constantly filled with noisy recitations of the law's history. The law itself requires this. Nothing may legally remain obscure, secret or private. The flimsiest half-thought, the merest daydream, the vaguest memory must-so it is ruled -immediately be expressed in the open, exposed to the light, rendered explicit. "D6s que'une id6e nous passe par la tate nous avons l'obligation de la communiquer i un voisin ou d'ex6cuter aussitat les projets dont nous nous 6tions entretenus avec nous-m6mes" (Aminadab, p. 130). There is nothing, under the law, irrelevant to the law. It constitutes the affirmation of its own all-inclusiveness. InAminadab the law has acceded to its ultimate form, it is the wholeness of a Whole uninterruptedly revealing itself to itself.

The Language of Laughter

Abstract: The increasing status given to theory in current literary criticism has stimulated radical reconsideration of many critical concepts, creating within the field a kind of meta-criticism, informed by new theories in philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, psychology and sociology, thus bringing literary analysis out of the realm of static description, into the realm of dynamic dialectic. Among the varied approaches used for re-evaluation of literary meaning, a structural approach views the text in terms of the processes which bring about its creation: whereas man has traditionally been viewed in terms of fabricated meanings, a structural analysis looks at him in the act of fabricating meaning and text is correspondingly seen being endowed with meaning. In this study one will reconsider the conceptual significance of comedy, a fertile and necessary area for re-examination because of the multiformity of comic elements in literature. A structuralist re-evaluation of the traditional staples of comedy, such as technique (role-playing, counterfeit, verbal twists and so forth), situation, and character, views these comic features as surface structures which, although they describe the elements of comic effect, do not explain cause, either in terms of the underlying structures or in terms of the dynamics of the structuring itself. Thus, in order to cast a different light on the meaning of comedy, one will go outside the text, into the realm of theory: a re-analysis of laughter-the result of comic effectmay provide another view on the necessary link between man and text, thus adding to our understanding of the nature of comedy. Viewing laughter as a means of communicating a wide variety of emotions, according to personal and cultural setting, one is concerned here with the observation that laughter, nonetheless, leads back to the same psychodynamics. In this essay I shall discuss the psychodynamics of laughter first in terms of Freudian theory and then, using Lacan as a referent, I shall interpret Freud's findings within a structural framework. In 1905 Sigmund Freud's Der Witz und Seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten appeared, providing an analysis of laughter in terms of his ongoing redefinition of human motivation and behavior. Dismantling the cartesian model for reason, Freud upset man's view of himself as an essentially rational, logical, unified creature who occasionally has outbreaks of emotion, by postulating a controlling subconscious which, although it exists below the level of conscious awareness, actually structures feeling, thought and behavior in light of its recording of all past experience. Thus, consciousness becomes one organ of perception, rather than the organ of perception. 1 In his Introductory Lectures Freud designates as " 'unconscious' any mental process the existence of which we are obliged to assume-because, for instance, we infer it in some way from its effects-but of which we are not directly aware."2 Revealed in conscious life as neurotic symptoms, dreams, errors, laughter and so forth,

Repression in "Cliges"

Abstract: Jean Gyory recently proposed that readers of Chrdtien de Troyes consider not only the significance of the discursive movement of the verse-narrative, but also the significance of the patterns created by the unconscious, "lateral" movement of the imagination of the poet (the terms resemble, as M. Gyory uses them, Max Weber's schematic polarization of rational/irrational).1 M. Gyory devotes most of his attention to incestual fantasies in Chr6tien's Erec, and skims through some of the other romances, offering a prolegmenon to a study of Chrntien's imagery. The few remarks he devotes to Cliges are worth pursuing:

Recent Trends in Psychoanalysis: A Survey with Emphasis on Psychological Criticism in English Literature and Related Areas

Abstract: The present survey is, almost exclusively, concerned with studies published in English after 1960. I have tried to distinguish between basic works-signalled by one asterisk-and seminal works which may also serve as introductions to the psychoanalytic approach-signalled by two asterisks. The third part of this survey deals with the social sciences. The fact that it is highly personal was inevitable in view of the broad range of topics I wished to cover and the lack of truly fundamental and up-to-date studies in most of those areas. Such a sectiqn is nonetheless included because of my belief in the need for versatility in present-day literary criticism. The social sciences are in a state of flux; it is typical, for instance, that Roman Jakobson's phonological papers should have influenced Claude L6vi-Strauss's anthropological constructs which, in turn, have prompted new research in narrative studies. Similarly, the structural studies of myth by noted English anthropologist Edmund Leach (Genesis as Myth, Jonathan Cape, 1969) foreground interpretations which could have been reached by a purely psychoanalytic methodology. But confrontation of the two approaches is illuminating and, to an extent, supports the validity of the conclusions arrived at. Finally, analyses such as the ones written by Leach implicitly throw light on the role of mythopoetic aspects of literature which should be taken into account by anyone using a psychological approach. To avoid misunderstanding, the scope of this survey should be defined in more detail. It is the result of some five years of research. Complete sets of all Englishlanguage journals devoted exclusively to psychoanalysis were consulted, including those which have ceased publication. Several psychiatric reviews which often carry psychoanalytic studies were also consulted, but no claim to completeness is made in this area. To the best of my knowledge, all books and monographs published in the field of psychoanalysis and literature were perused or read, as were the majority of books in the field of psychoanalytic theory-though not, for example, psychoanalytic psychotherapy. On the other hand, the word "psychoanalysis" is used by certain schools of thought which have given up adherence, or never adhered, to the basic principles of Freudian psychology. Such schools are not represented here. Neither are books by authors whose understanding of psychoanalysis is, in my opinion, inadequate or who are hostile to it. It did not seem fitting, for instance, to include Gaston Bachelard's Psychoanalysis of Fire or Jack Spector's Aesthetics of Freud-both titles being misnomers. Though they may be of interest in their own right, they teach us little about psychoanalysis and have, therefore, no place in this survey.

Formalism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis

Abstract: "Formalism" is often accused (and by "Formalism" we mean the theories of literary forms that come from structural linguistics and from Russian Formalism) of misunderstanding, or even ignoring, the historical dimension of artistic works. This dispute could have been avoided by originally putting it on surer philosophical footing. We know that, as Louis Althusser has shown, the "structure" versus "history" opposition makes only methodological sense because:

Colonial Discourse in the "Journey to the End of the Night"

Abstract: One recalls Bardamu's colonial days. Having reached Bragamance, an imaginary country in black Africa, the character in the Journey enters the store tended by a European on behalf of the "compagnie Porduriere". He witnesses there a typical scene of colonial commerce. For the reader's convenience, I am reproducing the passage to which I would like to apply some reading devices appropriate for the clarification of its ideological content:

Siren-Language: Kafka and Blanchot

Abstract: La parabole blanchotienne et kafkaenne du chant de la sirene. Kafka est reellement concerne par l'integrite de l'esprit de l'Odyssee, non par ce qu'elle recele de creativite. Pour B. Odyssee est l'artiste privilegie. Les sirenes peuvent disparaitre dans la verite et la profondeur de leur chant. L'A. montre comment B. applique sa parabole au paradigme de la narration: le recit est le royaume de la "metamorphose, passage du chant reel au chant imaginaire". L'abandon du roman pour le recit| la relation critique-creation. B., critique de K., pour qui la litterature est la seule chose essentielle, comme pour lui-meme. La sensibilite de B. au paradoxe de la mort. Impact de K. sur la fiction deB.

Parts and Holes: Heraclitus/Nietzsche/Blanchot

Abstract: Etude de la notion d'ecriture fragmentaire dans les etudes de B. consacres a Heraclite et Nietzsche. Le discontinu et l'inacheve tels qu'ils apparaissent dans les recits et les essais de B. En caracterisant l'ecriture de "tour et retour", B. nous offre une illustration de l'ecriture figurative et non representative qui prend forme dans ses premiers recits et ses discussions sur N. et H. L'ecriture fragmentaire definit un mode d'interrogation qui se situe au-dela de la dialectique.

A Reading of Ideology or an Ideology of Reading

Abstract: The reasons for which a problematic of reflection has been replaced little by little among literary critics of a Marxist orientation by a problematic of "ideology" are evident in the effects of this displacement. The difficulties encountered in situating the original problematic were due to the necessity of articulating a theory of literature in terms of the theory of the means of production. The purely mechanistic character of solutions based on an illusory parallelism between the world of "literature" and the world of "production" perhaps explains, but does not justify, the occultation of this problematic. The development of an "immanent," non-referential criticism, coming at the time it did, offered Marxist literary criticism a chance to divert its attention from a decidedly awkward problem and to re-orient research towards the project of an "ideological reading." This offered the advantage of being easily assimilated within the new academic structures under the convenient rubric of "plural readings." Such a displacement was possible, however, only at the cost of abandoning the specifically Marxist sense of the term, "ideology". To dislodge this notion from the theory of the means of production is to risk a drift towards idealism. For in the expression designating the project of an "ideological reading," it is clearly the second term which plays in the dominant role. "Ideology" can be the object of a "reading" only if one has already overturned the notion of ideology within the domain defined by that procedure, i.e., in the domain of decodation. Consequently, what can take place-or rather what finds its place ready-made--within the cautious world of "letters" was a purely speculative conception of ideological operations whose connection to a certain "sociology of literature" is easily discerned, but not its connection t6 a Marxist analysis. An "ideological reading" only if one means by that, a reading entirely dominated by laws which serve at one and the same time both to dissimulate and to maintain the whole of an apparatus whose function is to assure the smooth running of the production, consumption and distribution of those utterances designated, according to our cultural heritage, as "literature."

First Aesthetic Meditations on Capital

Abstract: The general development of Marx's theory (which we believe involves progressive conservation and reintegration of prior stages) may be conceptualized in terms of three successive emphases: 1. Diachronic: Production-Praxis/alienation (1844 Manuscripts). 2. Syrichronic: Base/superstructure (Grundrisse Intro., 1859 Preface) 3. Synthetic: Commodity form/other forms (Capital). Our focus in this initial aesthetic meditation on Capital derives from the intermitant Marxist effort to develop a theory of art and literature on the basis of Marx's analysis of the commodity. To our knowledge, this possibility was first announced by Mikhail Lifshitz in The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx1, and given totalizing theoretical resonance by Lukics in "On Reification."2 From that point on the theme was elaborated among Western Marxists by the Frankfurt School, notably Benjamin and Marcuse, by Adolfo Sinchez Vizquez in Mexico and by Lefebvre and Goldmann in France.3 The emphasis in this development was on an attempt to escape the "vulgar" base/superstructure Marxist economism of the Second International, by establishing a linkage between the question of diachronic analysis and form (1 and 3 above), an attempt given momentum by the publication of the 1844 Manuscripts. However, with the advent of structuralism came a new, highly sophisticated and non-economistic stress on the base/superstructural question, with the possible totalization between the diachronic and formal as now subject to the proper conceptualization of their relation to synchronic structural dominance, and with the sign itself acting as a primary source of "mediation". The chief figure in this enterprise is Louis Althusser, who attempted to unite structuralist views of base/superstructure, historicism, humanism and forms with a Marxism now "purified" of its "pre-Marxist" alienation emphasis. The themes of representation (Darstellung), structured production and diachrony as structural metonymy are brought together in Althusser's Lire "Le Capital" selections, and are related to the commodity form in Pierre Macherey's contribution to the same volume.4 Macherey also attempted to apply these concepts to literature in Pour une theorie de la production litteraire, as did, in different ways, a whole group of writers directly or indirectly identified with the periodical, Tel Quel.5 The structuralist enterprise has led to a reaction by the Hegelian anti-structuralist Marxists, now in terms of a focus on Marx's Grundrisse, especially in the later work of Marcuse in Lefebvre and Goldmann, in Ernst Mandell, and in the recent works by Mdz~iros and Ollman on alienation, as well as in Martin Nicolaus's "Foreward" to his new translation of the Grundrisse.6

The Psychoanalytic "Merveilleux": Suspense in Sade's "Florville et Courval"

Abstract: As they compose their novels writers of the modem world, according to Sade in his Idde sur les romans (1800), must all face up to a particular difficult problem of creating suspense. Because of the enormity of events leading to the French Revolution this genre "devenait aussi difficile a faire, que monotone a lire." His point is that in their everyday lives most readers had personally encountered more misfortunes in four or five years than the best story-teller could describe in a century. In order to attract any attention at all, then, the novelist has to depict extraordinary circumstances and events. In passages somewhat heavy with incestuous images Sade describes what the subject-matter must be: "il fallait donc appeler l'enfer a son secours"; "s'il ne devient pas l'amant de sa mere [la nature] d6s que celle-ci l'a mis au monde, qu'il n'6crive jamais"; "s'il entr'ouvre avec fr6missement le sein de la nature. .. voila celui que nous lirons." Even then there is still danger, from the point of view of technique, in laying bare this "foyer d'un volcan." Such heady material must be treated carefully if interest is to be maintained. By way of illustration, Sade refers to two English gothic novels, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823) and The Monk (1795) by Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775--1818). Their romances abound in violence, turmoil, terror and mystery, yet both authors fail and Sade explains why: "ici n6cessairement de deux choses l'une, ou il faut developper le sortilkge, et des-lors vous n'interessez plus, ou il ne faut jamais lever le rideau, et vous voilat dans la plus affreuse invraisemblance." 1 Although Sade intends to draw his impact from nature rather than from "le pays des chimbres"evoked by Radcliffe and Lewis, he knows that he must more successfully than they avoid the twin reefs of monotony and lack of verisimilitude. Radcliffe, giving a natural explanation to her mysteries, destroyed the suspense they had generated. Lewis, implying the reality of supernatural forces, lost his credibility in an age of extreme scepticism. The main object of the present paper is to indicate the formula by which Sade solves this dilemma in Florville et Courval, solution which may later prove to have been standard in many of his short-stories and novels.